Good morning everyone from Beijing! Here there is a beautiful sun and today I’m going to have a great day meeting some local VR companies! I will let you know soon about my adventures here… for now let’s just talk about the most important news of this week in AR and VR!
Top news of the week
The Valve Index has been officially released
June, 29th was the designed Index day and Valve has had no delays. People have started receiving their Index and having fun with it. Journalists have updated all their reviews, taking in count all the new updates.
Actually, there is no much more to say apart from what we already knew about the Index: the visuals are astonishing, especially because of the 120 Hz refresh rate; the audio is a next-gen one; the controllers allow for a new kind of interactions; the headset is very comfortable; there is a very handful guide on how to setup it on Steam website. This looks like a huge improvement over all the other headsets.
Of course, there are also problems: the setup is not easy because of the Lighthouse stations, some glitches in SteamVR and because Knuckles controllers require a bit of mastery to make them fit well to the hand; the price is quite high ($1000 for the full games); there are not enough games that make the Knuckles really a compelling input system; the black colors are grayish because of the LCD display.
Valve is also investigating a possible Wireless solution for the Index.
Overall, it is an amazing device to have a premium experience, if you can afford it. If you want to order it now, probably you will receive it at the end of September.
And Gabe Newell was so excited in announcing it, that it even teased that a Half Life 3 may be possible in the future! HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED? 😀
More info (Road To VR review)
More info (Ars Technica comparison with other devices)
More info (Polygon review)
More info (Playing Oculus games with the Knuckles)
More info (Orders backlog)
More info (Valve Index fitting guide)
More info (Wireless Index)
More info (All games compatible with Index)
More info (Gabe Newell talking about the Index)
Other relevant news
HTC has revealed new info on the Cosmos
Every week, HTC is revealing new info on the upcoming Vive Cosmos. This time they have talked about visuals, and have detailed that the Cosmos will have:
- 2880×1700 overall resolution (so, 1440×1700 per eye);
- LCD displays;
- 90Hz refresh rate;
- New gen lenses (I guess the same of the Vive Focus Plus).
These are interesting specs, that make the Cosmos the best headset that HTC has ever released. But, at the same time, honestly, I expected something more, like 2K per eye, as it was rumored during the CES.
To me, it seem that the Cosmos will be like a Vive Pro for consumers. If the price will be less than $600, it can be an interesting headset, to rival the Rift S for more demanding users.
WMR headsets are going out of stock
Road To VR has noticed that the various Windows Mixed Reality headsets are becoming hard to find on the various e-stores. Some have completely disappeared, others have very limited stock.
This may mean only two things:
- The platform is being discontinued;
- A next-gen is coming.
Considering that WMR devices now owns 11% of the market and that HP and Acer are launching the next-gen Reverb and OJO 500, I bet on the second one.
Oculus Rift S may be compatible with Xbox Scarlett
According to Virtual Reality podcast “Coffee & VR”, the next-gen Xbox, codenamed “Project Scarlett” may actually be compatible with Oculus Rift S. Podcast hosts claim to have a reliable source telling that. Considering that Microsoft owns part of Facebook, this wouldn’t sound impossible to me, even if I thought that Xbox would have been compatible with WMR headsets.
If this will prove to be true, the Rift S may increase a lot his sales.
Vive Video 6 DOF Lite is now available
At MWC Shanghai, HTC has made various announcements for what concerns virtual reality.
The one that caught more my attention is the official release of the “Vive Video 6 DOF Lite” mode. You know that 360 videos are nice, but one of the main annoyance is that if you try to move your head, the visuals actually remain fixed. This breaks immediately the magic. With this new 6DOF Lite mode, actually the user is allowed to move the head up to 1 meter in every direction and see the visuals modifying to this change of point of view.
What is mindblowing is that the creators won’t have to upload special volumetric videos: the platform is able to convert every standard 360 video in a video able to support this kind of little head movement. I have still to try it, but if it works, it is really a great thing.
(And BTW, in its MWC keynote, Mister President has also talked about a VR product that me and Enea Le Fons have developed and that can increase 3X the creativity of users trying it!)
Vivo and Vuzix are ready to announce new AR glasses
At MWC, the popular Chinese smartphone manufacturer Vivo has showcased its new pair of AR glasses: they are very light, work connected to the phone and support 6 DOF tracking. They will support video, facial recognition, and object recognition apps. I have not tried them… but someone that was at MWC have found them interesting, but not THAT interesting.
Vuzix has teased the release of a future AR device that will be even more light and stylish of the Vuzix Blade.
The AR glasses war is ramping up.
More info (Vivo AR glasses)
More info (Vuzix)
News worth a mention
Pimax is updating its products
Chinese manufacturer Pimax has just detailed a series of improvements it is going to apply on its 5K+ and 8K devices, so that to guarantee a better quality and duration. It has also detailed that its Sword controllers are going to come soon.
Oculus is improving its Codec Avatars
Thanks to new algorithms and new sensors introduced in the process, Oculus is now able to make the realistic avatars it is working on even more realistic. The addition of a new lip tracking device, for instance, is improving a lot the poses of the mouth of the avatars. The road in front of this avatars before becoming mainstream is still very long, though.
Oculus Runtime 1.39 is making the Rift S great again
With the latest update to the Oculus Runtime, the Rift S is having a huge improvement in controllers tracking and setup process. This finally makes possible to use the Rift S in most VR action games.
Oculus SDK update introduces interesting features
The new Oculus Plugin for Unity introduces some interesting features. One is support for Mixed Reality recording for the Oculus Quest. And another one, that all game developers should know, is a special build command (OVR Bulid and Run) that lets you build and run an Oculus application with far reduced build and deploy times.
nReal answers to Magic Leap
In a preset PR statement, nReal answers the Magic Leap claims defining them “False and anticompetitive”.
DisplayPort 2.0 can enable next-gen headsets
The new DisplayPort 2.0 standard allows for the transmissions of VR visuals up to 4K per eye at 120 Hz. It could be possible to use it also through a USB C VirtualLink port.
Darpa is experimenting in brain-to-brain communication
There is a new contest in which various research teams are working to create in 4 years a system that allows for real-time simple brain-to-brain communications. In the long run, this could be also combined with AR and VR…
Accuvein can make you see your veins in augmented reality
This is a very interesting application of the technology and it is very interesting in the healthcare sector. Of course, it requires dedicated hardware.
You can learn UE4 VR development in VR
Thanks to a partnership between VR First and Axon VR, this sseptember you will be allowed to attend a semester with a deep dive into UE4 VR development with Survios CTO directly in Virtual Reality.
That’s an intriguing idea, even if I’m curious on how someone can take notes fast or develop while he/she is in VR.
Steam Summer Sale 2019 is here
Time to buy all the VR games!
How to grab a beer while you’re holding Oculus Touch controllers
This video will teach you this unvaluable skill.
Some XR fun
The first teaser video of the Vive Cosmos with the spinning head has attracted some irony
Dogs don’t understand Beat Saber…
Support me on Patreon
This newsletter has been possible thanks to the support of my Patrons:
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Jason Moore
- Caroline
If you found this roundup useful, support me on Patreon to keep this column alive! Happy VR 😉