Jigsaw Night Welcomes Vision Pro & iOS Companions To Puzzling Quest
The multiplayer jigsaw puzzling experience on Meta Quest adds companion apps for Vision Pro, iPhone & iPad allowing players to piece together.
Vision Pro and iPhone owners can now share the same reality with Quest owners while piecing together a puzzle in Jigsaw Night.
The new Jigsaw Night companion app is available now for iOS and visionOS with cross-play to Meta.
“What we’re looking to do is expand the reach of Jigsaw Night so it goes beyond the Meta Quest ecosystem,” developer Steve Lukas told Good Virtual Reality. “Other people can join in even if they don’t have a headset on the low end [and we] provide access to Apple Vision Pro users to participate with Meta Quest users as well.”
Lukas is the one-man development force building Jigsaw Night out as a kind of spatial study solving for the myriad friction points that keep people from using VR headsets. The idea is to access a familiar activity tapping into every benefit of spatial computing while building out components that may one day be reusable far beyond just Jigsaw Night.
“This actually started out as a hobby project that I was building for me and my son,” Lukas said. “We were putting together Lego and jigsaw puzzles every weekend, and as part of my next virtual reality experiment, I thought, is there a way we can do this without having to find more table space, without having to find more shelf space, without having to go to the store and be able to still have that enjoyment of puzzling together?”
From this core idea Lukas’ work has burrowed deep into the reality of the current VR winter as Meta rebuilds for a more lightweight future with Apple, Google, and Pico steadily building out components of their own emerging platforms.
“We can actually make puzzles of the things that we care about without having to send them off to a manufacturer and wait so many days for it to be printed and be able to play together,” Lukas said. “So we can instantly puzzle together, but also by being able to do this in a 3D space then we’re able to move puzzle pieces wherever we want and if we are putting together a five hundred piece puzzle, and we’re only halfway done, we can pause, pack it up virtually, and then pick it up again tomorrow without having to take up any shelf space or table space in our house.”
On Quest headsets the app includes Facebook support so players can make puzzles from photos in their account. Players can start a sample puzzle on Vision Pro but, given the limited reach of the Quest ecosystem and an even smaller user base on visionOS, he’s only built out the Facebook support and full puzzling experience for Quest so far. Before he tackles next steps, he’s hoping to prove with this release that creating a bridge between ecosystems will compound overall usage.
“We’re not quite there where pick up and buy a bunch of headsets is the current mindset of the typical family,” Lukas said. “What we saw as a big need was being able to bring people in and allow them to participate with their family. If they’re in a group at their home for the holidays and they have just two headsets, then two people could play together and what would the rest of the family do?”
The LIV camera included in the Quest version lets streamers share their puzzling session with anyone and a new experimental feature colocates people on different headsets by tracking a hand from two headsets at once. He’s expended tremendous effort illuminating the invisible barriers that keep multiple devices from sharing the same reality, from wireless networking to syncing up coordinate spaces for colocation.
“The beauty of colocation is that when you’re doing activities together, then you really crystallize that concept that what we’re seeing digitally is real,” Lukas said. “Because then as I pick up a puzzle piece and hand it to you and you pick it up, then it feels seamless. It feels like this is an actual physical object and we are virtually using digital light to assemble a puzzle. While the dream is a full family of four playing together, it really starts with two people playing together in a session…being able to capture with a phone would be one way to start growing this understanding of what magic and power there is to this platform.”
You can find Jigsaw Night on the Meta Quest Store and Apple App Store. Guides are available to the companion apps in headsets and phones via the game’s website.
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