The XR Week Peek (2020.10.09): All about the Quest 2 launch and much more!
This has been the week of the launch of the Oculus Quest 2, and this event has been so big that basically, it will take half of this roundup to describe. There are so many pieces of news about it that today’s newsletter could have been called the Quest 2 Week Peek :). Jokes apart, the launch of Quest 2 can be so important for VR that is necessary that I tell you everything I have learned about it this week.
So, let’s dive together into Zuck’s sea…
Top news of the week
Facebook releases the Oculus Quest 2
After one month from its official announcement, Facebook has released the Oculus Quest 2, that from the 13th of this month can be purchased online on the Oculus Store or on official resellers (like Amazon) or offline on partner stores (like Best Buy). The headset can be bought in many countries worldwide for $299 for the 64GB version and $399 for the 256GB version. The enterprise version costs $799.
I have received it and I have reviewed it. I think that while it is not perfect, it is a very good device, and the resolution and computational power bump is so big if compared to the Oculus Quest 1. The Facebook login is a big issue (more on this later on) but on all the other side, this device is very solid. I’ll link my full review here below so that you can get to know better this device.
The fact that it costs so little and has so good content will make it start competing with the traditional consoles, and in my opinion, this device will start entering the mainstream (but it won’t conquer it yet). It can be an important milestone for VR. Good job, Zuck.
More info (Official launch post)
More info (How to buy the Quest 2)
More info (My review of the Quest 2)
More info (Ben Lang’s review of the Quest 2)
More info (Ben Lang’s review of the accessories of the Quest 2)
Other relevant news
Cool info about the Quest 2
After the launch of the Quest 2, we got some interesting info about it:
- To send the Quest 2 to selected developers and partners, Facebook used a box where the Quest 2 was depicted as a steaming iron called Slucou Armiarm (an anagram of Oculus Miramar). It is a pretty funny hack that prevented unwanted people from taking a peek into the box and leak what the device would have been;
- Twitter user GOROman has already disassembled the Quest. It is impressive how much electronics are packed in a so little space;
- Some games have already started updating for the Quest 2. Superhot, Red Matter, Walt of the Wizard, Rec Room, and many others are starting creating specific versions of the applications that improve the graphics or add new game modes only for the Quest 2. I think this trend will continue and probably in 12 months the support for the Quest 1 will be dropped by many games: the jump in computational power is so big that keeping Quest 1 compatibility would require too much effort for the developers;
- Facebook has clarified that the new Oculus Link will keep the compatibility with SteamVR. A pretty obvious decision, given the fact that VR people want to play games like Half-Life: Alyx;
- Go support has been dropped from the Quest 2. Even if with the Quest 1 was possible to play Oculus Go games, this support has been abandoned on the Quest 2. There is only one headset now for Facebook, and that one is the Quest 2. All the other ones are abandonware.
More info (Oculus Quest 2 decoy box)
More info (Oculus Quest 2 teardown)
More info (Rec Room improved for the Quest 2)
More info (In Death: Unchained improved for the Quest 2)
More info (All games improved for the Quest 2)
More info (Link will still work with Steam)
More info (Go apps support dropped)
The debate on the Facebook login continues
Almost no one likes Facebook: its contribution has surely been important for the development of VR, but the community doesn’t forget its shady practices around privacy. And for this reason, the Facebook login policy is continuing to create turmoil in the VR ecosystem… and after the launch of the Quest 2, things are actually even worse.
It has in fact happened that many people have found their Facebook account blocked or suspended after they have merged it with their Oculus account. These were all people that tried to create a new Facebook account or that revived an old Facebook account. Facebook AI identified this behavior as suspect and so blocked the Facebook account of these users. The result is that these people can’t use the Quest 2, and can’t even have access to their games because the two accounts are now merged. They are not a few cases: the whole /r/oculus subreddit is full of posts of people angry as hell for this. I think that Facebook has been pretty reckless: the community already hated the decision of a mandatory Facebook login… now everyone hates it even more.
Boz (one of the big bosses of XR at Facebook) has answered an AMA on Instagram that he’s sorry about this and he advises everyone to check that the Facebook account is healthy before merging it with the Oculus one. A wise piece of advice: I have creat…a-ehm checked my Facebook account some days before the Quest 2 arrived and I have checked day by day that it was kept alive before merging it with my Oculus account.
Some people have started thinking about a class action against Facebook. But Cix Liv from YUR reminded me that Facebook TOS clearly states that if you agree with them, you’ll never file a class action against Facebook. I don’t know if such a clause is valid in my country, but for sure it is a well-played move by Zuck and the other sith in Palo Alto.
Talking about the TOS, Facebook has published its new “code of conducts” for VR that prohibits you from harass people and doing sexual gestures in VR. The problem of these terms is that what is considered “harassing” depends on the group of people you are in: with some of my friends I can talk about kinky things for hours, with some other people I have to be more formal. It is all a matter of calibration, a calibration that doesn’t seem allowed by the TOS. It is like Facebook wants to impose its corporate’s plastic view of a safe life everywhere in the metaverse, and what is also more worrisome is that if you violates these conditions, your account gets banned or suspended, meaning you can’t use anymore the headset you have paid to own. I don’t think this is acceptable…
Some others have taken other initiatives to fight the power of the Zuck: a WebXR dev has offered $5000 to whoever can jailbreak the Quest 2, and Palmer Luckey has offered another $5000 of his for the same purpose. I have also added a coffee to the offering. After some days, it seems that someone has actually managed to do it, but some security experts are still verifying this claim. Jailbreaking would mean having root access (that is godlike access) to the Quest 2, letting us modify its runtime as we want, stripping away Facebook telemetry services, removing Facebook login, enabling cameras, and do almost whatever we want with it. But even if that happens, nothing will change: Facebook will surely issue a security patch soon after, and jailbreaking won’t be possible anymore (as it has already happened when someone managed to get root access to the Quest 1).
More info (People not able to use the Quest 2 anymore)
More info (Facebook answers about the blocked accounts)
More info (New Facebook policies prohibiting sexual gestures)
More info (Facebook TOS prohibiting class actions)
More info ($5000 bounty on the jailbreak of the Quest 2)
More info (Palmer Luckey’s additional $5000 bounty on the jailbreak of the Quest 2)
More info (Has Quest 2 been successfully rooted?)
Some pieces of advice for new Quest 2 owners
VR magazines have published this week many pieces of advice for new Quest 2 owners. They tell you what games to buy, how to customize your headset, what options to activate, and much more. I’ll link you some of them here below.
My favorite one? The hack through SideQuest that lets you already activate 90hz on all the apps of the device…
More info (Oculus Quest 2 tips & tricks)
More info (How to activate 90Hz)
More info (Top 15 free apps to download on Quest 2)
More info (The best paid games and apps to download on Quest 2)
The Quest 2 launch has been very positive
At this point, you may wonder how many devices have Facebook actually sold. Well, as it is a tradition of the last 8 years, no one is going to tell us. But we have strong signs that the launch has been pretty solid.
We can understand this from the data of the sales of the games on the Quest store. Many developers have detected a huge spike in sales on the 13th of this month. For instance, Rec Room has had the launch day of the Quest 2 2.5x more sales that on the launch day of the Quest 1. Cloudhead Games has reported even a 10x the sales than the day before for Pistol Whip. And even more, Half-Life: Alyx has returned now in the top 10 of the most sold games on Steam. These are all signs of a strong launch.
This is amazing news, it is a great day for VR and this means that Quest 2 will bring many more people to VR. But don’t get fooled by the launch day numbers, they are only one part of the game. It is “easy” to create hype and get preorders and many sales on the first day: Even the Magic Leap One had a very strong first day, and the community was flooded with pictures of people donning the device… but in the end, it was a huge flop. What is difficult is keeping the sales number high all the time, and this requires a good production pipeline from Oculus (so no more backorders), and also a huge marketing effort.
In my opinion, the Quest 2 will sell 2–4M of units the first year, the double of what I forecasted for the Quest 1. They could be even more if average consumers start buying it… but the mainstream public is highly unpredictable. Remember that the game of the year is a silly game made by a small indie studio (yes, I’m talking about Among Us) and not all the big expensive games made by AAA corporates. So it is quite unpredictable to foresee how much the Quest 2 will appeal to the mainstream audience… for now, let’s just enjoy the positive launch day.
More info (Rec Room on Quest 2 launch)
More info (Cloudhead Games on Quest 2 launch)
More info (All developers talking on Quest 2 launch)
More info (Half-Life: Alyx is back to SteamVR Top 10)
Apple launches iPhone 12, Pro models have Lidar sensor
While the VR community was excited for the launch of the Quest 2, the mainstream audience was all focused on the Apple event where Tim Apple launched the new iPhone 12, that comes in many flavors, but in all of them is very similar to the iPhone 11 😀
Apart from the scam, ehm, the innovation of having removed the charger to save money, ehm, to help the environment, Apple has added 5G compatibility to all models, and the Lidar sensor to the back of the iPhone 12 Pro models.
Lidar is a depth sensor, and it will be important because it helps in creating instant AR (because thanks to this sensor the device can orient itself in istants), have more stable holograms, improve interactions between real and virtual elements, and favor object detection and environment scanning. It means that it can be very useful for AR, and in fact, Snapchat has already released a dedicated filter that exploits its capabilities. Its only problem is that being available only on Pro models, most iPhone owners won’t have it, and so the market for Lidar-oriented software is still niche and not so interesting for developers.
But if Apple won’t abandon the project as Google did with Tango, and if companies like Samsung will start copying Apple (as it seems) in some years we could all have better phone-based augmented reality and 3D scanning may become a commodity.
More info (Apple’s newly launched phones)
More info (Apple adding Lidar to new IPhone 12 Pro models)
More info (Snapchat exploits Lidar in new filter)
More info (What is Lidar and how can it be so cheap on phones)
News worth a mention
Anonymization in VR is hard to obtain
A research published on Nature casts new shadows on privacy in VR. Researchers have been able to recognize a person with a 95% accuracy out of a group of 500 just by analyzing the movements inside the headset. It seems that how we move in VR is like a fingerprint of us and so an ML system can easily classify users even from anonymized data. This means that in-private browsing in VR and other similar hacks have no sense because you could be identified the same.
Companies like HTC and Facebook have TOS that allows for the gathering of anonymized data. We thought this could be a safe thing, but while it is for desktop PCs, this doesn’t hold to be true for VR anymore.
Lucas Rizzotto has made another awesome video of his
VR professional Lucas Rizzotto has published another amazing video on Youtube where he shows a quarantine project that he did to see in AR his friend Aidan Wolf who lives on the other coast of the US. The video is funny, informative, and inspiring, and I highly suggest you watch it. Thank me later.
Foxconn is building its own smartglasses
Foxconn is one of the biggest electronics manufacturers and according to a report, it is building its AR smartglasses aiming at launching them in 2022. We have no details on this, apart from the fact that the company is aiming at using microLEDs, and the news hasn’t been officially confirmed, but if such a big company is working on AR, we should all keep an eye on it.
UWB may be a new useful tech for smartphones
Ultra-WideBand (UWB) wireless technology is one of the latest innovations for mobile phones. It is already being adopted by Apple and Samsung and it works more or less like an indoor GPS, where you can locate some gadgets from your phone by using this radio communication protocol. For XR, this means that you could put some UWB tags on your desk and your keyboard, and when you are in AR/VR, the system knows exactly where they are and let you interact with them in XR. It is a pretty new technology, and it is not sure that it will be useful, but it’s worth noting that it has potential.
New research lets you track face expressions from the ears
A new interesting research paper shows how it is possible to track successfully the facial expression of one person from two tiny cameras located near his/her ears. Many people already wear wireless earbuds every time and two cameras installed there could use what they see, together with some ML magic, to infer the facial expression of the user.
This is a fantastic approach: first of all, it doesn’t need you to have a camera in front of you to be tracked, and this solution works everywhere in full portability. And then it has also the amazing advantage that it works even if you wear a mask because of the pandemic.
A new discovery may help in building believable VR haptics for the future
A team, led by researchers at the University of Birmingham, used Rayleigh waves to create the first scaling law for touch sensitivity. Rayleigh waves are usually employed in relation to earthquakes, but scientists have discovered that they are also the main component of our touch sensations. And interestingly enough, that the touch sensations of all mammals share this common trait.
This new research may lead to a better emulation of virtual haptics in the future.
More info (Official video explaining the findings)
More info (Article explaining the findings)
AR increments the engagement and sales of e-commerce items
These days I have read many posts claiming that adding an AR mode to e-commerce applications increments the engagement and also increases the sales of the products. For instance, Shopify has announced one month ago that “Interactions with products having 3D/AR content showed a 94% higher conversion rate than for products without AR/3D”. I’m linking just one post about this claim, but actually, I have found many of them. It seems that AR has the power to boost sales.
Someone has lived one day in 3rd person
Have your ever thought living your life in 3rd person like when you played Max Payne? Well, one German guy did it…
“To Miss The Ending” wins an award at LFF
VR Movie “To Miss The Ending” has just won the Immersive Prize at the London Film Festival expanded. It is a very intriguing story that talks about people that to run away from the craziness of our times decide to upload their consciousness to a digital metaverse to start life anew. The story makes you think about common VR themes like privacy, virtual identity and the question of what is real and what is not.
Some news on content
- Beat Saber multiplayer is now finally available;
- Horror Bar is like Overcooked, but with a funny horror twist;
- Blaston is one of the most interesting games out now, and it lets you have shooting duels against other VR players;
- Ready At Dawn is still working on Lone Echo 2, but a release date is still uncertain. In the meanwhile, Nathie has shared a preview of the game;
- Some people are already playing Mario Kart in AR… and cats in the home of Japanese people are already confused about it;
- Panoptic is a very nice asymmetric multiplayer VR game.
More info (Beat Saber)
More info (Horror Bar)
More info (Blaston)
More info (Update on Lone Echo 2)
More info (Lone Echo 2 preview)
More info (Mario Kart AR / 1)
More info (Mario Kart AR / 2)
More info (Panoptic)
News from partners (and friends)
Stereopsia, a small but very well organized European event about AR/VR this year goes virtual! You can follow the very interesting talks and have networking with cool people from the XR ecosystem by staying in the comfort of your home. A new special VR environment will let you enjoy the event as if you were there. Last year I have been a speaker there and I have really appreciated it.
Discover more about Stereopsia and register by following the link here below!
VR professional and community member Mohamed Sangaré is organizing for the end of the month a very interesting event starring high-profile VR speakers like Tom Furness and also some random VR guys like me :). It is called Dimensions XR 2020 and it will all be held digitally. I love how the organizers have called speakers from all over the world and I’m sure it will be awesome.
HTC is launching its enterprise-level spatial collaboration XR Suite on 10/20 at 1am GMT. Integrating great XR apps in their vertical to do events, work, play and experience art in an immersive, interactive, and collaborative way, the XR Suite aims at being the best tool to connect with other people remotely.
You can register now and join the launch for free on any device following this link.
Some XR fun
Share your faces wearing your VR headsets and tag me!
How many headsets can you wear on your face at the same time?
How Facebook behaves with the VR community
Damo 9000 has just published a new satyrical magazine on the Quest 2 launch!
What has happened too many times in merging the Oculus and Facebook account.
/r/Oculus subreddit in the last days
This is a REAL Beat Saber Mod. OMG.
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