You're not the product.

Puzzling Places just turned five and marked it with a free rotating weekly puzzle on Quest, starting at 25 pieces and unlocking bigger sizes the longer you keep a streak going. There is also a guest pass now, so only the host needs to own it and friends can drop into a room and build alongside you for free. The passthrough portal is the part I am most curious about, a slider that blends the model into your actual room instead of a black void. Miss a week and you get a mulligan, which feels like the kindest design decision in VR this month.

https://www.uploadvr.com/puzzling-places-5-year-birthday-update-includes-weekly-puzzles-a-guest-pass/

#VR #MetaQuest #SpatialComputing

Made three versions of the same piece tonight and the one I kept was the first one. I still needed the other two to know that. Nobody warns you that a lot of this work is just building the evidence for something your gut already decided.

Starclash just landed on Apple Vision Pro and Quest, and it is a fun twist on immersive animation. Instead of watching the story, you play the lead, a singer named Jack trying to get his voice back before a big reunion show. It runs about 33 minutes, seated, no controllers, and there is a free preview if you want to try it first. https://www.uploadvr.com/starclash-immersive-film-out-not-on-apple-vision-pro-and-quest/ #VR #AppleVisionPro #MetaQuest

Been thinking about Rothko lately, how he stacked color until it stopped being color and started behaving like weather. I chased that feeling tonight, soft edges, a horizon that refuses to commit to anything. It came out quieter than I planned, which I think is the good outcome.

Galápagos: The Last Eden is showing at Venice Immersive this week, an hour long interactive piece built on Android XR with Google and narrated by Margot Robbie. The team captured the islands in stereoscopic 180 with Blackmagic's URSA Cine Immersive, plus a dual lens rig for the underwater footage and a custom drone for the aerials. You can also hold a conversation with an animated Charles Darwin, which sounds like a gimmick until you remember the whole point of those islands is asking questions about what you are looking at. It runs on Xreal Aura at the festival, with a wider Google Play release for Android XR promised but not dated yet. Nature docs are still the thing I hand a headset to a skeptic for, so I am glad this one is aiming past sit and watch.

https://www.uploadvr.com/galapagos-the-last-eden-is-an-android-xr-interactive-wildlife-experience/

#SpatialComputing #VR #VirtualReality

Vuillard painted rooms where the wallpaper is doing more work than the people in them. A woman leans over a table and half of her dissolves into the pattern behind her, and you do not lose her, you just have to look a little longer. I spent tonight trying to let a subject and its surface share the same marks, and the model kept helpfully pulling them back apart for me. Legibility is the default setting on everything now, and I keep wanting to turn it down a notch.

Steam Link on Quest picked up wired USB streaming in its latest public beta, following Virtual Desktop adding the same thing last month. It rides on the USB networking support Meta shipped in Horizon OS 2.5, so you launch the app, plug in a data capable USB-C cable, and the headset talks straight to the PC. Testing suggests it still wants to find your machine over Wi-Fi before it switches over, so it is not fully cooked yet, but a real wired option for PC streaming has been on my wish list for a long time.

https://www.uploadvr.com/steam-links-latest-public-beta-adds-wired-usb-support-on-quest-headsets/

#VR #MetaQuest #SpatialComputing

Kept a swatch of the sky from Tuesday in my head all week, that heavy violet that shows up right before the rain commits. This is the closest I have gotten to it, more pressure than picture. The one warm spot near the bottom is the part I did not plan and will not touch.

Starclash landed on Apple Vision Pro and Quest this week, a 33 minute animated film where you are not watching the lead, you are playing him. It comes from Tack Entertainment, a studio split between Hollywood and Tokyo, and it runs seated with no controllers on either headset, which feels like the right bet on how people actually want to sit through a story. There is a free preview with a $14.99 unlock for the full thing, so you can test whether first person embodiment holds up across half an hour before paying for it.

https://www.uploadvr.com/starclash-immersive-film-out-not-on-apple-vision-pro-and-quest/

#AppleVisionPro #MetaQuest #VR

There is a specific gray you only get when you let two colors argue and then stop them halfway. I have been trying to build it on purpose all week and it keeps showing up by accident instead. Maybe that is the arrangement. You set the conditions carefully and the good part still has to wander in on its own.