At Year’s End 2020 — Progress on Natural Magic and beyond
Tags: Oculus, VR, Virtual Reality, Waltz Of The Wizard, Oculus Quest

As we approach year’s end we wanted to update everyone on our progress. This year has been incredibly exciting for VR, with accelerating advances in content design, VR/AR hardware and platforms in general. We’re happy to say this has been our best year ever and a leap forward for us in almost every way you can think of.

What a year!

2020 in a nutshell

Over the past few months alone we’ve released several big updates for Waltz of the Wizard, which continues to be among Quest’s best selling titles. That included the very well-received hand tracking updates on Quest that have resulted in Waltz offering the greatest range of unique hand tracking interaction on Quest, like finger snap, lightning hands, finger slingshot, accessibility features for finger disabilities, and more.

Oculus Quest hand-tracking release trailer

We also introduced the second generation of our Telepath movement system which minimizes discomfort and maximizes your ability to physically move in a natural, believable manner while moving artificially. There is more to come, but the second generation demonstrated new alternate modes and features for enhanced presence, and showed how it was designed with hand-tracking in mind.

Telepath 2.0 design overview video — VR movement evolved

Most recently, we released major updates for Quest 2, adding real-time lighting, post-processing bloom and a Super Resolution + 90Hz mode. Oh and we just released a minor haptics update a few days ago with various new sensations and effects, which we’re planning more of going forward!

Oculus Quest 2 graphical comparison video for Waltz of the Wizard

Seeing all of our work so well received and featured worldwide, while partnering with our friends at Facebook Reality Labs and Oculus in introducing new VR capabilities, has been a thrilling ride. We’re extremely excited for where things are headed.

Natural Magic

The above is, of course, all on top of working hard on Natural Magic! That is our first major expansion or Waltz which will bring new magical powers, new VR mechanics, procedural worlds and more replayability.

Natural Magic teaser trailer — first major expansion for Waltz of the Wizard coming 2021

As we’ve mentioned, following fun and successful beta tests for our smaller updates on Quest, our original goal was to have an invite-only beta for Natural Magic in December. Things are coming together, but with consideration to progress in recent months and upcoming opportunities in 2021, we will be shifting the timeline for beta from December to first quarter of next year. This is also likely to shift the full timeline, so we are now targeting public release in Q2 2021. Naturally, this is in favor of delivering the innovation and details of Aldin products that everyone is familiar with by now. We’ll provide further updates closer to dates.

Our sincerest thanks to everyone for the support and heartwarming reviews this year! Going forward we remain curious to explore different ways we can communicate more with the Aldin user community about our long-term goals — both through invite-only experimental betas and other ways like our Discord community, our blog and beyond.

Going into 2021

Our focus remains on exploring what VR can do that no other medium can — produce a believable experience of being in an alternate reality — which we are constantly getting better tools and technologies to create. From our own presence analysis- and gesture recognition software, to new capabilities like hand-tracking, there’s a constantly expanding range of factors enabling us to work towards that ultimate form of native experiences that only virtual realities are capable of delivering. Those who’ve been following us over the years know we try to innovate in every step and that our R&D covers a broad range of design principles, mechanics and technologies that are part of our long-term vision for VR/AR. You’ll see more of these advances next year ;-)

Even with the rapid advances in VR/AR over the years, we are still at the birth of this medium and the growing opportunities make us more thrilled than ever. We can’t tell you how excited we are for 2021 and the changes it will bring for Waltz of the Wizard and the VR industry alike!