The XR Week Peek (2020.03.09): New Half-Life: Alyx videos and details, coronavirus makes events go virtual and much more!
Yesterday it was International Women’s Day. So I want to thank all the wonderful women that are part of our AR and VR community for what they do every day and I also wish them the best for their future. You’re amazing.
As for me, I’ve been flooded by worldwide requests asking how I am here in Italy. Thanks for your love everyone, it’s so heart-warming to have so many friends in the community supporting me!
To answer your requests once for all: well, my cold is getting better, but it’s still a big nuisance since it makes me feel weak. The coronavirus outbreak is getting worse here in Northern Italy. My city, Turin, is not inside the “red areas” (the ones with most infected people), but it is quite near to other cities that have been declared “red”, so we’re not that happy. Road To VR’s Scott Hayden is inside one of the red provinces… but I’ve talked to him and he’s well, alive and kicking and writing great articles. HitMotion’s game designer Massimiliano Ariani is in Tuscany and he’s well as well.
People, in general, are a bit worried about the situation and a bit confused about what to do: for instance, we have no clear instructions about wearing masks or not. We have more difficulties in going to Milan, that is the economical heart of Italy, and now a red zone with all its region. The govt has closed schools, universities, cinemas all over the country and it is advising everyone to stay at home and not to gather with other people. Shops are open but you have to keep 1m distance from other people. I hate working from home, but it’s what I’m doing 90% of the time now, going to the office only when strictly necessary, because everyone has to do his/her part not to spread the disease. The situation is a bit awkward but we’re not collapsing at the moment. Let’s see what will happen in the next weeks. We’ll stay strong, and united we will win as China has just done 🙂
Top news of the week
Valve has shared more details and gameplay videos about Alyx
2 Weeks left to the great day of Half-Life: Alyx. Valve is rising the hype releasing constantly new material about the game, making us slowly discover how the game is.
This week, we had tons of materials and news coming:
- First of all, Valve has released 3 new gameplay trailers, plus one long 9-minutes gameplay video made in partnership with the popular magazine IGN. If you haven’t watched them… well, you should. The game appears fantastic: the graphics are high-level, the interactions are carefully studied to be natural (e.g. the inventory on the wrist is so cool), the world reacts with physics more or less like in the real world (so you can use the door of a car to protect yourself from the bullets) and the music and the environments together are able to convey the typical dark Half-Life vibes. It is official: this is going to be an awesome game;
- From the videos and the interviews that Valve has released with TESTED and IGN, you can understand more in-depth what has happened in the backstage of the game development. And you can get all the attention to details they had in every aspect of the game: for instance, the teleporting is not a classical teleporting, but it simulates your movement from the starting point to the end point and then makes it very fast. What changes is that this way you can’t cheat the game with teleporting, because enemies can see you even if you teleport from two different points where you are under cover. Also if you teleport in a lower location, you will hear the sound of the jump. This is great because it means that the game is more balanced and offers similar difficulties independently of your locomotion mechanic;
- The game will also offer different accessibility options, and for instance, it will be possible to play with it while being seated and employing just one hand. This is great to make the maximum number of people possible play with it;
- On Wednesday, Valve has released two environments of the game that you can explore from SteamVR Home. They are wonderful and are able to convey all the Half-Life vibes and the attention to the design that the company is having. It is also cool that there are some easter eggs, like a headcrab in the freezer with a “Do not eat” writing on it.
The 23rd is going to be a great day. I’m sure of it. And if you want to play Alyx with a Valve Index, there is still hope. Today, Monday 9th, if you connect at 5pm UTC, Valve will put on sale on Steam the last batch of headsets it has before the launch of the game. They are going to go sold-out in minutes, so be prepared.
More info (New gameplay trailers)
More info (What we learned from the new trailers)
More info (Valve saying this won’t be the last Half-Life game)
More info (Valve interviewed by TESTED)
More info (IGN gameplay commented by Valve)
More info (Half-Life: Alyx accessibility options)
More info (Half-Life: Alyx’s special teleporting mechanics)
More info (Valve Index back on Sale)
More info (Half-Life: Alyx’s environment on SteamVR Home)
Other relevant news
The coronavirus is causing the cancelation of worldwide events…
This week, the damn coronavirus has caused the cancelation of three super-important events: GTC (that will be substituted by the streaming of the sessions), SXSW and Google I/O. And I think it’s not over… we are just at the beginning of the spreading of this disease in the West, so I’m sure more conferences will be canceled or postponed in the upcoming weeks. That’s a disaster.
And now also companies are affected directly: after a worker has been found positive to the virus in the Seattle venue, now a group of Facebook employees has been left working from home. Now the tech giant is exploring its motto “Defy distance” with its own employees.
More info (GTC canceled)
More info (SXSW canceled)
More info (Google I/O canceled)
More info (Facebook & working from home)
…and fostering the creation of Virtual ones
Many companies that have seen their events canceled because of the virus are now thinking about doing virtual ones.
The most reactive major XR company has been HTC that has decided that its annual VEC event, that was usually held in Shenzhen, China, will be held in the ENGAGE virtual platform. The event will be live on March, 19th at 9.30am Beijing Time. There will be bilingual audio tracks (Chinese/English) and the event will be able to accommodate even a thousand people, even if every single ENGAGE room can host only 50 people max. This is possible thanks to special cloned rooms where every room will be able to see the same speaker talking. It seems a great initiative by HTC, and I can’t wait to participate in it 🙂 If you are interested in attending it, you can register to the event starting from tomorrow March, 10th.
IEEE has also been very smart and will host its VR Conference in Mozilla Hubs. The event should have been hosted in Atlanta, with a little VR spinoff, but now that real event has been canceled, the whole event will be in VR.
La Biennale di Venezia, the commitee behind the Venice Film Festival, has just organized its important workshop of the Biennale College inside the VRrOOm social XR platform for which I’m a developer. It couldn’t take place in Venice due to the virus, so it was held all in VR. The participants were all very satisfied and also had fun in a way that only VR could offer them.
More info (Tweet announcing the VEC 2020)
More info (Article on Road To VR about VEC 2020)
More info (IEEE event being 100% virtual)
More info (More info on the IEEE virtual event)
More info (La Biennale’s workshop in VRrOOm platform)
More info (When it is worth making an event in VR)
Oculus rejects Crisis VRigade again, causing backlash from the community
Crisis VRigade, a low poly shooter, is one of the most downloaded apps on SideQuest. It was rejected by Oculus, but it found great success on Quest’s unofficial store. Sure because of this success, the developers applied again to publish on Quest store, but they were rejected again. And again, Oculus has given no reason for this, and has just suggested developers to join Oculus Start.
I understand the content curation on Quest, but this attitude by Oculus of not providing any reason for a rejection of an app really makes me angry. It is something that Oculus has always done (I’ve already written an editorial about it) and it is completely disrespectful for us developers, that so don’t even know what we should improve to see our game approved. And in the case of a successful game like Crisis VRigade, this behavior is even more absurd.
Triggered by Upload VR, Oculus has answered that giving a checklist is not in Oculus’s style, and they prefer having an ongoing relationship with the developer during the development of the game. That’s why they advise developers to join the Oculus Start program, that gives indie developers hardware and mentoring, supporting the developer during the whole development of the project.
I think this answer has no sense. First of all, I shouldn’t be forced to join a group to see my game published. Then, Oculus Start has some strict entry rules, and if you have already a game on whatever store or if you ever received a funding, you can’t join it. And in the end, the Start developers’ titles that have reached the Oculus Store are probably just a few. So, Start it is not a valid answer.
Anyway, Oculus has stated that they are aware of the community being not happy of their strict guidelines, and will probably announce something to solve it soon. We don’t know what it will be: probably an official Early Access program, or an official alternative to Sidequest.
More info (Crisis Vrigade rejected again)
More info (Oculus suggesting enrolling into Oculus Start)
More info (Oculus Start TOS)
More info (Oculus Start not being that helpful in publishing on the Store)
More info (Editorial on SideQuest)
More info (Oculus thinking doing its own SideQuest)
Is the Vive Pro at the end of its life?
HTC has answered to Road To VR about the critics regarding the too many headsets of its on the market. In the answer, they specify that many HTC headsets are at the end of their lives, and among these ones, in the list, it is possible to see the Vive Pro. While the Vive Pro Eye is considered an ongoing professional device, the Vive Pro is in the list of the “End of life / remaining unit sell-through” section. This is overly important because the Vive Pro is used by almost all the arcades worldwide: do they have to switch to the Index or Cosmos Elite then?
News worth a mention
There is an ongoing closed beta round of Facebook Horizon
Do you rememberFacebook Horizon, the new social VR world that Facebook is creating? Well, it should launch in “Spring 2020”, but Facebook is keeping a lot of mystery around it. I had no news until some days ago, when various Youtubers and professionals publicly or privately claimed that they have been invited to join a private beta of the virtual world. But we won’t have any info from them since they had to sign an NDA before going into it.
Anyway, a private beta now probably means a launch in 1–2 months, that is the exact period when the F8 would have taken place.
More info (Redditor publishing the invitation e-mail)
More info (Nathie publicly stating he will try Horizon)
HoloLens 2 is now being used by the Army
We all know that Microsoft has won a contract with the US Army for the deployment of special HoloLens 2 devices to the troops, but now finally we have the opportunity to see some photos of them in action. In the pictures, you can see the headsets having been modified with the addition of various things like a thermal camera on the front and an additional power bank on the back, to keep it balanced. There will be various iterations of these prototypes and this research will be very important for Microsoft also for the design of the next generation of HoloLens.
Pico Neo 2 is going on sale
Pico Neo 2 has been of the most interesting VR headsets of CES 2020, and it will probably be a fierce Quest competitor in enterprise settings. Finally, Pico has decided to release it: in China, it will start pre-sale on March 16th and will be officially shipped on March 25th.
nReal adds hands tracking to its AR glasses
nReal is adding another important feature to its intriguing AR glasses. Thanks to a partnership with Clay AIR, also happened with the help of Qualcomm, the AR glasses will feature hands tracking even if they don’t have any depth sensor. The videos on the feature are amazing, but I would like to test it to see if it is really stable and reliable. Honestly, I doubt it, since no solution on the market has these features, but I am curious to test it myself.
The Chinese company has also established a partnership with Deutsche Telekom to start selling the headsets in Europe in July.
More info (Hands tracking on nreal)
More info (nreal partnership with Deutsche Telekom)
Papa John’s reaches 25% conversion rate with AR marketing
AR Marketing scores another important result: with its recent campaign on Snapchat with an AR filter for Valentine’s Day, Papa John’s has been able to convert 25% of viewers into customers. These numbers are stellar, and the conversion rate is far bigger than whatever form of standard marketing means you can analyze.
But while AR marketing is doing so well on one side, we should also analyze it looking at the whole picture. AR marketing usually operates at a much lower scale than the traditional one: for instance, AR ad revenue reached $1.58 billion last year according to research arm ARtillery Intelligence. But that’s less than 1 percent of global ad spend. So, it is good, but still a small niche.
3dRudder becomes wireless
The 3dRudder, the device that lets you move in the virtual world by just moving a little platform with your feet, has just evolved in a Wireless Pro version. The original version of the device has become pretty successful among PSVR players, because it lets them move on a platform that doesn’t have proper joysticks, and now the French company hopes to have a similar success on Quest. According to its developers (like my friend Nico), VR can become mainstream only if it can be played while being comfortably seated on a couch (like with a PlayStation), and the 3dRudder is the ideal device to let you move in the virtual world while you are seated in the real one. The wireless version is intended to be played with standalone headsets like the Oculus Quest. Let’s see how much the Quest community will like it!
VR will change how we will watch sports
In a thorough article on Forbes, you can discover how the new Intel technology installed inside some NBA stadiums is changing how the user can watch sports matches. The viewers can see the actions in 3D, and watch every scene from the angle they prefer. This also changes how the running commentary is made: how can the journalist describe the action if he’s not sure what the viewers are looking at? The future looks very intriguing.
The VR Power is a great accessory for Quest
After a thorough test on the device, Upload VR confirms with a detailed review that VR Power is probably one of the most interesting accessories for the Oculus Quest. It is a battery pack that gives you nine hours of playtime, plus helps you in balancing the headset making it far more comfortable. A must have for all the hardcore Quest users.
Some info on content
Some interesting news on content from this week… even if nothing is interesting if compared with Half-Life: Alyx:
- Space Channel 5 on PSVR is good for fans, but according to Upload is not that great as a VR game;
- A new VR mod for Quake is out and it’s probably the best you could ever try;
- Down The Rabbit Hole seems a nice adventure set in Wonderland… but it launches so close to HLA (a suicide move);
- Bizarre Barber is a quite original game where you have to cut the hair of weird creatures while they are on the train. It is a bit rough in the UX but very interesting.
More info (Space Channel 5 VR)
More info (Quake VR mod)
More info (Down The Rabbit Hole)
More info (Bizarre Barber)
News from partners (and friends)
Our fellow VR community member Bob Fine is raising money to benefit Nashville Rescue Mission, that seeks to help the hurting of Middle Tennessee by offering food, clothing, and shelter to the homeless and recovery programs to those enslaved in life degrading problems.
It is a noble cause and if you want to support it, you can do that on Go Fund Me.
Sean Ong has started a crowdfunding campaign for his solution to create a special magnetic docking station to charge your Oculus Quest / Oculus Rift S controllers in a very smart way while you’re not using them. For $79 you can take with you the full kit, that can be useful for VR users and also for LBVR.
Support this cool project on Kickstarter, and a grab a charging dock!
Some XR fun
The case for which we can really talk about “VR glasses”
When you put too much energy in your VR gaming session
I want the confidence of this man that is using the Oculus Go
“Lil Dicky” (a nickname that says it all) explains us why he uses a VR headset every day. Wise words from a wise man.
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(Header image by HTC Vive)
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