Quest Drone Rage Demo Is Mixed Reality Space Pirate Trainer

Meta released an open source Quest demo app including a minigame that’s basically mixed reality Space Pirate Trainer.

Drone Rage replaces your ceiling with a night sky featuring an alien mothership which sends waves of flying robot enemies you fight off with your dual wielded laser blaster pistols.

The minigame is included as one of two demos in Discover, Meta’s new showcase of the potential of mixed reality on Quest. The other demo is called Bike, which guides you through attaching parts to a bicycle in front of you by grabbing parts on a surface beside you.

Anyone can download and try Discover, and the demos within it, but it’s mainly intended to be a showcase to developers of what’s possible with mixed reality on Quest.

The Discover demos show how to use Meta’s various SDKs to build immersive mixed reality apps with colocated multiplayer support.

It uses the Quest Passthrough API to show the real world, the Quest Scene APIs to leverage your walls, ceilings, and furniture as geometry, and the Meta Interaction SDK for the user interface and for grabbing, holding and placing objects.

For colocated multiplayer – where multiple headsets see the same virtual objects in the same part of the room and play together – it leverages the Quest Shared Spatial Anchors API. For remote multiplayer over the internet, it leverages Meta Avatars SDK.

Of course, running room-aware mixed reality apps like this on Quest 2 and Quest Pro requires arduously manually marking out your room geometry, and on Quest 2 the passthrough is very low resolution black & white. The upcoming Quest 3 may scan your room automatically though, and it’s said to have superior color passthrough quality to even Quest Pro.

Discover is available for anyone to download for free on App Lab, and the source code is available on GitHub.