The XR Week Peek (2020.11.02): PSVR likely not to come in 2021, new info revealed on Decagear, and more!
I hope you all that celebrate Halloween had a nice time celebrating this holiday! And don’t worry, your favorite ghost will keep haunting you with VR news all over the year, not only during Halloween!
Top news of the week
PSVR 2 is probably coming in 2022 and with a slow transition
I admit that this news caught me a bit off guard. I was expecting a PSVR 2 launch in 2021, but then suddenly Jim Ryan in an interview with The Washington Post has commented on VR with these exact words:
PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that.
I personally agree with what he says: notwithstanding the positive trend of VR, the ecosystem has still to grow before it enters the mainstream with the same power of a flat-screen console. What worries me (and all of us) is that usually companies talk about what they themselves are doing, and if Sony doesn’t believe that next year VR will be a meaningful component of interactive entertainment, it is probable that this means that next year they won’t ship the PSVR 2. This is coherent also with the fact that Sony didn’t want to launch the PS5 and PSVR2 together, but we hoped for a shorter delay between one and the other.
So, PSVR2 probably won’t launch before 2022: Sony can afford that also because it has no competition in the console VR space, so there is no need to rush. The good news is that they say they are still highly committed to VR, but the bad news is that times are longer than we expected. And the transition to PS5 without a transition to a PSVR2 is already creating some confusion: some games like Hitman 3 or No Man’s Sky do not work with PSVR in their PS5 version (you have to use the PS4 version). The old PSVR headset (still supported by PS5) doesn’t work with the new PS5 with the new PlayStation Camera, but you have to use the old PlayStation Camera with an adapter that you must request on Sony’s website (and that will be shipped for free, though).
This transition seems a huge mess to me, and it is not positive for the experience of PSVR users. I speculate that Sony is taking its time also because the PSVR2 will be hugely different from PSVR and the systems are highly incompatible from many sides, so the transition isn’t easy. But this anyway will take back some users from VR and will make others switch to other systems like the Quest 2.
Anyway, for sure, PSVR 2, when it will be released, will be cool. There are the first unboxing and impressions on PS5 and its gamepad, the DualSense, and they are positive. Especially the DualSense is an amazing piece of tech, with very stable IMUs and haptic sensations that increase a lot the “immersion” in the games: they can provide you the sensation of resistance, of textures of materials, of movements. All the reviewers are amazed. These advanced haptics make us dream of PSVR 2 controllers with best-in-class immersive haptics… but we have to still wait various months before discovering if this is the truth.
More info (PIayStation CEO on the future of VR)
More info (PS5 Unboxing)
More info (DualSense review on Road To VR)
More info (DualSense review on Upload VR)
More info (Video showing the IMU of DualSense)
More info (How to request PS Camera Adapter for PSVR)
More info (First pictures of the Camera Adapter)
More info (Compatibility issues of PSVR games on PS5)
Other relevant news
We have news on the DecaGear headset, but it still doesn’t convince me
After the surprising announcement of last week, this week many journalists made their best to have more info on the interesting DecaGear headset, which promises very high-quality PC VR for only $450.
What the DecaGear promises is astonishing. Just to tell some features:
- 2 displays
- 2160 * 2160 per display
- 90hz
- Full IPD Adjustment
- 114° FOV
- Custom lenses (working on an Index-like design to reach 120° FOV)
- Facial tracking
- Full-fingers tracking controllers
- Integrated Wi-fi 6 for wireless mode
- Integrated audio
- Pupil tracking (but not eye-tracking)
- Hip tracking with dedicated add-on
- Full-fledged SDK
- Software management to let people seamlessly launch games and in the meanwhile communicate with their friends
All of this for $450 and free shipping. Coming in May 2021, with first units sents to reviewers in January 2021, because the product is almost ready.
Thanks to Sebastian Ang of MRTV (one of my favorite VR YouTubers), everyone can now watch the CEO and CTO of MegaDodo Simulation Games (the company behind the project) talk about this new device, their company, and even showing a prototype. Many VR enthusiasts liked the interview because the two executives shared many insights, shared their vision, and were very frank. So after the video, many people said that they understood it is not a scam and proceeded to pay the $10 to reserve the headset.
Personally, I have to say that I’m not convinced at all even after the video. And I invite you all to not investing in this product until we have more reliable info about it. Let me briefly explain why:
- The $10 reservation is too little. And the fact that PayPal is not accepted is weird
- The fact that a company is not a scam doesn’t mean it is reliable. Pimax was not a scam, but its delivery was a disaster (even if the product, albeit messy, is not bad)
- The prototype was not on during the video
- They are promising too much (Positional tracking with four cameras, face tracking, a metaverse, an SDK, a super-high spec device, Index-like controllers) and they are a team of 20 people.
- EXECUTION IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR A COMPANY. Everyone can have an idea, everyone can make a prototype. But transforming that prototype into a product is a gigantic effort. The product must be polished (and polish takes an insane amount of time), certified (and this is expensive), shipped worldwide, and then you must guarantee post-sales assistance. How is this little company going to guarantee all of this? Remember also that they have promised lots of features, and all of them must be delivered well. There is no point if you have face tracking and it doesn’t work well… and the positional tracking alone is very difficult to provide well even for established companies (only Oculus’s one is very fluid)
- In the video they say confusing things like “R&D is cheap now” (really? Then why Magic Leap hasn’t delivered a solid product with 2B?) or “We’ll go to Kickstarter because is an opportunity every company should take” (No, every company has its own delivery model. And if you are already asking $10 for a product that is “almost ready” why should you also do a Kickstarter campaign??)
- They say that the headset is cheap because now the components are cheap. But doing an electronic device is not like buying fruit at the market: you don’t sum the prices of the components and you obtain the price of the device…
- They claim to have millions already invested from their own pockets (Well, in my pockets I have 20€… maybe I have the wrong trousers) but it is not clear at all how they plan on getting them back and have a viable business with super-cheap headsets… in a field like PC VR that is the least profitable at the moment.
- This company has no previous track with VR and includes no known expert on the matter
- The CEO has some shady moments in his past: it is cited inside the Panama Papers, and he sold a previous startup of his and his product is now used as adware/spyware.
I think that in the best case, they are some passionate guys that have made a prototype and think that they have a product… so in the best case, it will become a production nightmare with long delays and rising prices. The only way MegaDodo can deliver is that thanks to the hype they have created, they get something like $20M of investment and they hire people that can deliver. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but with the current information, I don’t trust they can provide what they promise, and you should be cautious as well.
At this point, some of you may tell me that I’m wrong and that I don’t trust a team of passionate developers and I only believe in big corporates. Well, no, it is that I’m an entrepreneur myself and know how things work in the business. Let me make an example with another company coming out of the blue some years ago: Varjo. Varjo exited stealth mode with an investment, a prototype that journalists have tried during a press conference, and announcing only one single technology (the double-displays stuff) for a device targeted at the enterprise (and so, little volumes at high prices, something manageable by a little company). Varjo has been very solid in all these years, and they are focusing on execution on a few new features for few headsets sold to few customers. And in any case, they still haven’t delivered on their initial promise of a moving retina display… because the prototypes for this technology are ready, but they are not good enough for a product (does it sound familiar to you?). This is how a solid company behaves. And it is the exact opposite approach of MegaDodo.
More info (More info on DecaGear — Road To VR)
More info (More info on DecaGear — Upload VR)
More info (Sebastian Ang’s interview with the DecaGear team)
More info (Main points of Sebastian’s interview)
The Quest 2 is selling well, but the debate on its privacy policies continue
In its quarterly earnings calls, Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the Quest 2 is selling very well and that its preorders were 5X the preorders of the original Quest. The news doesn’t surprise me, since the VR ecosystem is riper now, but the 5X factor is anyway impressive and I compliment Facebook for this. Zuck seems also very confident that in Q4, with the holiday season, the Quest will provide a good income to Facebook (still negligible if confronted with the ads business, though).
In the meanwhile, the community is still rioting about the Facebook login, and /r/Oculus should now be called /r/FacebookBannedMyAccount because this is the only topic people are talking about. As I reported last week, people are exploring class actions, or are switching to other devices, and I even found on Kotaku (a popular indie gaming magazine) a very angry article about this topic. Other magazines, like Road To VR, are instructing on how to maximize the privacy on your Quest, and Kent Bye has released an amazing podcast episode where he openly talks about privacy with a Facebook representative. This is what we need: a healthy dialogue about privacy with Facebook, to convince them to remove the mandatory Facebook login and let us decide exactly what data to share with them. At least we had a win this week: Facebook has announced that you can use 2 headsets with your same account at the same time without being banned.
Other community members have taken another root, and it has been officially confirmed that Quest 2 has been jailbroken, and some people have been able to use it without Facebook services. These people’s identity has been protected for obvious reasons and the announcement has come from the XRSI. This is good news, but first of all, for sure Facebook will fix the software issue in a future release, and then it is not clear without Facebook login, and hence the (Facebook) Oculus Store, what you can do with the device at the moment. Anyway, the message to Zuck has been sent.
More info (Quest 2 preorders being 5X the ones of the Quest)
More info (Multiple headsets for the same Facebook account allowed)
More info (How to protect your privacy on Quest)
More info (Kent Bye talking about privacy with Facebook)
More info (Oculus Quest 2 has been jailbroken)
OpenXR slowly increases its adoption
The OpenXR standard, that aims at standardizing virtual reality hardware and runtime is keeping improving, and in its latest release, it has added new features like experimental overlays and hand tracking extensions.
In the meanwhile, its adoption is getting better, too: the popular Unity game engine promises the first implementations of OpenXR for the end of the year with a complete implementation coming in 2021, and Microsoft has already completely switched to an OpenXR runtime. From now on, whoever intends to develop for products like HoloLens should use OpenXR: WinRT will be supported for backward compatibility, but it won’t implement the new features for the devices.
All these pieces of news make us think of a positive future for OpenXR.
More info (New features of OpenXR)
More info (OpenXR in Unity)
More info (OpenXR in Microsoft products)
AMD releases its new RX6 graphics cards
AMD today introduced the Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT graphics cards based on its latest RDNA 2 architecture. These graphics cards are poised to compete with the new NVIDIA RTX30 graphics cards. Price, release date, and features are well summarized in the table here below (courtesy of Road To VR):
Before we dive into details, here’s the release date, price, and basic specs of each card:
| RX 6900 XT | RX 6800 XT | RX 6800 | |
| Price | $1,000 | $650 | $580 |
| Release Date | December 8th, 2020 | November 18th, 2020 | |
| Compute Units | 80 | 72 | 60 |
| Game Clock (GHz) | 2.02 | 2.02 | 1.82 |
| Boost Clock (GHz) | 2.25 | 2.25 | 2.11 |
| Memory (GDDR6) | 16GB | ||
| Connectors | DisplayPort 1.4 w/ DSC*, HDMI 2.2 w/ VRR*, USB-C* | 2x DisplayPort 1.4 w/ DSC, 1x HDMI 2.2 w/ VRR, 1x USB-C | |
| * connector counts unspecified |
These new graphics cards are a good evolution of the previous models and are based on the new RDNA 2 architecture that brings with it many benefits. They also feature hardware acceleration for ray tracing, so that to compete with the famous RTX functionality of NVIDIA cards.
What is interesting (and a bit funny) is that AMD has integrated into these graphics cards the VirtualLink connector, the USB-C standard to easily connect VR headsets to PCs that sounded like a good idea many months ago and that already looks like abandonware. Let’s see if this will bring to a revival of the standard (I doubt so) or if AMD will look like the Internet Explorer of VR for having implemented it so late.
News worth a mention
SuperData predicts 3M Quest 2 sold in 2021
I know you all don’t like SuperData (someone of you has re-branded it as “SuperGuess”), but I think that while its insights are not perfect, they are anyway interesting.
Three things about their latest report caught my attention:
- They estimate that the Quest 2 will sell 3M units before the end of 2021. This is more in less in line with my gut forecast of 2–4M units sold and would represent double the sales of the Quest 1, so a good result actually.
- The Valve Index sold around 56K units in Q3, and its real issue is not the demand, but the supply for which Valve can’t keep the pace
- Half-Life Alyx has earned in less than a year more money than all PC VR games combined made in 2019. This makes you understand how this game has been disruptive for VR
Facebook announces new cloud gaming service
It is not a mystery that Facebook has a strong interest in gaming, and this week it has announced a new upcoming service for gamers. Facebook will have its own Cloud Gaming Service, entering so the field of the future of gaming where other companies like Google (Stadia!), NVIDIA, Sony, and others are experimenting. The boss of the project is Jason Rubin (I think you remember him) and they have already announced that this service will also be used for VR in the future. This is well in line with Facebook’s strategy of investing only in standalone headsets, that will need XR cloud streaming to provide compelling graphics.
A final thought: if they are working towards VR Cloud streaming, for sure they have also a solution for domestic streaming like Virtual Desktop… so all these arguments about Virtual Desktop making a better job than Facebook are not valid… and it confuses me even more on why they don’t distribute it.
DropLabs EP-01 are shoes that can improve your immersion
This week I have learned two new things: that there are out there shoes with speakers in their soles and that this kind of shoes can increase immersion for VR users. The Verge, in his reviews of Droplabs EP-01, highlights how the audio of the experience you are playing gets transformed into vibrations that you can feel on your sole of these smart shoes, and all of this increases the sense of presence. Try it to believe it 🙂
Lynx R1 and Reverb G2 are coming in December
It seems that it will be a very sweet Christmas for VR prosumers. HP has already started shipping its Reverb G2 headsets to its channel partners and so we can expect the sales starting soon. Who preordered the headset should receive it in the period November-December.
At the same time, another cool device, the Lynx R1, is coming soon and the startup has announced that it should ship the first batch in December this year. The headset has had another redesign and should feature some open-source software like the launcher and the possibility of creating some custom accessories.
More info (HP Reverb G2)
More info (Lynx R1)
Tilt Five secures $7.5M of investments
Tilt Five is one of the most intriguing AR startups in the market. It is currently focusing only on one niche market (board games), but it is doing it with a device that delivers the best AR possible for it. The lead of the company, Jeri Ellsworth, is a genius (you can read my interview with her to realize that), and I think that the whole team deserves the money that they have received. I can’t wait to see the future evolutions of this device.
Oculus Quest is putting pressure to the Chinese VR ecosystem
A very long and detailed article in the Chinese magazine Yivian examines the VR market worldwide with then a focus on China, and on how the Oculus Quest 2 is putting pressure on Chinese companies that can’t compete with its software ecosystem and cheap price. And considering that the Quest is blocked in China, this means that Chinese VR enthusiasts can’t buy an affordable VR product and this may limit the growth of consumer VR in China.
The journalist highlights that maybe one big Chinese corp like Tencent should enter the field and make huge investments (maybe helped by the govt) to be able to create a Chinese VR ecosystem that is comparable to the American one.
More info (Using Google Translate)
Oculus Touch protection systems are a thing
The first Oculus Touch controllers were almost indestructible, while all the subsequent models have been more fragile. Especially the tracking ring is prone to cracks when the controller falls to the floor or hits a wall.
Well, to solve this issue, some companies are offering aftermarket accessories that try to protect the external ring of the controllers without ruining the tracking. The last example of this is “VR The Hardcore” a product on Kickstarter that aims to protect your controllers from external hits.
More info (VR The Hardcore)
More info (Another protective accessory that actually looks like some kind of BDSM stuff…)
Steam Halloween Sales offers you discounted VR games
Get your wallet ready! Lord Gaben has started some Halloween sales on Steam and you can found some interesting VR titles at a good price! Even Half-Life: Alyx is 25% off!
Immersed lets you bring your keyboard in VR
Productivity tool Immersed, that simulates a virtual office you can enter in with your Quest, now lets you bring your physical keyboard in VR! But before you think about a real inclusion of your keyboard, I have to tell you that is a trick that lets you define where is your keyboard, so that the system can show you a virtual keyboard in that position in VR. When this trick works, it is good, and the founder of the company manages even to type 160words/min in this way.
More info (Keyboard support in Immersed)
More info (Fast typing in VR with Immersed)
Cloudhead Games launches its collaboration tool
Cloudhead Games is one of the most important VR studios and like all the other companies, it had to face the difficulties of working together during the pandemic. Since they are smart developers, they decided so to build their own collaborative tool that let them work together by staying at home, but keeping the same spirit of working in an office. The tool also supports VR, for when it is needed.
This application is currently in beta and given to selected testers (Cloudhead, please, select me!)
Some info on content
- YUR is finally available on Oculus Quest 2 via SideQuest to help everyone measure the calories he/she is spending in VR;
- Blair Witch: Quest Edition has been reviewed by Road To VR, which highlights that the atmosphere of the game is cool, but the execution of the rest is so-and-so;
- Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall is coming to PCVR and Quest next year;
- Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge is going to be a saga made by little episodes, and one of the will feature the beloved Master Yoda (with his original voice!)
More info (YUR)
More info (Blair Witch)
More info (Warhammer)
More info (Star Wars)
News from partners (and friends)
KLM is experimenting with VR training for pilots (as my friend Chris Koomen already detailed in my blog), and this is the first company I’m aware of that it using the Oculus Quest 2 For Business.
Learn more (Announcement)
Learn more (Photo of an Oculus Quest 2 For Business)
Some XR fun
VR is a green technology
The new game for binge drinking
The Index Controllers are the best to shoot in action games
Fantastic offering for the Quest 2! Wait, what?
AI will rule the world!
Also AI:
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(Header image by Sony)
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