Today, three years ago, Chess Club was released on the Meta Store🎂!
In this special day we want to share with you some of the most exciting milestones we have achieved during this journey, and to celebrate we are announcing our upcoming update: Chess Club Mixed Reality mode will launch on July 20th for World Chess Day!
A Journey of Passion and Innovation
We are chess lovers and VR geeks, so it just made perfect sense to fuse our two passions and create the best VR chess game for the Meta Quest ecosystem.
After a frantic year of work, we were able to release an immersive and challenging chess game that can capture the emotion of playing against a rival face to face in real life.
The Evolution of Chess Club
Hand-tracking integration was one of our main priorities in the development of Chess Club. After some iterations, we achieved a great level of precision, bringing a level of immersion and realism rarely seen in other VR experiences. With Chess Club, you can almost feel the weight and shape of the pieces… and you can even juggle some pieces (it won’t give you any tactical advantage, but it’s cool and fun!).
Our effort in creating one of the best hand-tracking experiences on Quest was recognized in 2022 by Mark Zuckerberg himself, who posted a video playing Chess Club to show the benefits of this technology on Meta Quest devices.
Hand tracking is key for an immersive experience, but you also need to see your oponent’s movements in order to feel you are playing an opponent face to face. That’s why we added the long time requested Meta avatars. Seeing your opponent hesitating about which piece to move has always felt exciting!
The Future of Chess Club: Mixed Reality Mode
For our third anniversary, we are thrilled to announce that Chess Club will have a free update with a magnificent Mixed Reality mode available on July 20th, the World Chess Day! This new feature will blend the virtual and real worlds, offering a unique and engaging way to play chess.
If you are curious to try it out, join our early access through our Discord Channel!
And for sure we are preparing a cool new trailer, you can take a look at some behind the scenes by our partners Reynard Films who are taking care of the shooting.
A message from Odders
Chess Club is a truly special product for Odders. As our second release, it has played a crucial role in the growth and establishment of Odders as a key player in the XR video games landscape. This project has been an inexhaustible source of learning, standing out technologically and spearheading innovation within Odders Labs. Since its launch, Chess Club has incorporated cutting-edge technologies such as hand tracking, voice control, multiplayer, avatars, lip sync, matchmaking, and motion capture, among others. Within the company, it serves as an innovation lab, whose advancements we subsequently apply to other projects.
We are proud to present a completely revamped version of our beloved Chess Club. The incorporation of mixed reality at this moment allows us to fully exploit technology at its best, offering a fresh, renewed, and more natural way to play chess than ever before.
“We have strived to give Chess Club a unique imprint, a signature character of its own. We love the feeling that we have created a product with soul. From the moment you enter the main menu, the game surrounds you, offering an experience that feels very special, full of passion in every detail, and encouraging the player to go further.” – Fernando García, Co-Founder and CTO of Odders.
One Last Thing🎁
We are giving the community a 90% discount to encourage more players to join Chess Club. Please share with friends and rivals alike, as it is only available for the weekend of the anniversary!
Grab Chess Club with a huge 90% discount🎁 using this code until July 1st 23:59 CET!
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Thank you all for your constant support. We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed developing it at Odders. Thank you for being a part of our journey. Here’s to many more years of chess and VR!
Odders Lab
