The XR Week Peek (2020.12.21): Lenovo and NuEyes are releasing new AR glasses, and much more!
The Winter Holidays are near and I hope you’ll spend them with the people you love. I’ll have to work also during these Holidays because we’re organizing the VR concert of Jean-Michel Jarre for New Year’s Eve (please come and enjoy it with us!), but I hope that you at least can relax a bit.
I celebrate Christmas, and if you want to make me happy that day, you can make me the gift of a VR game, or you can make a donation on my Patreon page! I would really appreciate that 😉
Now let’s dig into the VR news, even if this week, as usual for the end of the year, nothing special has happened.
Top news of the week
Lenovo and NuEyes to launch AR glasses in 2021
While all are waiting for the amazing AR glasses that Facebook and Apple will release in the upcoming years, many other big companies and startups are trying to enter the same market, trying to earn some early market shares.
One of them is Lenovo, one of the most prolific (if not the most prolific) hardware company for what regards building AR and VR glasses, that according to some images leaked by the popular leaker WalkingCat is going to release new AR glasses, probably at CES. In the four leaked pictures, it is possible to speculate that these glasses are connected to a computing unit like the Nreal glasses, but they feature waveguide optics, that offer better visuals than the birdbath design used by the Chinese company. There are two tracking cameras and one RGB camera for environment understanding. The glasses are very lightweight: they have not a sexy design like Nreal Light, but they seem a very nice mix of HoloLens and Nreal dedicated to the enterprise sector. I can’t wait to discover more about them.
A company that instead has openly disclosed its plans is NuEyes. Historically dedicated to making XR glasses for the Healthcare niche, the Californian startup has decided to release general-purpose AR glasses that are very similar to the Nreal Light. The new NuEyes glasses come in three flavors (one with thermal vision so that you can see like Predator) and you can already preorder them. Let me copy-paste the press-release that describes the three models perfectly:
The NuEyes Pro 3 Product Line delivers unparalleled clarity with 4K displays and a wide 51-degree field of view. This tethered solution weighs only 88g and comes in three versions. The first is tethered to a proprietary controller with dual 6DoF cameras and a forward-facing 20MP RGB Camera. Its robust SDK includes: SLAM, object, speech, and gesture recognition, as well as plane detection. The second version (Pro 3-C) boasts a 5MP RGB camera with a USB type C plug that easily connects to any smart device that renders video via a display port. The Pro 3 C connects and displays images in 2D and 3D on most Android phones and tablets, iPads, MacBook’s, and Microsoft’s Surface Book 2. The third version of the Pro 3 is geared around Thermal Imaging for enterprise needs. The NuEyes Pro 3 products will be available for sale beginning on Dec. 18, 2020, and will ship starting in late January.
The AR wars are ramping up, and with Facebook and Luxottica releasing a smart-glass in 2021, they will become even more fierce. Let me grab some virtual popcorns…
More info (Lenovo AR glasses)
More info (NuEyes AR glasses)
Other relevant news
Facebook has found a way to provide very robust hands tracking
A paper by FRL Research shows a new algorithm that Facebook has found to provide optimal bimanual hands tracking. The new algo is incredibly robust, and it can track the hands with high precision even in conditions of occlusion, self-occlusion, unusual poses, etc… Watching the accompanying video, it is possible to see that the hands are tracked correctly in many complicated conditions, like the hands with all the fingers crossing each other, and it provides a great improvement with regards to other similar papers already published.
It is amazing, but… we have to wait a bit before this could arrive on the Quest. The solution is already real-time, working at 30fps, but on an NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU (it is a powerful GPU for workstations) using the data of 124 4K cameras. So, we have just to wait that Facebook installs a big GPU and 124 cameras on the Quest 3 and we are done…
Jokes apart, this work is amazing, and starting from here, Facebook can work in simplifying and optimizing the algorithm to see if a solution with similar results can run on next-generation VR hardware. I hope so.
Virtual beings are on the rise
Virtual humans powered by AI are one of the big trends of the moment. We already have VTubers and virtual influencers (like Lil Miquela), but the future trend is having completely automated humans that can interact with all users as if they were real people. And this trend will be accelerated by the rise of AR and VR: works like Magic Leap’s Mica show how people would love to have an intelligent humanoid virtual assistant that is always there in every moment of their life.
This week, Fable Studio, the company behind Wolves In The Walls, has announced two new intelligent virtual beings that will be added to the already existing Lucy: Charlie and Beck. It is interesting that despite Lucy, that is the main character of a story and that lives in the time when the story is set, Charlie and Beck live in present times and they have both a story, a past, and a life in the present. For instance, Beck is an athlete that prepared for years for the Tokyo Olympics 2020 that have then been postponed to 2021 with much of her frustration. Fable has prepared a mix of custom AI + powerful GPT3 technology so that you can speak with them as if they were real humans, able to remember what you have already said, and able to carry on an interesting conversation even in topics that they don’t know. They already use social media that are more suitable to their story (e.g. Beck uses Strava, which is a social media for athletes) and can answer on those platforms as well. The idea of Fable Studio is creating virtual beings that are the closest possible to real people, and I’m fascinated by it. Charlie and Beck are currently in private beta, and you can sign up to be able to try them in the next months.
Sensorium Galaxy (one of the new social VR spaces for virtual concerts) is instead now working towards virtual DJs. It has partnered with musical AI company Mubert so that the platform can offer virtual dancefloors where people can have fun listening to the procedurally generated music of a virtual DJ. The DJ would be a digital avatar able to create music on the fly depending on the genre that the audience likes the most. This is a great idea to create virtual discotheques.
I want to close this chapter of the roundup by linking here below also an interesting article that talks about the reasons behind the success of the VTubers. VTubers are real people with digital avatars, so they are in the middle between real users and digital beings and they have a growing success, especially in the East of the world. According to the post, people like them because VTubers can be everything: they are not completely bound to the real world, so they have a kind of magic and can make people dream.
More info (Fable Studio’s new virtual beings)
More info (Sensorium’s virtual DJs)
More info (The reasons behind the success of VTubers)
HTC is going to deprecate Vive Pro and Vive Pro Eye
According to German publication Mixed, HTC is going to drop support for its enterprise headsets Vive Pro and Vive Pro Eye.
It seems that HTC is going to implement compatibility to OpenXR in the runtime of its headsets (and this is an amazing thing), but that it is going to do this only for the Vive Cosmos and the Vive Focus lines. The Vive Pro and all its variant (Eye, Secure, etc…) will just stay with the current runtime, and they will keep working with that, which won’t be ported to OpenXR. This means that if you own the devices, you can still use them, and HTC will still guarantee support for them, but it won’t provide any new substantial updates to the runtime and especially it won’t be ported to OpenXR. HTC is so guaranteeing continuity while deprecating the headsets.
It seems so that for 2021, HTC is betting only on the Cosmos and Focus lines. Or maybe there will be a new line coming… during Virtual Reality Day, we got to know that a new HTC device is coming soon in 2021…
More info (Use Google Translate)
News worth a mention
Half-Life: Alyx gets selected as Gamespot’s Game Of The Year
Half-Life: Alyx is a title that has done a lot for VR: it has given the technology a lot of visibility and has also drawn many new users into the ecosystem. We owe a lot to it. And now, there is even a new important accolade for it. For the first time in its history, Gamespot has selected a VR game for its Game Of The Year Award, and that game is indeed Alyx.
VR still a long road in front of it before becoming mainstream, but these little wins show how that road will lead to the success of the technology.
Ready Player Two may become a movie, too
In a recent interview, Ernest Cline has stated that most probably Ready Player Two will become a movie as well, like the first chapter of the saga. He says that the project is still in the early stages because of the confused situation in Hollywood due to the covid, but he’s confident that it will come out. I personally hope it will be better than the first one.
Oculus is shipping again the Elite Straps
Some weeks ago, Facebook suspended the sales of the Elite Straps for the Oculus Quest 2 because of a manufacturing issue that made the accessory to crack for some users. After the issue has been identified and solved, now the Elite Straps are back to the shop, and Facebook is even offering a two-year warranty to anyone that buys them. I think that Facebook has handled this situation very well, and I compliment them for this.
Microsoft Flight Simulator comes to VR
Mark the day on the calendar: on December, 22nd Microsoft Flight Simulator is going to get an update that, along with real-time ice and snow, will finally add VR support. The support will regard all OpenXR-compatible PC headsets, which includes devices such as Valve Index, Oculus Rift S, Windows MR headsets like HP Reverb G2, and Oculus Quest with Link. Unluckily it seems that at launch, VR controllers won’t be supported, and the users will have to use HOTAS or mouse+keyboard, but I’m sure this will be fixed in a future update.
I’m sure that Flight Simulator will be stunning in VR and many people are going to share the videos of their experience tomorrow.
More info (Microsoft Flight Simulator to get VR support)
More info (Ice and Snow in the new update)
Some news on content
- Synth Riders is going to release a new music pack with tracks from The Muse, plus some new bonuses for the Multiplayer matches;
- Jurassic World Aftermath is out on Quest, and a DLC will come in 2021;
- We have a gameplay video of The Wizards: Dark Times for Quest;
- Resolutions Games’s one-vs-one action game Blaston has been released for PC VR;
- Five Nights At Freddy’s releases its first DLC for Quest;
- Ven VR Adventure is out now for Oculus Rift, and Upload VR has reviewed it. According to the article, it is a nice game, but needs some better balancing;
- Grapple Tournament is a very interesting multiplayer action game;
- Spatial launches its mobile version and it is now available both in 2D and AR mode on all smartphones!
More info (Synth Riders)
More info (Jurassic World: Aftermath)
More info (The Wizards: Dark Times)
More info (Blaston)
More info (FNAF)
More info (Ven VR Adventure)
More info (Grapple Tournament)
More info (Spatial)
News from partners (and friends)
My friends at Happy Giant have unveiled around 6 minutes of “Sam & Max: This time is virtual” at Upload VR’s Winter Show. I was a big fan of LucasArts’s point-and-click adventures, and I really can’t wait for this VR experience to come out… I’ve been told is very funny!
Some XR fun
We don’t know kung fu, but we know de wei
Zuck, is that you?
This is how people in the past predicted 2020 to be. But… where is the corona?
Can you make me a Christmas gift?
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(Header image leaked by WalkingCat)
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