Enlarge / Is this the new face of the tabletop RPG player? Demeo maker Resolution Games thinks it might be.

Resolution Games today announced that a version of Demeo —the developer's popular virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) tabletop RPG simulator—is in "active development" for the Apple Vision Pro headset. The title is among the first VR/MR games to be officially confirmed for Apple's highly anticipated $3,500 wearable computing device , which is expected early next year.

After Demeo 's launch in 2021 , Resolution Games added a Mixed Reality update late last year that places in-game objects on top of a view of the real world (via passthrough cameras on compatible headsets like Meta's Quest 2 and Quest Pro and the upcoming Quest 3 ). A "Mixed Reality 2.0" update for the game, launching today, adds support for controller-free hand-tracking as well as "co-location" of mixed reality items, which can now appear in the same place for multiple users in the same physical room.

Those kinds of MR features will be useful on the Apple Vision Pro, which doesn't use handheld controllers and is primarily focused on MR apps that can be layered over a view of the real world. But Resolution Games says Vision Pro will also support a "fully virtual" version of the game that doesn't integrate passthrough images.

Enlarge / Product photography of the Google Glass wearable. (credit: Google)

Google's head of operating system and software platforms for augmented and mixed reality devices, Mark Lucovsky, has left the company after months of turmoil for the company's mixed reality projects and staff. He publicly announced his departure in a tweet on Monday:

I have decided to step away from my role at Google, where I was Senior Director of Engineering, responsible for OS and Software Platform for AR and XR devices. The recent changes in AR leadership and Google’s unstable commitment and vision have weighed heavily on my decision.

It's unclear exactly which leadership changes he's referring to, but it seems possible or even likely that he's talking about the recent departure of Clay Bavor, who had led Google's XR work since 2015. Bavor left the company in March of this year.

Google was one of the pioneers of mass-market AR when it piloted Google Glass with developers in 2013, but things have been rocky of late. The company killed Glass, brought it back as an enterprise-only product, then killed it again . Rumors swirled that the tech giant was working on a new AR product called Project Iris , but it was reportedly canceled this year amidst a wave of company layoffs.

Enlarge / Apple's first promotional image for WWDC 2023. (credit: Apple)

Apple will host its 34th annual Worldwide Developers Conference at its Cupertino, California, headquarters from Monday, June 5 through Friday, June 9, the company announced on Wednesday.

The conference will kick off with "a special all-day event," inclusive of the customary keynote presentation and the platform State of the Union talks. The language on Apple's website suggests that like last year, some or all of those will be presented in prerecorded video form rather than as a live on-stage presentation.

After that first day, Apple will likely host various panels on how developers can work with the company's developer toolkits and APIs to support new and old features across the various Apple platforms.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images )

A new report in the Financial Times claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams overrode design team objections to move forward with a new mixed-reality headset before designers believed the technology was ready. That said, the report isn't detailed enough to provide a nuanced picture of what's going on inside the company.

Here's the picture it does paint: A once-influential industrial design team is losing agency as executive departures and other factors have led to the team reporting to the company's operations chief instead of a top-level design executive.

We've written quite a bit about the gradual departure of famed design chief Jony Ive, who was a close collaborator with former CEO Steve Jobs. In addition to Ive, though, Apple also lost Ive's successor, Evans Hankey .

Enlarge / The "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display, the original augmented reality headset, circa 1968. Augmented reality has gotten a lot more mobile in the past decade. (credit: Ivan Sutherland)

A new report in The Information corroborates and expands upon an earlier Bloomberg report claiming that Apple is preparing to launch a high-end VR headset as early as next year, citing unnamed people with knowledge of the product.

Among the new revelations is that the new headset will feature two 8K screens (one for each eye) and that Apple has considered a steep $3,000 price point.

The headset (which the report says is codenamed N301) will be able to display rich 3D graphics at that resolution, thanks both to an ultrafast M1 chip successor and because Apple will liberally use an already-known VR technique that involves using eye-tracking to render objects in the user's periphery at a lower fidelity than what the user is focusing on.

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