How Infinite Inside blends augmented and virtual reality on Quest, Vision Pro and beyond

thesixthaxis.com:

As all manner of companies have pushed to find the next steps in personal computing over the past decade, there’s been a tussle between augmented reality and virtual reality for supremacy. Do you want to be fully ensconced in a rendered environment and cut off from the rest of the world? Or is it better to place objects within our living spaces, analyse the world around us and overlay them with more information and detail? For video games, it’s been clear that VR is the more appealing technology, but what if you blend the two together? That’s what Infinite Inside seeks to do, the next game from Maze Theory.

Infinite Inside kicks off with a suitcase falling into your living room, busting open and sprouting a strange stone pillar right in front of you. As you get up and walk around it, you spot gaps or handles for drawers to pull out, revealing 3D shapes that you can grab and then piece together to create a whole. Slotting those completed puzzle blocks into gaps in the front of the plinth eventually reveal little trophy-like statue that, as you grab it, whisks you away from the real world and into an entirely virtual setting.

Talking about the game’s inspirations, Maze Theory’s Chief Gaming Officer Russ Harding told us, “We always ask, when we play with new tech, what can we do now that we couldn’t do before? For us and our previous backgrounds working in VR and AR, combining the two elements together was something that we hadn’t been able to do before. We hadn’t been able to take you from your real world with augmented reality objects and then unlock a virtual world and take you in and out of that space. That felt quite unique and exciting for us to explore.

“Taking away controllers, what can you do just using hand interaction? How do you get around spaces? How do you pick things up?”

Now, it’s important to note that Infinite Inside is coming to all major VR platforms and catering to all their various capabilities. The game on SteamVR and PlayStation VR 2 will have a