Hey everyone. The latest news with us is we have a beta version of our flight-based, earth exploration in VR app FLY on the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) MR headset. Hats off to the super talented, hard working VirZOOM dev team for pulling off this major engineering accomplishment ahead of schedule.
FLY is like Goggle Earth VR. FLY takes the astonishing experience of traveling through 196 million square miles of earth mapped in 3D and adds the excitement of free flight that you can control with body movements alone, made possible by our patented and patent-pending motion tech.
As brief background, we first developed FLY in a special project with Google in 2018. It was designed to work with the tethered PC-based VR platforms available at the time. We had to wait until 2023 before Google made a version of the underlying Google Earth 3D maps tech available for stand-alone VR platforms like the Meta Quest.
We launched a version of FLY for Meta Quest 2 & 3 in December 2023 on AppLab. You can download and play it here: https://virzoom.com/fly
After a few updates FLY has over the past few months received a 4.8 out of 5-star rating, excellent for any v1.0 app. One reviewer called it "The Greatest VR Concept of all time." Another: "This is the killer app for me."
FLY v1.0 version on Meta Quest 2 & 3 is already a great product, as the ratings attest. We plan to get an even better v1.1 version listed on the main Meta Quest store later in 2024 where it can be promoted to the 20+ million Quest owners there.
You can purchase a Meta Quest 2 for a mere $199 to enjoy FLY. FLY on the $3,500 AVP is super high performance. It takes full advantage of the AVP's massive processing power and high resolution display. Image resolution is stunning and flight is smooth and exciting.
That's great but here's the really interesting part. FLY is designed around the concept of navigation without hand controllers. Nearly all of the apps and games designed for the Meta Quest, on the other hand -- so to speak -- rely on two hand controllers for navigation, using an assortment of buttons, triggers, and joysticks. Apple decided that most consumers aren't interested in learning how to use these complicated peripherals. The AVP, unlike the Meta Quest, doesn't have hand controllers. AVP apps have to be designed to work with the platform's "Spatial Computing" gaze and hand gesture user interface, which is simple and intuitive. As a result, only a few Quest apps and games are a fit for the AVP. Since FLY already works without hand controllers, it's a perfect fit for the AVP's "Spatial Computing" philosophy.
Can FLY be a killer app for AVP? Time will tell.
