The XR Week Peek (2020.12.28): Flight Simulator VR released, a new hack lets you use Quest without Facebook, and more!
Happy Holidays, my dear AR/VR community!
Even if these should be holidays, my will to inform you is not in vacation, so here you are my roundup of the best AR/VR news for this week.
It is the final newsletter of the year, so… see you in 2021, a new year that I hope will be filled with many interesting news about immersive realities! 😉
Top news of the week
Microsoft Flight Simulator releases VR patch
The time has come: one of the most awaited VR games of the year (or better, one of the most awaited VR modes of a 2D game) has been released. Microsoft Flight Simulator is now compatible with VR headsets: not only the HP Reverb G2 as initially teased but all the headsets that are compatible with OpenXR, so basically all the most famous devices. Asobo and Microsoft have worked hard for this and on 22nd, the VR patch has been released.
This was one of the most awaited VR modes because Flight Simulator is a very famous game, and in this edition, there is a very special representation of the surroundings around you. The 3D maps of the terrain below you are very accurate, and people can so see in VR a realistic view of the cities from the above, and this is breathtaking scenery in virtual reality.
But, hey, this is 2020… could this launch be perfect? Of course, no. It turns out that Flight Simulator hasn’t been much optimized for VR, and the result is that many people are having terrible performances. Some Redditors have choppy visuals even with an RTX30 graphic card. So, it’s better to wait for some patches before buying it… like many of the other games that have been rushed for a Holiday release (Cyberpunk, Medal Of Honor, I’m talking about you).
More info (Microsoft Flight Simulator is now compatible with VR)
More info (Performance issues of the game)
Other relevant news
There can be a way of using the Quest 2 without a Facebook account
Yesterday I was hanging around on Reddit, where I found a video getting very little attention, but with very interesting content: it talked about how to use the Quest 2 without having a Facebook account. I thought it was a click-bait title (it had very few upvotes, in the end), but watching it I realized that it was actually made in a very serious and reliable way.
The method has been developed by Redditor Tiger-Hobbes and shared by Youtuber “No Borscht For You”. It consists of you using just an Oculus account (even a new developer one) without an associated Facebook account and using an old version of the Oculus companion app on your phone that sees your Quest 2 as an old plain Quest. Using this trick, you can use the Quest 2 and its store without the need of having a personal Facebook account.
Of course, there are some caveats: doing like that you lose all social features of the Quest, you lose the casting to your phone and you may have some quirks here and there. But the advantage is that you can play all the games of the Oculus Store and from Sidequest without Zuck watching you.
If this method becomes popular, Facebook could patch the Quest runtime to block it. But for now, it is free real estate. Use it at your own risk.
The Lynx R1 has been delayed (again)
The Lynx R1 is a mixed reality headset we are all curious about. It has been the first device powered by an XR2 chipset that has been announced, it supports both AR and VR and it has a very special lens design, that makes it pretty unique in its genre. The device should have been released in half 2020, then because of the pandemic it has been delayed various times, and in the end, it should have been shipped in December.
But December is here and no one has got its Lynx headset. It turns out that it has been delayed again since the company is not satisfied with the quality of the hands tracking offered by the currently-used tracking cameras. The Lynx will ship with hands tracking as the primary interaction method, so high-quality hands tracking is crucial for this headset.
The delay appears justified, but it means that we’ll still need other weeks before being able to put our hands (pun intended) on the device.
Meet Tooz, a new AR glass
Tooz is a joint venture between two very big companies: Zeiss, that has a big expertise in optics and glasses, and Deutsche Telekom, that is one of the most important telco company in Europe. They have created this reference design of a smart-glass that is very lightweight and fashionable. Of course, it works by being connected to the phone via USB.
The Tooz Devkit 20, the first product of this joint venture, looks like North Focals and is a smart-glass that can already be purchased in China, with expected shipping in Q1 2021. Some of its features are:
- Curved, free-form surface, non-diffractive waveguide
- 20° field of view
- Full-color RGB OLED display
- 400 x 640 pixel portrait resolution
- Adjustable brightness
- Integrated hinge with switch function
The price for this devkit (that has a companion SDK) is 3900 Yuan, which is more or less $600. The features are not impressive, but considering the companies behind it, it could be interesting to keep an eye on this brand for the future.
(Thanks to Chris M for the tip!)
More info (Launch blog post)
More info (Tooz Devkit 20 product page)
More info (Tooz website in English)
News worth a mention
Google lets now everyone contribute to StreetView
If you have an ARCore-powered Android device, you can now contribute to Google StreetView. By just filming your surroundings with your phone, Google will re-create a representation of the environment around you made by multiple photos that are somewhat comparable to the one of the official StreetView. Of course, the quality will be much worse, but they will be usable by the people needing to know how are the surroundings in that position.
This is important especially for all the places where official StreetView cars are not going and I think it is overly interesting because it makes me immediately think about the AR Cloud. AR Cloud means that all people with all their devices help in reconstructing the whole mesh of the world, and this crowd-managed version of StreetView seems to be the first step towards that.
Facebook is investigating the skin irritation caused by the Quest 2
According to an analysis performed by Facebook, it seems that the facemask of the Quest 2 causes skin irritation in a very limited portion of the population. Facebook still doesn’t know the reason (it may be the additives, the materials, etc…) but it is determined to find the cause and solve it even if it regards only 0.01% of the users. Kudos to them to care so much about this problem.
It seems that even flies have a VR setup better than mine
A very interesting research is being carried out at Yale University: a professor is trying to understand more about human vision by studying the vision of flies. It turns out that even if our eyes are so different from the ones of the flies, we have some common traits in how we perceive the environment around us.
To carry out this research, the researchers have built a mini VR setup for flies, with a mini treadmill and a projection of a virtual environment around them. It turns out that flies have a VR setup better than mine.
Virtual Reality may affect the own perception of gender
A new study published in Nature highlights how entering a different body in virtual reality and experiencing it with realistic sensations (e.g. haptics) can affect our perception of gender. For instance, males embodying a female can feel less masculine afterward. Virtual Reality is so helping in better understanding how we perceive our gender.
The Holotron is a big exoskeleton to make you walk in VR
HoloTron Technologies is building The Holotron, a big exoskeleton that makes you move and walk naturally in VR while being suspended in air, with realistic haptic and force feedback sensations. Currently, it is a hacky prototype, that is very bulky and unstable, but it has potential for enterprise and military applications.
A third of small and medium business plan to implement XR
“Around 35 percent of businesses plan on implementing virtual or augmented reality technology in 2021 according to a recently published research report by GetApp, involving 700 small and medium business leaders from around the world.” I don’t know how to trust this kind of studies, but it is good to see that there is this growing interest towards XR from the enterprises, even the smaller ones.
Voxon Photonics is a cool holographic display
Voxon is proposing a holographic display on which you can see 3D content without needing to wear glasses. In the video linked here below, you can see how it is cool using it to preview the content that you are modeling in Blender.
Enjoy the Holiday Sales!
It’s the winter holidays, and all the major stores are proposing discounts on content! Here you are a collection of the most interesting discounts on Steam, Oculus Store, and… well, that thing that a friend of yours likes!
More info (Sales on Steam)
More info (Sales on Oculus Store)
More info (Sales on VR adult content)
The holiday season caused many games to be rushed
A very good editorial by Jamie Feltham on Upload VR highlights how the Holiday Season may have caused the rushed release of many games on the Oculus platform, that so look buggy or unfinished. The effect is that almost all the most awaited games on Quest have been a disappointment.
Do you need some examples? Jurassic World: Aftermath is too short and invites the players to wait for the DLC coming in 2021; Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy Edge is just an episode; Warhammer 40K: Battle Sister has the multiplayer mode coming next year; Medal Of Honor: Above and Beyond has released with tons of bugs that hurt its initial reviews. And remind that all these games aren’t cheap.
While I may understand the decision from a business standpoint (Christmas Sales are very important), the final result of all these unfinished games is that the whole image of the VR gaming ecosystem on Quest has been hurt and this is not positive.
Some news about content
- Beat Saber will release its OST 4 with a different kind of songs from the usual ones;
- Jurassic World Aftermath has been released and reviewed. It is very good, but kinda short and repetitive.
More info (Beat Saber)
More info (Jurassic World)
News from partners (and friends)
My friends at FXG and Mi7 have partnered to produce a new professional camera to shoot VR movies. It is called FM360 and it features two 3D lenses to make you shoot 180 3D videos both indoors and outdoors. You can shoot 30 frames at 12K, or 60 frames at a maximum of 8K. Each lens has a resolution of 6000×6000, which makes the FM360 Duo suitable for high-quality VR filming. If you are interested in this device, you can ask me for an introduction with FXG so you can talk about it directly with them.
You know that I’m a big fan of Sam & Max: This Time is Virtual, so let me propose to you the most recent devlog of the game, where the developers explain some decisions that they have taken for this game.
Some XR fun
When Zuck was a kid…
Zuck vs Santa Claus
A perfect day for VR
Yes, having new people in VR is cool, but, well… it depends on which kind of people…
VR and fitness are a perfect match
Oculus Support always knows where to find you o_O
Wish me Happy Holidays!
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(Header image by Microsoft)
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