The Ghost Howls’s VR Week Peek (2019.08.18): Nate Mitchell leaves Facebook, No Man’s Sky VR released and much more!
It’s a beautiful summer day and I’m quite happy because this week my blog has turned three years old! I had a beautiful Web VR yacht party (tomorrow I will share some videos about it!) and I wrote a very long post about entrepreneurship in VR to advise people that want to enter the AR/VR field as startupper.
Do you want to make me a gift to celebrate? Please support my hard work on Patreon by clicking this link. It would make me a lot happy 🙂
I really want to thank everyone that has wished me a happy birthday or that made me compliments this week. I got a lot of love from the community and I really felt so good. Thank you everyone!
And now, let’s dig into the news…
Top news of the week
Nate Mitchell has departed from Facebook
Nate Mitchell was the last man standing. He was the last Oculus founder to still work at Oculus. From this week, this is not true anymore. From now on, nothing of the old Oculus remains at the new Oculus. Oculus is no more, there is only Facebook. And in fact, now Oculus is not guided anymore by nice startuppers, but by experienced managers, by executives of big companies. For the good or the bad, the transformation is now complete.
Mitchell left with a heartwarming letter on the Oculus subreddit. In the letter, he thanks everyone, and then he says that he will relax a bit before pondering what to do in the future. It seems that there has been no quarrel with Facebook, it is just that his role there is over.
I really wish the best to him. He, Palmer, Brendan, and the others started something so magical. Most probably without Facebook acquiring Oculus, XR wouldn’t have evolved this fast, but there are still times I miss the old crazy startup…
More info (Mitchell’s goodbye letter)
More info (Road To VR comment on the news)
More info (Damo9000 satyrical image on the news)
Other relevant news
No Man’s Sky Beyond has been released
On August, 14th, as promised, Hello Games has released No Man’s Sky Beyond, the big 2.0 upgrade to Man’s Sky that adds support for virtual reality headsets. Hello Games’s Sean Murray has declared to be very happy of it since virtual reality has been a dream of his for many years. The porting has required a huge effort by the game studio, that has had to fix a lot of things that could look ok on the 2D screen of the PC, but that were unrealistic in VR.
The game works on all PC VR headsets and also on PSVR. Unluckily PC and PS players can’t play together in multiplayer, for technical reasons. Regarding porting the game to the Quest, at the moment it seems unfeasible. Hello Games is considering the possibility, but not for the short term future.
The first feedbacks are positive, especially for what concerns the vastness of the world of the game. There are anyway some concerns: the game is very demanding, and so some people had sloppy performances even with an RTX 2080! (I wonder if this game could ever be ported to Quest…) There are some suggested settings to enjoy the game in VR without stuttering. There were also problems with WMR headsets, that at the beginning were not supported well. There have already been released various patches to solve the main issues that have come to light after the release.
I’ve not played the game yet, but the first impressions of my buddy Max are that the game is interesting, but there are some problems of UX and game design that have to be fixed for virtual reality (e.g. teleporting makes some situations become too easy). Other people have reported to me enthusiastic feedbacks instead, especially because of the fact that you could play this game for years, and still not having finished it. It’s the biggest universe ever released for VR.
More info (No Man’s Sky released)
More info (No Man’s Sky review)
More info (No Man’s Sky guide for beginners)
More info (No Man’s Sky gameplay video)
More info (Interview to Hello Games)
More info (No Man’s Sky performance issues)
More info (No Man’s Sky first patches)
More info (No Man’s Sky forbidden crossplay)
More info (No Man’s Sky all that we know so far)
More info (Someone showed No Man’s Sky on Google Glass)
Oculus Quest on the road to sell more than 1M units in 2019
According to a report by SuperData, in Q2 2019 the Oculus Quest has sold a bit less than 347K units worldwide. This would mean that it has sold more than Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, HTC Vive, and HTC Vive Focus all together. It has even sold more than PSVR in the same period.
If we try to predict sales of 2019 using these data, we obtain that the Quest will sell more than 1M devices during this year. Considering that for sure Oculus will make some initiative for the holidays, we can expect that the device will manage to arrive also at 1.5M.
Of course, you have to take this data with a grain of salt… Oculus has not released official data on its sales. And analysts in the past have made a lot of errors.
Project Soli to be implemented inside the Google Pixel 4
Project Soli is a device on which Google ATAP is working since many years. It is a little piece of hardware that thanks to a miniature radar is able to detect mini gestures made with your fingers, at a distance. This means that you can use little movements of your fingers to swipe the current page that is shown on your smartwatch, without touching the wearable device. This opens a lot of new opportunities for the UX of wearables and that’s why its initial reveal video became viral.
The device seemed doomed to remain an R&D project, but actually, Google is now going to implement it into the Pixel 4. I’m very curious to discover how the UX of this phone will be thanks to these new enabled touchless gestures. And I’m also wondering if in the future this kind of interactions could be used also for AR and VR.
More info (Project Soli reveal video)
More info (Project Soli to be embedded into the Pixel 4)
SparkAR is now in open beta on Instagram
If you have followed my newsletters for some time, you for sure already know how I think that SparkAR is one of the tools that you have to keep an eye on. If you don’t know it, it is a creative tool offered by Facebook that lets you create easily AR filters (e.g. facial filters) for Facebook and Instagram, without you knowing how to code. SparkAR can be an awesome tool to express yourself, but also to earn money by producing filters for the marketing campaigns of big brands.
Until this week, SparkAR was in closed beta on Instagram. Now it is in open beta, and considering the importance of Instagram, I would advise you to give it a try…
More info (SparkAR in open beta on Instagram)
More info (How much money you can earn with AR filters)
Snap releases the Spectacles 3
Snap did it again. It has released the third iteration of its AR glasses, the Spectacles. And they are very similar to the previous two versions, for the good and the bad.
The good is that the glasses are light and very fashionable, they are something cool and trendy and don’t look like something for techies. Then they have been evolved so that to have two HD cameras, and this means that the device can sense the depth of the world around it, and so can let you shoot 3D photos and apply 3D filters to your creations.
The bad is that the UX has not changed, and it is still not possible to upload your AR creations directly from the Spectacles to your Snapchat account. Furthermore, the appeal of such kind of AR-filter glasses has still to be proven. To be honest, the flop of the past two versions make me think that the market is not interested in this kind of applications yet. The price has also been raised at $380, something not feasible for the very young target of Snapchat. And to be honest, the design in real life photos appears less cool than in the staged photos of the website.
I think that Snap is aware of the issues and that’s why it is releasing these glasses in limited edition. Let’s see if they will be popular at least in the circles of fashionistas.
More info (Spectacles 3 announcement video)
More info (Spectacles 3 official website)
More info (Spectacles 3 article on Verge)
More info (Sam Watt’s real photo of the device)
News worth a mention
Apple may be working on an MR visor
According to journalist and consultant Robert Scoble (that is starting the consultancy agency Infinite Retina), Apple may have in the works a visor that will be able to replace our present 2D screens. So, not a glass, but a headset, a bit like the Oculus Quest, but more fashionable and capable of more than VR.
The same Scoble warns us that Apple works every time on many internal projects, so this visor could never see the light. Only Tim Cook knows how the iGlasses that will ship will be. Anyway, Robert underlines that in the next 2 years we will see the immersive reality industry ramp up.
Huawei trademarks its AR/VR glasses
The smartphone giant Huawei has not entered the AR/VR world yet, but the fact that it has just trademarked the name “AR Glasses” and “VR Glasses” means that the reveal of its first XR device may be near.
(Thanks Eloi Gerard for the tip!)
Facebook is working on force feedback gloves
A very interesting article by David Heaney informs us that Facebook has just won some patents for the creation of innovative haptic gloves. What is interesting is that the patents don’t cover only haptic sensations, but also force feedback. This means that at Palo Alto, researchers are working on offering in the future gloves that can make you feel not only the texture of what you are virtually touching, but also the forces that virtual objects apply on your fingers.
I reached out to Aler Gu, the CEO of Dexta Robotics (the company behind the amazing Dexmo gloves) to have an opinion on the feasibility of this design. He said that is a very interesting work that was probably developed by Facebook Reality Labs. Patents disclosed today are traditionally filed years ago, so there could be a lot going on that we don’t know yet. But just for this specific patent, it seems more experimental than a real consumer product for a number of reasons.
Such a design based on fluid or air, typically requires pressure pump, reservoir, tubings, valves and lots of other hardware. This means that, even if the glove may be made slim, the final device implementation will require space for putting up all of this hardware.
The cool news is that Facebook is working on haptics, but as Abrash said, a perfect design for this will still need many years.
Rumors about Splinter Cell coming to VR are intensifying
Some weeks ago, we all heard a rumor about Facebook contacting Ubisoft to take Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed to VR. This week, an interview with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has been published and in it, Mr. Guillemot says “On Splinter Cell, there will be some new type of experiments, but more on different devices”. “Different devices” for sure may mean VR…
LED Walls are becoming a thing for cinema productions
New companies are coming to light to substitute the dull green screens used for shooting movies that require post-processing with big LED Walls already showing in projective VR the background of the scene the actor is in. This lets the director see immediately the result of the shot and has also the positive effect of making the actor feeling less alienated.
Light Field Lab raises $28M
The company is planning to produce big ledwalls that lets you see 3D holograms in front of you, without the need for you to wear glasses. This is damn amazing.
An interesting proposal for privacy terms
Avi Bar-Zeev, the man behind projects like HoloLens 1 and Apple AR glasses (maybe), has written an article in which he proposes the right way in which the terms and conditions of the various online services should be written to be user-friendly. I love his proposal, and I think you should read it as well. We need clear privacy statements for XR, otherwise, major companies may learn too much about our lives.
(Thanks Tom Emrich for pointing me to this)
Kat Loco is for personal use only
Kat Loco is a locomotion device for VR that has been funded on Kickstarter. It is a bit weird that I have just discovered that the device is for consumers only, and it has not a business license. Weird, considering that it could be useful in arcades as well. Some of its backers are now disappointed because this was not clear since the beginning.
New Intel Realsense is incredibly cheap
Some weeks ago, Intel has revealed its new RealSense SR305, a mid-range depth-sensing camera that costs only $79. If you make research on computer vision stuff, you may consider buying it.
VR and Robotics may help American Football players
American Football is a rough game, and players get a lot of hits, that in the long run may ruin the health of their brains or spines. What is interesting is that over the career of a football player, most hits are taken during the training.
That’s why it is interesting that Darmouth is experimenting in avoiding tackling during the training sessions, substituting real hits to teammates with hitting robots and using VR. This is not only helping the young players in growing healthier, but is also improving their performances.
Submit your project for the VRCORE awards!
VRCORE is an association of VR Developers in China. In May it has opened the submissions for its Awards and you are still able to submit your VR project until August, 31st! There are a lot of categories you can apply for, so I am sure you will find one suitable for your project.
If you manage to win, apart from the glory, you will also get support to sell your content in the Chinese market.
More info (VRCORE Awards)
More info (VRCORE Awards submission)
Some XR fun
I didn’t know 2D experiences were called “pancakes” :O
Someone loves his Vive too much…
What if, while we storm Area 51…
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