The XR Week Peek (2020.04.20): Oculus Quest goes AR, Oculus Jedi may be like Valve Knuckles and much more!
Heeeeelllo VR people! It’s time for another mega roundup of news!
But before reporting to you what has happened this week, I’m pleased to announce that I will actually be a speaker at AWE in the end! There won’t be a physical AWE, but there will be an online one, made through online webinars. The AWE Online Global will be held on May 26–29 and I will speak on May, 27th from 01:20 PM to 01:40 PM. My speech will be about AR and BCI. More info on my talk here: https://www.awexr.com/usa-2020/agenda/1369-the-potentialities-of-brain-augmented-reality
Top news of the week
Last Oculus Quest update shows hints of an Oculus MR ecosystem
Facebook is continuously updating the Oculus Quest, its most successful device, and this week it has rolled out the runtime v16. I think that this update, together with the last ones, marks the beginning of a mixed reality ecosystem that is being built by Oculus. A bit like Apple, whose upgrades to ARKit show its creation of an AR framework aimed at the future more than the present (because phone AR is good only to add features to 2D apps), Facebook updating the Quest gives us a hint of what we can expect in the upcoming years.
With v16 update, Oculus has introduced some features like:
- Possibility of adding the passthrough as your home environment background, giving you a de facto augmented reality home menu;
- Ability to set up your guardian area using your hands instead of your controllers (though this feature is not available in many devices yet)
- Ability to start some content in VR directly from your Facebook app on the phone. If someone shares something about a VR experience on Facebook, on your timeline you can have a button to jump to that experience, maybe to meet him/her. This reduces friction and enhances the social aspect of VR.
If we sum these features to the other ones added in the past, like hands tracking, Passthrough Shortcut, or the multiple windows in Oculus Browser, we start seeing the first signs of a mixed reality operating system, with which you can interact with the controllers or with the hands in a natural way. It’s not a far stretch to think that in some updates we’ll get to an Oculus runtime offering multitasking 2D windows in augmented reality, inside which you can do everything using your hands. And if Oculus released the mixed reality feature in the SDK, that would let many developers create many original MR experiences, transforming the Quest in a fully AR/VR headset.
Of course, there would be privacy concerns in enabling the passthrough to everyone, and yes, the current world vision is mediocre (black&white and distorted). But as I’ve stated before, this would be useful for Oculus to start creating an MR ecosystem for its future devices (maybe Del Mar?) that will probably feature color passthrough, controllers tracking the full hand and other amazing features.
And there are even already some hints for the future. It seems that in the Oculus SDK there are now some lines that refer to the Oculus Quest colocation APIs, that would let you play in local multiplayer with other people in your home. This would be great to play with your friends, and even better for arcade owners to start a LBVR venue by just having some Quests instead of expensive backpack PCs. My bet is that if Oculus is going to launch this service, it is going to be at OC7.
At OC6, Facebook promised us that it would have been building a great platform for the Oculus Quest and its successors, and I think they’re fulfilling that promise completely. I think the battle with Apple has just begun.
More info (New AR menu in Oculus Quest v16)
More info (New Space Station environment in Oculus Quest v16)
More info (Setting Guardian with your hands in Oculus Quest v16)
More info (Facebook app now can open VR experiences)
More info (Oculus Quest colocation APIs)
Other relevant news
Oculus Connect 7 and Gamescom will be held online
Because of the damn coronavirus, always more events will be held online. Apart from the AWE that has become an online event, as I’ve highlighted in my intro, also Oculus Connect 7 and Gamescom will transition to a fully digital version for 2020.
Of course, Oculus Connect 7 is the one that interests us the most. Oculus has just said that it has transitioned to an online version, without specifying the form. For sure there will be online posts and webinars, but we are all wondering if there will be a part of the OC7 that will be held virtually, of course inside Facebook Horizon. This would be amazing because Oculus could prove that its social tool (currently in closed alpha stage) works very well even for important events and can fulfill the mission of “defying distance”.
I tried asking Facebook’s Meaghan Fitzgerald on Twitter more info, and if there will be a VR version of the OC7, and she answered with a “nothing to share yet! :)”. Let me speculate a bit on this simple sentence: if Facebook had zero intentions to host the event or a part of it in VR, she would have answered a clear “no”. But that smiley and the fact they’re not going to share info let me think that they are considering the idea, and are experimenting with it. Then they’ll decide if yes or no depending on many considerations (e.g. how many people can Horizon host). Fingers crossed for an OC7 inside Facebook Horizon!
More info (Gamescom becoming completely digital)
More info (Oculus Connect becoming an online event)
More info (Meaghan answering me on Twitter)
New info on Oculus Jedi controllers found in the driver
Developer Gerald McAlister of RGB Schemes has found a driver for the Jedi controller within the latest firmware for the consumer Quest. And in it, there are some interesting hints on how the controllers of the future Oculus Del Mar will be.
According to the data, they won’t be much different from the Oculus Touch controllers, but they’ll be an upgrade:
- They’ll still have A/B buttons, a thumbstick, and a trigger;
- They’ll have much better tracking, thanks to 60Hz tracking LEDs (now current frequency is 30Hz) and a very precise IMU sensor (the best in class);
- Haptics will be improved with a more sophisticated mechanism;
- All five fingers will be somehow tracked.
This reinforces my speculation that the Jedi controllers will be like the Valve Knuckles. I think this because:
- Oculus doesn’t want to disrupt the input scheme because that would make all previous content incompatible. Knuckles are an evolution of Oculus Touch, and you can use them to play games studied for the Touch;
- Knuckles check all the above boxes of the new features exposed by the driver;
- There are already many games that are porting their control scheme to the Valve Knuckles, so Oculus would find itself with many titles that could have an easy porting (starting from Half-Life: Alyx);
- The codename “Jedi” makes me think of you opening the hand and moving objects using the Force… and Valve Knuckles lets you open your hand with the controllers on.
I’m quite excited by this rumor, and I think we’ll have more info on this at the upcoming virtual OC7…
Mozilla updates its Unity WebVR exporter
Two years ago, I reviewed on this blog a Unity plugin that Mozilla had released in beta to let you create WebVR experiences from your Unity projects. Fast Forward two years and Mozilla has just announced that it has upgraded that plugin.
Why does this matter? Because most VR developers know well Unity or Unreal, and WebVR languages like A-frame are based on Javascript, that is very different from the usual programming flow of the game engines. This prevents many developers from creating WebXR apps. Thanks to this exporter, every Unity developer can create a WebXR experience by just building the Unity project for HTML5! This is massive.
Of course, there are many limitations with regard to usual Unity builds, and I expect also bugs and a worse visual quality of the experience, but hey, it is anyway very useful. I’ll try it in the upcoming days and I’ll keep you posted on it.
HoloLens 2 is expanding its availability
Microsoft has released the news that it is increasing the availability of HoloLens 2 and that tens of thousands of units have been shipped to date. But since there is a big backlog of people that preordered it during its launch, now you can’t order a unit because Microsoft is contacting all people that had preordered it to evaluate the purchase. This will require some time, and from what I’ve read, there are still many people that are waiting to be contacted again.
To offer a piece of complete information from my experience as a consultant, actually now HoloLens 2 is also available through your local resellers (there are few around the world). Anyway, due to the shortage of units, priority will be given to projects that prove the usefulness of HoloLens, that involve a famous brand or that may require a big number of devices in the future. Basically, projects that give value to the device and to Microsoft in general. So, if you are a dev that just wants to experiment with HoloLens 2, probably you will still have to wait a lot.
News worth a mention
Half-Life modding continues and now you can play the game with mouse and keyboard!
Even if Valve has not released yet the proper tools to mod Half-Life: Alyx, the community is already using what it has to create interesting mods for it. For instance, there is now a mod offering you a survival wave shooter and even the full re-creation of the first level of Wolfenstein 3D inside Alyx.
But probably the most interesting mod is the one that lets you play the full game on a standard screen using mouse and keyboard. This can increase the reach of the game, even if, as Valve has stated, the game has been studied for VR, so it can result boring on a standard Desktop PC.
And while players find always crazier things to do inside the game (like carrying all the goodies in a big crate), Valve continues to release info on how it has designed the game. In an interview from this week, they underlined how they crafted the single environments one by one, refining them using the feedback from the beta testers.
More info (Half-Life: Alyx mouse+keyboard mod)
More info (Half-Life: Alyx wave survival shooter mod)
More info (Half-Life: Alyx Wolfenstein 3D mod)
More info (Interview on Half-Life: Alyx design)
More info (People carrying on crates in Alyx)
Vuforia adds interesting features for its v9 release
The New 9.0 version of Vuforia introduces new interesting features to the augmented reality solution. The main ones are:
- Area targets: you can scan your environment with Matterport, and then use the 3D scan to define the exact places where your augmentations should appear in your app. This can be extremely useful to implement indoor navigation;
- Vuforia Spatial Toolbox, that lets you integrate AR augmentations with industrial machines. These augmentations can show the data of the sensors of the machines, but can also be used to change the logic the machines are implementing. See it as an AR programming framework using visual blocks for industrial settings. Of course, the hardware you use must provide access to this software solution.
More info (Vuforia Area Targets)
More info (Vuforia Spatial Toolbox)
Enter the new dimension of advertisement
Tom Emrich, one of the greatest experts on the augmented reality business, has written a very long and detailed Medium post that showcases many use cases of AR and VR in the marketing sector. It is very complete, and it is a must-read if you plan using XR in your next marketing campaign.
VR Ears Kickstarter launches tomorrow
VR Ears, the accessory for VR headsets proposed by Rebuff Reality, launches on Kickstarter on April, 21st. It is an add-on for VR headsets offering high-quality audio, with a design inspired by the off-the-ear speakers of the Index, to headsets having poor audio emission.
Google Glass can help Autistic kids
A research project using Google Glass to help autistic kids has been published on IEEE. Autistic kids can’t recognize emotions in other humans, so the system uses the smartglasses to track the faces of the people around them and show them an icon explaining the current emotion felt by the other people. This is very useful to train the kid in recognizing the emotions of the people surrounding him/her. The first results are encouraging, but the researchers underline that still a lot of work has to be done.
NeRF is a new algorithm to reconstruct views of 3D objects
A new algorithm is in town, and it can be useful for AR and VR. It is called NeRF, and it is a machine learning solution that lets you reconstruct different poses of an object just starting by some discrete photos of it. So, for instance, you shoot 10 photos of a car from different points of view, and the algorithm is able to reconstruct how the car appears from all the possible points of view.
You may think that this is more or less how photogrammetry works, but this algorithm is better for two reasons:
- The quality of the reconstruction of the image is better;
- It is able to also understand how lighting works. So, if you move your point of view, also the reflection of the sun on shiny surfaces moves according to it.
This is very cool, and it could be used for AR, but also VR, for instance, to let you move your head in videos so that to have 6DOF videos or photos.
More info (2 Minutes Paper video about NeRF)
More info (Official website with technical information)
New Simpsons’ Cough Gag is all about VR
Have fun watching the couch gag of Season 31 Ep. 18 of the Simpsons, that shows you all the family playing in VR.
Resident Evil 8 may come in 2021 with PSVR support
According to a rumor collected by online magazine Gematsu, Capcom is working on a Resident Evil 8 title, that should be released for “current and next-generation platforms” in 2021. PSVR support should be in the works, and given the release date, I speculate that it may be one of the launch titles of the new PSVR 2. This would boost a lot the purchases of the new headset.
Some creative content you can enjoy in VR
Artistic and creative content is a good alternative to VR gaming. Here you are some things you can evaluate:
- Oculus is offering storytelling VR content from Tribeca in exclusive on Oculus platform. You can have it a look;
- Oculus is proposing the event Live X Live, a virtual music festival free on Go and Quest that features many famous artists;
- Soundself is a trippy VR experience very focused on audio. The trailer is disturbing and fascinating at the same time.
More info (Tribeca VR)
More info (Live X Live)
More info (SoundSelf)
Some info on content
- Pixel Ripped 1995 is going to launch on April, 23rd. Feel the nostalgia for the 90s within VR in the sequel of the much-appreciated Pixel Ripped 1989;
- Pistol Whip launches new map Dark Skies;
- Resolution Games announces its new game Blaston;
- A developer has teased a game for Quest called Unplugged: Air Guitar that seems very cool because it looks like Guitar Hero in VR;
- Magic dueling game SpellPunk is coming this month for PC VR. The graphical style of this title seems very interesting.
More info (Pixel Ripped 1995)
More info (Pistol Whip Dark Skies)
More info (Blaston)
More info (Unplugged: Air Guitar)
More info (Spellpunk)
News from partners (and friends)
AIXR, the association behind the famous VR Awards, has created an online page with many resources to help VR companies in overcoming this coronavirus pandemic. Feel free to jump there and see if something may be useful for you.
Two Redditors have created an interesting VR game concept about parkour. The game has an interesting mechanic that makes you jump and move with your hands. There’s also a free playable demo :O
Some XR fun
VR people have all the fun now
What a beautiful day to play VR!
There’s an Oculus VR headset for… no one
Probably the best headset stand ever.
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