The XR Week Peek (2020.08.17): Facebook Horizon avatars revealed, Mozilla dismantles its XR team, and more!
My blog has just turned 4 years old and I’m incredibly happy about it! I’m thinking about making a VRChat party to celebrate this anniversary and I will keep you posted about when this is going to happen!
For the rest, this week in VR has been the typical summer week when nothing special has happened in the VR space. Outside VR, the big news to keep an eye on is the dispute between Epic Games and Apple (and Google), which could lead to a complete change in how app stores are managed, even in VR. If you have missed it, I suggest you start from this roundup of posts by The Verge.
Top news of the week
New Oculus Venues gives us a glimpse of Facebook Horizon
Without previous notice, Facebook has started rolling out a new version of Oculus Venues, for now available only to selected beta users. Oculus Venues, in case you forgot, is that VR experience that lets you enjoy some important event (like an NBA match) in a big auditorium together with many other VR users.
The new version of Oculus Venues features renewed graphics, renewed avatars, and according to Facebook, it also offers a lobby where you can hang out with friends and many other new social features. But what is most important is that its graphics remind too much the screenshots of Facebook Horizon shared by Facebook during OC6. And for this occasion, the app has been renamed “Venues”, dropping the “Oculus” naming (that is disappearing always more in Facebook’s products).
This means that Facebook has started making other apps of its ecosystem coherent with the Facebook Horizon metaverse: Venues could become that part of Horizon where people meet and enjoy events together. And so its appearance gives us the best glimpse we can have now of how Facebook Horizon will be.
The most important feature that we can notice from the media materials we have about the new Venues is the new avateering system, that features many customization options and looks like a mix between the one of Altspace VR and the one of Rec Room. I found also cool that the avatar makes facial expressions depending on your gestures: if you do a thumbs up, your avatar smiles, while if you do a thumbs down, it becomes sad. Since we don’t have face tracking in our headsets, this can be a nice idea to emulate facial expressions in social VR ecosystems.
If Venues is becoming Horizon-ized, it means that Horizon is close to launching. Can we expect it to happen at OC7? And since Venues is being updated now… is it possible that OC7 will all happen inside Venues? We’ll discover it in a few weeks…
More info (New version of Venues rolling out)
More info (Venues’s new features and avateering system)
Other relevant news
Mozilla lays off almost all its XR team
The shocking news of the week is that Mozilla has laid off 25% of its staff, and among them, it has fired almost all the people that were part of the XR team.
Mozilla says that the layoffs were necessary to guarantee the long-term financial sustainability of the foundation and that the company will now focus on some of its core products like Firefox, Pocket, and Hubs.
But while Hubs has been cited among the projects that will survive, it is unclear what is happening. My sources confirm that also many people working on Hubs have been laid off, and there is a great confusion also on the future of the distributed metaverse.
What is worrisome the most is that it is unclear what will happen to all the other amazing XR projects that Mozilla was managing like the WebXR framework A-frame or the WebXR exporter for Unity. Personally, I have not good vibes regarding them.
I also would like to understand why Mozilla has dismantled its XR team. WebXR is not seen as profitable anymore? Is it too expensive to create products for it? Is Mozilla abandoning VR? Without clear answers, the “why” scares me much more than the “what”.
In any case, a big hug to all my friends inside Mozilla that have just lost their job.
More info (News on Road To VR)
More info (News on Upload VR)
The HTC Cosmos Play will be an enterprise headset
HTC has confirmed this week to Upload VR that the upcoming Cosmos Play will be an enterprise headset devoted to museums and educational institutions.
This is pretty surprising considering that the Play was announced as an affordable device that gamers could buy as an alternative to the cheap Rift S for a price of around $4–500. The name “Play”, was chosen exactly for this reason. Now HTC has changed its mind, and the Play has become an enterprise headset.
Apart from the fun that the community has made of this decision (“The name ‘Play’ clearly shows that it is an enterprise headset” someone said in the comments), I think that this decision is the clear sign that the new CEO has imposed an enterprise-only strategy: I bet that HTC won’t release consumer headsets for all the next years until the market will be evolved enough that it will be able to afford to enter the consumer realm again. This is probably a good decision: HTC’s financial troubles can’t let it compete with giants like Valve and Facebook.
Facebook keeps improving its realistic avatars
We all know that Facebook is working on hyper-realistic avatars (dubbed “codec avatars”) and this week the social media giant has released two new studies about them
The first one is a new way of implementing the movements of the avatar’s face, which is modular. There are different ML systems that try to identify the pose of the various parts of the face (the left eye, right eye, mouth, nose, etc…) and then the results get merged together. This approach, which is different from the previous one that had a single classifier for the whole face, lets the avatars accurately track the funny faces made by the user. It is so possible for instance to wink with one eye and make a strange grimace with the mouth, and see the system still correctly tracking the facial expression.
The second one is a study to make codec avatars work with standard headsets: it makes the avatar move their faces by just using an eye tracking sensor and a microphone. The headsets used until now by Facebook Reality Labs were custom ones with special cameras inside, but this new research highlights how eye-tracking and microphones, that are already available in many commercial headsets like the Pico Neo Eye 2 or the Vive Pro Eye, could be enough. This means that these codec avatars could already be used inside these off-the-shelf headsets. With this new method, the tracking of the facial expressions is less accurate, but it works well the same.
More info (Modular tracking of avatars)
More info (Eye-tracked avatars)
Is The Sony XRperia coming?
Sony has just published a job offer looking for professionals to build an XR headset. You may yawn at this news because we all know that PSVR is a thing, and of course, Sony hires people to work on it, but the announcement is more interesting than this.
First of all, it has been made by the mothership Sony Corporation, and not by Sony Interactive Entertainment, that manages the PlayStation. Then the announcement talks about building the headset of the future “with a view to five years from now” and that it should be able to “deliver beautiful images and comfortable ease of use to customers”.
Since I don’t think that the PSVR2 is coming in 5 years (or well, at least I hope so) and for sure it is not managed by Sony Corporation, to me, this looks like a new project by Sony to enter the XR field. Sony is not only PlayStation, but it is for instance also smartphones (Sony Xperia) and other electronic gadgets. We all know that XR is the next technological platform and for sure Sony won’t want to miss it.
So it is probably starting a new unit (with around 15–20 people now) to start investigating the Sony headset of the future, the one that will substitute the PC, the smartphone, or both. The Sony XRperia is coming.
News worth a mention
NVIDIA teases launch of new graphics cards
On August, 10th, NVIDIA has tweeted something about the “Ultimate Countdown”, accompanied by the “21 Days. 21 Years” sentence. Since 21 days from the 10th is the 31st, that day of August will probably the day when the new RTX30 series, based on the revolutionary Ampere GPUs, will launch. The new graphics cards should feature a big boost of performance with respect to the previous RTX20 ones, and so could also give better performances in VR games.
Prepare your wallets!
Nreal launches its Light glasses in Korea
LG Uplus will start selling the Chinese AR glasses Nreal Light in Korea as a standalone device for around $586, or bundled with the Galaxy Note 20 or LG Velvet and a 5G data plan for around $295. Preorders start on August 11th, and the glasses will be available in stores from August 21st.
It will be interesting to see how the sales will go. Nreal is one of the most interesting AR gadgets (read my review here), and $300 is a steal for such a device. Its problem may be its lack of content, tough. Let’s see what will be the reaction of consumers!
More info (News on The Verge)
More info (News on VentureBeat)
Sandbox VR shuts down
It’s a piece of sad news for LBVR: due to the coronavirus lockdown, that forced all LBVR venues to close, and its high running costs, Sandbox VR, that got popular for having received big funds from Andreessen Horwitz and some popular singers, has filed for bankruptcy.
These kinds of big VR arcades were already having problems in becoming profitable, and the COVID has now just killed them all. I wonder what will happen to The Void, which has also recently been “abandoned” by Disney.
The problems of Single Pass Stereo
VR professional (and also Patreon supporter of mine) Ilias Kaspouranis has written the second chapter of its post about Single Pass Stereo, and what problems it may cause if used improperly. After having read this post, I think that people at Unity and Unreal Engine should do something to fix this issue.
Watch Microsoft Office in XR
A university research project has mixed a Vive Pro together with a tablet running Microsoft Excel to create an enhanced version of Excel in virtual reality, that lets you use Excel with a better interface. I personally think the UX of the project would need a lot of rework, but the idea is interesting nonetheless.
Hitman 3 is a PSVR exclusive and works with Gamepad
This week we had some interesting revelations about the new upcoming Hitman 3. First of all, there have been released some interesting short videos about the gameplay. There is also a video where the character uses the crowbar against one enemy (see, Valve? You can use the crowbar even in VR!)
Then, during a Reddit AMA, the developers have revealed that the game will be in the beginning a PSVR exclusive title (but future compatibility with PC is not excluded) and that only Gamepad will be supported. The gamepad choice puzzles me a bit, an action VR game working with a gamepad is pretty weird… but someone has hypothesized that it is because it will support the new PSVR2 controllers that have not been revealed yet, and so they can only talk about Gamepad support. I really hope so.
More info (First gameplay video showcased)
More info (Hitman 3 developer diary)
More info (Hitman 3 is a PSVR exclusive title)
Some info about content
- Prince of Persia The Dagger Of Time is the new Ubisoft title for LBVR arcades;
- ‘Vox Machinae’ Quietly Added New Mechs, Weapons, & Co-op in Updates;
- The Walking Dead Onslaught has announced a release date of September 29th;
- “Cyberpunk Essentials” is the new update of Synth Ryders with 10 new songs from respected EDM artist;
- Star Wars Squadron showcases great customization features for your ship;
- There is now a virtual park all about Pokemon, but it is in Japanese;
- Popular sandbox tool ModBox approaches version 2.0;
- Popular mixed-reality-videos tool LIV releases 2.0 version with dual camera support.
More info (Prince Of Persia)
More info (Vox Machinae)
More info (The Walking Dead Onslaught)
More info (Synth Riders)
More info (Star Wars Squadrons)
More info (Pokemon Virtual fest VR)
More info (Modbox 2.0) More info (LIV 2.0)
News from partners (and friends)
My friend Ilja “GamerToTheEnd” has disassembled a Valve Index again, this time identifying all the different chips that are part of its PCB. If you’re a techie, I think you will love its work.
My friend Jan Horsky has got a StarVR headset and reviewed it for us! It seems to have solid optics but pretty dated displays.
Some XR fun
Damo9000 imagines a party between a Quest and the Rift S!
Another mixed reality video of someone playing Beat Saber. Wait what?
(NSFW-ish)
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(Header image by Facebook, adapted by Road To VR)
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