The Ghost Howls’s VR Week Peek (2019.26.11): Half-Life: Alyx revealed, Oculus Link out, XBox not considering VR and much more!
Guys and girls, sorry for the delay in the release of this weekly recap. I have had terribly busy days with the launch of our game HitMotion: Reloaded that will happen tomorrow on Viveport M. We are incredibly excited, but also need some sleep. If you can help us in spreading the world tomorrow when I will publish the launch post, I would be incredibly grateful!
I am also excited because thanks to the organizers of the VRX event, yesterday I have been able to interview Facebook’s Sean Liu and ask him some questions about Oculus and its vision of Virtual Reality. If you’re interested, you can check the interview out here.
That said, let me do a short recap of the past days in AR/VR.
Top news of the week
Valve has announced Half-Life: Alyx
In last week’s newsletter, I told you that there was a tiny possibility that Valve could announce a new Half-Life VR… and actually it has happened!
I guess you have already read the news, so I won’t go into much detail here. Alyx is a Half-Life game set between Half-Life 1 and 2, in which you embody Alyx Vance. It will be available on all major headsets through Steam on March 2020, with preorders already open now. The price is 50€ but there will be a 10% discount for who preorders the game. The game will be optimized for working on the Valve Index and especially on its controllers. It will feature very innovative and natural hands interactions that will exploit the five-fingers-tracking of the Knuckles. Who owns the Index will have the game for free (and for the occasion, the Index has been distributed to more countries, like Canada).
Half-Life: Alyx will feature 15 hours of gameplay and it will be moddable. Most probably it won’t have a desktop-PC porting because the team has conceived it from the ground-up specifically for VR. It has been made together with the development of the VR hardware, it can’t translate to mouse and keyboard. The team that has made it is comprised of 60 people.
The game is being beneficial for VR: all major gaming media are talking about it, and about VR: the launch trailer has been #1 on Youtube. The bad side of thing is that most gaming communities are angry with Valve for making it VR-only and are hating on this. Thanks Valve for taking such a bold decision, you are helping the whole VR ecosystem a lot.
More info (Half-Life: Alyx reveal)
More info (My editorial on why it is important for VR)
More info (Minimum PC specs)
More info (Why Half-Life: Alyx won’t come to PC)
More info (15 hours of gameplay)
More info (HL VR team is made by 60 people)
More info (Most Steam users’ PC are not ready for VR)
More info (Launch trailer #1 on Youtube)
More info (Index now shipping in Canada)
Other relevant news
Oculus Link is here
Facebook has finally deployed the required updates to let the Oculus Quest users connect their device to the PC via USB and use the Quest as a Rift. It is still in beta and doesn’t work with all graphics cards (e.g. it doesn’t work with AMD cards), but it will be improved in future updates. The god John Carmack has already promised a future update that will exploit all the USB 3.1 bandwidth for improved image clarity (this news makes me happy also because it shows that John is still working on Oculus products).
Oculus will release its official cable next month in limited quantities, but for now, it has released the specifications required for Link so that you can find alternate cables on Amazon. They’re officially suggesting one on Amazon US, but it is like 1m long, so I don’t know if it is actually the best choice…
The first feedbacks on Link are very positive: this is a killer solution for the Quest!
Final mention of my friend GamerToTheEnd, that has managed to connect the USB cable to a system that lets him transmit the signal over a fiber optical cable that can be long up to 250m! This way you can transmit the signal all over your house…
More info (Oculus Link released)
More info (Oculus Link requirements)
More info (Oculus Link vs Rift S through the lenses)
More info (How does the Link work?)
More info (John Carmack talks about a future update)
More info (Oculus Link officially reccommended cable)
More info (Oculus Link cable specifications)
More info (Mike Hall’s suggested Link cable if you are in China)
More info (Oculus Link through fiber cable)
nReal launches its AR glasses devkits
Finally, the Chinese manufacturer nReal has launched its very interesting glasses. The Nreal Light Developer Kits are now available for pre-orders on nReal website, with actual shipping of the units to come in one month. The price is $1200, and together with the glasses, you will receive a computational unit that the glasses must be attached to to work and a 3 DOF controller. The computational unit contains a Snapdragon 845 chipset. If you have some eye impairments, you can also buy a set of prescription lenses for $500.
Devs can use the devkit in preparation for the big launch of nReal, which should release next year consumer AR glasses that will be as cheap as $500 and will be able to connect to the smartphones of the users (if they mount an 855 Snapdragon chipset).
nReal is one of the most interesting products coming to the market: it is light, it is trendy, it has good imagery (you can read my review here). The company has yet to improve its 6 DOF tracking, and especially it has to prove it can actually deliver a product without delays. I really hope so, because these devices can be very interesting, for instance for marketing installations of fashion brands.
More info (nReal devkits launching)
More info (LG partnering with nReal for the launch in Korea)
It has been a great week for art in XR
This week three pieces of news about art in XR have caught my attention:
- It has been released for free “Il Divino”, a virtual reality experience that lets you appreciate the Cappella Sistina in VR, with the possibility of getting very close to this masterpiece. I’ve heard it is amazing, but I have still to find the time for trying it;
- For the first time, an XR piece of art will be auctioned. “The Life” from the Serbian artist Marina Abramovic will be put on sale with a £600,000 price tag. It is not the best performance by Ms Abramovic, and considering that it costed £1M to make, it is not even a good deal for her, but it is amazing that XR art is getting official recognition;
- Tender Claws has just released on Quest “The Under Presents”. It is a crazy experience mixing improvisational theater and VR, where you can follow a theatrical representation of some people on a ship with a sad fate waiting for them, or you can go to a crazy hub where you can meet live actors performing fun stuff also involving you. A pretty unique experience in its genre.
More info (Il Divino)
More info (Marina Abramovic)
More info (The Under Presents)
More info (The Under Presents)
VR is not a focus for next-gen XBox
Phil Spencer has just said that VR is not a priority for the next XBox Scarlett. He commented on the topic saying “We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and… nobody’s asking for VR.”. It’s a pretty harsh statement, given the good success of PSVR (more than 5 million units sold) and the big hype around Half-Life VR. Of course we know that VR is still a niche, but usually consoles have very long cycles, so doing a console not ready for VR could be a big problem for the future of Scarlett. Anyway, the door is not closed completely: he added to the interview “I think we might get there [eventually], But yeah, that’s not where our focus is.”
Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida has just burnt completely Microsoft tweeting “we oftentimes work hard to make things that no customers are asking for them”. I love him.
More info (VR not a focus for Xbox Scarlett)
More info (Shuhei Yoshida’s tweet)
CTRL-Labs CEO says we will have neural interfaces in less than 5 years
I found on VentureBeat a very good article that finally explains well what CTRL-Labs (the company just acquired by Facebook) actually does. Its technology tries to analyze the electrical impulse in your arm to try to understand what you want to do with your fingers. This is already very interesting, but it is what happens after a while that you use it, that it really feels like black magic. Once your brain understands that thanks to the bracelet it can just “think” about doing an action and it gets understood and executed by the system, it stops moving the muscles and just triggers only an electrical signal enough to activate the CTRL-Labs sensors. That is, you start by moving your index finger to operate a trigger and shoot in a game, and in the end you just think about shooting in the game, and without moving anything, you shoot. That’s fascinating and opens a lot of new possibilities for future AR and VR interfaces. I dream about keyboards made this way, and CTRL-Labs is already experimenting with them.
According to its CEO, neural interfaces are not that far away… we could have something like this in less than 5 years. I really can’t wait…
News worth a mention
The Eden Snacker shows an interesting design for public VR installations
South-Africa startup Eden Labs has created an interesting design for VR headsets needed in public installations to show 360 videos. It is a VR HMD based on the Skyworth S1 that features a handle, so that users can take the handle, push the headset to the face and enjoy the 360 content without the need of completely wearing it. The headset is paired with a touchscreen PC where the user can select the experience that he wants to play and stays on a stand that charges it. I think it’s a very original and smart design.
Facebook announces Deepfovea
Facebook R&D department on AI has just detailed its latest research product called Deepfovea. It is an algorithm that given a frame where it has been rendered in high resolution only the little region that the user is looking at and a very rough rendering of the other parts of the image, is able to reconstruct with great accuracy all the image. As you can imagine, something like this would be amazing in VR headsets to implement foveated rendering.
Google announces The Relightables
Google has just invented a new system to shoot volumetric videos of avatars. Volumetric recording is nothing new, but Google has invented a peculiar method, that thanks to special lighting applied while the video is recording, is able not only to save the colors of the person inside the system, but also the optical properties of the mesh. That is, the avatar recorded this way can be put in virtual environments and it will reflect the light in the correct way, for a much improved realism. I’m amazed.
Rikard Steiber departs HTC
Rikard Steiber, a very well known personality in HTC, is stepping down from his role of Viveport President. He will depart the company, but he has not given info on his future yet. Good luck to him!
Minecraft Earth has been downloaded 1.2M in US
In its first week on the US Market, Minecraft Earth has been downloaded 1.2M times. This may seem a grat number, but actually to put it in perspective, Pokemon Go had more than 32M in its first week, and even the disappointing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite had more than 3M. It is true that Minecraft is still in beta, but I expected a better launch for such an innovative game.
Oculus Go won’t support USB memory sticks
John Carmack made us dream about USB memory sticks as a way to expand the memory of the Go (and maybe also the Quest). Actually, it won’t be possible. The reason seems to be that they adsorbe too much electrical power.
Some cool Black Friday deals are coming!
Black Friday is coming, and VR companies are offering many juicy sales! Viveport is discounted of 45%, and all Vive headsets (Cosmos included) will be $100 off. The Rift S and the Go will see a $50 discount. Oculus Quest won’t be discounted, but all purchasers will get the trilogy of Vader Immortal for free. Many PSVR games will be discounted. It’s time to spend some money on VR!
More info (Black Friday VR deals on Road To VR)
More info (Black Friday VR deals on Upload VR)
More info (HTC discounts all headsets)
More info (Oculus Go $50 off)
Two news on content
This week, there has been the launch of the third episode of Vader Immortal! I’ve read that the final encounter with Darth Vader is a bit disappointing, but the final dojo is cooler than ever.
Tomorrow Upload will make its usual VR Showcase, so we will hear lots of news of VR content, that I will tell you next Sunday! For now let just me say that Arizona Sunshine is coming to Quest on December, 5th.
More info (Star Wars Vader Immortal Episode III trailer)
More info (Star Wars Vader Immortal Episode III review)
More info (Arizona Sunshine launches on Quest)
Some XR fun
It seems that farmers in Russia are using VR to let cows make more milk. It seems fake news, but the picture of the cow with the VR headset on is very funny
Accurate depiction of an Oculus Quest Link users in his first use of the tech
Some satyre on HTC
We finally know who is the suitcase man in Half Life!
A special thanks to who makes this newsletter possible
This informative newsletter is possible only thanks to these amazing people that support me on Patreon:
- DeoVR
- Michael Bruce
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Paolo Leoncini
- Vooiage Technologies
- Jennifer Granger
- Jason Moore
- Matias Nassi
- Francesco Strada
- Caroline
If you find these roundups useful, consider becoming a donor as well. I would be very thankful!
(Header image by Valve)
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