There are a few great ways to market VR games, but there’s arguably none better than by showing real people immersed in virtual environments thanks to mixed reality capture. While Meta has its own Mixed Reality Capture tool (MRC), the company is taking a step back from development by adopting third-party app LIV as its official solution.
LIV describes the deal as a “multi-year partnership with Meta to bring LIV’s mixed reality capture & virtual camera solutions to developers publishing on Meta Quest and soon also creators who wish to use those features in Meta Quest and Rift apps.”
To boot, LIV is today releasing in beta its new SDK v2.0 for Unity-based apps which support Meta’s Presence Platform capabilities, such as hand tracking, passthrough, spatial anchors, etc.
The studio says that later this year a beta release of SDK v2.0 for similar Unreal-based apps will also arrive, with official release of both Unity and Unreal versions coming sometime in Q4 2024.
Although a headlining feature, LIV isn’t just a mixed reality capture tool; it also specializes in avatar solutions for Vtubing and allows streamers to monitor chats, alerts and notifications in VR. Notably, to create mixed reality videos like the one seen below, you’ll need a PC with a supported external camera, and of course the free PC app itself.
One of the biggest names to use LIV is Another Axiom’s Gorilla Tag, which has just topped $100 million in revenue, making it one of VR’s most successful games to date.
“Another Axiom builds fully realized spaces that are meant to be shared together, like in our popular game Gorilla Tag,” said David Yee, COO at Another Axiom. “We’re always looking at new ways to give our players and creators a great experience they can share with their family and friends. This partnership between LIV and Meta provides access to best-in-class capture and virtual camera technology, introducing new ways to capture and share in-headset experiences. We can’t wait to see what the community does with these new tools.”
You can download LIV on Steam and get started on integrating LIV SDK to your Quest app starting today, both of which are free for content creators and game developers alike.