Into the Dead: Crimson Heights is a new horror game that, on Quest 3 headsets, constructs its VR levels based on the scanned walls and furniture of your physical room.
Put simply, that means the main structures of the virtual world will occupy the same space as your real walls and furniture. The developer, PikPok, calls this "hyper reality", and it works by leveraging Quest 3's scene understanding feature.
David Heaney
The PC VR version of the game, on the other hand, will have fully developed immersive environments, as most PC VR headsets don't have the ability to generate a mesh of your physical environment.
The game is the latest entry in its Into the Dead series. The original Into the Dead was a 2012 smartphone game, and the series made the jump to VR with the Samsung Gear in 2015 and Oculus Rift in 2016, and recently to Steam with Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, a 2D side scrolling survival game currently in Early Access. PikPok also has prior VR experience with Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition.
Here's the trailer for the new game:
We have seen many games utilize your play space for mixed reality gaming like Drop Dead: The Cabin's Home Invasion, Resolution Games' Spatial Ops, Vanbo BV's Laser Dance, and Cyborn's Wall Town Wonders. But all of those examples start with camera passthrough and add virtual elements to it, whereas Into the Dead: Crimson Heights is a fully VR experience that uses the scene mesh, and the recognized furniture within it, to guide how entirely virtual levels are created.
The basic idea PikPok is implementing here is not new. There were a few prototypes of it on research hardware in the 2010s, and it was presented by Meta's Reality Labs Chief Scientist Michael Abrash as an interesting future use case of VR headsets with environment meshing back in 2018, at Oculus Connect 5. But as far as we're aware, this is the first VR game from a studio, not counting solo developer experiments, set to actually be built around the idea.
Sometimes eight years is the length of the path from research to products. Keep that in mind when you read about new XR research on UploadVR and elsewhere.
Michael Abrash presents the basic concept back in 2018 at Oculus Connect 5.
Into the Dead: Crimson Heights comes to Quest 3 headsets and SteamVR sometime in 2027.
PikPok says more details will be revealed at Gamescom in August.
