The XR Week Peek (2020.09.07): new Quest is coming at $299 and $399, NVIDIA RTX3070 is powerful and affordable and more!
This fall promises to be very interesting for AR and VR, and in this first week of September we had many interesting XR news that are going to heat up the competition in the space!
But before talking about it, let me invite you once more to visit the Venice VR Expanded virtual worlds that we did in VRChat for the Venice Film Festival. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Top news of the week
Rumors hint to Oculus discontinuing the current Quest and selling the new one at $299 and $399
The Facebook Connect is close and we all expect that during that conference Oculus is finally going to announce the new Oculus Quest. But two rumors coming out this week may already tell us what we should expect for that day.
Walmart seems to have leaked the price of the upcoming Oculus Quest S. On its online store, it is possible to see two pages relative to two Oculus products called “Oculus Point Reyes” with a picture of the Oculus Go in. There is a 64GB model costing $299 and a 256GB model costing $399. Since we guess that at Facebook they haven’t all got drunk and start selling again the Oculus Go, the most probable option is that these are the placeholder pages for the upcoming Oculus Quest 2. “Point Reyes” is a beach in California, so it is just an internal codename at Oculu… ehm Facebook, following what it has always been its tradition for new unannounced headsets.
I think this new pricing strategy is very important: $299 has historically been considered as the golden price to start getting mainstream adoption, and Facebook proposing this in the months that lead to the Christmas Holidays may cause a big spike in sales of virtual reality headsets. If the Quest 2 proves to be good enough and if people won’t be scared by the Facebook login, we can finally see VR (slowly) start entering the mainstream.
In the meanwhile, according to Upload, some stores like US retailer B&H Photo Video and UK retailer Overclockers have started delisting the Oculus Quest, that so appear like it is going to be discontinued pretty soon. And it seems a reasonable decision: with two new models coming at $299 and $399, there’s no way the old Quest could fit in this strategy unless it gets a huge discount and costs $199. So the original Quest is going to die pretty soon, closing what has been a historical cycle for virtual reality. I’ll miss ya, boi.
More info (Leaked price of the new Quest)
More info (Original Quest delisted)
Other relevant news
NVIDIA announces the new RTX30 graphics cards
Finally, NVIDIA has announced the new RTX30 graphics cards, surprising us all with their prices and performances.
These new pieces of hardware are based on the new Ampere architecture, which offers a big boost in performance compared with the previous Turing one. Especially if you have to do tasks like ray tracing and AI (for DLSS), the performances of the RTX30 cards are more or less 2x the ones of the previous RTX20 ones, with 2x the power efficiency.
The cards are called RTX3090, RTX3080, and RTX3070. The RTX3070 has a very low entry price of $499, but it has performances superior to the ones of the $1200 RTX2080 Ti. It is probably the graphics card that offers the best value for the price, and it will increase a lot the possibility for people to have a VR-ready PC rig without having to spend much money. So I think that this announcement by NVIDIA is very important for the VR market. On the other hand, the RTX3090 is made to have super performances and so it costs $1499. This is a summary of the various graphics cards released, courtesy of Road To VR:
RTX 3090 RTX 3080 RTX 3070 Price $1,500 $700 $500 Release Date September 24th September 17th October CUDA Cores 10,496 8,704 5,888 Boost Clock (GHz) 1.7 1.71 1.73 Memory 24GB (GDDR6X) 10GB (GDDR6X) 8GB (GDDR6) Connectors 1x HDMI 2.1, 3x DisplayPort 1.4a
NVIDIA has made a great job, but I think that we have also to thank the fierce competition of AMD, that with its latest announcements has made NVIDIA lower its prices.
One little big detail of these new cards is that all of them lack the VirtualLink connector, the new USB-C standard for VR that should have revolutionized how people connect their VR headsets to PC and that has died before even being truly adopted. NVIDIA truly believed in it when it implemented it in its RTX20 graphics cards, but then almost no headset vendor used that connection, and all of them used DisplayPort+USB A. RIP VirtualLink, no one is going to cry for you.
More info (NVIDIA RTX30 on Upload VR)
More info (NVIDIA RTX30 on Road To VR)
More info (VirtualLink standard being abandoned)
Facebook halts the sale of Quest in Germany
Facebook is temporarily suspending the sale of Oculus Quest devices in Germany. The social media company claims that there are some problems with local regulations. What is happening is a bit unclear, because when asked by German publication MIXED, the German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) has declared that there’s no ongoing talk between it and Facebook about whatever problem.
We all wonder what is happening, and a Redditor, that seems informed on the fact, claims that it should be all about the mandatory Facebook login. There’s an antitrust rule in Germany that prohibits Product A to force you to use Product B, and this basically means that you can’t be forced to use the social media Facebook to use the gaming device Oculus.
If this is the reason, Facebook may have some problems in imposing its Facebook login, especially, as I hope, similar rules exist also in other countries. Germany, please save us 🙂
More info (Facebook halting Quest sales in Germany)
More info (A Redditor explaining the problem)
FRL Research is working towards giving you audio superpowers in AR
FRL Research (the previous Facebook Reality Labs) has just published a blog post detailing the amazing research it is doing on audio for Facebook’s future AR glasses. They have talked about two projects.
One is devoting to give you more realistic audio in AR and VR. They are working on more realistic spatial audio, and especially they are working on calculating easily your HRTF (Head-Related Transform Function), which basically expresses how your auditory system hears things. It is unique for every one of us, and if you want people to hear virtual spatialized sounds exactly like real ones, you have to inject in their ears the sounds exactly as they get heard when they pass through the shape of their ears. This requires knowing the HRTF of the user, which currently is very hard to calculate. Facebook is working towards calculating it by just using some photos. This would make the path towards realistic virtual sound much shorter. In some internal trials by Facebook, people couldn’t distinguish when a sound was real or was created artificially. This is amazing.
The other experiment is intriguing: AR glasses that filter the audio as you wish. I mean, imagine that you are in a crowded room, and you are talking with two friends: you have to do a lot of effort to hear what they are saying, and separate their words from the background noise. Facebook wants to use some AI magic to eliminate all what you don’t want to hear and let you hear only what you are interested in. This sounds like black magic and it is really fascinating: using eye tracking and other hints, the system may understand what is that you want to hear, and filter out all the rest. Of course, as Upload highlights, from great power comes great responsibility, and this technology could be used also for the bad: I could filter out all the other sounds, and focus on hearing what people of the other tables in a restaurant are saying and spy them. So these kinds of bad uses should be prevented by the system.
Facebook highlights these are only research matters for now, but it is always fascinating to hear (pun intended) what FRL Research is working on.
More info (Facebook Research on Road To VR)
More info (Facebook Research on Upload VR)
HTC CEO Yves Maitre resigns
HTC, you did it again.
Less than one year ago, the Taiwanese company had designed a new CEO, Yves Maitre, to invert the negative trend of its business. And I think that he was doing a good job: he understood that at this point, HTC can’t compete with Oculus and its ridiculously low prices, so it should all focus on the enterprise market, where instead HTC shines. He was giving a clear direction to the company.
But after just some months from his designation, Mr. Maitre has now stepped down from his role: he claims personal problems, also connected to the lockdown and the impossibility of traveling, but who knows what are the true reason. Cher Wang so returns to her role of CEO. This of course will lead to even more confusion in a company that is still looking for a clear identity.
HP Reverb G2 delayed, and new Omnicept edition leaked
It seems that the amazing HP Reverb G2 is having a little delay, and it will be released in October and not anymore in September as initially announced.
But don’t despair, we have also amazing news about this device: an Italian Blog has leaked a photo of a new model of the Reverb G2, called Omnicept edition, that includes eye tracking and face tracking (mouth tracking, etc…). This would be very interesting: this kind of facial tracking would be amazing for enterprise usage: applications in training, virtual remote collaboration, and psychology would benefit a lot from full facial tracking of the user. If this new Reverb won’t be too expensive, it could really become a big hit in the enterprise market.
More info (HP Reverb G2 delayed)
More info (HP Reverb G2 Omnicept)
News worth a mention
Magic Leap now is worth a bit more than $450M
Magic Leap and its magic drop. The Florida company has been the startup losing more value in 2020, and it has gone from an estimated value of more than $6B to a present value of around $450M. This means that all of its investors have lost a lot of money, and the company is in desperate need of cash.
NVIDIA DLSS now works also for VR applications
NVIDIA has announced that DLSS, the technology that uses AI to upscale the resolution of the images rendered by the graphics cards is now available also for VR titles. This is a piece of great news, because it means that VR players will be able to play the games with much better visuals without having to upgrade their PCs.
Burning Man in VR has been the big VR event of the week
While I am proudly showcasing our work at Venice VR, I have to admit that the biggest and coolest event of the week has been Burning Man in VR. Everyone that attended it in Altspace VR has remained astonished by this massive project, with more than 100 portals to other virtual worlds, music played by volumetric avatars, and a lot of special effects. Being in the industry, I guess this has been made in a lot of time with a big budget, and seeing the images I can only make my biggest compliments to BRCvr that has created this virtual event! I invite you all to check it out.
More info (Kent Bye interviewing the creator of Burning Man VR)
More info (One of the cool concerts happening there)
More info (Some images of the burning man)
More info (Fast Company talking great about this event)
Spatial arrives on Quest with a huge update
Remote XR collaboration tool Spatial (read here my review about it) has just released its 1.7 version, that finally lands officially on Quest, with also support for amazing features like natural hands interactions.
Google releases a tool for body tracking on your phone
Google has just released MediaPipe BlazePose, an AI tool that is able to track the upper part of your body in realtime on your phone. I tried it and it works pretty well: it is impressive that 10 years ago you needed a PC and a Kinect to do full-body tracking and now you can do everything with a phone!
The system is fully opensource on GitHub, and there is also a compiled version that you can try on your phone.
TPCast releases TPCast Air for Quest
TPCast has released in China TPCast Air for the Oculus Quest, allowing you to play your SteamVR games wirelessly on your Quest. This is the same as Virtual Desktop with the difference that TPCast provides you a dedicated dongle for a dedicated wireless connection, making sure that the latency is the smallest possible.
Of course, if Oculus announces an official wireless streaming solution at FC, this becomes pretty useless… otherwise, it is interesting.
The Line wins an Emmy Award
The Line, a little romantic VR storytelling experience by Brazilian studio ARVORE, has just won the Emmy Award for Innovation In Interactive Programming. It is very pleasant seeing a VR experience winning an Emmy! Compliments to its creators.
Two nice XR experiments
This weekend I’ve shared on my social media two videos that have become pretty viral:
- An AR experiment made with an iPad Pro and UE4 where you can see quasi-realistic reflections on the virtual sphere;
- An experiment by Varjo to put you in a green screen cube and let you configure your house in VR while you still see the real estate agent like in real life.
More info (AR sphere)
More info (Varjo’s interior design)
Nintendo takes augmented reality to the Switch
After VR, Nintendo has taken also AR to the Switch. But if you think about the classical dull experience with 3D models on AR markers, you are wrong. It has had a very original approach to the technology and will release some little Mario karts cars with a camera embedded on them. You create a path in your living room, and then with the Switch you control these tiny cars and see them racing inside your living room through their cameras, in a POV fashion. The visuals are then augmented, so you can enjoy all the special effects of the race happening exactly at your place. The child that is in me loves it and wants to buy it.
Some news on content
- Someone has made a Beat Saber mod to play the game in the Fall Guys environment;
- Gnomes & Goblins by Jon Favreau finally releases after many years of work;
- Eye Of The Temple releases its demo for free, and all the reviews are enthusiastic about it. It is very original how it makes you play all the game in a small area while making you imagine you are moving inside a big space;
- Let’s Go Chopping makes you kill zombies in a realistic way on the Oculus Quest;
- Cook Out by Resolution Games seems Overcooked in VR;
- Cubism is a very original enigma game for the Oculus Quest that looks intriguing. Have a look at its trailer and then decide for yourself;
- Upload reviews (and blasts) Project Cars 3 in VR;
- Synth Riders and Oh Shape release a new free song;
- Gorn is coming to the Oculus Quest! We can expect the announcement at the Facebook Connect.
More info (Beat Saber)
More info (Gnomes & Goblins)
More info (Eye Of The Temple)
More info (Let’s Go Chopping)
More info (Cook Out)
More info (Cubism)
More info (Project Cars 3 VR)
More info (Synth Riders)
More info (Gorn)
News from partners (and friends)
My friend Eddie Avil, that is very passionate about AR and VR, has just started in his India a new venture called XR-Bazaar. XR-BAZAAR is an AR/VR focused B2B , E-commerce platform that also offers Virtual XR Consulting for Enterprise. If you are in India and you need consultancies about AR/VR or if you need to rent some hardware, be sure to get in touch with him.
We all would like to have a paper magazine all about VR, so some VR professionals on Twitter have joined forces to create VR Trends Magazine, a new magazine about VR with articles from professionals all over the world. You can receive this publication by donating on Patreon. In one of the first numbers, there will also be an article by me!
Check out the game Table Trenches, an AR tabletop war game. The biggest thing the devs are excited about is thir new local multiplayer mode, where 2 players can battle on a shared AR map.
The London Film Festival announces for 2020 LFF Expanded, a virtual exhibition that you can attend by staying at home.
Some XR fun
One moment of silence for who has bought a RTX2080Ti
Facebook and its new login policy
Alternate ending for Half Life Alyx
V-sick
What have in common a blogger and a beggar?
We both ask money! Please, if you want me to keep writing this informative article for the community, donate some money to me on Patreon 🙂
If today you are reading this roundup of news, you have to thank these generous people and companies:
- DeoVR
- Jonn Fredericks
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Michael Bruce
- Paolo Leoncini
- Immersive.international
- Bob Fine
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jennifer Granger
- Jason Moore
- Steve Biggs
- Niels Bogerd
- Julio Cesar Bolivar
- Jan Schroeder
- Kai Curtis
- Francesco Strada
- Sikaar Keita
- Ramin Assadollahi
- Sb
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
- Liam James O’Malley
- Paul Reynolds
- Matias Nassi
Help me in my quest in informing the XR community by donating some money on Patreon:
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