The first wave of invites are on the way for the Rec Room iPhone early testing program.
The addition of Apple’s handhelds to the cross-platform social service represents a major expansion for Against Gravity, the Seattle-based startup building Rec Room. The service encompasses a set of activities including paintball, dodgeball and cooperative quests. There are also creative tools in Rec Room players use to construct their own worlds and inventions they can share. We even watched an entire production of The Princess Bride made inside the social VR app. It is a bit like Roblox or Minecraft except that Rec Room is supported on practically every major VR headset, including Oculus Quest, with flat screen modes added more recently on PlayStation 4 and PC.
There’s also an economy inside Rec Room and the software designers hope to let “creators charge in-app tokens for inventions they created, costumes, events, and for different things they can build into their games and rooms.”
A thread on Reddit outlines guidelines for reporting bugs and you can still sign up for a chance to enter the beta program. Fans of the service recently named iOS, Android and Switch as the top three platforms on which they’d like to see in the game. Extending multiplayer games across three completely different interaction paradigms from phones to VR to desktop is a major undertaking by Against Gravity and we’ll be curious to see how the service works on Apple’s devices. And if they can add Android and/or Switch too? It should be a very big year for Against Gravity.
Update: I’ve posted a few gameplay videos from an iPhone XR. One of the rooms I tried to join from an iPhone said for “VR players only” and wouldn’t let me join. While Rec Room features a single shared community across all supported gadgets it is still possible to limit access to certain activities or rooms.
