Just an hour after Switch 2 pre-orders went live on April 24 in the United States, Kotaku has spotted over two dozen eBay listings for the upcoming Nintendo console. Some are real. Others are actually people making fake listings to throw off bots and scalpers.
Switch 2 preorders went live online at 12:01 a.m. ET and were every bit the mess some fans feared: pages timing out, error messages that weren’t real, and email cancelations being received just moments after it seemed like orders had gone through. There must be a better way to do these. Not in time for the Switch 2…
GOLF+ now uses the new Meta Avatars with legs, and implemented a custom IK system to make them work for swings.
The new Meta Avatars SDK released in October. While the previous Meta Avatars had legs in Meta’s own apps for around a year before that, the SDK for third-party apps remained legless. For apps using it, such as GOLF+, legs only became available with the new avatars. In fact, the new avatars take the opposite approach, not letting developers disable legs even if they wanted to.
When launching the new avatars, Meta originally said that it would switch off the old avatars at the end of March, leaving them as grey featureless humanoids. But as developers like GOLF+ struggled with integration issues, Meta extended this deadline to the end of April and released an SDK update solving key issues holding back developers from upgrading.
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With less than one week until the switch-off, GOLF+ has now migrated to Meta’s new avatars. But even with those last-minute fixes from Meta, GOLF+ has had to undertake “months” of significant work to make full-body avatars suitable for golf swings in VR.
The developer engineered their own custom IK (inverse kinematics) system, with feet-locking to avoid “moonwalking” and hip rotation that aims to reflect your real-world stance throughout a swing.
The first iteration of this “isn’t perfect”, the developer admits, but they’re proud of what they’ve pulled off with relatively short notice, and believe it “strikes a great balance across different swing styles”.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
GOLF+ is $30 on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest headsets. The game comes with three selectable courses, while 34 paid DLC courses are also offered, or you can access them all for $10/month with GOLF+ Pass.
Speaking to UploadVR in February, GOLF+ CEO and co-founder Ryan Engle confirmed selling over 1.5 million copies to date. Meta recently revealed the 50 best-selling paid Quest games of all time, and GOLF+ was listed as #17 – making it one of the most successful independent VR games of all time.
Late last year, Sony added a couple of nostalgic PlayStation 5 dashboard themes the recreated the experience of using an older PlayStation console. People really liked these themes, but Sony said they were temporary and eventually they were all removed. But now they’re coming back for good.
The worst-kept secret of the year, Bethesda’s current-gen remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, finally shadow-dropped yesterday and the Xbox-360-era open-world RPG has wasted no time in reminding fans why it was such a hit nearly two decades ago. Complete with refreshed graphics, updated gameplay, and cherished…
After a year of rumors and reports, we finally got the first official teaser for the upcoming movie Predator: Badlands. And the teaser promises a Predator sequel unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Ray-Ban Meta glasses can now translate speech between English, French, Italian, and Spanish, and multimodal Meta AI is finally rolling out to Europe.
Additionally, you’ll soon be able to message and call on Instagram from the glasses, Meta and EssilorLuxottica are launching three new color variants of the Skyler style, and the companies plan to launch the glasses in Mexico, India, and the UAE.
As Meta teased at Connect 2024 in September, the glasses can now translate in real-time between English, French, Italian, and Spanish.
To activate the feature, you say “Hey Meta, start live translation.” You’ll then hear the spoken words of people nearby translated to your own language from the speakers of the glasses, while they can see your words translated as text on the Meta View phone app.
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Real-time translation demo from Meta Connect 2024.
If you want the feature to work even without an internet connection, you can optionally download the data for each language pair to your glasses via the app.
Earlier this month, the multimodal capability of Meta AI started rolling out to the UK. This means UK owners can now answer queries about what they’re looking at, by taking an image using the camera, whereas previously Meta AI couldn’t access the camera in the UK.
In the rest of Europe, Meta AI was only available in Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain, and only in its basic voice-only form. Now, today, basic Meta AI is rolling out in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
Next week the full multimodal Meta AI will start rolling out to every country where the glasses are officially sold, including these European countries.
Leveraging your nearby phone, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses can already send and receive messages and make calls via WhatsApp, Messenger, or your phone’s built-in calling and messaging system. This includes video calls, wherein the recipient will see your first-person view.
“Soon”, Meta says, this messaging and calling capability will also be available for Instagram.
At Meta Connect 2024, the company teased an upcoming capability called Live AI, wherein you can have a continuous session with Meta AI without the need to say “Hey Meta” each time. During this session, Meta AI will have continuous access to your camera.
Meta says this will allow its AI to “help you more naturally, in real-time as you’re doing things like exploring a city or preparing a meal”, and today announced that it’s coming “soon” in the US and Canada.
To start the session, you’ll say “Hey Meta, start live AI”.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
This capability already exists on traditional devices like phones and laptops via OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and Google recently demonstrated it running on “conceptual” smart glasses.
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses come in three styles: Wayfarer, Headliner, and Skyler.
These styles are offered with four types of lenses: Clear, Sun, Polarized, and Transitions, and come in a variety of colors, for both the frame and the lenses.
Today, Meta and EssilorLuxottica have launched 3 new variants of Skyler:
Skyler with Shiny Chalky Gray frame and Sapphire Transitions lenses.
This brings the total number of Ray-Ban Meta glasses style and color variants to 25.
Meta and EssilorLuxottica say they will soon start officially selling the glasses in Mexico, India, and the United Arab Emirates.
That will bring the total number of countries where the Ray-Ban Meta glasses are sold to 17:
UploadVRDavid Heaney
As of February, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses had sold over 2 million units, and EssilorLuxottica announced that it plans to scale up annual production capacity to 10 million units by the end of 2026.
The world of Oblivion Remastered allows for a lot of leeway in how you approach situations, whether you’re sneaking by guards, sword fighting like a swashbuckler, slinging magic spells, or, perhaps, talking your way out of situations. The latter often proves the most challenging for one reason: the persuasion…
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a deep and lengthy role-playing adventure with multiple characters, each with skill trees to flesh out. So, of course, as you advance through the game and unlock new skills, you’ll find that you can optimize your characters’ synergy with one another.
Star Wars Andor is back just over two years after its first season ended on Disney+. The first three episodes of season two premiered on Disney+ on April 22 and the show is just as good as before, with lots of great dialogue, intense action, and a whole bunch of tension. And sprinkled throughout all of this are some…
We’ve seen a bit of Avatar: The Last Airbender in VR before, thanks to the rocksteady Rumble. However, that’s only about earthbending. If you’re looking for something where you can play around with all four elements, then pay attention to Elements Divided because it could well be just what you’re after. It’s not officially an Avatar game – what a world that would be – but it does a darn good job of letting you play around with water, fire, earth, and air.
I recently went hands-on with the Steam version via Quest 3 and things kick off with the tutorial, where you jump around a bit and other standard stuff. You then learn to punch, a movement you’ll likely never use, and block. Then you choose your element. You can change the element later on but, and I’ll get to this, mastering one first really pays off. Your element teaches you three moves, and then you’re free to either go into single-player or hop online for multiplayer.
Single-player is a good warm-up that helps you get used to moving around. More importantly, you’ll earn new skills as your elemental mastery levels up. This is crucial because jumping into multiplayer, which is the main attraction here, is truly awful if you’ve not unlocked a couple of movement abilities for your element. Each element has unique moves and I went with air, which means my movement skills started when I could swing a magical air sword at the floor to fly high.
Eventually, I gained the ability to turn that sword into a glider when in the air to freely move around, or into a giant wheel on the floor for incredible speed. Once you’ve got these abilities, you can go into multiplayer matches in earnest because otherwise you’ll feel like Sokka does in Avatar, just without his comedic charms.
Multiplayer itself is always battle-based, though there are a few different options. The worst option here is rounds. This has your “teams” fighting it out to get two wins in total. I don’t dislike this idea, but dying early means you can’t play for the rest of the round, which is rather dull. You’ve then got stock matches where everyone has three lives, while time has everyone playing for the most amount of time overall. The latter two are more enjoyable, a bit snappier, and also involve more actual playing at any skill level.
Combat initially feels a little odd, though it starts to flow a lot better as you unlock more abilities. Playing for an hour should have most skills unlocked for one element, and at that point you can move around with ease in various ways. You can aim to knock people off the arena, take them out as they’re fighting one another, or get into some intense duels. It becomes considerable fun, but the early moments with each element feel really sluggish. Keep that in mind because it gets significantly better very quickly, though you won’t get to that if you don’t put in a couple of rounds first.
Overall, Elements Divided feels like an incredibly cool addition to the world of VR brawlers. I’d love to see something like this taken into an open-world RPG, yet it’s still an amazing experience as a multiplayer brawler. The matches are fast enough to just hop in for some quick rounds whenever else you have spare time, and frenetic enough that you’ll work up a bit of a sweat doing so.
Elements Divided is out now on the Meta Quest platform and Steam.
If you’ve been itching for an RPG that mixes old-school turn-based combat with a penchant for modern flair, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is probably on your radar. Considering its stunning art style, immersive and rewarding combat system, and genuinely compelling narrative, it’s hard to blame you for being interested.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has a lot of moving parts in its turn-based battle system. Though the RPG does a decent job of introducing things to you slowly, by the time you have a full party, you’re juggling pretty distinct characters with bespoke playstyles and trying to find some way to make them fit together. Part…
Avatar: The Last Airbender doesn’t have an official VR game, although you’d be forgiven for double-taking as you bend all four elements in the multiplayer action game Elements Divided, now available on Quest 2 and above and PC VR headsets.
Developed by Loco Motion and published by Fast Travel Games, Elements Divided lets you go head-to-head in online combat, or take on hordes of foes in co-op mode.
Like in the Avatar TV series, each element has its own fighting style, which includes 60 attacks and abilities across the four core elements—fire, water, air, and earth.
As you gain experience, you can also level up your character for even more devastating abilities, and customize your loadout and individual avatar.
“Every ability in the game can be summoned using immersive, gesture-driven controls that allow you to guide the flow of water, summon stone barriers, hurl yourself across arenas and more,” Loco Motion says.
At launch, Elements Divided offers:
Elements Divided is available starting today on the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and above and Steam for PC VR headsets, priced at $10.
The post ‘Elements Divided’ Launches Today on Quest & PC VR, Bringing ‘Last Airbender’ Inspired Fighting Action appeared first on Road to VR.
