The XR Week Peek (2020.04.13): iPhone 12 adds depth camera, StarVR One is back to the market and much more!
Happy Easter everyone, and if you don’t celebrate Easter, Happy Sunday! I really wish you and all your families a lot of peace and joy. These are harsh times, but we must stay united and resist. We can do it 🙂
As it is tradition, I prepared a terribly photoshopped image to wish you Happy Holidays! You can find it here: https://imgur.com/gallery/6YFwHlw And since it is tradition, I ate a lot of sweeties to celebrate Easter. I will come out fatter from this quarantine 😀
Top news of the week
New iPhone 12 Pro may have a LiDAR back camera
A new leak coming from Twitter user choco_bit and published by online magazine 9to5Mac seems to point to the fact that the upcoming iPhone 12 Pro phone may feature a rear depth camera.
In the picture, that seems leaked from a manual on the device, it is possible to see 4 back cameras: the Wide angle, Ultra Wide angle, and Telephoto lenses, and a LiDAR Scanner. To be exact, as clarified by VR expert Rafael Brown, this wouldn’t be a classical LiDAR scanner, those are big and are suited for big open environments, but a Flash LiDAR depth camera, very compact, and useful for indoor contexts.
Why is this a big deal? Well, if the rumor becomes reality, this would mean that all next Apple devices will have both front and back depth cameras, for high-precision Augmented Reality and 3D reconstruction. On one side, this is great for all iPhone users, because this means that they will be able to scan in 3D all objects that they will want. On the other side, this is massive for Apple, that mixing the data of Apple Maps together with all these point clouds detected by the rear cameras when in use, will be able to create an AR Cloud ecosystem probably even before Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.
Google, with its fragmented Android ecosystem, will have to chase Apple again, as it has happened with ARCore that has been created as an answer to ARKit, but that is still behind its competitor and is not even available on all Android phones. This is very ironic, considering that Google was very ahead of its time with Tango, that had years ago a technology similar to the one proposed today by Apple, but never made the project compelling to anyone.
Well played Apple. Let’s see if Facebook will be a worthier opponent than Google.
More info (iPhone 12 Pro equipping a rear LiDAR camera)
More info (What is Flash LiDAR)
Other relevant news
Acer announces that StarVR One will be on sale soon
The biggest surprise of the week has been the return from the world of the undead of the StarVR One. Acer, after having discontinued the device two years ago, has announced that it will be effectively put on sale, at first in Asia, and then in the rest of the world.
If you have entered the VR world just in the latest months, probably you don’t even know what I’m talking about. Well, long story short, the StarVR One was announced some years ago as the enterprise headset to rule them all by a consortium made by Acer and software developer Starbreeze. The headset had astonishing specifications, like:
- Display resolution: 1,830 × 1,464 per lens resolution, total 16 million sub-pixels
- Display type: AMOLED
- Refresh rate: 90Hz
- Field of view: 210-degree horizontal FOV, 130-degree vertical FOV
- Eye-tracking: Fully integrated Tobii eye-tracking, including Dynamic Foveated Rendering
In 2018, this was mindblowing. And all the reviewers agreed that it was a very polished device, with almost no lens distortion, good comfort, and a great display. The price tag of $3200 seemed reasonable for businesses. But at first, Starbreeze abandoned the consortium, leaving everything to Acer, and then, after having announced the opening of the developers’ program, Acer halted the registration without adding any reason, and no one ever heard about this headset anymore. Until now.
The reason for the program halting are still unknown. Someone says that the headset was too powerful for the time (it requires two DisplayPort ports to work!), others say that Starbreeze has left Acer without all the software it had developed for the headset, that so was just a brick.
The problem of selling this headset now is that, if it has not been changed in these months, it is now old. Now there are consumer headsets (e.g. Vive Cosmos or Valve Index) that have a resolution comparable to the one of the StarVR One, and even better Refresh Rates. Pimax has superior features and costs much less. The price tag of $3200 would be a nonsense now. Furthermore, I got the rumor that Acer may have problems with its runtime, and so the visuals are not as good as before. As the icing to the cake, I contacted the official resellers indicated in the website, and no one was able to give me a price or release date, with one clearly telling me it is not selling it yet.
So, the situation is very confused and I hope Acer will clarify everything soon. But now it is sure that the StarVR One is back.
More info (Acer re-launches the StarVR One)
More info (StarVR One detailed specifications)
More info (Possibility of a launch for the end of the month)
PSVR 2 may have inside-out tracking
This week Sony has showcased the new DualShock controller for the PS5, dubbed DualSens. It is white, it is elegant, and it features a blue light that goes from the back of the device to its top face. And exactly this feature is what is making David Heaney of Upload VR suppose that PSVR 2 will have inside-out tracking. Let me explain why.
PS5 will be accompanied by a new PSVR headset, that according to almost everyone will be launched next year, many months after the launch of the PS5. PSVR2 will surely have its dedicated controllers, but since Sony is trying to guarantee retro-compatibility of games (especially gems like AstroBot), this headset should also be able to work with the DualSens controller.
Sony’s gamepads have a colored light that is used for their positional tracking: the DualShock, for instance, has a big blue light on its back, so the PS Camera can track it, and you can use the position of your gamepad in VR games. Surprisingly, the new DualSens has still a light on its rear part, but this light also continues and expands till the top of the controller, that is on the big part where there are the buttons and the thumbsticks. Now, since the PS Camera can never see that part of the device, the light should be there for another kind of camera, and a reasonable assumption is the front cameras of an inside-out tracked PSVR2. The other explanation is that it is there just for decoration, of course.
All of this is a big speculation, absolutely not confirmed, but very reasonable.
More info (Speculation on PSVR2 inside-out tracking)
More info (Another interview teasing PSVR2 in 2021)
Microsoft releases Azure Remote Rendering
This is one important piece of news of the week that has been almost ignored by many XR magazines: Microsoft has just released Azure Remote Rendering for Microsoft HoloLens.
If you’re wondering what the heck am I talking about, it is quite easy to be explained. We all know that HoloLens 2 is a very powerful tool for remote assistance and collaboration, and can, for instance, be used to watch a 3D model of an industrial machine by many people together that have to discuss about it. But we all also know that the processing power of the HL2 is mediocre, and so it can’t render complex machineries in 3D with high-quality graphics.
Azure Remote Rendering comes to the rescue: it renders on the cloud the 3D models needed by HoloLens, and streams them to your device. It is maybe the first commercial case of XR Cloud Rendering, and who has tried it says that it works quite well and it is quite smooth.
Currently, it works only with HoloLens… but I wonder if Microsoft will expand it also to VR headsets in the future…
More info (Azure Remote Rendering)
More info (Video of Azure Remote Rendering in action)
Blender 2.83 supports VR
3D artists rejoice! The powerful opensource 3D modeling software Blender has added preliminary VR support for version 2.83. Thanks to this official support, artists are able to enter into their creations in Virtual Reality by just pressing a single button. This is massive because it lets them see better their creations by navigating inside them, having a better sense of the scale of objects and how things appear in general by just using the natural human sense of observation in 3D. This is especially useful for those people already working in the VR field, that can so preview how their creations will appear inside a VR experience already within Blender.
This integration is still very rough, and so:
- It works only with Oculus and WMR headsets (because it requires an OpenXR-compatible runtime);
- It just lets you see your model, not also modify it.
But the roadmap is set, and so in the next months all these problems will get solved, and Blender will become a powerful 3D modeling application in virtual reality.
More info (Blender now supports Virtual Reality)
More info (How to activate VR support in Blender)
Some news on Half-Life: Alyx
The big hype for Half-Life: Alyx (read my review here) is over, but every week there are still plenty of interesting pieces of news about this game. This week I have read that:
- The game has already more than 20,000 reviews on Steam, with 98% positive rating. Apart from the fact that I wonder who are the 2% of people giving it a negative mark, this is quite a record for VR. Someone estimates from these numbers that the sales of the game are around 600,000 units until now;
- Valve still doesn’t give us a release date for the official Source 2 tools and Hammer tools to build mods and levels of the game. These are something that the whole community is waiting for, and that can give the game new life for months;
- Valve has released a minor update for the game, that lets you carry objects inside crates;
- In an interview, an engineer working on the game has revealed that half-through the development, the core team of the game was made by 80 people;
- Valve has released a deep-dive video on its locomotion mechanics.
More info (20,000 reviews for Half-Life: Alyx)
More info (HLA Source 2 tools and Hammer tools)
More info (HLA update)
More info (New interview to Valve regarding Alyx)
More info (Deep dive on locomotion in Alyx)
News worth a mention
Is the Index sold at loss?
You may remember Twitter user GamerToTheEnd from his complete disassembling of the Valve Index published some months ago. Speaking with him, I’ve discovered that if we sum the cost of all its high-quality components, even at a big production scale, the overall cost is more than the one of the headset.
I’ve so asked other sources about this, and they confirmed to me that the Index is most probably sold at cost, without margin or with a very very thin one. This surprises me a lot since I’ve always thought that given the high price of it, it was profitable. This also basically means that the deal of giving Half-Life: Alyx for free with every Index sold, is a double-loss strategy for Valve.
It seems that the two most successful VR hardware companies of the moment, Oculus and Valve, are both selling at loss, to gain dominance of the sector and impose their platforms in the long run. And this is possible because they both have big cash cows: Oculus has Facebook’s advertisement, and Valve has the Steam game store.
Huawei releases AR maps in China
If Google and Apple are working on AR maps here in the west, the giant Huawei is doing in the same in China. With the new P40 phone, the Chinese company has released a version of Maps that is fully powered by Augmented Reality, showing you the directions on where to go, and also displaying information of the places around you, all on your phone screen in AR. This functionality may also use the “Cyberverse” Cloud AR infrastructure that Huawei is building.
Knowing how the Chinese market works, there are many caveats. First of all the service is available only in some selected zones in China, and I imagine that at the beginning it will be very rough. But it’s also true that Chinese companies move very fast…
Google releases Chrome 81
Chrome 81 was delayed due to the problems caused by coronavirus, but now it has finallybeen released. It contains the first implementation of WebAR for Chrome, with also hit-testing for interactions with AR objects.
Oculus Quest adds OpenXR, but rolls back new UI
It has been quite an interesting week for Oculus Quest.
On one side, the good news is that the standalone headset has got a prototypical implementation of OpenXR, the standard that should guarantee the compatibility of all XR runtimes and accessories. Kudos to Oculus to be in front of many other players on this side.
On the other side, the bad news is that the new UI released with the v15 runtime (that I showcased you in this post) has been automatically rolled back. I had switched to the new UI, and some days ago, turning on the headset, I discovered that it automatically returned to the previous one. First of all, this is a bummer, because I liked it. And then, I kinda hate that I have absolutely no control over my device, and someone else has the power of canceling things without my approval. The reason for this rollback are unknown, but I guess that Oculus has found some issues within it, and so canceled the update to many users.
If you are among the lucky people still having the new UI, you can implement support for the system menu appearing on top of your app using a handy guide provided by Upload VR.
More info (Oculus Quest supporting OpenXR)
More info (Oculus Quest rolling back for many users)
More info (How to update your Quest app for the new system UI)
Probably we have 1.7M people having a PC VR headset
Road To VR has made its usual interesting analysis on the Steam Hardware Survey. From it, we can see that VR adoption still follows an exponential curve and that probably the number of PC VR people in the world is 1.7 million.
A relaxing video in VR
Professor Giuseppe Riva, a luminary when it comes to psychology treatments in VR, and BecomeHub, have released a carefully-studied free relaxing 360 video on Youtube. This can be useful to handle issues of anxiety, autism, or other mental problems. They’re putting it free to help people having a hard time locked at home for the coronavirus.
More info (Youtube video — English version)
More info (Youtube video — Italian version)
Do you want to date a woman in VR?
Casie Lane is a single woman that would like to find the love of her life, but she must stay locked at home because of the coronavirus. So she has thought it could be a nice idea to start dating people in virtual reality, to still be able to have fun with dates while staying comfortably at her home.
She has 8 weeks to find the love of her life, and if you are a single man, I think it could be a fun thing to do. You can book a 2-hours date with her directly on her website.
Download Transpose for free!
The VR game Transpose is completely free until today. If you grab it on Steam, it will be yours forever! Have fun with it 🙂
Some interesting VR experiments
This week I have seen three amazing experiments with VR and hands tracking:
- A guy has transformed his fingers in a chorus singing;
- Another one has used fluid simulation to let you interact with big bubbles in VR. It looks very satisfying, and there is also a playable demo;
- The very famous PushMatrix has made a video on his Quest where he… grates his own hand :O
More info (Fingers concerto)
More info (Interaction with bubbles)
More info (Fingers grating)
Some info on content
What about VR games?
- Beat Saber has released fitness-focused track FitBeat;
- No Man’s Sky has added mechs in its latest update!
- Upload has reviewed Form on PSVR;
- Echo Arena is going through different beta stages before its release on Oculus Quest. I guess this will require months;
- Tvori Updates its Animation Tools With Subscription Pricing And Free Version;
- Upload has reviewed upcoming game Ironlights, underlining its pros and its cons;
- Supernatural is a new fitness app for Oculus Quest that mixes Beat Saber and OhShape. What is peculiar to this application is that it works on a subscription model: $20/month to have always new workouts available. Will this work out with Oculus users? We’ll discover it in the upcoming months…
More info (Beat Saber’s FitBeat)
More info (Mechs in No Man’s Sky)
More info (Form review)
More info (Echo Arena entering beta for Oculus Quest)
More info (Tvori tools)
More info (Ironlights review)
More info (SuperNatural on Quest)
News from partners (and friends)
Augmented Reality company Scapic is offering its solutions to scan objects in 3D and to create augmented reality applications completely for free in this pandemics period. I think it is a very kind initiative, and I invite you to check it out.
A consortium of many companies has created a white paper on the various XR collaboration and meeting tools, with some pieces of advice on how to organize virtual events. You can download it for free, provided that you leave your e-mail.
RagTime is a tool for Oculus Quest that lets you experiment with virtual instruments, and compose music from within virtual reality. It is completely free, and developers are looking for feedback from early users.
On April, 9th, Eric Wu has launched Hooplord on Steam. Hooplord “combines boss battles and basketball into a hybrid VR experience that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen or played before”. It seems weird in a cool way, so check it out on Steam!
Some XR fun
VR is addictive, but in a good way
How to take a plane while in quarantine
Non-VR gamers vs VR gamers
We are living in 2020, but this girl is playing Beat Saber like in 2030
Someone was wearing nreal glasses before it was cool
When VR scares also the people around you
Gift me an Easter surprise!
It is Easter, and here in Italy we gift each other chocolate eggs with inside a little surprise like a toy, a little jewel, a keychain, or something like that. I hope that opening my e-mail, I will also discover that someone of you has become a new Patreon of mine, to support my hard work in informing the VR community! (I’m working even on Easter :O)
This is the family of my kind supporters, that make me proud of what I do:
- DeoVR
- Michael Bruce
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Paolo Leoncini
- John Fredericks
- Immersive.international
- Jennifer Granger
- Jason Moore
- Steve Biggs
- Niels Bogerd
- Kai Curtis
- Francesco Strada
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
- Liam James O’Malley
- Matias Nassi
Please join them in supporting my work by clicking the link below!
(Header image by Phone Arena)
Disclaimer: this blog contains advertisement and affiliate links to sustain itself. If you click on an affiliate link, I'll be very happy because I'll earn a small commission on your purchase. You can find my boring full disclosure here.
