The XR Week Peek (2020.01.13): Zuckerberg shows his vision for the next decade, Vive Pro discounted to $600 and more!
It’s been the week of CES, and we’ve got many news and articles about AR and VR in these days! Actually, I’m writing another article with the best news from CES, so I’m just writing few lines about it here, and then I will focus on the few most important non-CES news from this week. Register to my newsletter to not miss the best roundup of CES news!
Top news of the week
CES 2020 has shown some interesting XR gadgets
As I’ve just told, I will spend a few words on CES, since I’m writing a super-mega-hyper-roundup about it for tomorrow! Anyway, some of the most important XR news from it have been:
- Pico announcing the Neo 2 standalone headset, that seems very intriguing for the enterprise;
- Panasonic showing a concept 3DOF VR glass that has a nice steampunk look and very high resolution;
- Pimax announcing a 5K SUPER model, with a whopping 180Hz refreshrate; Artisan headset that can offer 140° FOV at 120Hz for only $449 (for the headset only); and finally showcasing the 8K X headset;
- NVIDIA announcing VRSS (Variable Rate Super Sampling) that will allow VR games to have a better definition in the center of the vision, where the eye sees better;
- VRgineers showing a new version of the XTAL headset, with 4K per eye. Of course, it is aimed at the enterprise (and the military) market.
More info (Pico 2 Neo)
More info (Panasonic VR glasses)
More info (Pimax Artisan)
More info (Pimax 5K SUPER)
More info (NVIDIA RTX VRSS)
More info (XTAL 8K)
Other relevant news
Zuckerberg talks about the future
In his usual Facebook post about his new year’s resolutions, Mark Zuckerberg has decided to talk about his resolutions for the next decade, for him and for his company. In it, you can read Mark’s vision about the future, a future where we all will be more connected, and always closer.
Of course, he also talks about immersive realities. He expects that XR will help “defying distance”, making people see each other together in VR even if they are geographically very distant.
Regarding VR, he thinks that this technology will help in solving problems like housing in big cities and geographical inequalities. Thanks to VR, even an African child can attend the most prestigious University in the US, for instance, and exploit his/her talent. It will also solve the housing problem because most people won’t need living in a big city to be able to work in an important company because all the offices will be virtual. So big cities will be less crowded and the houses will be less expensive.
Regarding AR, Mark says that he believes that it is the next technological platform and that before 2030, it will be more important than smartphones. We believe that with you, Marky Z…
More info (Mark Zuckerberg’s post)
More info (Comment by CNBC)
More info (Comment by Road To VR)
Oculus Link official cable now available worldwide (but Quest is still soldout)
Good news for all the Quest fans: the official Oculus Link cable is now available worldwide in 22 countries. It should offer a better quality of streaming, longer length, and the possibility to charge your device while you use it. According to popular YouTubers Cas&Chary, though, this cable doesn’t offer at the moment any noticeable improvement in the quality of the streaming, since the bandwidth of the Link solution is already limited via software to keep latency low. Anyway, with future software updates of the Oculus runtime, the official cable will be able to exploit all the maximum speed possible.
Regarding the Quest, it is still sold out in the US, and the waiting time is still around two months. The situation is different in Europe, where you just have to wait some days.
More info (Oculus Link cable available)
More info (Oculus Link cable review)
More info (Oculus Quest availability)
HTC reduces the Vive Pro price by $200
The Vive Pro, the enterprise headset offered by HTC, has just seen a big discount: the headset only now costs $600, and the full bundle with the SteamVR 2.0 base stations now costs $1200. The price drop is permanent.
I think this choice is perfectly reasonable, given the new landscape of VR headsets, where there are now the Reverb and the Valve Index, and the fact that the Vive Pro is now 2 years old. Furthermore, I think that the device was a bit overpriced since the beginning.
Some people wonder why this headset should still be considered now that there is the Valve Index. Well, the reasons are mostly two:
- Wireless. The Vive Pro with the Wireless add-on lets you live wire-free VR and that’s awesome;
- Clear business licensing. The Valve Index is a headset for consumers, while HTC offers a lot of services dedicated to enterprise customers. That’s why you see all arcades using a Vive Pro.
Apple signs a deal with Imagination Technologies
Apple has just signed a multi-year deal with Imagination Technologies. At this point, probably you, like me, would ask “And why should I care?”. Well, let me tell you.
Imagination Technology is a British chip maker, and it seems that in the last years, it has worked to implement ray tracing in mobile chips. With this agreement, Apple gets access to various IP by this company, and so gets access to this knowledge.
Real-time ray tracing is the new trend of PC graphics (for sure you remember all the RTX OFF/RTX ON memes), and the next platform it will land on is mobile. Apple is probably securing the possibility to implement fast ray tracing in iPhones. This could be interesting considering Apple’s interest in AR/MR: virtual elements, thanks to ray tracing, may appear more realistic, even if they are just rendered on a mobile device.
News worth a mention
Nintendo is experimenting with AR
In a recent interview with Nikkei, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has claimed that the company is experimenting with immersive realities. In particular, he claimed to be interested in augmented reality: “As for AR, it is definitely one of the many aspects we are interested in. We are currently researching what interesting ways we can utilize it.”.
We know that Nintendo has already released a VR product (that is Labo VR Kit), but still nothing in the AR field. According to these words, if the Japanese company will find a valuable way to integrate it into its products, it will do it. I’m very curious about what they can come out with…
How many billions is Facebook spending in XR R&D?
Jason McDowall, host of the “The AR Show” podcast, reveals that since Oculus acquisition, Facebook’s spending on R&D has gone from $4B to $14B every year. For sure all this money doesn’t get spent on XR alone (there is also the Portal device, and many other gadgets and experiments), but I’m sure a good part is.
This shows the big commitment of Facebook towards XR and also explains how Oculus can offer such good products at such low prices. It has basically infinite money, that its competitors can’t afford to spend.
It also puts in the right context the $3B investment got by Magic Leap. It is nothing compared with these amounts of money.
VR can fix some eye problems
On Reddit, I have found a nice story of a guy for which VR has solved a vision problem. He suffered from stereo vision issues, and the continued use of VR helped him in solving it. Probably it has been because VR makes the eyes focus on only one focal plane, and this has helped his eyes in learning how to focus properly to see 3D objects.
I hope all people with the same vision impairment will discover this and use VR headsets to start seeing well again!
Some news on VR content
- Crunch Element is a nice indie game with lots of cool explosions, that is now running a Kickstarter campaign (support it!)
- Pavlov Shack, a lightweight version of Pavlov, is now available on Oculus Quest via SideQuest;
- Masterpiece Studio lets you model and animate 3D models all in VR
More info (Crunch Element)
More info (Pavlov Shack)
More info (Masterpiece Studio)
News from partners (and friends)
On Wednesday, January 15 at 8am PT, XR Intelligence is running a webinar for businesses interested in discovering how to integrate VR. The themes touched by them will be:
- Prove the benefit: How XR champions, innovation departments, business heads and HR struggle get budget sign off and the process you need to take
- Identify the types of ROI that can be shared within your businesses to help your business case
- Measure and prioritise different ROI metrics including operational costs, learning retention, customer sales and satisfaction, accuracy and speed of tasks and risk
- How to turn XR into a ‘nice to have’ into ‘need to have’ for management
- Get insight on where the biggest hurdles to wider deployment come and how best to navigate them
If you’re interested in it, register by clicking the link below!
I’ve still some keys for the artistic meditation sandbox Art Pulse, available for PSVR. If you have a Playstation VR and want to play it for free, just shoot me an e-mail and I’ll give you a free key for this experience!
SIDI (Swiss Institute for Disruptive Innovation) is running a Workshop about VR all in VR on February 22–23rd that will touch all the main themes regarding the present and the future of immersive realities, also including topics like Brain Computer Interfaces, and AI.
The event will be all in Italian and will be a paid one. If you’re interested in it, you can learn more by clickng this link.
Some XR fun
All this quarreling on VR headsets’ framerate is all a lie!
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