The XR Week Peek (2025.03.18): Niantic sells Pokemon Go, Meta released passthrou…
This has been a very intense week for me, work-wise. Luckily, intense in a good way. And just when I thought I had already too many things to do, I had to add another task, because Meta decided to release camera access for Quest and I couldn’t resist getting my hands dirty with it!
Anyway, let’s dig into the most interesting pieces of XR news of the week… which are actually a lot! And keep reading until the end, because there will be a giveaway!
Top news of the week
Niantic sold its gaming division to Scopely
Niantic has announced that it sold its whole gaming division (including its jewel Pokemon Go) to Scopely for $3.85 billion. Scoperly’s parent company is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, meaning that Pokemon Go now belongs to the king of Saudi Arabia.
Niantic will now focus all its efforts on its geospatial tech, which mixes AI, AR, spatial intelligence, and geolocation. For this purpose, it created a spin-off called Niantic Spatial which starts with $250M in funds.
It’s a big and crazy bet. While $3.85B is a great amount of money, with this operation Niantic has lost its biggest cash cow, that is Pokemon Go, and the new promising game Monster Hunt Now. They sold this money machine to focus on a technology that is currently not making any relevant money.
It’s a big bet on the bright future of XR. I’m happy about it because if Niantic made this operation it means it believes AR is going to become profitable soon-ish (maybe in 3 years). But on the other side, I also think that without Pokemon Go they are making this jump without a parachute: if the adoption times for AR get longer (and in XR, times are always longer than we would like to be), the company can get into serious troubles. Plus, as someone made me notice, keeping Pokemon Go would have meant for Niantic to have a system-seller application for its upcoming glasses.
I must owe John Hanke that it had the balls to do a huge pivot: he’s going all-in with XR and burning the bridges behind him. However it goes, I’ll respect him for doing this.
More info (Niantic sold Pokemon Go to Scopely — Road To VR)
More info (Niantic sold Pokemon Go to Scopely — Upload VR)
Other relevant news
Meta released passthrough APIs for Quest 3/3S
In the end, Meta did it. It released the Passthrough APIs to let developers access the camera frames so that the MR applications running on Quest can “see” what the user has around him/her and modify their behavior accordingly. This may especially happen by analyzing the images grabbed from the cameras with AI/ML models.
Meta has released this feature in the SDK and runtime of Quest and Quest 3S, plus it has released some official samples that show how to use this new technology. The community has already started experimenting with them and content creators have already started creating tutorials for them. I myself have written a hugely detailed post on my blog to teach people how to get started with Passthrough Camera Access.
The approach chosen by Meta is similar to the one that Google promised to take with Android XR. Access to cameras will require the application to ask permission from the user (that so is in control). Then the management of the camera will happen through the functionalities exposed by Camera2 in Android and WebCamTexture in Unity, which are the ones developers have always used with smartphones. This means that it will be pretty easy to make a cross-platform application that uses camera access between phones, Meta Quest, and AndroidXR headsets. This is great news.
The small bad news is that Passthrough Camera Access is currently an Experimental feature so applications employing it can’t be released on the Horizon Store. It is not the first time that Meta does something similar and usually, it lifts the ban in a few months. We have just to wait…
More info (Roberto Coviello announcing camera access for Quest)
More info (Meta releases camera access — Upload VR)
More info (Some famous developer studios are already experimenting with camera access)
More info (Dilmer Valecillos showing one of his demos using camera access)
More info (My detailed tutorial about how to get started with camera access on Unity 6)
The VR Games Showcase March 2025 brought a lot of announcements of XR games
The VR Games Showcase led by Jamie Feltham has been also this time a collection of interesting pieces of news related to VR gaming. There has been no mindblowing piece of news, but many pleasant updates. I’m linking below all the related announcements, but let me hand-pick a selection of my favorite ones for you:
- “Stay: Forever Home”, a game that lets you live adventures in VR and MR with a virtual dog-like companion, is going to launch on Quest in April. There is a new trailer where you can appreciate this game
- There is a new trailer for Hitman: World of Assassination for PSVR 2. The trailer is pretty well-made, so we have hopes that also the game can be good when it launches on March, 27th. We are in need for a good Hitman VR game
- Sci-fi survival horror game Memoreum is going to launch on Quest in September. It has been released a new intriguing trailer about it
- Slender: The Arrival VR is coming To PS VR2, PC VR & Quest this spring. Slenderman is already very scary on PC, I can’t imagine how it could be in VR
- Flat2VR Studios has announced four new upcoming titles (that are porting of flatscreen games): Out of Sight, Surviving Mars, Postal 2, and Shadowgate VR. It seems that after the success of titles like “Trombone Champ: Unflattened”, the studio has more trust in its capabilities and it is trying more complex games.
Read the links below to discover all the announced news!
More info (All the news from the VR Games Showcase)
More info (Titan Isles is a new co-op adventure platformer from Psytec Games)
More info (Forefront is a multiplayer shooter inspired by the Battlefield series announced by Triangle Factory)
More info (Interview about Forefront on Upload VR)
More info (FLAT2VR Studio announces 4 new titles)
More info (Out Of Sight is getting a VR port by FLAT2VR)
More info (Flat2VR Studios showed off some fresh gameplay footage of Roboquest VR and confirmed co-op support)
More info (Reave is a multiplayer dungeon-crawler from the team behind A Township Tale)
More info (Slender: The Arrival comes to Quest, PSVR 2, and PC VR this spring)
More info (VR pet simulator Stay: Forever Home is officially coming to Quest in April)
More info (A new trailer for HITMAN World Of Assassination)
More info (Memoreum, a game inspired by “Dead Space”, is going to be released on September for Quest)
More info (UNDERDOGS to be released on PSVR 2 on March, 25)
More info (Vendetta Forever is heading to PC VR on May 8, and five new levels are coming as a free update)
More info (Prison Boss Prohibition, the expanded follow-up to Prison Boss VR, will feature mixed reality support with local colocation on Meta Quest)
More info (There is a new trailer for the high-octane roguelike ZIX)
More info (Ghost Town offered a new look at the VR supernatural adventure’s gameplay before its upcoming launch on April 24)
Ultraleap has been sold for parts
A very sad piece of news from this week has been about Ultraleap being sold for parts. What was until some time ago a very cool startup with a lot of knowledge about haptics and hand tracking (and with a lot of friends of mine) is now just a ghost.
According to a report by Sifted, that cites “sources familiar with the situation”, the company has agreed to sell the portion of its business developing hand-tracking tech to musical instrument company Roli. The company has also laid off 30 employees. The 24 remaining people will join Roli as part of the sale.
The intellectual property surrounding the startup’s haptics and hand-tracking business units has been sold to US IP financing company SIM IP, in a deal that is expected to be completed in March and officially announced last month.
Ultraleap declined to comment, which usually means that the report is true. I have no idea what will happen with all the hardware that has been sold and all the headsets that integrated an Ultraleap controller. Probably Ultraleap, or even when it was just Leap Motion, should have aimed to be bought by a headset manufacturer before all the major XR brands started developing hand tracking internally.
The Samsung headset should have motion controllers
According to a report by SamMobile, Samsung will be making its own first-party handsets for its upcoming Project Moohan headset. There have been discovered references to controllers with the model number ET-OI610. This means that Samsung won’t go all-in with hand tracking like Apple did. It is not clear if the controllers will be shipped in the headset box or not, though.
Having controllers is good because it allows developers to easily port content from other headsets like the Meta Quest to the upcoming Samsung Project Moohan device. When Android XR was announced, Google showed how it was easy to port Unity content from other headsets to Android XR and the compatibility with controllers is another good step in this sense. This will let Google enrich its content library pretty fast.
Meta can’t even make its employees use Horizon Worlds
A report by New World Notes puts the spotlight on the problems of Horizon Worlds. It seems that there are clear reasons why this “metaverse” is not succeeding as Zuck wants.
The first one of them, which is rather surprising, is that its developers are not passionate about virtual worlds. It seems that at a certain point the company forced them to spend time inside the applications, and the employees just put some tape on the headset sensor to pretend they were inside the experience instead of actually playing it. Meta employees prefer to fake the use of Horizon Worlds instead of playing it: this says a lot.
Then there is the fact that many developers working on it have been taken from the teams that were working on the social apps, often using React. This is why some of the interfaces seem more suited for a website than a virtual world.
I think this sentence says all about the experience and the passion the team working on Horizon Worlds has for it: “The guy that was put in charge of Horizon Worlds needed help learning how to don the headset and launch the game after being in charge of it for 3 months”
Basically, if the report is right, the development of Horizon Worlds is a shitshow. I wonder why Meta keeps betting on this application instead of trying to improve its whole Quest ecosystem and help all the developers making great content that are struggling there.
News worth a mention
Google in talks to acquire eye-racking company AdHawk
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Google is acquiring AdHawk Microsystems for $115 million. AdHawk is a company whose product is an eye-tracking technology that does not employ optical cameras, but a system with micromirrors that scatter a laser ray on the eye. This system has a double advantage: it does not have an optical camera that is always invasive privacy-wise, and it consumes less power than a standard eye-tracking device. The con is that the precision is a bit less than standard systems.
In any case, for me, the great news is that Google is willing to invest serious money in this deal, which proves its commitment to XR.
Valve is working on its Wireless dongle
Datamining revealed that Valve is working on a “SteamVR Link Dongle”, which is a device meant to provide a dedicated Wi-Fi connection between a headset and a PC, which could dramatically improve the reliability of wireless PC VR. According to rumors, this device is meant to be used with the upcoming Deckard headset.
It seems anyway that Valve is taking a very open approach for what concerns PCVR: its Steam Link software is allegedly coming also to Pico and HTC headsets, giving more people the ability to play Steam VR games on their standalone devices.
More info (Valve Wireless dongle)
More info (Steam Link coming to Pico and HTC devices)
Meta releases support for micro gestures
It has not only been the week of passthrough camera access. Meta has also released in its SDK the ability to detect microgestures, that is tiny movements that the user does with its fingers (e.g. slightly moving the thumb finger along the index finger). This is a very intriguing feature that allows the user to perform effortless interactions with the MR applications.
Immersed announced new delays for Visor, continuing the troubled story of this headset
Immersed has announced that the mass production of Visor will begin “after summer”, which is some months later than what was promised in September, during its memorable-but-for-the-wrong-reasons event. In the meanwhile, the situation surrounding the company is always more confusing: Immersed is raising more than $2M on Wefunder, but it is not clear why it reports there some financial data from 2023. Even more concerning is that on Wefunder, the company claims that “Our cash in hand is $1,589,997, as of January 2025. Over the three months prior, revenues averaged $101,813/month, cost of goods sold has averaged $11,741/month, and operational expenses have averaged $594,569/month”. If it has a burn rate of half a million dollars a month and the money in the bank is $1.5M, it means that money is ending fast. This new money from Wefunder may make the company breathe until the launch of the device, but then it’s a mystery what is going to happen. I hope they have a plan: probably they hope that the traction of the headset after the release is going to guarantee a huge investment.
The questions are many, but people asking them on the Discord or Reddit groups of the company are being banned every week. I think a bit more communication would help clarify the situation and make the people who purchased the headset more happy. We know that doing hardware is complicated, so there is no need to hide problems from the community.
More info (Visor having a new delay)
More info (One of the many people complaining about being banned from the Visor community)
More info (Visor on Wefunder)
Other companies are leaving VR
The streak of bad news related to the VR gaming market continues. This week, we had the veteran VR studio Phaser Lock, which made games like Primal Hunt and Final Assault, shutting down, claiming problems because of “the challenging economic climate and the current state of the gaming industry”.
Then we had the publisher People Can Fly, which distributed titles like Bulletstorm VR and Green Hell VR, that announced that it will stop publishing VR games after this year. The reason is a “significant reduction in investments in the production of new VR games by VR hardware platform holders.” Since the platform holder that was pouring the most money was Meta, this confirms the report of a few months ago that claimed that Meta is investing less money into VR games now. Hey, but we have Horizon Worlds…
More info (Phaser Lock is shutting down)
More info (People Can Fly will stop distributing VR games)
Two crazy futuristic experiments
This week I have read two pieces of news that are not strictly related to XR but made me think “WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUCK” and so I wanted to share them with you anyway.
The first one is about Cortical Labs which has built the first deployable biological computer, priced at $35,000. The CL1 integrates living neurons with silicon for real-time computation. Yes, you’ve read it well… a computer mixing chips and human neurons. Man-made horrors beyond my comprehension.
The second one is even crazier. They made an experiment to make two people communicate inside their dreams while they were both sleeping. Fast-forward 10 years, you will have Whatsapp groups haunting you even while you sleep…
More info (The first biological computer)
More info (Two humans communicated in their dreams)
MAGE delivers crazy fast physics simulations on Quest
MAGE is a magic and physics sandbox in early access on Quest 3 that offers fun physics-based mayhem. The peculiarity of this game is its engine, which guarantees “solid 120Hz even with dynamic lighting, shadows, magic vfx, >100% render res, and hundreds of high fidelity dynamic physics props”. This is something absolutely impossible to have with Unity or Unreal.
It seems that MAGE developers manage to create an engine that is over-optimized for its specific purpose (instead of Unity which is instead very general purpose) and so can deliver these crazy framerates. I wonder if they will ever open it up to other developers.
Apple releases a concert by Metallica for Apple Vision Pro
Apple has released for Vision Pro an immersive experience related to a Metallica Concert that happened in Mexico City. The concert was captured in Apple’s own immersive video format, which features 8K 3D video and spatial audio. Many people in the XR community tried it and praised it, even if some complained that the recording seems more made using 2D movie techniques than the one specific to VR content.
Discover immersive storytelling at SXSW 2025
SXSW 2025 has been the usual showcase of interesting immersive storytelling pieces. The usual Charlie Fink has written an amazing piece that summarizes the most relevant experiences there and I suggest you read it.
Enjoy the big sale of games on Steam and Quest
Both Steam and the Horizon Store are featuring big sales on VR titles. Half-Life: Alyx is now at 70% off, bringing one of the most beautiful VR games to just $18. If you want to buy some games, this is the right moment!
More info (Sales on the Horizon Store)
More info (Sales on Steam)
Some news about content
- XR Games announced BEATABLE, a new rhythm game with an engaging mechanic employing you to beat your hand on the table following the rhythm of the music. It is expected to launch on April, 10
- The action game “Path of Fury — Episode I: Tetsuo’s Tower” has been released on Quest for $10
- Quantum Threshold is an accessibility-focused VR roguelike shooter that turns your wheelchair into your greatest weapon
- The adorable event coordinating simulator Penguin Festival is coming to Quest and Steam
- Tactical PvE VR shooter Exoshock released a new gameplay trailer
- RoboCop: Streets of Anarchy is an official VR game based on the acclaimed sci-fi film, and it’s coming in late 2025. But before you rejoice, you should know that it is coming only to arcades.
More info (BEATABLE)
More info (Path Of Fury)
More info (Quantum Threshold)
More info (Penguin Festival)
More info (Exoshock)
More info (Robocop)
Some reviews about content
- Waltz Of The Wizard with hand tracking on PSVR 2 feels very well, but it has some occasional hiccups
- Deep Cuts takes you behind the scenes of a movie to create your own action-packed scenes as eccentrically as you wish them to be. It is pretty fun to be played
- “Path of Fury — Episode I: Tetsuo’s Tower” is fun, but feels like Beat Saber masked as a punching game (because you keep almost rhythmically punching the enemies, one after the other, with a known sequence)
- Mythic Realms is a compelling MR combat game, a casual kingdom-building and item-crafting sim, and a moderately strategic roguelike all at once
- Pixel Dungeon provides classic Dungeon-Crawling fun, and it feels already complete even before the updates provide new content
More info (Waltz Of The Wizard)
More info (Deep Cuts)
More info (Path Of Fury)
More info (Mythic Realms)
More info (Pixel Dungeon)
Other news
Vicon is presenting at GDC a new markerless motion tracking system
The D-Link dongle for Quest Air Link does not work anymore in the most recent versions of Windows
Tyriel Wood reviewed True Gear suit, the most inexpensive true haptic suit on the market today
XPANCEO has unveiled new prototypes for its smart contact lenses
Brendan Iribe has launched Sesame, a conversational AI startup which is getting a lot of praise
News from partners (and friends)
Mythic Realms giveaway!
I’ve linked you above the very positive review of Mythic Realms, a very cool mixed&virtual reality game for Quest. I have great news: you may get this game for free if you are very fast and grab one of these two keys before the other people!
EAHJR-MYWX6-J6FAE-G3QYR-7K3R6
JFXPC-9WJW9-HQPJ6-7CY3H-PXJ6P
If you didn’t get to redeem a free key, consider buying the game to support the developers!
Get the game on the Horizon Store
Some XR fun
There is always need for more space on our XR headsets
Funny link
This is not the simulator I was expecting to find…
Funny link
VR players are never satisfied…
Funny link
Palmer Luckey talks to Andrew Bosworth…
Funny link
I am different from my grandparents
Funny link
What if AI becomes too intelligent?
Funny link
Donate for good
Like last week, also this week in this final paragraph I won’t ask you to donate to my blog, but to the poor people who are facing the consequences of the war. Please donate to the Red Cross to handle the current humanitarian situation in Ukraine. I will leave you the link to do that below.
Let me take a moment before to thank anyway all my Patreon donors for the support they give to me:
- Alex Gonzalez VR
- DeoVR
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
- Jonn Fredericks
- Jean-Marc Duyckaerts
- Reynaldo T Zabala
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- Immersive.international
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jake Rubin
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And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Niantic)
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