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Facebook Acquires POPULATION: ONE Developer BigBox VR

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Facebook acquired another VR shooter game development studio with the purchase of BigBox VR, the creator of battle royale title POPULATION: ONE.

Facebook said it wouldn’t disclose the terms of the deal, which follows the April purchase of Downpour Interactive and its tactical multiplayer shooter Onward. Both POPULATION: ONE and Onward are among the highest revenue earners on Facebook’s standalone VR headset Oculus Quest. In February, Facebook said six Oculus Quest titles had cleared $10 million in revenue and Facebook now owns at least half of them.

Launched in late 2020, POPULATION: ONE is a first-person shooter (FPS) in which players team up in groups of three and fight across a large map to be the last team standing. The game is comparable to Epic Games’ battle royale sensation, Fortnite, both in terms of structure and business model – POPULATION: ONE is currently running a second ‘season’ of themed content including free updates and cosmetic items that are locked behind a premium battle pass.

The purchase represents Facebook’s 5th VR game development studio acquisition. The company first acquired the developer of rhythm slicing game Beat Saber, Beat Games, in late 2019. Beat Saber is likely VR’s most popular game at more than four million copies sold. Then, in February 2020, Facebook bought Sanzaru Games, the makers of PC VR’s visual powerhouse title Asgard’s Wrath.

In June 2020, Facebook also bought Ready At Dawn, the makers of the Echo VR games. Ready At Dawn’s Lone Echo II is slated for release on PC VR this summer, likely representing a swan song for the PC-powered Rift platform as Facebook zeroes in on the success it is finding with the standalone Quest. The multiplayer Echo VR, meanwhile, now runs a seasonal content structure similar to POPULATION: ONE.

Facebook says BigBox VR will operate as an independent studio.

“BigBox VR has big plans for the future of POP: ONE and for other projects, but we’re not ready to share details at this time,” a blog post prepared by Facebook states. “POP: ONE will continue to be supported on all its current platforms.

‘The Climb 2’ Freestyle Update Adds Hamster Wheels & Slides

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Part 2 of the free update turns Crytek’s VR rock climbing simulator introduces six outrageous levels.

Germany-based developer Crytek (The Climb, Robinson: The Journey) today released Part 2 of its Freestyle Expansion Pack for The Climb 2, introducing a handful of new levels complete with a variety of ridiculous obstacles designed to test your skills as a virtual rock climber.

Part 2 introduces six new levels in total (Crumbling Madness, Obstacle Course, Press Me!, Rotating Blocks, Slides, and Wheel’n’Jump), each of which featuring its own unique obstacles to overcome. Wheel’n’Jump, for example, adds enormous human-sized hamster balls to scale, whereas Crumbling Madness has you navigating a perilous course composed almost entirely of broken grips that crumble in your hands.



Similar to Part 1, which introduced “rhythm-based climbing” to the game, each of these new courses can be played in both casual and professional mode with zero checkpoints. Experienced climbers can rack up additional points by completing each level without chalking their hands. Finish every course back-to-back, and you’ll unlock exclusive gloves as a reward.

“Once again we’re delighted to bring yet another expansion pack to The Climb 2, which means more menacing levels to be taken on for players,” said Andreas Liebeskind, Principal Gamer Designer, in an official release. “Players have told us how much they love the game and the updates we’re continuously bringing to it and this is all part of our post-launch support for the game. The levels were designed for players to have fun but also challenge them in new ways and we hope they’ll enjoy what’s in store for them.”

Whereas the game’s original maps focused on providing a realistic climbing experience by replicating popular real-world locations, the Freestyle Expansion Pack features colorful, artificial environments, resulting in more of an arcade-style experience.

Image Credit: Crytek

Part 2 takes this concept to the extreme, introducing a wide range of impossible obstacles that drastically change the way you approach each level. While the core gameplay remains the same, new hurdles like the giant hamster ball and button-activated grips add a whole new dimension to the game.

Despite having completed the game start-to-finish, Crytek’s free updates have successfully kept me coming back for more. Part 2 of the Freestyle Expansion Pack is easily my favorite addition to the game thus far, offering a plethora of over-the-top courses that would impossible—or at least incredibly expensive—to replicate in real life.

The Climb 2 is available now on Oculus Quest headsets for $29.99. Parts 1 & 2 of the Freestyle Expansion Pack are available now to all existing owners 100% free of charge.

Feature Image Credit: Crytek

Kuo Claims 2022 Oculus Headset Will Have New Lenses

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Android Central says it viewed a note from Ming-Chi Kuo claiming Facebook & Sony have ordered high quantities of new, more expensive VR lenses for 2022.

Kuo is a TF International Securities analyst mostly known for predicting Apple products & moves over a year in advance. Apple Track gives him a 77% accuracy rating.

oculus rift s display lenses
Facebook announced its current lens design in late 2017

Facebook last shipped a new lens design in May 2018 with the launch of Oculus Go (now discontinued). That same ‘Super Libra G’ lens was used in Quest and Rift S, and is still used in Quest 2.

The PlayStation VR headset launched back in late 2016, and had been shown at trade conferences since 2014. Sources tell us Sony’s next-generation headset for PlayStation 5 has significantly higher resolution, inside-out tracking, a vibration motor, and even foveated rendering – so new lenses wouldn’t exactly be a surprise.

HTC recently introduced new, wider field of view lenses in Vive Focus 3 & Vive Pro 2

Current VR lenses have a field of view roughly around 100 degrees wide. New lenses could allow Facebook & Sony to increase the field of view, the area of clarity, or both. In an Instagram AMA back in March, Facebook’s VP of AR/VR Andrew Bosworth said he likes the idea of a taller field of view, which he claimed could be more impactful than wider.

Android Central’s headline names the 2022 Oculus headset as ‘Oculus Quest 3’, but the article notes the source isn’t actually claiming that. In a public Q&A session in April, Bosworth said Quest 3 “doesn’t exist yet” and claimed “Quest 2 is going to be in the market for a while – for a long while”.

In that same April Q&A session Bosworth did, however, discuss the idea of a ‘Quest Pro’, suggesting it could add new features but won’t launch in 2021. It’s possible Facebook plans to introduce new lenses in a Pro model – unlike Sony, Facebook also has to include a mobile processor and battery. As the cost comes down over time, it could then bring these lenses to a mainstream Quest 3 – but of course that’s just our speculation based on Kuo’s claim & Bosworth’s statements.

Livestream With Supernatural’s Head Of Fitness Leanne Pedante

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A little more than one year after launch, Supernatural is changing lives with its subscription-based fitness program on Oculus Quest.

If you’re looking for a “daily source of inspiration and motivation” and curious about the broader impact of VR as a technology, you might think about checking out the Official Supernatural Community on Facebook. The group has more than 13,000 members with updates streaming in at all hours from people talking about their fitness journeys in VR. They share what’s going on their lives, their progress, the music and the workouts, and generally encourage one another with support and tips.

A key part of Supernatural is its focus on coaches in virtual reality who talk members through new workouts every day. Leanne Pedante is the Head of Fitness at Supernatural and her encouraging voice has been driving “champions” to finish their Supernatural workouts strong and proud. We’re going to be joined by Pedante in our virtual studio this week for a live broadcast interview talking about exercise in VR. Has Pedante been noticed out in the physical world by Supernatural players who “met” her virtually? Does she have any advice for people to keep up with their workouts? Do you have your own questions?

Tune in on Wednesday, June 9 at 11 am Pacific time for our live discussion with Pedante from our virtual studio. We should be able to monitor live comments, so no matter if you’re a member of the Supernatural community already, or entirely new to VR and thinking about getting a headset for exercise, leave a question or comment and we might talk about it on the show.

You can subscribe to our channel and set a reminder for the interview with the video below, or check back on this page at 11 am Pacific time on June 9.

No Oculus Studios Projects At E3, Facebook Confirms

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Facebook will not be showing any new Oculus Studios projects during next week’s E3 streams.

Studios Executive Producer Mike Doran confirmed as much in a recent post on Reddit. “The Oculus Studios team will not be showing anything at E3,” Doran said, “but stay tuned!”

To be clear, Doran is only speaking on behalf of Oculus Studios – it’s possible that Facebook’s VR efforts still pop up during E3 in some way.

Facebook hasn’t announced another VR Gaming Showcase for the big event – it held its first one in April. There are several Studios projects we know about on the horizon right now – Rift exclusive Lone Echo 2 is finally coming this summer and Facebook is partnering with Capcom to bring Resident Evil 4 to the Quest 2 as the platform’s first full exclusive. A similar partnership with Ubisoft will bring Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell to VR, too.

Last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also seemed to accidentally confirm that Facebook-owned Downpour Interactive is making Onward 2.

It’s not too surprising that Oculus Studios is skipping E3, however. We’re now likely just a few months away from Facebook’s annual VR event, Facebook Connect, which is where the company often puts a big spotlight on news games. We might well see another Gaming Showcase before or around that time, too.

Of course, E3 won’t be without VR news. On Friday we confirmed that we’ll be bringing back the Upload VR Showcase over the course of the show. You can tune in on June 12th at 3pm PT for new game trailers and reveals not just for Quest titles but PSVR and PC VR too. You won’t want to miss it!

Facebook: ‘Long Term’ Oculus Studios Titles Targeting Quest 2

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Oculus Studios titles releasing in the “long term” are targeting the Oculus Quest 2, according to Executive Producer Mike Doran.

The comment was made in a fairly obscure post on Reddit asking whether any big studio titles were coming to Quest. One user commented that games such as After the Fall and Resident Evil 4 are on the way, then tagged Oculus Studios Executive Producer Mike Doran and mentioned he had previously said that there were some long-term projects in the works.

Doran then chimed in to reveal a bit more. “I can’t say for sure when announcements will happen but there are several long term projects being produced by the Studios team that have yet to be revealed,” he wrote. He then also responded to a follow-up comment and said that “the long term Studios projects [he] referred to are all targeting Quest 2.”

In some respects this isn’t a huge surprise — towards the end of last year, Facebook confirmed that its PC VR headset the Rift S would be retired and that it wouldn’t be releasing any new PC VR-only headsets. The focus is now squarely on standalone VR, with the goal of making the Quest 2 the main and “best” PC VR experience on offer.

With Facebook’s line of dedicated PC VR headsets gone, it’s not shocking that all of Oculus Studios’ unannounced projects are targeting Quest 2. Facebook have also previously indicated that its intention is for Quest 2 to be in the market “for a long while”, despite also confirming work on an unannounced Quest Pro headset. Still, news that projects that are further out will still be targeting Quest 2 should relieve some concerns from owners worried Facebook might be making Quest Pro or perhaps even Quest 3 exclusive software in the immediate future.

It’s not quite the same story for Quest 1 – this year’s release of Resident Evil 4 will be exclusive to Quest 2.

In a separate Reddit post, Doran also confirmed that the “Oculus Studios team will not be showing anything at E3” this year, so don’t expect any of those projects to be revealed over the next few weeks.

That being said, his comment leaves the door open for other companies to reveal VR content at E3 later this year… We might have something to say about that very soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

Sniper Elite VR Releases July 8 For Quest, PSVR & SteamVR

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Rebellion revealed Sniper Elite VR will launch July 8, 2021 on PlayStation VR, Steam VR, Quest and Rift.

A new trailer for the shooter showcases some of the gameplay.

You’ll play as an “Italian partisan, fighting fascism in a powerful World War II story told through his harrowing memories as you protect your fellow countrymen and drive back the merciless invaders,” according to Rebellion.  The game is developed in partnership with Just Add Water and Coatsink and it offers an 18 mission campaign with either full locomotion or single stick teleport. You’ll use rifles, SMGs, pistols, shotguns and the developers are promising some satisfying gunplay throughout. The game will also include a VR version of x-ray kill cam that’s a signature of the Sniper Elite franchise.

We’re looking forward to seeing how the game handles on Quest in particular, we’d tried it in 2019 with the PlayStation Aim Controller and heard in late 2020 it was planned for standalone release as well.

Zuckerberg Explains Why Facebook Is Building A ‘Reality Operating System’

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and VP AR/VR Andrew Bosworth hosted a live Ask-Me-Anything session on Instagram, in which they confirmed work on a new OS.

Back in 2019, The Information reported that Facebook was working on a new operating system for AR glasses. In yesterday’s AMA, one user-submitted question asked whether Facebook is really building a OS, and why. Zuckerberg responded, “We are building a reality operating system. That’s sort of how we think about it.”

“These new platforms are so different from everything that’s come before it – not just the input, but the app model, how you’re going to discover things, how tightly they need to be optimized. If you’re building a pair of glasses that need to look like normal glasses, you need to have the system be so tightly optimized so you can basically do all the computation that you would expect from a modern computer, but do it on someone’s face within a thermal envelope and a power envelope that can last all day long. So that’s a very big challenge.

The team is pretty far along in this, at this point. We’re building a microkernel-based operating system, which is the architecture that you want to segment the pieces to make it as secure as possible. That way you have a small [set] of pieces that you know are going to be fundamentally trustworthy that you can build on top of. But at the end of the day, we need to basically be able to design and customize every layer of the stack in order to build out the performance and efficiency that we need in order to deliver these systems.”

It’s unclear whether this OS will be only for AR glasses or also in future Facebook VR headsets. The Information’s report only mentioned AR, and Zuckerberg’s answer referenced “a pair of glasses that need to look like normal glasses”.

Bosworth jumped in to clarify that he and the team at Facebook Reality Labs ideally wanted to build as little as possible from scratch, but ended up needing to build quite a lot to tackle the large technical challenges:

“I want to build as little as possible. And Facebook really was built on top of open source. We’re big contributors to open source. When software is available for us to use, we love using it. Obviously, our Oculus and Portal systems are built on Android, which we’ve had great success with. I want to build as little as I can. What is amazing is how much you have to build to fit into these tight thermal envelopes.

And I do feel at times that mine was a generation of computer programmers who were a little bit lazy. We got to be lazy. We were at the absolute, just the fattest part of Moore’s law, delivering tremendous gains in silicon. So you can just write high-level inefficient code and who cares? We’re not up against Moore’s law — much tougher than that, we’re up against the first law of thermodynamics. The amount of heat that we can dissipate off of your face — not very much without burning you, which we strongly oppose.

So any piece of work you see me doing, any piece of work you see Facebook Reality Labs doing… I don’t want to do that work – I feel like I have to do it to deliver the vision. And building our own reality operating system is a part of that.”

Facebook’s operating system effort is led by Mark Lucovsky, a former Microsoft engineer who co-developed Windows NT. Lucovsky’s Twitter & LinkedIn profiles call the project ‘The Reality Platform’. Some job listings at Facebook have referenced this work but we haven’t seen the executives speak publicly about the efforts.

Interestingly, earlier this year Bloomberg reported Apple is on a new OS for AR and VR called rOS, with the r likely also standing for reality.

Staff writer David Heaney contributed to this report.

Low-Fi Spin-Off Tech Demo Agency Launches On Quest Via App Lab

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Blair Renaud, developer of Technolust and upcoming VR title Low-Fi, announced that a tech demo for the upcoming Low-Fi spin-off, Agency, is now available for Quest via App Lab.

The demo itself is quite short, coming in at around two minutes. You can’t move or interact with anything either — you’re stationary but control two robot arms. Instead, this demo is meant to showcase some of the visual fidelity Renaud and co are pulling off on the standalone headset.

agency quest 2

You cycle through a couple of different environments in the demo — one is a spooky prison lined with robots, another sees you in an alley looking up at a neon-coated cyberpunk city. There’s also a few ambient character models and robots who stand around you or move through the area in certain scenes. Across all the short scenes, the lighting and human models look particularly impressive, especially given it’s running on Quest.

agency quest 2

Here’s a short summary of the game’s premise, taken from the App Lab listing:

You’re the first Metacorp model to receive an experimental firmware update, code named GENE.SYS. While the engineers are discussing the implications of the update, you awaken. You have agency. You must escape this prison, find a way to survive, and take freedom from your makers. You’ll meet friend and foe along the way. Spread the firmware and start a revolution.

When we talked with Renaud in November last year, he said that a pitch for Agency on Quest had been sent to Oculus and been approved. However, the focus is on existing projects for now. “[Agency] still needs funding to justify taking people away from LOW-FI though. Fingers crossed for us!”

Low-Fi is available in Early Access now for PC VR, with plans for a full launch on PC VR and Sony’s new VR headset sometime in the future. Meanwhile, you can try out the Agency tech demo for Quest here.

VR Battle Royale ‘POPULATION: ONE’ Adds Team Deathmatch

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First to 30 kills wins in this limited time game mode coming soon to Oculus Quest and SteamVR headsets.

Developer BigBox VR Inc. (Smashbox Arena) this week announced the latest update to its popular VR battle royale game POPULATION: ONE.

Beginning tomorrow, players can dive into a brand new game mode, Team Deathmatch, and compete against other players for the highest kill count. It’s pretty self-explanatory: whereas existing modes, such as Squad and War, have you fighting for survival throughout a steadily shrinking battlefield, Team Deathmatch is all about racking up more kills than the enemy team.

Unlike the aforementioned game modes, players will have the opportunity to respawn after being killed, allowing them to jump back into the action in seconds without having to wait for a teammate to revive them via the defibrillator.

Similar to War mode, players will be broken up into two teams; the first to reach 30 kills being crowned the winner.

Since its launch back in October 2020, BigBox has done a commendable job at supplying players with a regular stream of updates and enhancements. This past April, the developer launched its Private Room Beta for a limited time, allowing players the chance to enjoy various game modes alongside 17 of their closest friends via a private server. Prior to that, the team introduced War mode, which ditched the conventional three-player squad format in favor of 9v9 big team battles.



Most recently was the launch of Season 2: The Frontier, which introduced several Western-themed environmental changes, custom private rooms, and new weapons and items. This includes the incredibly useful harmonica, which—when played—revives your teams’ shields. Season 2 also boosted the overall player size from 18 to 24, resulting in even more chaotic gunfights.

Similar to past updates, Team Deathmatch will be available for a limited time, so get in while the getting’s good.

POPULATION: ONE is available now on Oculus Quest and SteamVR headsets for $29.99.

Feature Image Credit: BigBox VR Inc.