Meta released a new mixed reality showcase for Unreal Engine developers that ought to help kickstart some Quest projects that use your room in fresh and interesting ways.

Phanto for Unreal, an open source port of the previously released Phanto project for Unity, was recently launched for Unreal Engine 5.3.

In Phanto, players combat ghostly foes invading their surroundings with various weapons. While it presents a slice of some fun and visually interesting gameplay, regular users can’t download it through either the Quest Store or SideQuest—at least not for now.

Instead, it was built to showcase best practices for Meta’s Presence Platform features for mixed reality, including things like Scene Mesh, Passthrough, and Depth API.

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Much like the open source Unity demo Cryptic Cabinet from Meta and veteran XR studio Magnopus, the Phanto for Unreal Engine reference app includes a number of recommended practices for doing things like content placement using Scene API, immersive mesh collisions with Scene Mesh, air and ground navigation for characters utilizing Scene Mesh and NavMesh, and optimizations like Application Spacewarp and Depth API for enhanced performance and realism.

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Granted, users can download Cryptic Cabinet, as well Meta’s other mixed reality reference app Discover—both of which are available through App Lab—so maybe the company will publish it there too eventually, if only for the curious non-developers out there who don’t want to go through the hassle of compiling and loading the game on Quest manually.

However, if you are looking to use Phanto for Unreal Engine to build your own mixed reality experience on Quest, check out the project’s full source code and assets over at GitHub.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • ViRGiN

    Time to get out the hand cream.

    • ViRGiN

      I’m still hoping sadly it’s bradley will drop some valve dickhard leaks, it’s been a while since he got his monitor replacement AVP.

  • another juan

    meta seems very interested in unreal and godot after last year’s unity debacle

    • Anonymous

      90% of VR games are made in Unity and frankly it isn’t a good thing even without Unity’s debacle.

      • ViRGiN

        And 100% of these Unity games just feel wrong.

        • kakek

          No but seriously, you don’t actually like VR do you ?
          You just dissed SuperhotVR, beat saber, and the room VR …

          • ViRGiN

            Yeah, Superhot was super-gimmicky, beat saber is yet another stupid phenomen that has very little to do with VR and would work equally as fun on xbox kinect. It’s as phenomenal as gorilla tag, the #1 PCVR game.
            Or it’s as great as Onward.
            Yeah, a ton of people keep saying you can get good visuals and feel regardless of engine used, but that has not been really seen in VR. Unity is much easier to use to put together _something_ than Unreal.

  • polysix

    Every VR game I’ve ever been near that uses Unity feels like a massive step backwards in tech vs my own stuff I threw together in Unreal Engine (since DK2 days even).

    I pretty much hate Unity and the sub-par standard of graphical finesse it’s foisted onto VR for years. VR is worth MORE than that utter, non-compelling, very much NON virtual *REALITY* like crud.

    Unreal Engine may be power hungry but VR isn’t VR without reaching for better graphics… all these cartoon worlds and flat shaded shovel ware ‘games’ have only hurt VR in the long run, turned it into a gimmick to the outside world.

    In some ways I wish VR hadn’t even started yet outside of dev kits to us VR nerds and devs, but with minimum Quest Pro levels of tech (lenses – wireless PCVR etc).

    It was unleashed too early on the public and the public remains sceptical due to the still underwhelming tech and ergonomics of HMDs. In 5 years it will be different, that’s when they should have started shouting about it. And behind the scenes, proper VR stuff would have been created, not shovel ware bare-minimum ‘oh look I’m VR so don’t need to bother with making decent GFX or GAMEPLAY’ stuff.

  • Ardra Diva

    the MR content on the Quest 3 is magical stuff. I find myself seeking out those titles the most now. Really enjoy The Cabin’s “Home Invasion” mode, but Ocean Rift’s MR aquarium mode, Thrill of the Fight, heck anything i’ve tried that’s MR is a next-gen feeling and experience.