The Ghost Howls’s VR Week Peek: Facebook admits that VR is taking longer than expected, Pistol Whip ready to launch and much more!
It’s again that time of the week where I tell you the most important news in AR and VR! Are you ready?
Top news of the week
Zuckerberg admits that VR is taking longer than expected to take foot
While discussing the earning calls for Q3 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that VR is taking longer than expected to become successful. This comes together with the data by SuperData, that show how the Quest has probably sold around half a million units until now, a result that is not that bad, but that is far away from mainstream adoption.
Anyway, Zuck is not worried but remains bullish on VR. He said that Facebook still believes in the tech and will continue investing a lot in it, and this delay may even be an advantage for FB: since Facebook was not a hardware company, the fact that VR will take longer than expected means that the company will have more time to learn about hardware manufacturing. He then continued highlighting how the Quest is selling pretty well. This is also confirmed by the numbers: in Q3, the “Payments and Other Fees” revenue, the one that includes all money earned my services external to advertisement (this means sales of VR hardware as well), has been of $269 million, up 43% from last year. Facebook said that this growth has been mostly due to the sales of Oculus Quest.
It is exactly this number that made me try to make some speculations on the actually sold Quest headsets. Admitting that Oculus Quest is the only responsible for this big growth from last year (just an assumption, I want to be clear), we obtain that the sales of Quest for Q3 account for $81M. Since every headset costs more or less $399 (there are also models costing more), we obtain a bit more of 200,000 headsets sold for the third quarter, a number close to the 180,000 forecasted by SuperData. If we want to be super-bullish and think that Quest hardware sales make up 50% of total extra-ad earnings by Facebook, Quest has sold 340,000 units in Q3. Personally, I think that 200–350,000 seems the right range of Quest sales for this Quarter.
This means that mainstream adoption is far away… but as I’ve said, VR needs time. And this is also what Marky Z thinks: a Redditor spotted Zuckerberg commenting the earnings of Facebook in 2017 underlining how XR is a 10-years journey and not a 5-years one. We must be patient.
More info (Facebook earning call)
More info (Zuckerberg commenting VR in 2017)
Other relevant news
Pistol Whip is going to be the next great VR game
Pistol Whip, the new game by Cloudhead Games, is slated for release on November, 7th for Oculus Quest, Rift and SteamVR. A PSVR version is in the works. On the same day, an arcade version of the game will be released in LBVR locations through Springboard VR.
The game is a bit a mix of Beat Saber and Superhot VR. It is a rhythm shooting game, where you always walk forward and you have to shoot the enemies that will appear around you and dodge the bullets that come towards you, all following the rhythm of the beat. First reviewers highlight how the game makes the player enter a flow state where he/she automatically shoots and dodges following the music. To make shooting easier, there is an auto-aim feature, but the most expert players can disable it (this is called the “Deadeye” mode).
The embargo on the first impressions has been lifted, and all journalists and Youtubers have highlighted how the game is incredibly cool. Upload’s senior editor Ian Hamilton even claimed that Pistol Whip will be his to-go experience for all the times he will have to demo VR to people. The hype is rising, and this game is slated to obtain a huge success.
People at Beat Games know this very well, and for this reason, the Czech game studio has announced a new great feature to come to Beat Saber exactly on November, 7th, the same day of the launch of Pistol Whip. This makes me think that they want to ruin the launch of the competitor game. The possibilities of this great feature are two:
- Launch of 180° or 360° levels;
- New levels that are made in collaboration with Superhot. The two companies already teased a collaboration, and it would be perfect to compete with Pistol Whip…
More info (Pistol Whip launch day)
More info (Pistol Whip launch day in LBVR locations)
More info (Pistol Whip’s preview on Road To VR)
More info (Pistol Whip’s preview on Upload VR)
More info (Gameplay with Deadeye mode)
More info (Gameplay with Dual wielding mode)
More info (Beat Saber teasing new feature)
More info (Beat Saber teases a collaboration with Superhot)
Let’s make some facts checking on 5G
This week, two important VR journalists, Benjamin Lang and Jeremy Horwitz, have decided writing a post to discern the truth from the false for what concerns 5G. 5G is one of the buzzwords of the moment, and everyone is envisioning 5G changing all the sectors of our life. Telco companies are of course adding fuel to the fire, since 5G is the next big thing they can make money on.
All this buzz is creating also many lies and many unfulfillable dreams. Some services sold as 5G actually are still 4G. The rollout of 5G services has just begun, so we will need time for it to actually change the lives of many people. Some use cases that are presented, like realtime streaming of VR games, are still far away: streaming of desktop games has not proven yet to be a successful business, so streaming of VR games, that is even more difficult because of the low latency requirement, is something not so close in the future. 5G will help in having fully automated smart cities, but it is just a little part of the equation: creating all the infrastructure is the big problem.
We are in the peak of inflated expectations of the Gartner life cycle, and I guess that in some months we will enter the Trough of disillusionment, where people will understand that 5G is not the technology that solves everything.
More info (What 5G does and does not mean for XR)
More info (Separating hype from reality for what concerns 5G)
Oculus Quest may have an assistant soon
A report of some weeks ago revealed that Facebook was working on a vocal assistant for Oculus Quest (something like Siri, probably). This week, Upload VR has spotted a package coming with the latest Quest runtime whose name is “Oculus Assistant”. Trying to launch it, nothing happens yet, but the system asks for Mic permissions, and this means that it is something that most probably works with vocal commands.
It is not known yet if it will be able to speak like Siri or it will just interpret simple commands, and it is not clear yet if it will have a 3D counterpart like Mica or not. Facebook has not commented on the news.
For sure, VR seniors like me remember that Oculus already added a simple vocal interface in Oculus Home menu some years ago. This could be an enhanced and more intelligent version of that interface. Mixed with hand tracking, it could be a perfect mix to let people interact with Oculus Menus without the need of controllers.
Owlchemy Labs adds subtitles to Vacation Simulator
Owlchemy Labs has added two cool features to its popular game Vacation Simulator: one is subtitles, with all the dialogues and vocal communications that appear as a transparent popup in front of the user, and the other one is localization, with the translation of the game in many languages.
This feature is fantastic for accessibility: people that are deaf or have other hearing problems have typical problems in playing games that are full of dialogues. Thanks to this new feature, they will be able to finally have fun while playing this game. And this will also be good for people that are better at reading English than at listening to it.
Currently in the VR field is hard to focus on accessibility due to the little market and the little revenues that indie game studios are obtaining, and it is so very cool that the successful Owlchemy labs is working in including the most people possible in its gameplay. You can read from the blog post all the UX choices they took to make the subtitles interface to appear in a way that is unobtrusive and comfortable for the eyes.
On the same day, also Sanzaru Games have announced that the big Asgard’s Wrath will add subtitles as well. The transcription process has just begun, and it will be completed in some months. I hope that this will take foot among all the bigger games studios… and maybe that someone will release an automatic system for indies…
More info (Vacation Simulator adds subtitles)
More info (Owlchemy Labs talks about the subtitles feature)
More info (Asgard’s Wrath adding subtitles)
New statistics data on VR from Steam, SuperData, and DigiCapital
This week, we had a bunch of new analytics data on the VR market. I want to highlight 3 reports:
- Steam Hardware survey. From it, we can learn that Oculus and Valve have seen their market share shrink a bit, and Vive gaining some users. The fluctuations are not that big, so I can say that numbers are pretty stationary. The news is maybe exactly this one: the Rift S and the Index are not gaining many new users. The number of VR users on Steam has also slightly dropped. The VR landscape has not changed a lot in the past month;
- SuperData analysis on Q3 in XR. In this report, Superdata repeats the fact that the Quest has sold 400,000 units since launch, and that on the other side of the spectrum, the Index has sold less than 50,000 headsets. From 2018, 2019 sales of VR headsets has jumped only by a 16% factor in the consumer market, but by a 69% on the enterprise market. So, enterprise VR is maybe taking finally off. Superdata also shows how LBVR will represent a big chunk of the VR turnaround in the next 4 years. As always, take SuperData’s number with a big grain of salt;
- Digicapital report on XR companies. Digicapital instead offers us a picture of the landscape of AR and VR companies and startups. What is evident from the report is that most money (investments) is currently attracted by a few big startups (e.g. Magic Leap, Niantic, etc…) and by two big countries (USA and China). All the others are getting breadcrumbs. Digicapital underlines that the XR market is still unripe: many companies have a big evaluation on paper, but they aren’t actually making real money for their investors.
More info (Steam Hardware Survey)
More info (Superdata XR Update)
More info (Digicapital Report)
News worth a mention
Facebook shuts down Spaces but keeps working on social VR
Facebook Spaces, the first experiment by Facebook in creating a social VR ecosystem, has shut down this week. It has been a complete failure because of many reasons, and I think that very few people will cry for this.
But Facebook has not given up on social VR: it will launch next year its metaverse Facebook Horizon, and other cool features like Destinations and Deep Linking that will let people meet easier in virtual reality.
More info (Facebook Spaces shutting down)
More info (Oculus’s new social VR tools explained)
Facebook works on new tools for environment understanding
Facebook Reality Labs continues working on cool stuff related to AR and VR. This week, Next Reality spotted a paper where FRL has invented a new algorithm that makes a system understand the objects it is looking at by just using multiple 2D images. This means that a future model of smartglasses could not only detect what object it is looking at, but also extract its 3D model, and some properties. For instance, after the system has been trained about what is a mug, it could understand where is the handle of a mug it has never seen yet. This will be very important for the AR Cloud system that Facebook is working on.
Oculus Rift S to be discounted at $350 for Black Friday
Black Friday is coming soon, and Lenovo has already announced that it will discount the Rift S to $350. I think that the sale should become permanent, considering that with the release of Oculus Link, many people will opt for buying a Quest.
Magic Leap releases new tools for developers
If you are a Magic Leap developer, you will for sure be happy to discover that the Florida company is releasing a set of tools and facilities to make the development of AR applications easier. The tool, dubbed MLTK (cough cough so similar to the name of HoloLens’s MRTK cough cough), will offer to Unity developers ready-to-be-used prefabs to handle controller interactions and other basic stuff.
What is more intriguing, in my opinion, is that Magic Leap has announced that Version 1.0 of the Magicverse SDK will come out at the beginning of 2020. Magicverse is the name of the metaverse of ML, so I’m curious to see what this SDK will contain: for now it seems certain that it will let developers create AR applications that are interoperable between Magic Leap One users and smartphone users.
Acer Ojo 500 gets released
In a quite absurd move, Acer has finally launched its OJO 500 headset. You may ask me what is so absurd: well, it should have launched one year ago, and in 2019 this headset feels already old on Day 1 of launch. It is a standard WMR headset (1440×1440 per eye, 90Hz, etc…), with just some features that make enterprise customers clean it easily. The price is €450/£400.
No news on the high res ConceptD OJO and on StarVR headsets, and I hope they won’t be released when they will be already old as well 😀 😀 😀
Scientists are working on creating a network of brains
You know that I am very fascinated by BCI, and this week I found a very cool article about the experiments that are being performed on connecting the brains of people and animals. A researcher has already been able to connect the brains of some rats, so that they learned to “think together” about how to solve problems. And a simple experiment on humans made three people communicate by just using brain impulses through EEG and TMS.
There are also experiments that feel like the ones of the crazy scientists of Marvel movies, where people have been able to connect to the body of a rat and move its body by just thinking about it.
I am at the same time very intrigued and very scared by this kind of experiment…
Supermedium browser stops development
The developers of the interesting Supermedium browser, that contained a curation of the best WebVR experiences on the Internet, have stopped developing the product. The company, that recently received $1M+ of investments, will shift to other products that can appeal to more VR users. I think that this means that Supermedium was not profitable, and investors were not happy with this. That’s a pity because it was a cool application.
More info (Supermedium halts development)
More info (My review of Supermedium)
Google Chrome adds supports for WebXR
Finally, the popular Google Chrome browser is adding support for WebXR. This will let it run web-based AR and VR applications that follow the official standard.
The 8th Wall launches cloud-based WebAR development tools
The 8th Wall is one of the most interesting startups in the augmented reality field, and especially its WebAR products are becoming popular, enabling different marketing experiences. Now this company is pushing WebAR even further, offering a complete cloud solution for developing and hosting WebAR experiences. This means that you will have a full solution that not only makes you create your AR experiences very fast together with your team (it supports an in-browser version control system), but that will also host your creations, so that you will be able to share them by just using a link without worrying about anything else.
Some news on VR content
Some interesting news regarding VR games for this week:
- VR fitness game Viro Move, that should let you punch, slice and shoot enemies for a mix of movement and fun, is coming soon, and a free demo is now available on Steam! I have played it, and you can see a terrible Youtube video of mine where I play the game. I’ve found it very funny if your only purpose is moving a lot;
- Synth Riders, a very cool rhythm VR game is coming to Oculus Quest;
- Vader Immortal Episode 3, the final one, is coming to Rift and Quest on November, 21st;
- Golem is having another little delay… and this is pretty comic, considering that it is like the milionth delay of this game! Anyway, it will finally start being distributed in EU on November, 15th. Or maybe it will have a new delay, who knows…
More info (Viro Move)
More info (My gameplay of Viro Move)
More info (Synth Riders)
More info (Vader Immortal ep. III)
More info (Golem)
Some XR fun
How to escape the simulation that we call “reality”
The horrors of virtual reality!
When kids understand that they should be careful of people playing in VR
A sign that we all VR players should use
The Lab, but in real life
When a bus hitting you in VR is too realistic…
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