October 12 was a weekend like any other; I had family coming to visit for Canadian Thanksgiving when, suddenly, a friend of mine posted a link to Project Avalanche showing up on the Meta Quest Store. While we can’t download it yet, we can add it to our wishlist.
For those unfamiliar, this new project has been leaked several times over the past two years where people would see this experience popping in their headset. It allegedly allows players to stream high-quality PCVR games from the cloud. Games that could obviously not run on the standalone headset.
In September, we’ve finally received an app called Hyperscape where we believe that Project Avalanche technology is used under the hood. It was very cool to finally have a glimpse on how it all worked. It was a well made experience.
What is on the App Store of Project Avalanche?
Slideshow
Clicking the link brings you to the Project Avalanche logo, set against a background image of an avalanche. Whether intentional or not, the avalanche itself somewhat resembles a large cloud, which feels fitting.
Two images showed in the slideshow are a popular game called Lone Echo. This game was an exclusive Oculus Rift PCVR game, and it would be great to be able to play it without the hassle of connecting to your PC. The slideshow also shows an image of Beat Saber. We already have this one on standalone VR, but the PC version definitely makes the graphics of this game look a lot better. The last image showed looks like an experience where you can visit real life locations.
Description
The description of the Project Avalanche app is as followed:
Download to test out the latest cloud streamed titles on Avalanche.
Even though it’s very short, it does tell us a few things. First, this confirms that this is the cloud gaming app that we all thought it would be. The second interesting thing is the “test out” wording. This makes me wonder if maybe this app is being showed publicly by mistake, and was only made to be visible on a selected few that were asked to test it; or it might perhaps release in an “early access” state, which would make sense.
Additional Details
Scrolling down the page reveals more interesting details The release date of the app is marked for July 24th, 2024. So it must’ve been available to a selected few for testing purposes before we were able to publicly see it. The app is only 17.09MB, not that we needed extra confirmation, but this definitely proves that all of the hard work of the app is being done on a server somewhere. Other little things are that the game is developed by Meta, published by XR Tech, and the version number is 0.0.0.0.1921—clearly an indication that Project Avalanche is far from complete.
Is Project Avalanche Finally Happening?
Well that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? I’m an optimistic person, but given what’s being laid out here, I don’t believe that we were meant to see the app just yet. The fact that the release date is wrong, the “test out” wording in the description, and the version number, looks like this is still in the pre-release state, but it could be possible that we see it sometime soon! I do hope that I get selected to try it out at some point. Definitely keep an eye out since we’ll definitely shout it loud in the clouds here at Cloud Dosage when it happens!
