The XR Week Peek (2020.02.03): VR adoption is rising, Lynx teases new MR headset and much more!
First of all, let me wish a nice rest to anyone who has participated in the Global Game Jam, especially the ones that have proposed some AR/VR games!
This week in XR hasn’t been that interesting, we had mostly some minor news… but as always, this hasn’t stopped me from finding some notable things to know…
Top news of the week
Statistics show that VR is continuously growing
This week we had the release of four interesting statistics about the status of VR and they’re pretty encouraging.
The first one is the usual SteamVR hardware survey. Apart from highlighting that the Rift S is expanding its size and that the Valve Index is now selling well, the survey shows that VR users on Steam are continuously growing. According to Road To VR, we have now 1.3M monthly connected headsets only on Steam (so this doesn’t consider Oculus Store users and PSVR users), and the year-over-year growth is +75%. The growth of VR headsets still fits an exponential curve and this is a piece of FANTASTIC news.
Talking about fantastic news, Marky Z, the CEO of Facebook has just shared some interesting info. He said that only on Christmas day, people spent $5M on the Oculus Store, and we can expect that most of this money was spent on Quest. Zuckerberg has clarified that it was an outlier day (and in fact, the week of Christmas always represents a big spike for VR usage), but it is anyway very good news. For Facebook, Quest is being a very good source of money: the company has just stated that “Other revenue [the ones apart from advertisement] was $346 million, up 26%. Year-over-year growth was driven by sales of Oculus Quest”. So, finally, Oculus Quest sales start to be important for the company… even if ads still represent 98% of total Facebook’s turnaround. (Just a little parenthesis to say that Zuck has also said that Facebook is working hard on AR hardware and operating system)
ARtillery Intelligence, an analytics company, still provides good news, but it wants to stop our enthusiasm. It projects continuous growth for VR, with Enterprise VR revenues to reach $4.26B by 2023. But it avoids giving enthusiastic projections about the future. The company still forecasts growth, but more a linear one than an exponential one for the next 3 years. The good news is that there is still a consistent growth.
And then, of course, there is SuperData, that someone has already renamed “SuperGuess”, that has released its estimates of VR sales for Q4 2019. According to this report, the most selling headset has still been PSVR, but only because Oculus Quest has always had limited supply.
Having sold 317K units in Q4, the Quest has so sold around 710K units in 2019. Not bad as a result (more than Go+Rift combined!), but less than the million units most of us expected. Most probably it has been because of the limited availability. It is anyway a huge result that finally, a headset is really challenging the successful PSVR.
The true surprise has been the Valve Index, which thanks to Half-Life: Alyx, has sold 103K units, 50% more of the sales of the cheaper Rift S in the same period. It will be interesting to see how the different headsets will sell after the release of the flagship game by Valve.
A final stats: AR/MR headset hardware and consumer software are set to earn a combined $6.7B by 2023, 45% of all XR revenue.
Anyway, many people have called bullshit on this data, and among these people, there is sir Palmer Luckey. The fact that the Rift S has sold less than the Index seems absurd, since it costs less, it has grown more than Index on the Steam data, and it has never gone out of stock. So, take SuperData’s data with a grain of salt.
More info (Steam VR’s data analysis by Road To VR)
More info (Zuckerberg’s report on Facebook earnings)
More info (Highlight on $5M sales on Christmas day)
More info (Highlight on Facebook’s other revenues’ growth)
More info (ARtillery Intelligence’s report)
More info (SuperData’s report)
More info (Palmer Luckey’s answer to SuperData’s report)
Other relevant news
Lynx will unveil today its mixed reality headset
Last week, out of nowhere, the startup Lynx came out from stealth, announcing that today (February, 3rd), it will reveal its innovative standalone mixed reality headset. With mixed reality, it means that it should be able to do both AR and VR.
We know mostly nothing about it, and we just have the image of its front view (semi-obscured) and the info that it will be revealed in San Francisco at Photonics West event. The company teases great stuff: “Get ready for innovations in optics, hardware and ergonomics that will open amazing opportunities in all industries”.
Honestly, I expect a decent AR+VR headset, that can be useful for enterprise. Without compelling content, that is the true value of the Oculus Quest, I doubt that it can become disruptive among consumers. I also doubt that a startup can carry many innovations, given the high costs of R&D in immersive technologies, but I would be happy to be surprised!
More info (Reveal Tweet)
More info (Official website)
Amazon promises “single-digit latency” XR streaming
Amazon has announced some weeks ago “Wavelength”, a new offering of its AWS services, that should provide “single-digit latency” over 5G networks. The company highlights how this can be very useful for XR streaming, game streaming, IoT and more. These super-low latencies should be possible thanks to many partnerships with phone carriers like Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, etc… that should help in realizing this ambitious service. To have such a low latency, the company needs very fast 5G networks and edge servers very close to the client.
There are many people in the VR communities that doubt that this can actually be possible, especially because Amazon claims that this should be available already in 2020. That would require widespread 5G networks, and a vast network of edge servers deployed everywhere. I think that Amazon in 2020 will just provide some pilot centers (maybe close to some partner companies) and then will actually perform the rollout in the next years. Anyway, this makes us dream about a future when we’ll be able to actually stream fast XR content, and where XR glasses may become slim by offloading computations to the edge servers via 5G. Maybe thanks to Wavelength, companies will already be able to experiment on these concepts this year.
CD Project RED confirms that VR won’t come to Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk2077 is the most hyped game of 2020 (sorry, Half-Life: Alyx) and there is a common refrain on the fact that it should implement VR. The company has already claimed various times that there won’t be VR in this title, but I think we have now a definitive confirmation.
Interviewed by OnMSFT, CD PROJEKT Red’s John Mamais has answered many questions about the upcoming game, and of course, he has talked also about VR. He said that they thought about using VR, but they won’t implement it. The reason is easily understandable by this quote “Some things would work in VR but, I think, it’s not really viable yet. You’re not making a lot of money in VR yet. It’s very experimental and niche, yeah. I would like to. I like VR but we’re not doing anything with it yet.”
So, probably we’ll see something in the future, since they like this technology, but not now, because VR is still “very experimental and niche” and “you’re not making a lot of money in VR yet”. This gives you the dimension of what AAA studios think about immersive realities… and having talked with Ubisoft, some months ago, I can confirm that this is exactly their vision. There is not enough market yet.
News worth a mention
Unity now supports Vulkan for Oculus Quest
Unity has finally implemented Vulkan support for the Oculus Quest, in Unity 2019.3. Vulkan is the graphics API that is substituting OpenGL, and it gives more low-level features to those who implement it, making possible to have more optimizations. Long story short, this means that using Vulkan instead of OpenGL, you may even have a +20% performances boost on your Unity apps for Quest. Not that bad, given the limitations of the platform!
Samsung Odyssey+ is now at $230
Samsung has just discounted its best PC VR headset, the Odyssey+, at the incredibly low price of $230. If you’re interested, get it now.
I wonder if this discount is due to the fact that it is going to launch soon its new device…
Devs are doing very interesting things with hands tracking for Quest
You know that Oculus has released hands tracking for Quest and now developers are playing with it. Every week we see new original uses of it, and I selected three of them to let you take inspiration:
- Tea for God, that let you use the gun gesture on your hands to shoot at things;
- Waltz of the Wizard that lets you cast magic spells just with gestures;
- A redditor that has made a fun skateboarding game that lets you use two fingers to move your skate
More info (Tea For Gods)
More info (Waltz of the Wizard)
More info (Skateboarding game)
Gleechi lets you grasp objects in VR
Startup Gleechi is working on a software solution that lets you grasp objects in a realistic way in VR. That is, whatever your object you pick in your game, you see the virtual hand positioning in a realistic way to grab it. It may be a good tool for XR developers.
Atari wants to open gaming hotels
Atari, the company that launched arcades in the US, is now working to offer some special hotels all oriented on gaming. These Hotels should feature the Atari brand, and include all the latest about gaming, and this also means incredible AR/VR attractions. What it does mean, honestly I don’t know, but I’m curious to discover it.
Vuforia won’t drop Unity support
After my latest newsletter, I’ve been contacted by many people from Vuforia/PTC, that clarified the situation about Unity support of AR solution Vuforia. So, let me clarify it once for all: from Unity 2019.3, Vuforia won’t be integrated in Unity anymore, but the company will still produce a Unity plugin for its AR solution, so you will still be able to create AR solutions with it in Unity.
The first 5G AR dress is a “meh”
Yesterday, at BAFTA, there has been showcased the first “5G AR dress”. For many days there have been articles on this topic, and I was very curious to discover what it did mean. Yesterday evening, I finally watched the video about it on Facebook, and I discovered that it was just a marketing stunt for a phone carrier. The results are mediocre, in my opinion, and I was “meh” all the time while watching it. I’ve seen better filters on Instagram.
More info (One of the announcement articles)
More info (Video of the “performance”)
Sundance Festival has showcased some interesting XR solutions
As every year, at Sundance Festival there have been showcased some amazing XR installations. I’ll leave here below some links about the most interesting of them, where you can find XR experiences that you can enjoy underwater tot simulate a zero-gravity setting; experiences with live performances of actors; volumetric performances; etc…
If you like creativity and VR, please check them out.
More info (Spaced Out)
More info (Solastagia)
More info (Scarecrow)
More info (Communal VR)
More info (Breath)
Some info on content
Some info on content from this week:
- A rumor talks about Resident Evil 8 being in the works. It should be a first-person game, so we all hope that it will get VR support (maybe for PSVR 2?)
- Secret Oops is a nice AR game for Apple Arcade (and it is made by Mixed Bag, a studio from my city!)
- Dashii VR looks like a very intriguing indie game for Quest, mixing speed, hands gesture and a fast rhythm. I can’t wait for it to be released!
More info (Resident Evil 8)
More info (Secret Oops)
More info (Dashii VR)
News from partners (and friends)
My friends at XR Intelligence are running a new webinar this week! This is how they describe it:
Want to learn how to grow XR adoption across your business? Better Adoption = Better ROI. Hear how KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Thomson Reuters, Novartis and HTC Vive are making progress in this area. Don’t forget, we’ll send everyone that signs up the recordings!
I’m very happy to see that my friend Kris Koomen will be there… it seems it will be an interesting talk!
Some XR fun
The future of AR gaming
If she dies, she dies
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