The damn coronavirus has arrived in my city in northern Italy, but I’m still alive and kicking, reporting you the most interesting XR news of the week!
This weekend I’ve also organized together with SIDI a big VR workshop on new technologies (XR, AI, neural links, etc…). It was cool making people dream about our future in 5–10 years and I’m happy I got lots of compliments for my speech on neural interfaces. VR will be huge for events, as soon as some issues will be ironed out (e.g. comfort of headsets) and more people will have the headsets at home, I’m convinced of it! If you want my help in organizing your VR event, please reach out to me…
Waiting to meet you in VR, let’s talk about some news…
Top news of the week
HTC expands its Cosmos offering and teases the future with Proton
This has been a pretty interesting week for HTC Vive. The Taiwanese company has in fact finally unveiled the full line of Vive Cosmos, that now becomes made of four headsets:
- Standard Cosmos ($699): features 6 inside-out tracking cameras. Made for the enthusiast;
- Cosmos Play (around $500): features only 4 tracking cameras. Made for the casual gamer, that wants more resolution than the Rift S;
- Cosmos Elite (around $900): features SteamVR tracking and is compatible with all SteamVR accessories. It is for the professional and the gamer, and it is especially intriguing if mixed with wireless module and Index Controllers;
- Cosmos XR (price unknown): features two high-res RGB cameras, that let you use the Cosmos both as a VR headset and an AR one. Really my favorite.
The cool stuff of all of this is that all these Cosmos have the same base unit and just ship with a different faceplate on, and these faceplates are also on sale for $200. This means that you can buy a Cosmos Play, and then the External Tracking faceplate of the Elite, and have a SteamVR tracked Cosmos for only $600. This is the kind of customization and versatility that I love from this device.
And it is nice that HTC with this new Cosmos line is satisfying the needs of a broad share of VR people: from the casual gamer that wants something cheap to the professional.
The problem is that this may be confusing for people, especially if added to the other many HTC Vive devices on the market. There’s a lot of irony these days on the fact that now there are like 12–13 HTC headsets on sale. I agree: HTC should simplify its offerings and maybe only stay with the Cosmos and Focus lines for the future.
Besides the launch of the new Cosmos, HTC has also teased Project Proton, the design of a future headset that is very lightweight, trendy and that can be a standalone unit or a headset working by being connected to the phone. It is 6DOF and lets you enjoy both virtual reality and passthrough augmented reality. Its problem is that it doesn’t exist: it is just a prototype, for which HTC has shared the renders to have feedbacks from the community. And the feedback I have read until now is “If that exists and is affordable, it is overly cool. But for now, it is too early to judge”.
HTC is struggling with sales, especially because of the false start of the Cosmos (and the smartphone division doing pretty bad). Now with this new offering and the share of the vision with the Proton, it hopes to get back on track. Its new CEO, Ives Maitre, is confident that he will be able to steer the ship and save the company. I really hope so, we now don’t need a big crash in the XR space.
More info (New Vive Cosmos offering)
More info (HTC Project Proton)
More info (IDC analysis of Vive problems)
More info (HTC CEO talks about the company)
More info (Some irony on the too many Vive devices on the market / 1)
More info (Some irony on the too many Vive devices on the market / 2)
Other relevant news
The coronavirus keeps impacting VR
The damn Coronavirus is impacting the lives of many people, and I’m incredibly sad about what is happening especially in China, with millions of people quarantined and thousands of dead. Stay strong, China.
Among its side-effects, we have also things related to Virtual Reality. This week we had two bad news related to the Covid-19:
- Valve has reassured that the Index will get back in stock before the launch of Alyx, but due to the virus, the amount of devices available will be much less than they hoped for;
- Sony and Facebook have pulled out from GDC. The reason is that they are afraid some of their employees could get the virus inside such a big manifestation. Facebook has anyway communicated that it will make anyway its announcements in those days, probably with online videos. At this point, I wonder if GDC may be canceled as the MWC.
More info (Valve Index availability)
More info (Facebook and Sony pulling out from GDC)
Developers are coming up with creative uses of Oculus Quest hands tracking
Oculus Quest hands tracking is being a success among developers. Many of them are experimenting with the new feature and some of them are coming up with pretty original solutions.
Daniel Beauchamp, that handles AR and VR at Spotify (yes, they have a team about that) is sharing online the videos of his experiments with hands tracking and they are very intriguing because he’s taking a completely original approach. Do you want to know his experiment that I love the most? One in which you take one hand of yours, you throw it to the other side of the room, and then remotely move your hand to perform some tasks. It’s crazy and cool.
Another developer, instead, has added physics interaction to hands tracking, and so hands can realistically press keys on a keyboard or press buttons. It is amazing to be seen.
Since hands-tracking is being so successful, Oculus has made two things to help developers. First of all, it has made possible for developers to quickly test hands-tracked applications with the Quest connected to the PC via Oculus Link. Then, it has created an amazing guide for developers on how to create a good UX using hands tracking. Do yourself a favor and invest 30 minutes of your life to read it all. It is very interesting.
More info (Daniel Beauchamp’s experiments)
More info (Hands tracking + physics)
More info (Quest’s hands tracking inside Unity)
More info (Oculus’s hands tracking UX guidelines)
More info (All apps currently employing Quest’s hands tracking)
Sansar is on sale
Sansar is not dead, but it is an un-dead, a zombie, in the social VR ecosystem. Linden Labs had great plans for what could have been the successor of Second Life, but notwithstanding the big amount of money spent, the platform never took off. For this reason, the team handling it has been progressively shrinking down and now the company has put Sansar on sale. LL is looking for companies buying it, or companies that want to develop it in partnership with it.
The platform in the meantime continues being up, and there are no signs of it shutting down. But I wonder what happens if Linden doesn’t find an acquirer soon…
JDI starts mass production of its 1058PPI microdisplays
Japanese manufacturer JDI has announced that it has started the mass production of its high-resolution microdisplays. These devices are very little (just 2.1-inches) and feature an amazing 1,058 ppi pixel density for a 1,600 × 1,600 resolution in its square format.
They represent the displays that will enable the next generation of standalone headsets: being so little and with such a high pixel density, these screens will make upcoming headsets lighter, smaller and with less SDE. This comes at the cost of having to produce more complicated lenses (e.g. pancake ones, like in the case of Pico headsets) to be able to zoom such a small display into an acceptable field of view.
The already-announced new headsets by Pico and Lynx will feature these displays and that’s how they can be smaller than their predecessors. This is a very welcome piece of news, that guarantees us that we’ll have lighter headsets in the short-term future.
More info (News on Road To VR)
More info (News on Upload VR)
Ubisoft is working on an AAA VR game
I think that after all the cues of the past months, there were few doubts that Ubisoft was working on a VR game. But after having looked at its job offerings, we can now say that the news is sure.
The French company is in a VR-hiring spree for an “unannounced AAA VR project” on “one of Ubisoft’s greatest IPs which will be developed across multiple studios”. We don’t know what the game will be about, probably Splinter’s Cell or Assassin’s Creed. Some times ago we heard about a possible partnership with Oculus, so probably this could be an Oculus exclusive game, maybe to be revealed this year at F8 or OC7.
We don’t know, but reading about a “AAA VR game” makes me happy. And if it carries with it a popular IP, it will help for sure the whole XR ecosystem in growing.
News worth a mention
Ghost Giant has come to Quest
PSVR game Ghost Giant has come to Oculus Quest on February, 20th. In this acclaimed title you can discover the world of Louis, and follow his story. He lives in a little diorama world, that is a pleasure to explore, and using the fact that you’re big and smart, you can use your strength and your cleverness to solve the problems of its inhabitants.
It is a lovely game, and according to Upload VR, it is a 5/5 title, and so probably the most intersting title for the super-intersting Quest headset in this moment.
StageCraft is a new technology for shooting films
I’ve already talked about StageCraft some months ago, but now it seems that this technology is becoming more popular, so it’s time to mention it again. StageCraft is a big LED screen, powered by Unreal Engine, that is used to replace the traditional green screens when shooting movies.
Now when you want to shoot a part of the movie set, for instance, on an alien planet, you have to use a big green background, that in post-production gets substituted by the alien landscape. With StageCraft, the big LED wall already shows you the alien background, as if it was real, behind the actors. This has two big advantages:
- It is less alienating for the actors, that so see the environment and don’t just see all green around them;
- It is better for the director, because this way he can preview live the result of the shot and so can be faster in finding the best framing.
StageCraft has been just used by ILMxLAB on the set of the Mandalorian series.
Occipital wants to make you scan your room with your phone
Do you remember Occipital, the creators of the Structure sensor? Well, the company is now right on track with a new product, called Canvas. Canvas is not another hardware sensor, but a software solution that lets you scan completely your surroundings by just using your phone and then reconstruct the associated 3D model. It may have great applications in architecture and real estate, for instance, and a demo will be available soon at its website. I’ve already applied, of course.
Oculus Mirror is now easier to be used
If you’re a developer, a Youtuber or a blogger, for sure you know Oculus Mirror, the command-line tool used to record the footage of Oculus Games. The good news is that Oculus has just updated the tool, that now features a simple GUI, freeing you to mess with command-line parameters. That’s very interesting.
Join the Pistol Whip tournament!
Cloudhead Games and Springboard VR are hosting a Pistol Whip tournament open to more than 500 arcade locations as well as at-home players. It will be held next month and the winners have the opportunity to win some nice cash, Oculus hardware and a free trip to Salt Lake City to join the finals. What are you waiting for?
Boneworks comes to Rift (and later on, to Quest)
Stress Level Zero has just updated its popular Boneworks game, adding features that all the community was waiting for: saving checkpoints, less-nauseating climbing and more. It has also added a nice Brawling mode. The other good news is that now this game has also been launched on Oculus Store, for all the players not wanting to install Steam.
The indie studio has also specified that the Boneworks version for Quest, that will come later on this year, has been codenamed Project4, and won’t be a Quest exclusive title.
What makes a tear appear in my eyes is that they have also released a special Sandbox for Rift, that is the old Tuscany demo, where you can hang-out and shoot at butterflies and do lots of other physics-empowered stuff.
More info (Boneworks update)
More info (Boneworks for Rift)
More info (Tuscany Boneworks)
Some news on content
- No Man’s Sky update adds overly cool living ships, that are majestic in VR;
- Snapchat adds lava and water AR filters for your surroundings;
- Cook Out: A Sandwich Tale is the new game teased by Resolution Games;
- On Shape seems an amazing game for Oculus Quest, inspired by Human Tetris;
- Ironlights Beta is a promising one-on-one swording game;
- You Are A Bird video shows a good indie game available on Steam.
More info (No Man’s Sky)
More info (Snapchat AR lava)
More info (Cook Out: A Sandwich Tale)
More info (On Shape)
More info (Ironlights Beta)
More info (You Are A Bird)
News from partners (and friends)
The Virtual Reality nordic is an interesting event about Virtual Reality organized by my partners at MeKiwi (who sponsor some posts on my blog), that will take place in Oulu, Finland. There you can discover more the VR landscape of Northern Europe, make community, and get to listen to the talks of people from Nokia and Hugo Boss!
I’ve managed to obtain a big discount for all of you my readers: if you use the code GHOST20 during checkout, you get a 20% discount on the price of the ticket!
XR Europe is coming! This big event about enterprise AR and VR will be hosted in London on 28–29 April, 2020. If coronavirus doesn’t kill us all, I should also be there speaking inside a panel, so if you go there, it could also be a great opportunity to meet!
I obtained a big $100 discount for all my readers that want to register to this event. You have just to write the code 5099TGH100 during check in to obtain it!
Check it out XR Europe by clicking the link below.
Some XR fun
Some covers of VR headsets are beautiful. Some others, well, ehm…
Before today, I didn’t know that Alien Kiss VR simulator was a thing…
Don’t let the Week Peek disappear!
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