Happy Holidays and have a fantastic new year you all! I wish you a wonderful 2020!
Of course, not much has happened in the VR field in these days, because most VR companies are in vacations, and VR journalists are not writing many posts as well (in these days, we just see a lot of fluff articles like “The best 25 games for Oculus Quest” and things like that).
But since I care giving something informative to you even in these holiday days, I’ve managed to assemble a roundup even for today! I hope you will like it
(PS I have also written an interesting article about Viveport Streaming this week… I recommend you read it!)
Top news of the week
VR adoption is increasing, thanks to Quest, Half-Life, and Beat Saber
This 2019 ends in a very good way for virtual reality. The Oculus Quest, thanks to its affordability, usability and great content catalog has been a great Christmas gift, and in the US it is sold out in all stores and will get back in stock in February. You can only buy it from 3rd party resellers, which sell it for prices as high as $1000. Thanks to this spike in demand, the Oculus app on the US iOS Store is now the Top 25 app among all the free apps and the Top 7 among the free entertainment apps. That’s an astonishing result and shows how in the US the demand for the Quest has been really high. Worldwide, things are a bit less extreme: here in Italy, a new Quest bought today will be shipped in 10 days.
The Valve Index is back ordered to February as well, thanks to the hype created by Half-Life: Alyx. Alyx is also contributing to the sales of Quest, since the game can also be played with Quest+Link.
In the meanwhile, Steam has published the list of the most bought titles of the year. Titles like Beat Saber, Boneworks, Skyrim and Gorn have been put in the “Platinum” category of the most sold VR games of the year. But what is interesting is that for the first time a VR game has been inserted in the “bronze” category of the overall games on Steam, and this title is of course Beat Saber. For the first time, a VR game is among the most sold games on Steam for the whole year. That’s a piece of amazing news for the whole ecosystem.
And do you want to hear another last cool news? SuperHot VR developers have just declared that just in the 7 days of the Christmas week they have grossed $2M in sales of their game across all platforms. These are astonishing numbers and show how much a very successful VR game can earn nowadays.
This 2019 is ending in a great way for VR, and we have even better perspectives for 2020. Wasn’t VR dead? 😉
More info (Quest and Index sold out)
More info (Steam’s most sold games)
More info (Bonework’s dev commenting the success of VR games)
More info (SuperHot VR sales)
More info (Oculus app being top in the US App Store)
Other relevant news
Oculus Link official cable is available and sold out
Oculus has put on sale the official 5m cable to use with Oculus Link so that to transform your Oculus Quest in a PC VR headset. The official cable has the advantage of being 5m long (while many non-official cables are only 3m), being highly performant and letting the Quest recharge itself while it is used as a tethered headset. The cable is already sold out, and new orders will ship from January, 7th. I haven’t been able to find a single review until now, but redditor u/tub79558 has finally published a picture of its package, that you can see here above.
More info (Oculus Link cable availability)
More info (Oculus Link cable package photo)
Teslasuit, TG0, and others raise the interest for VR gloves
Teslasuit, the company famous for having created the most advanced virtual reality suit (that embeds haptics, hot/cold sensations, pain induction, etc…), has just announced a new product of its: a haptic glove. This Teslasuit Glove, that is quite similar to the Dexmo Gloves I’ve tried in Shenzhen, will be able to offer haptic feedback, force feedback and also read biometric data (like heart rate) of the user. They can work in conjunction with the Teslasuit suit, but also independently. The product will be officially announced at CES, and the price will be around $5000, so we are talking about an enterprise product for training, healthcare and similar applications.
In these days, another interesting startup, TG0, has started its pre-campaign for Kickstarter, asking interested people to register their interest for its device, the Etee. It looks like a lightweight version of the Valve Knuckles, and can track all the five fingers of the users so that to let people use their hands in VR. The video on Twitter has got more than 25,000 views and many people are intrigued by it. Price is expected to be around $300.
On Reddit, I found an interesting project called Pulso, that seems a simple version of a VR glove. And Contact CI, that has participated in last year’s CES, will be again at CES 2020 to show the evolution of its VR gloves.
It’s cool to see so many new products that try to bring full hands presence in VR!
More info (Teslasuit Glove)
More info (TG0 Etee video)
More info (TG0 Etee price)
More info (Pulso)
More info (Contact CI)
FeelReal is having problems with FDA approval
Do you remember FeelReal? It is that mask to let you experience smells in virtual reality, together with the sensation of wind and mist. Its company has successfully conducted a Kickstarter campaign and is now working towards actually making and commercializing the product.
Unluckily, it seems that it is having problems with US Food and Drug Administration, because FDA considers all vaping devices dangerous to people… and FeelReal needs this technology to provide scent and mist sensations. The startup is working to solve this problem, and I really hope that they manage to find a solution, otherwise they would have to give up this interesting project and disappoint all their backers.
(Thanks Matias Nassi for the tip!)
News worth a mention
Unity releases the EditorXR runtime
Some years ago, Unity released its VR editor, a version of its popular game engine working all in VR. As you can read by my review of that time, it was quite unusable. But the company has continued working on this, and now it is shipping a new update for this system. And apart from that, it is also transforming it in an opensource framework so that everyone can create VR editors (e.g. world editors, level editors) and VR authoring tools for his own VR or AR applications. There is still a lot to do before this system becomes perfect, but it’s very interesting to imagine its potentialities in some years for all the XR developers (like me) out there.
VR Fitness Insider announces the best XR fitness games of the year
Popular online magazine VR Fitness Insider has assigned its awards for the best XR fitness games of 2019, and games like Beat Saber, Pistol Whip and The Thrill Of The Fight have all been awarded. BoxVR has also been chosen as the best VR fitness game of the year. If you’re into fitness and XR, give this list of cool VR games a look. I hope that our game HitMotion:Reloaded will be on this list next year!
Admire Takashi Yoshinaga’s work
On Linkedin, I always follow the amazing work that developer Takashi Yoshinaga is doing with Kinect for Azure and AR/VR devices. He is trying to reconstruct the body of the user and put it inside AR/VR applications. I think he’s doing a great job, so give a look to his experiments!
A list of NSFW discounts
I’ve found on Reddit a list of all the most important discounts running on VR adult entertainment websites and apps, and I thought it was interesting to share it with you. I mean, I know that it is not for you, but for a friend of yours… so tell him that there are some discounts now.
A Quest that looks like Bender
This Oculus Quest modded so that to look like Bender is overly cool…
Some info on XR content
- Rosie Summers has created a very nice VR advent calendar, with the creation of a cute Christmas-themed VR world;
- Holoception has now a free demo on Steam;
- An AR experience immerses you in photos and artworks of the Pink Floyd.
More info (VR Christmas world)
More info (Free Holoception demo)
More info (Pink Floyd AR experience)
Instrument Studio VR giveaway!
If you like composing music and you like VR, then Instrument VR Studio, an experience that makes you record music made with virtual instruments is the ideal application for you! And thanks to the support of its author, I can gift two keys to my readers! The first two ones that will share this newsletter and write me an e-mail asking for this application, will be awarded a key for a free copy worth €20!
More info (Instrument Studio VR on Rift store)
Some XR fun
Richie Plank Experience may not be the best game to play at Christmas
A special kind of Christmas tree
Beware of saying that VR is dead
One of the most sold SteamVR games is VR Kanojo, that lets you “interact” with a young Japanese student…
Support these newsletters for 2020!
Do you want these informative roundups to still be released in 2020? Then please, make a donation on Patreon! Even a small amount is very important to keep this magazine up and running.
The family of my supporters is composed by these amazing people:
- DeoVR
- Michael Bruce
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Paolo Leoncini
- Jennifer Granger
- Jason Moore
- Matias Nassi
- Francesco Strada
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
Please join them by clicking the link below and gift me a wonderful beginning of the new year!
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(Header image taken from Upload VR)