A few days ago I played a game called ‘Dimension Wanderer’ on the Meta Quest 2 VR headset. It’s a mixed reality/augmented reality fighting game that reminded me soulslike game. Or maybe it’s better to say, soulslike combat similar to Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and such.
The combat is slow pace an you fight against a boss with a sword. You can dodge with your own body (literally moving in the real world), deflect attacks and punish your opponents when you find holes in their defences.
This mixed reality fighting game is fairly simple and it uses Meta Quest’s passthrough features to display the 3D content mixed with the real world camera stream.
At the top you can see me playing it in my apartment. The initial setup of the scene wasn’t great but with more attention I couldn’t have done it better. I personally wait for mixed reality glasses or VR glasses with more advanced passthrough that includes depth-scanning and auto object recognition so setup will be fully automated. This mean that in future augmented reality headsets or VR/MR headsets, you will just launch the game and it will scan the environment, or used already scanned areas that were previously scanned by the system and saved to the AR cloud digital replica of your home or local environment to be used in future games.
Of course, this is not the case here and the Quest 2 passthrough is in black and white. If you are using the Meta Quest Pro or maybe as of reading it, the Meta Quest 2, you’ll be able to experience the passthrough in colors. This will lead to better blending of the colorful virtual content with the local real world scene to create a more immersive experience.
This is BTW why I am so excited for the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Because I really want to experience AR/MR games with all the advanced technologies that are available by Apple and already used in the iPhone–and of course way beyond.
The only thing I am worried about is not having a physical controller, but for this particular game, a melee combat mixed reality game, I wouldn’t mind, it will be way better to have it with hand-tracking.
Anyway, future is bright and I hope to see many more augmented/mixed reality game introduced to future headset that will motivate developers to jump into making such games with occlusion, object recognition and make some really innovative gameplay experiences. This is just something simple but still fun to play and it’s free (demo) so it’s worth giving it a try, even on the Quest 2, which I played myself.