The Ghost Howls’s VR Week Peek (2019.09.01): HoloLens 2 may come in September, Oculus may commercialize a multiplayer LBVR solution, HP Reverb is back and much more!
It’s the first of September! The autumn is getting closer, but here it is still very hot.
Also VR companies seem still in vacation since we had no big news this week. Anyway, it was not a boring week at all… discover what it has happened here below!
Top news of the week
HoloLens 2 could be put on sale on September
According to Reuters, Microsoft’s executive vice president Harry Shum took the stage at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and said that the HoloLens 2 will be released sometime in September of this year.
After the news started becoming widespread, Microsoft has released an official statement saying that actually there is no official date announced for the shipping of the headset. In the same statement, Microsoft has also announced that some near-final prototypes have already been shared with some customers and partners to have feedback.
The fact that Microsoft has not explicitly denied that September is the month of the release may us think that the news is possibly true, and the fact that Microsoft has already provided some devices to close partners means that actually, the release is close. So, the news may be true.
But the VR expert Tony Rogers don’t agree: he says that according to his sources, October-November is a more probable release window, since Microsoft is still ironing out some bugs. Maybe all this uncertainty on the shipping moment is because Microsoft is not sure about when the debugging procedure will end.
In any case, we will see. Many companies are waiting for HoloLens 2, since it is a device that can be very useful to create enterprise applications, especially in the maintenance sector.
(PS Contact me if you need someone to develop for you some AR enterprise applications!)
More info (HoloLens 2 sale report)
More info (Tony Rogers commenting the news)
More info (Tony Rogers continuing commenting the news)
Other relevant news
Jaroslav Beck wants to invest in indie VR studios
Jaroslav Beck is the former CEO of Beat Saber, and one of the creators of the Beat Saber levels that we all love so much.
Since Beat Saber has been a huge hit, while most VR indie game studios are struggling to survive, he had a great idea: he decided to invest in some interesting indie VR projects. He said that it is his way of giving back to the VR community… and it is not a project of Beat Games, but a personal one.
Personally, I praise a lot this initiative: we are in a very complicated moment for virtual reality, where the market is not ready yet for many startups to survive easily, and we should all support each other, helping each other to survive. This idea by Jaroslav is so great because it follows exactly this philosophy, because it is in made in the spirit of uniting us all to make VR succeed.
Mr. Beck, you are an awesome man.
The HP Reverb is on sale again
The soap opera
HP has clarified that the headset model launched the first time had actually various issues, as signaled by the VR communities, and so it was recalled. The company has now solved all the issues and the headset can return on the market. It is now on sale on US HP Store and on Amazon US. It will arrive in Europe in mid-September. HP has also been good in apolog
The first reactions from people having the new models have been positive: the headset now works and has
Venice Film Festival is featuring a rich VR section
Among the most important film festivals, La Biennale del Cinema di Venezia is the only one with an official VR competition. And this year, like the last one, there are various amazing storytelling experiences that will take part in it.
There are both 360 video experiences and interactive CGI ones. There are again Gloomy Eyes and the Collider, that I have personally tried and appreciated at the Sandbox Festival (here you can read my review on The Collider). There is an experience about the Chibok kidnapping. “These Sleepless Nights” will make people face the problems of homeless people. “Waiting Room” will make people live the experience of a woman that has cancer and fights it with chemotherapy. There is also an experience about Ghost In The Shell. The Line will show you the love between two miniature dolls. HTC Vive is supporting 6 experience showcased there, among which shines Inory, that accompanies the viewer on a spiritual journey.
All these experiences are incredible and will show people the great value of storytelling in VR. I can’t wait to discover who will win.
More info (Venice Film Festival VR section official website)
More info (Article on Venice Film Festival VR)
More info (Article on Venice Film Festival VR)
More info (Ghost In The Shell VR experience)
More info (These Sleepless Nights)
More info (Waiting Room)
More info (The Line)
More info (HTC Vive titles)
More info (Daughters of Chibok)
6d.ai exits beta stage
6d.ai, the American startup that first worked on developing the AR Cloud, is finally exiting the beta stage for its iOS platform.
For the few ones of you that haven’t heard this name yet, 6d.ai is a company that aims at using the data from the cameras of all the phones running AR applications, send them to a server, and merge them all together to create a full mesh representing the whole world. Once we will have this mesh, it will be possible to create a 1:1 match between the real and the virtual world, and so create AR experiences that are persistent, and are shown to all users of the world exactly in the same locations. Finally, AR could become truly useful since it won’t be confined to rooms, but it can expand into the whole world.
6d.ai has already a working prototype, and now this prototype is exiting the beta stage for iOS. The big news is that finally, the framework is coming also to Android (where it is in private Beta) and to some smart glasses, like nReal.
Exiting the beta stage, the company has also announced the prices for using its services. But don’t worry, people that will release an app using 6d.ai framework before the end of the year will also have 3 years of free use of its SDK!
More info (6d.ai exits beta)
More info (Video of 6d.ai mesh reconstruction in action)
More info (6d.ai free SDK deal)
John Carmack has participated in the Joe Rogan podcast
John Carmack has just taken part to the Joe Rogan Experience, the very famous podcast where Joe Rogan interviews important people (yeah, we European have no clear idea who he is, but in America, he is pretty famous).
The video lasts 2 hours and a half, and frankly speaking, it is not completely worth watching it. Don’t misunderstand me: Carmack is a genius and whatever thing he says is interesting, but when in this video he speaks about VR, he mostly says things that we already know. I have found more interesting the parts where John comments other technologies, like opensourcing games (that in his opinion is a great idea), Quantum Computers (that he says they have only downsides, since they will invalidate all cybersecurity), 5G (that according to John is not the saviour of VR, since VR is already performing well without it), The Moore’s Law that is not working anymore (because we reached the technological limit).
Regarding AR/VR, I mostly found interesting these points:
- Passthrough AR is nice, but it requires us to wear big VR headsets on our face, and people don’t want to wear shoebox-sized devices when they go in the streets. Sky-goggles like headsets may be a better solution, but Carmack thinks they are not appealing as well;
- Boxing VR games are cool, but the lack of haptic feedback when you hit the targets breaks a bit the magic (something we should take in mind for our game HitMotion: Reloaded);
- Consumer AR has no present… it’s better an enterprise approach like the one of Microsoft at the moment. Mobile AR has no interesting use cases;
- People complain that living another world in AR/VR and not living a real life is wrong, even if it can make our lives better… but no one complains that we are having air conditioning, that prevents us from living the real heat;
- Oculus may, in the end, release an SDK to create multiplayer free-roam experiences (like the one of the Dead And Buried demo at OC5). This seems in line with what the German publication Mixed.DE teased some months ago.
More info (Interview video)
More info (UploadVR’s selection of most interesting XR things)
More info (John Carmack on augmented reality)
More info (John Carmack on LBVR multiplayer SDK)
News worth a mention
A Redditor has published a full teardown of the Valve Index
Redditor GamerToTheEnd has performed a full teardown of the Valve Index headset and published the photos on Reddit. Apart from crying from seeing a similar cool headset destroyed, I found very interesting two details:
- In the teardown, the dual-elements optics of the headset are clearly visible: the lenses are like two lenses stacked one on top of the other;
- The displays of the Index have a screen diffuser that limits the Screen Door Effect, similar to the one of PSVR and Odyssey+.
More info (Road To VR article)
More info (Disassembly album)
VRGO Kickstarter is now live
VRGO is a special pillow that you can put on your chair so that you can control your movements in the VR game by just leaning your body: e.g. if you learn forward, you can walk forward in the game. According to the developers, since you move your body to move in VR, this also reduces motion sickness.
The device also introduces haptics… and personally, I find a little funny the ide of having haptics on my bottom… I guess it has some applications in some kind of experiences… IYKWIM.
The project has almost reached its goal on Kickstarter, so be sure to check it out if you are interested in VR accessories!
More info (Upload VR article)
More info (Kickstarter campaign)
VR is an empathy machine, but this is not always the case
A very interesting article debates the fact that embodying a minority may make you actually feel empathy for what these people experience. Since you live the bad experience only in VR for some minutes and then you return to your happy life, where you have not these kind of problems, you may not understand the burden of going through all the discrimination every day.
“I would call it toxic empathy,” says Nakamura. She says that because you don’t actually live in the body of the character you’re playing, the abuse you experience as that character becomes much easier to dismiss. “So if somebody comes up to you, and you’re playing a black character and they call you the N-word and … it doesn’t bother you, then you feel like, ‘Well it isn’t that big of a deal.’
Namakura says that choosing a character outside of your own identity can risk turning into what she calls “identity tourism.”>>
My review of Google Hand tracking library
Last week, Google has released an opensource library for hand tracking on mobile devices based on its MediaPipe framework. There has been a lot of buzz around it, but almost no one has actually tried the library and showed the results online. So, I have decided to try 3D-tracking version and review it on Youtube, where you can see that it is an interesting product, but at present time it is still too buggy.
Some updates on AR/VR games
These are some cool news on AR/VR games for this week:
- Until You Fall has been released. From the reviews, it seems a cool action game, that has anyway a very shallow story;
- Acron Attack Of The Squirrels may be a very intriguing VR party game, where one player plays in VR and his/her friends play with mobile phones;
- Men In Black: Global Invasion is the latest PokemonGo clone, this time with a MIB theme. It is not getting that much interest;
- Borderlands 2 is finally coming to PC VR headsets! And also a DLC for all platforms is going to be released…
More info (Until you fall review)
More info (Until you fall review)
More info (Acron: Attack of the Squirrels review)
More info (Men In Black AR game)
More info (Borderlands 2)
Women may have an IPD that make for them uncomfortable the use of most VR headsets
In a very detailed article on motion sickness, there is a statement that shows how the comfort of most VR headsets may be more tailored to men than women. This is the excerpt:
Studies have found that when the headset’s interpupillary distance is too large, users experience greater discomfort. In his research, Rokers has found that approximately 90% of women have pupils that are closer together than the default headset setting, and 27% of women’s eyes don’t fit the headset at all. In comparison, only 5% of men had had too narrow an interpupillary distance for the headset to match.
I shared this statement on Twitter, and it got pretty viral. Some people, like Tom Forsyth, claim that from his experience, this is not true… and even if it were true, a wrong IPD value shouldn’t cause motion sickness.
I am not an expert in the IPD field, so I can’t tell who is right and who is wrong. For sure, the article is based on research whose results have been officially published, so it shouldn’t be bulls**t.
More info (Article on Motion Sickness)
More info (Answer by some people on Twitter)
Scape is mapping 100 cities to anchor AR Objects
In the first part of this post, I told you about the work of 6d.ai in creating the AR Cloud. 6d.ai is not the only company working on this. Scape is a UK company that is trying to reach the same goal and it is already working in creating the maps of 100 cities.
Insta360 Go is maybe the smallest 360 camera on the market
Insta360 is a 360 camera that is big as your thumb and it weighs only 20 grams. But it is able to shoot 3K 360 videos. A very impressive action camera.
Decentraland is starting its game jam
If you are into blockchain and virtual worlds, the game jam by Decentraland may interest you. You have to create environments for this social world governed by blockchain, and you can win free land and mana to spend in Decentraland.
VeeR is offering funds and distribution support for interesting storytelling projects
If you are into 360 videos, you may check out the latest initiative from VeeR. The Chinese startup is offering up to $50K to support the realization of interesting ideas concerning 360/VR videos. If you have already some cool VR video, you can ping the company to ask it to distribute your content on VeeR platform, that is performing pretty well in China.
More info (Funding)
More info (Distribution)
Join the VRX event!
VRX is a very interesting virtual reality event that will take place in San Francisco, from 12th to 13th December. There you can attend to the talks of VR superstars like Denny Unger of Cloudhead Gamer, Stephanie Llams and Amy Peck.
I have managed to get a special deal for you: if you want to attend the event, you, my readers, may exploit a very special -100$ discount code: just enter 5049TGH100 when you are buying the ticket!
Enjoy your time at VRX 🙂
Some XR fun
When you must equilibrate the weight of your headset, but you are poor
VR can be good for parents and children
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