Happy Autumn everyone! The sun is shining less these days for me, but my passion for VR keeps me warm everyday! Here you are the best AR/VR news for the week that has just finished.
Top news of the week
The debate on Facebook and the Quest 2 continues
This week we had no big news from Facebook, but in the communities, the theme of the Facebook login for the Oculus Quest 2 remains pretty hot. Or better, the debate on Facebook, in general, remains hot. Some of the topics that people are discussing are:
- How it is tough to be a developer on the Oculus Store, considering that Facebook “steals” the best ideas and integrates them inside its platform, using unfair competition;
- How Facebook has and has had shady practices on the privacy front, not to mention hate speech and other things happening on the social media;
- Some people had their Facebook account disabled for no reason and now they don’t know how they can use the Quest 2 they have already preordered;
- How to create a legit fake Facebook account;
- Facebook being forced to suspend the sales of its headsets in Germany, because German laws prohibit them to sell a product that requires users to have another product;
- The EU asking Facebook to keep all the data of its European users on servers hosted in Europe, creating concerns from Facebook on how it should handle the accounts of these people. Some people say that Facebook threatens to leave Europe, but I think this is never happening. (Personally, I think that this trend that every country wants to keep its data inside its boundaries in understandable, but it risks also creating a collection of walled gardens, as it is happening with USA vs China)
And this is just a summary of the most interesting things. There is a harsh ongoing debate about Facebook login in VR communities and the tension in the ecosystem is pretty high. Some people have already abandoned the Oculus ship, but many have still bought the Quest 2, that in fact is already backordered by several weeks in some countries (e.g. USA). Let’s see how things will turn out: IMHO the Quest 2 will sell a lot, because even if Facebook loses some hardcore VR users, it will gain many new casual users, and so its business will stay healthy.
More info (Facebook and the unfair competition on its store)
More info (Facebook vs EU)
More info (Facebook vs Germany)
More info (How to create a Fb fake account)
More info (An example of a disabled Facebook account)
More info (Oculus Quest 2 backordered)
Other relevant news
SideQuest raises $650K
This is a piece of news that makes me particularly happy: SideQuest, the unofficial store for the Oculus Quest, has just raised $650K from BoostVC, Palmer Luckey, and The Fund.
Yes, you’ve read it well: Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, has returned supporting a VR company. He has decided to directly invest in SideQuest because it reminds him the good old times of the Oculus Share. If you’re new to VR, let me remind you that the Oculus Share was a website at the times of Oculus DK1 and DK2, where all creators could share their experiment with VR, in a completely disordered and free manner. It was the community creating and publishing, with almost no control, exactly as it happens today on SideQuest. The Oculus Store is instead exactly the opposite: a walled garden where only selected programs can enter.
I’m happy SideQuest is getting this money because it is helping standalone VR to have a creative open store, not directly controlled by the business owner Facebook. It’s helping us indie VR developers in having a way to show our works and I appreciate it.
But on the business side, I wonder what is its business plan. This is an investment, not a grant, and investors want their money back (multiplied). How is SideQuest going to build a viable business? Currently most of the experiences there are sold for free! I guess we’ll discover it in the next months…
Multiplayer shooter Solaris is the game of the week
Multiplayer shooter Solaris Offworld Combat, from the creators of the successful Firewall: Zero Hour, has been released this week. The game is very different from its predecessor, and it is less a realistic combat simulator and more an adrenaline multiplayer game, like Unreal Tournament or Quake Arena.
The game is fun to be played and has a great user experience. The reviews I am reading about it are all positive. But it is not a perfect game, and it won’t enter the Hall Of Fame of VR masterpieces (like Half-Life: Alyx), because it has some little issues here and there. For instance, it is too easy to be hard and too hard to be easy; you have no control over your left virtual hand that is always artificially attached to your weapon, creating some immersion issues; some maps have not been designed well; many features are still missing at launch; etc…
Also the graphics on Rift is very similar to the experience you have on Quest. This game has clearly been designed for Quest, and so even on PC it doesn’t have a fantastic graphic. This is a proof that my concerns about Quest killing PC VR quality were founded.
Notwithstanding all its little issues, many players are having fun with it and appreciating the experience it offers. Let’s hope that all the little issues will be solved in future updates. And especially let’s hope that this game will have enough online players in the next months.
More info (Road To VR impressions on Solaris)
More info (Upload VR impressions on Solaris)
More info (Upload VR’s review)
More info (Solaris on Quest vs Rift)
Microsoft has acquired Zenimax for $7.5B
In-between the console wars, Microsoft has bought Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax, for $7.5B. This gives Microsoft complete control of popular game franchises like Skyrim, Fallout, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, etc…
This news is a complete bomb in the gaming industry and the long term consequences are not predictable. Will this mean that all future Bethesda’s titles will be exclusive to Xbox and never land on PlayStation? We don’t know yet.
For us VR enthusiasts, the news is intriguing because some of these games already have a VR porting (Skyrim, Fallout) and others would be great with it. Microsoft has not announced a VR headset for the Xbox, but could it be interested in creating more VR games for PC? And again, will these games support the new PSVR2 headset?
The good news is that John Carmack has expressed appreciation for the news, and said that he has good relationships with Microsoft, so he’s evaluating working again on some of his previous titles, maybe on a VR version… (Quake VR incoming? Let’s dream!)
More info (Microsoft acquiring Zenimax)
More info (John Carmack commenting the news)
News worth a mention
Facebook acquires Lemnis Technologies
Facebook has acquired the startup Lemnis Technologies for an undisclosed amount. The operation has happened very silently and now the former CEO of Lemnis is working at Facebook Reality Labs. The news is interesting because Lemnis was working on Varifocal technologies through the use of optics employed the Alvarez Lens Design. This confirms the interest of Facebook in solving the vergence-accommodation problem in its next headset.
HP Reverb G2 is shipping in November
HP announced that its upcoming Reverb G2 headset will begin shipping in “early November” to those who pre-ordered it online and that new orders starting this week will ship from December. It is a bit later than expected, but it is cool that this great headset is finally coming!
Shadow Creator teases new AR headset
Shadow Creator, one of the best AR/VR manufacturer in China, has teased at AWE Asia its new upcoming AR headset. From the trailer video, it seems a pair of lightweight AR glasses with 6DOF tracking, and two 6DOF controllers. In the demo, it seems that the glasses are wirelessly connected to a computational box that has a display on it, and they let you put in the world around you many 2D screens where you want them to be. For sure I’m curious to know more about them.
Look this interesting AR experiment
On Twitter I’ve found an amazing experiment done with ARKit where the creator has created an AR instant replay machine, that lets you record the movements of some 3D objects in front of you and then re-see the action forward and backwards from all the points of view. It is very rough, but it looks incredible.
RTX30 graphics cards have stability issues
The launch of the RTX30 graphics cards has been taunted by various issues. Not only it was almost impossible to buy them because the automated bots of the scalpers bought them all in the first seconds, but also they have been found to be a bit unstable. It seems that NVIDIA shared the actual design of the cards to 3rd party OEMs too late, and so these have been implemented with cheap or wrong capacitors, that mine the quality and the stability of the whole design. Not a good commercial for the American company…
(Thanks Rob Cole for the tip!)
More info (Technical analysis of the issue)
More info (More technical details on the electronics of the cards)
Festivals want to build their VR platform
The curator of Venice VR Michel Reilhac has said in an interview with VRrOOm that he and the curators of the other festivals are thinking about creating a platform (that is, a store, I guess) dedicated only to showcasing the virtual experiences selected for the worldwide VR festivals. From one side I like the idea, so everyone can enjoy at home these amazing VR experiences, on the other side, I wonder if we really need another store.
Oculus Developer Hub is a great utility for VR developers
Oculus is working hard to improve the user experience not only of its players but also of its developers. The new release of the Oculus Developer Hub goes exactly in this sense. It is a series of tools to make the life of Oculus Quest developers easier, with drag-and-drop install of APKs, mirroring of Quest to PC, and many other facilities that we all will love.
Magic Leap may partner with AWS
In an article on Bloomberg that analyzes the failure of Magic Leap, it is cited a rumor that says that Magic Leap may partner with Amazon so that to exploit its famous Amazon Web Services. Magic Leap has always had big problems in competing with HoloLens on the enterprise side also because HoloLens is backed by the amazing Azure cloud services, while Magic Leap has no infrastructure. This partnership with AWS would be a great idea to favor the business use of Magic Leap 1.
Nreal may launch in Europe next year
Covid has hurt all companies, included the Chinese AR manufacturer Nreal. In a tweet the company says that its glasses, already released in Korea, may not arrive in Europe until next year. We European still have to wait… (as always)
Viveport turns 4 and gifts The Walking Dead
The Viveport store turns 4 years old and to celebrate it offers some discounts, plus a free copy of The Walking Dead: Saint And Sinners to whoever subscribes to Viveport Infinity!
Facebook releases FrankMocap
Facebook Research has just released FrankMocap, an opensource ML project that lets you track the full body and the hands pose from just a single point of view. The goal of the project is to “democratize the 3D human pose estimation technology, enabling anyone (researchers, engineers, developers, artists, and others) to easily obtain 3D motion capture outputs from videos and images.”
Some news on content
- Minecraft has been released for PSVR;
- We Live Here is a very interesting storytelling experience about homeless people;
- Frostpoint is a multiplayer shooter with a very interesting Play-To-Buy model. Since the big issue of multiplayer VR games is the lack of players, the developers give the game for free to players that guarantee to play the game many times each month. This way they hope to have a basis of expert players that are available for each match;
- Camp Marshmallow is a dark and fun indie experience that you can find on SideQuest;
- Alvo seems an amazing shooter from the trailer.
More info (Minecraft)
More info (We Live Here)
More info (Frostpoint)
More info (Camp Marshmallow)
More info (Alvo)
News from partners (and friends)
Facebook has just copied the idea of YUR and implemented it inside the Oculus Quest. But the YUR guys are not surrendering and they have just created a fitness AR game for smartphones! I think it is still pretty rough, but the idea is interesting. I really invite you to check it out and to support these smart guys and gals!
The Week in XR by Charlie Fink and Michael Eichenseer is one of my favorite AR/VR weekly roundups out there. Since some weeks, it has also become an amazing podcast by Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz (from Paramount) that you can enjoy on Youtube, Spotify, and other platforms! It’s super-interesting and I really advise you to check it out!
(And yes, I’m advertising a competitor: Charlie is a great journalist and he’s doing a great job for this community, so he deserves all my appreciation and support! I think this is the right attitude we all should have in the VR community)
Learn more (Latest Week in XR)
Learn more (Links to latest podcasts)
Some XR fun
AR on toilets is pretty disturbing
Prepare to see a lot of Quest 2 boxes after October, 13th…
Thanks to my new supporters!
Every week new Patrons join The Ghost Howls gang, to support the hard work I’m doing in informing the AR VR community. Let me shout a big thank you to Jeff Dawson and Juan Sutelo that are the ones that have joined this group this week!
And of course let me also thank all the others that make my work possible:
- 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
- Jeff Dawson
- Juan Sotelo
- Sb
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
- Liam James O’Malley
- Paul Reynolds
- Matias Nassi
But it is not enough. Join you as well to let me keep this website up and running with high-quality posts!
(Header image by Facebook)