The Ghost Howls’s VR Week Peek (2019.08.11): Gear VR is over, Go long term future is uncertain, Huawei teases its metaverse and much more!
Next week my blog will turn 3 years old! I am so excited.
I’m preparing to celebrate this birthday by hanging around in some social VR environment and chatting with people that will be there. Probably I will choose UXR, so you won’t need to install anything if you want to join me. Anyway, I will keep you posted about that in a dedicated article! For now, just know that The Ghost
Top news of the week
Gear VR is dead
I guess that the title has surprised no one.
But at the presentation of the latest Samsung Note 10, for the first time after the Note 4, Samsung has dropped support for Gear VR in its latest flagship device. This means that all new devices by Samsung won’t support Gear VR, that is so condemned to die. Gear VR has been useful to drive the first adoption of VR, but now people can exploit the Oculus Go for that, given its much better form factor and affordability.
I am a bit sad because I remember when I bought a Note 4 just to be able to try mobile VR. It was a great phone, and I had a great time with it.
But at the same time, I know that this is part of the game. And Samsung is not abandoning XR for sure. Rumors talk about a Samsung AR/VR hybrid standalone headset powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 that should come in the future. And the Note 10+ is able to scan objects and reconstruct them in 3D, letting you animate them by moving your body… something that is overly cool for AR.
So, the Gear VR has died, but XR is not.
More info (No Gear VR support on Note 10)
More info (Object scanning on Note 10+)
More info (Video of object scanning on Note 10+)
Other relevant news
Xiaomi disbands the Mi VR team, with unknown effects on Oculus Go
According to a rumor reported by various reliable sources, Xiaomi is abandoning the Mi VR project. The team working on it has been disbanded and now there are only workers that are keeping the current status quo. That is: the Mi VR will still be in sale, but there won’t be a Mi VR 2.
It is uncertain what this does mean for the Oculus Go. Xiaomi and Oculus are strong partners for the Oculus Go, that is being manufactured by Xiaomi and sold in the west by Oculus and in China by Xiaomi itself, with the name Mi VR. The fact that Xiaomi doesn’t believe in the project anymore, and that in China the device has not sold well are for sure not good news for Oculus.
Of course, Oculus can still technically manufacture a Go 2, since it has all the expertise to do that (the Go was fully designed by Oculus, as David Heaney points out), but other sources of mine report that Oculus is not fully satisfied by its sales and that the Go has been made as an entry point for VR, to replace the Gear VR… but its future is not in a product line, and so a Go 2 has never been planned. The Go will have to live another 1–2 years, and then it will be all over. The future should be only Quest.
Anyway, these are all rumors…
More info (News on Mi VR team layoff and rumors on Go 2)
More info (News reported on VentureBeat)
Oculus is gaining importance among customers and developers
This week we had various reports on the VR market and the result seems always the one that Oculus is performing always better.
The newest Steam Hardware Survey shows how Rift S has now more or less 8% of the market. If we sum the market share of the Oculus Rift CV1, Rift S, and the highlander DK2, we obtain that now Oculus controls 50% of the market on Steam. The Index is at less than 2
A new report from CCS Insight, instead, predicts that this year will be sold 7 million standalone VR headsets, and of course Oculus Quest and Go should make a great part of these devices. Honestly, that number seems a bit too optimistic to me (I expect more or less half that amount), and I’m afraid it can create false expectations for VR. But I hope that CCS is right for the good of VR.
Strategy Analytics highlights in his survey that mobile headsets like Daydream, Gear VR and Cardboard are continuously losing importance and revenue shares. The winner of this analytics is the Playstation VR, with a revenue share of 30% of the total VR market, compared with Oculus’s 25% and HTC’s 22%.
In the end, XRDC has made a very interesting survey among XR devs. These are the most important data contained in the report:
- Oculus is now the leading platform for developers. The low price policy is paying off. HTC Vive is at the second place;
- Oculus Quest, even if it is so new, has already gathered a lot of interest from developers;
- Gaming is still the most popular content developed in XR, but now there is also interest in other kinds of applications, like entertainment (e.g. storytelling), education, training, etc…
- XR is not profitable in the short term: only 22% of products are already profitable or will be so soon. The rest won’t be profitable or will make money only in the long run. This makes difficult for developers to sustain their work;
- Small studios lament the fact that the big companies are attracting almost all the investments in the field, and this, together with the above point, makes hard for indies to survive;
- There are still some crazy people developing for Daydream 😀
More info (Steam Hardware Survey)
More info (CCS Insights)
More info (Strategy Analytics)
More info (XRDC Report)
Huawei announces its OS and mentions XR
Huawei has announced its opensource operating system, Harmony OS, that could be installed in its future smartphones if Trump will confirm its ban, but that, in any case, will be deployed on many different devices, from wearables to TVs.
Huawei has shown the roadmap for Harmony OS, and from the timeline, it seems that Harmony 3.0, that should be released around 2021 should add support for VR devices. Huawei has also started talking about the “Cyberverse”, that is its idea of the metaverse. The Cyberverse is very similar to the Magicverse by Magic Leap and is a system that employs the AR Cloud, mixing the real and the virtual world, and that uses AI for object recognition, uses localization, fast network
Huawei is the current leader in Android smartphones, and so we should care about what it does in our environment. The fact that it is planning supporting XR headsets with its operating system and that it is laying the foundations of its metaverse is overly interesting. And its 2021+ timeline for XR makes me wonder if Huawei plans to release its headset around that date… that is more or less the same that we predict for Apple glasses.
(Thanks David for the tip)
More info (What is Harmony OS)
More info (Harmony OS timeline)
More info (Huawei Cyberverse)
5G is a safe technology
5G is a hot topic in all the tech field because it is an enabling technology. For what concerns AR and VR, it will enable the possibility of finally streaming AR/VR content and making the XR headsets lighter and cheaper.
But there is a question that haunts 5G: is it safe or does it fry our brain cells?
Well, according to FCC, it is exactly safe as 4G and 3G, so we shouldn’t worry more than with the technologies that we currently use with our smartphones.
(Thanks Eloi for the tip)
News worth a mention
Snapchat raises $1B
Snap Inc., the company behind the popular social media Snapchat, is going to raise 1 billion dollars to increase its ecosystem of “camera as a platform”.
Snapchat is probably the startup that first understood the power of augmented reality, and made it become mainstream. And it is continuously adding new features, like augmentation of popular buildings, of animals, the possibility of solving math equations just by framing them or even developing its own hardware.
The new money should serve exactly to improve all of this, creating new features and new content, making Snapchat the most complete camera-based ecosystem. You can read about its vision in a recent interview with the company CTO.
More info (Snapchat raising money)
More info (Interview to Snapchat CTO)
Valve publishes a deep dive article on the speakers of Valve Index
One of the most acclaimed features for the Valve Index is its fantastic audio: the over-the-ear speakers are just fantabulous and having tried them, I can confirm it.
This week, Valve has published a deep dive article on the speakers, and how they got to the current design. It is very long, but also very interesting, so I advise you to read it.
Oculus publishes a deep dive article on ASW 2.0
ASW 2.0 is one of those mechanisms that Oculus uses to keep your content at a steady 90 Hz even if your PC is struggling to render all the frames of the game.
On a post on the developer blog, Oculus has detailed how it works internally. It is very interesting, even if sometimes not that easy to understand 🙂
Apple moves top executive to AR glasses team
According to a report, Apple has just moved Kim Vorrath to the AR glasses team. She’s a very experienced executive, that is very good in making sure that the projects she supervises deliver on time and bug-free.
It seems a move that is making the glasses go into the production stage. It seems that the R&D phase for the glass is over and now it is turn to go into the actual execution stage. This would mean that Apple glasses are not that far away…
UE4 adds Oculus Quest Vulkan support
Unreal Engine is adding Vulkan support for Oculus Quest and Unity fill follow later on this year.
This news is important because Vulkan support may lead to around 20% of performance gain on the Oculus Quest, letting developers create better applications for Oculus standalone device.
VR Training for surgeons is more effective than standard methods
An indepent research has certified that the VR training for surgeons offered by Osso VR is 130% more effective than traditional methods for training. That is huge.
Amazon thinks using AR for its delivery agents
In an interesting patent filed by Amazon, the company proposes the use of AR glasses to improve the efficiency of delivery agents, showing them an overlay of info about the best path to follow and the places where they can park.
VR gamers are expecting No Man’s Sky and other cool games
VR gamers can be happy, because some cool VR content is coming:
- No Man’s Sky is coming on August, 14th, taking with it an infinite procedural virtual universe. The hype is real for this game in VR;
- VR support for Dirt Rally 2.0 has been released, for the happiness of racing games lovers;
- Beat Saber is going to introduce new features, like the possibility of choosing the colors of the cubes to slice. This can help colorblind people in seeing the colors of the cubes better;
- Red Matter is coming to Quest, and Vertical Robot has probably created the best graphics in a game for the Oculus standalone.
More info (No Man’s Sky: all that we know)
More info (No Man’s Sky Beyond is 2.0 version)
More info (No Man’s Sky Beyond trailer)
More info (No Man’s Sky Beyond
More info (No Man’s Sky is 50% off)
More info (Dirt Rally 2.0 VR)
More info (Beat Saber color picker)
More info (Red Matter for Quest)
Google launches AR Live View for Maps
The time has come. Finally, Google will release the AR features of Google Maps for all the Android and iOS smartphones that support ARCore or ARKit.
This will let people orient better while following the indication of Maps by watching arrows showing the path in AR superimposed on the camera feed of the phone.
LiquidMask makes you feel underwater in VR
LiquidMask is a face mask that you insert inside your VR headset and that, thanks to some water pumping inside it, can make you feel the sensation of the water touching your face. It can also convey heat and cold sensations.
Its problem is that it has to be connected to a big suitcase, so it is not a portable solution.
Massless announces release date and price for its device
The VR pen offered by Massless, that should make people create in VR by drawing in the air on a physical surface, is going to be released in Q4 of this year in beta. People that will pre-order it will be able to buy it for $500, and after that the price will be $1000. As you can see, the price is pretty enterprise.
Enrique Tromp gives some lessons about VR UX
In an interesting article on Road To VR, Enrique Tromp of VRMADA gives some examples on well-made interactions in VR. If you are an UX designer, give it a read 😉
Some XR fun
How to not let sweat ruin your VR experience
Weightless is a device that will VR fail videos reach a new fun level
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(Header image by Oculus and Xiaomi)
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