What you must know from Facebook’s 2021 AR/VR conference.
For my long-time readers, you know I am a VR interaction designer & indie game developer for Isekai Ent, launching titles for Steam VR & Oculus.
That means other than getting mailed the newest VR kits “for free”, one of our Sword Reverie team’s biggest excitement is to tune in for Facebook Connect 2021, the annual AR/VR conference, that was hosted today October 28th.
Although not as technical as last year, this year Facebook did not disappoint. The whole conference gave us truly a front-row seat to the future from Mark Zuckerberg himself.
If you are even remotely caught up with tech news, you probably already heard Facebook has officially changed its name to Meta. Here is what Zuckerberg had to say.
“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote.
“Facebook is one of the most used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do. Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”
If everyone here at the Sword Reverie team were to sum up the conference in two words, it would be Future-Driven. As a developer, designer, or just a tech enthusiast, here are the three topics you should know about what Meta (Facebook) will bring to us moving forward in 2022.
- The future of VR/AR Gaming
- The future of VR in our everyday lives
- A bright future for investors, consumers, & developers alike.
The future of VR/AR Gaming
Yes, you heard it right, GTA is coming to VR & not just any VR device, the Quest. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the VR take on GTA: San Andreas as “an entirely new way to experience this iconic open-world in virtual reality.”
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Currently one of the major selling points of oculus headsets is for gaming, no doubt this is a big consumer market. It is only natural Zuckerberg would touch on this aspect of VR to satisfy consumers and investors alike.
GTA won’t be the first classic console video game ported over to the Quest 2, there is currently a version of Resident Evil 4, which was turned into a first-person game for virtual reality. Nonetheless, today’s announcement is still big news, especially to hear it first not from Rockstar, but from Zuckerberg himself.
For the gaming community, although more portable, currently there are still lots of technical limitations to the Quest. However, no doubt the added accessibility and easy-to-use nature of Quest have been decided by Facebook as the way of the future.
This support and attention given by Facebook to the quest is not a big surprise to everyone working on Sword Reverie at Isekai ent. During our investment rounds with Oculus, we already heard a while ago Facebook will be mostly focusing its attention on the more portable and accessible gaming headset Quest.
Creating a Quest port for Sword reverie or our future VR titles will surely be something we keep in mind moving future as well. In fact, VR titles like blade and sorcery that has previously strictly stated they will not be porting over to Quest have announced a title launch in just a few days.
So what do you think, as a VR gamer, or someone looking to buy a headset, do you agree with this direction of VR? Would you still want more immersion through better hardware and other devices such as an omnidirectional treadmill?
