The most important XR news from MWC 2019

The MWC 2019 in Barcelona has finished some days ago. Like every year, during this event we have seen some important AR news, but not that many, since the event was more focused on mobile phones than immersive technologies.

In my opinion, there are 3-4 pieces of news that are really worth a mention and I’m going to tell you about them in this post so that reading it you will have a clear picture of what has happened at MWC 2019 for what concerns XR. I will also provide you link to go deeper in the news you are interested into the most. So, ready for this short roundup of mine?

HoloLens 2

The biggest news of the MWC for what concerns XR has been for sure the announcement of the HoloLens 2 by Microsoft.

The HoloLens 2 is the new version of HoloLens that will feature:

• Improved comfort (Microsoft claims it to be 3x more comfortable than the original Hololens);
• Instant-on setup (you wear it in seconds);
• 52° diagonal FOV (the FOV area is 2x the one of the Hololens 1);
• 2K per eye displays (47 PPD pixel density);
• Flip-up display;
• Login via iris authentication;
• Full hands tracking;
• Eye tracking;
• Improved UX, with all controls that are reactive to the hands and the eyes;
• Integration with Azure, with the possibility of creating multiplayer applications that work also with people using ARCore and ARKit apps;
• 2-3 hours battery duration;
• Services targeted at enterprise like Microsoft Dynamics 365, that will let enterprise customers create their AR step-by-step instructions in an easy way.

Preorders are open now at $3500 for the device (in enterprise edition), or $125 every month with included the Dynamics 365 services. There is still no news about the developer edition of the device, but considering that Microsoft has announced the MR dev days for the beginning of May, I guess that we will have more news in the following months.

If you want to read more about the Hololens 2, I have written a long article about it and you can find it at this link.

Azure Kinect

Together with the HoloLens 2, Microsoft has also announced a new version of the Kinect, called Kinect Azure. This new version of the device will:

• Be very little: it occupies only 103 x 39 x 126 mm and weighs only 440g;
• Feature a 4K RGB camera;
• Feature a 1MP IR depth camera;
• Have a microphone array;
• Have an IMU sensor;
• Consume only up to 5.9W;
• Be able to work locally with the connected PC to provide the various streams from the cameras or the body tracking of the users in front of it;
• Be able to work connected to the Azure cloud to provide advanced services like for instance object recognition or voice recognition;
• Work both with Windows and Ubuntu;
• Be able to synchronize with other Kinects connected in daisy-chain so that to make 3D reconstruction of objects easier.

The price will be $399 and preorders are open now.

I’ve already detailed the Azure Kinect in this other article, so I recommend you to read it if you are interested.

HTC 5G streaming

HTC was at MWC showcasing its new headset Vive Focus Plus together with a 5G network. There was a real 5G network created by HTC where on one side there were some special computers that mocked a rendering farm and on the other side there was a user wearing a Vive Focus Plus. In the middle there was the new HTC 5G Hub. The computers rendered the SuperHot VR game and sent the streaming of the game via 5G to the user playing it with the Vive Focus Plus. The Vive Focus Plus so worked only as a dull display showing the frames rendered by the PCs and sending back to them the data on the pose of the head and the hands of the user.

This showcase of HTC has been very interesting because it has been a glimpse of how XR will probably be in the next years, with all the rendering happening in the cloud and the user wearing a little headset that is similar to standard glasses and that work only as a display.

I have also to say that there is still a long road to go before going there: the magazines that have tried the solution of HTC found it very interesting, but at the same time highlighted how the latency was still high and sometimes if you moved too fast, you lose the tracking. HTC answered saying that it was just a showcase to show the potentialities of the technology and not a solution ready to be shipped.

You can read the hands-on by my friend Scott Hayden of Road To VR here.

Qualcomm lets you use your phone with your XR device

Qualcomm is betting hard on XR (it powers almost all the standalone AR and VR headsets) and at MWC it has made an important announcement for what concerns the use of XR viewers with 5G-powered phones.

Qualcomm is working so that in the future, all of us will be able to connect our XR viewers (e.g. our VR headsets) to our phones via USB-C. This means that the phone will be able to become the computational power and the battery of the XR headsets and will transmit the computed frames over DisplayPort via USB-C. Since these phones will be powered by the new Snapdragon 855 chip, they will be able to provide the VR content in a satisfactory way. Thanks to this, the headsets of the future may come as just dull displays, knowing that the user will already have in its pocket a device that will act as their computational units (the smartphone).

And that’s even more: since all the upcoming smartphones with these features will also be 5G enabled, in the future, when the 5G will be full deployed, it will be possible to use your XR headset to see XR content directly in streaming from the cloud.

Qualcomm is working to create a healthy ecosystem in this sense, partnering with all the entities that can contribute in creating a good 5G VR ecosystem:

• The headset makers: Nreal has just announced that its AR glass will work together with Qualcomm-powered smartphones and Acer has just made the same announcement for its new OJO headset. Pico is preparing a VR headset with similar characteristics for 2019. You may wonder about the Vive Cosmos… well, I’ve tried asking Qualcomm, but a representative of its has answered that we have to wait for an announcement by the Taiwanese company;

• The smartphone makers, that will have to create phones that can connect to VR headsets: big names like Xiaomi, Oppo, HTC, Vivo have already agreed to this consortium;
• Platform and content providers, that will provide the content that will be viewed in 5G: Vive Wave, Next VR, Wikitude, etc… are already in;
• The various Internet Service Providers that will supply the 5G networks. Here I am proud to say that the Italian TIM is already on the boat.

This choice by Qualcomm means that in the future we will see always more AR and VR headsets that will be able to connect to mobile phones and stream data via 5G. We will see always more headsets that are light and just works as “stupid” displays that are connected to our phones.

LetinAR

At MWC, LetinAR has showcased its lenses technology that may be useful to create AR glasses with high FOV and resolution.

The glasses were able to show a stereoscopic 4K image (even if the glasses were dubbed “8K”), with a field of view of around 80 degrees. Consider that we are all excited by the HoloLens 2 that have 52 degrees FOV and 2K resolution and understand why the technologies offered by LetinAR is incredibly interesting. And there is even more: the offered image is incredibly bright and lets the user focus on different focal planes going from 50cm to the infinity, solving the vergence-accommodation conflict.

LetinAR doesn’t work with waveguides or lightfields as all the other AR glasses, but it employ a different technology called “pin mirror”. The lenses are all scattered with very tiny pinhole-sized mirrors that reflect the images from the real displays where they are rendered to the eyes of the user.

This is all great, but doesn’t come without downsides: all these pinhole mirrors that you have on the lenses in front of your eyes at the moment make the perceived vision of the real world a bit worse. I suggest you to read the hands-on review by Scott Hayden on LetinAR at this link to understand the pros and cons of these devices.

Demos

Some notable demos from the MWC have been:

• A Spider-Man VR demo, that let you swing between skyscrapers by casting webs. Read more about it on UploadVR or watching the below video;

• A Batman demo, that was interesting because it exploited the mixed reality features of the Vive Pro and also the 5G network by AT&T. According to Jamie Feltham, the demo was particularly interesting because it was partly made in AR and partly made in VR, showing how in the future we may continuously switch between all the technologies of the reality-virtuality continuum;

• An interesting demo made by You are Here for AT&T that combined 3D printing and image projection to show a very cool vision of the world.

Hands-on reviews

We had some interesting hands-on from journalists on AR and VR devices:

• Road To VR tested the Vive Focus Plus and defined it as an interesting evolution of the Vive Focus. The lenses are especially the greatest evolution over the previous version: they have less god rays and other kinds of artifacts. You can read the full hands-on here.
• Road To VR has also tested the new HoloLens and found it very good: according to Scott Hayden, it can really be defined as a AR 2.0 device. The headset is really comfortable and the UX is really better. The FOV has been defined “really quite usable and not terribly annoying” and this means that finally, it is not that terrible little window that there was in the 1.0 anymore. Read Scott’s hands-on here;

• Next Reality has instead tested the Nreal glasses, that I continue saying that are one of the most interesting gadgets of this 2019. The journalist said that Nreal can’t be compared with HoloLens or Magic Leap, but that is anyway an interesting Augmented Reality device, with a good quality of the images. The look it provides is also cool. You can find the review here;
• UploadVR’s Jamie Feltham tried the Varjo headset and was really astonished by its amazing resolution that is close to the one of the human eye. He especially appreciated the fact that he was able to read all the texts inside the virtual world. Read the review here.

Other

For the first time we had an augmented reality glass implementing the new Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 chipset, that has been specifically made for lightweight XR glasses: it’s the Vuzix M400. It is a smartglass for enterprise usage.

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And that’s it with this round-up of the MWC! I hope you have enjoyed it and that it has helped you in keeping you updated with the latest news in XR. And if you like these updates, subscribe to my newsletter to keep you updated with the latest news in XR every week…

(Header image by Microsoft)