2021 has just started and we’re all curious to know what are the big XR surprises it will gift to us. Until now, nothing special has happened yet, but I want to be confident about the future…
Top news of the week
Virtual CES is about to start and will feature AR and VR devices
CES is one of the most important technological events of every year. Because of the pandemic, though, it won’t be held physically in Las Vegas this year, but it will all be digital. Every year at CES many AR/VR headsets and accessories get launched, and I expect this to happen the same this year, but to a less extent than the previous years because:
- The event appears to be less important than the other years because of its digital nature;
- Since the event is held remotely, no journalist will be able to try the crazy devices showcased there. This will make the announcements less interesting, because there won’t be a real-life feedback from people that have tried the devices;
- XR is in a transitional moment and I don’t expect the launch of big products happening.
The third point is due to the fact that I’ve not heard any rumor about a big player doing something at CES: usually, there is always a leak, a hint about an incoming launch, but until now, I’ve heard only silence. Facebook has already launched the Quest 2; HTC hasn’t tweeted anything, so I expect it to not launch its Quest 2 competitor at this CES; Nreal is still in the middle of its logistic problems; Samsung is silent; etc… I hope to be wrong, but I don’t think we’ll see any kind of disruptive XR headset at CES 2021.
The good news is that anyway, some news is coming. For instance, Nolo has just launched its 6DOF standalone headset, which seems a Vive Focus Plus coming 2 years after. And Lenovo has officially announced ThinkReality A3, its new AR glasses (that were leaked some weeks ago) for enterprise uses. They can be connected to a PC or a Motorola phone (yes, they’re still a thing) and let you have up to 5 virtual displays in front of you.
Nice, but… I hope for something more 🙂
More info (Digital CES and AR/VR)
More info (Nolo VR headset)
More info (Lenovo ThinkReality A3)
More info (Lenovo ThinkReality A3 photos)
Other relevant news
Facebook smartglasses are coming “sooner than later”
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the head of Facebook Reality Labs, has written a blog post in which he revealed two very interesting pieces of news.
The first one is that Facebook smartglasses are coming sooner than expected. Boz has confirmed that Facebook is going to launch this year a pair of smart glasses made in collaboration with Luxottica and that they are coming “sooner than later”. I think this means that we can expect them to be released in the first half of this year.
Boz has added that he doesn’t want to overhype these devices (to avoid the same error made by Magic Leap), and so he has confirmed that they are not AR glasses, but just smartglasses. So expect them to be able to show you notifications from your phone and nothing more. A wise choice to keep them light and comfortable and test the waters on if people want to wear on their face something branded by Facebook.
The second news revealed by him is that “Quest 2 surpassed the original Quest’s monthly active people in less than 7 weeks”. This doesn’t come by surprise, considering that all indicators are pointing to the fact that the Quest 2 is selling incredibly well. It’s an amazing piece of news and shows how VR is slowly entering the mainstream thanks to standalone headsets. Compliments to FRL for that.
More info (Facebook smartglasses)
More info (Oculus Quest 2)
VR game earnings were +28% in 2020
The usual yearly report by SuperData (rebranded as SuperGuess by the community) highlights how the total VR game earnings in 2020 were pretty good, and they showed a +28% year-over-year increase with respect to 2019. The only Half-Life: Alyx has earned alone more than all PC VR games of 2019 together. These are all great news for the VR ecosystem.
But SuperData also highlights a negative datum: the overall shipping of VR headsets was inferior in 2020 if compared to the one of 2019. This is mostly due to the two causes:
- The slow death of phone-based VR (that pumped a lot the numbers of shipped VR headsets);
- The pandemic that has hurt the production lines of virtual reality headsets, and that so made the Oculus Quest and the Valve Index always out-of-stock.
This second news should be a negative one, but since all the main VR headsets are always out of stock, it means that the demand is very high and in my opinion, this is an overly positive thing.
AR filter creation programs offer always more
AR filters on Snapchat, Instagram, and Tiktok have been one of the big trends of 2020, and probably one of the most popular ways through which XR has been used by the mainstream audience. That’s why these social media are trying to offer always better filters and better creation tools for them.
This week, for instance, SparkAR, the creation tool for Instagram/Facebook/Messenger AR filters, has added a new preview mode inside the Oculus Quest. Thanks to it, you can preview your filters on the fly in a virtual smartphone that you can see in a suitable virtual environment. If you made a filter about books, for instance, you can preview it inside a virtual library, and see how it fits in it without having even to install it on your phone and walk around in real life.
The competitor TikTok, instead, has followed the example of Snapchat and has introduced AR filters that are specially crafted for LiDAR-powered iPhones. The first filter released this way is one to celebrate the beginning of 2021 and it is really amazing. You can see virtual confetti pop up in the air, and then they fall down on all the objects of the environment in the same way they would do in real life. It feels so incredible.
I can’t wait for what new kind of filters we’ll see in 2021…
More info (SparkAR preview in Quest — Official post)
More info (SparkAR preview in Quest — Upload VR)
More info (TikTok filters for iPhones)
News worth a mention
Facebook Research has found a creative way to reduce screen door effect
Facebook Research has published this week a blog post highlighting a new method it has found to reduce the screen door effect in VR headsets. The method is pretty original, and it concerns making the whole display to vibrate very fast so that it moves with a circular movement with a very tiny radius. The display moves so that every pixel in an instant is in a position, and the next frame it founds itself in the position that was the “hole” between it and the consecutive pixel the frame before, and so it is able to cover this hole. This movement continues in a loop, and so at every frame, the pixels are covering the black holes of the previous frame. Since the movement is very fast, the eye doesn’t perceive it, and everything that it perceives is a display with no holes, so no screen door.
The solution is intriguing, but honestly, I think it will never see the light: it seems an overly complicated solution, especially now that we have displays with a so high resolution that SDE is almost completely hidden, and it also features mechanical parts that are always prone to breaking. But it is very interesting to read nonetheless.
Midnight Tech Power Pucks are power banks for Vive Trackers
On Kickstarter, it has been launched the Midnight Tech Power Puck, a gadget that you can attach to an HTC Vive Tracker so that to extend its battery life of 6–12 hours. If you use Vive Trackers a lot (for instance for performances inside VRChat), you should find this crowdfunding campaign very interesting.
VR Cover releases accessories to protect the Oculus Touch rings
Some weeks ago, I’ve talked to you about a new gadget being released on the market: protectors for the fragile rings of the Oculus Touch controllers. Now the famous brand VR Cover is releasing its own solution to let you protect your Oculus Touch controllers, together with other accessories for your Oculus Quest 2, like colored silicone facemasks.
Looking Glass makes you create 3D portraits
Some weeks ago, I reported how Looking Glass launched on Kickstarter its new small holographic display to let you have a little 3D scene in a frame on your desk. This week, it has announced a new related service: thanks to some AI magic, it is possible for you to convert the 2D image of a face into its 3D version and put it inside the holographic frame. This means that you could have the 3D face of your loved ones always there with you on your desk, and see it without the need to wear glasses. I personally love it.
How Alyx bottle shaders are made
The shader of the bottles of Half-Life Alyx, that show the wobbling liquids contained inside, is pretty amazing. This week has been published an interview with the developer that has created it and he has explained some details of how he has implemented the related logic. He won’t go too much into coding details, of course, but I’ve found it an interesting chat the same.
AI can now generate images from text
A new project developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3 shows how AI can now do very interesting things like generating images from text. An AI system called DALL-E has been trained with many pictures and related descriptions and now it can do the reverse, that is creating an image starting from the related textual description.
What is amazing is that it composes the image, that is, it doesn’t find an image, but it creates a new image to fit the description, even if it is a weird one like “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog”. It works surprisingly well, and it makes me dream of a future in which this AI can create 3D scenes starting from a description, and maybe also stories. Imagine if you could say “I want to live an action-adventure with a bit of love that is set at the times of the Roman Empire” and an AI could create an original 1-hour experience you could live in VR just based on that description. That would be mind-blowing.
(Thanks Eloi Gerard for the tip)
Minecraft Earth is shutting down
Minecraft Earth, the geolocalized AR version of Minecraft, is going to be shut down and it will officially close on June 2021. This is a great pity: I forecasted that Minecraft Earth could be the real main competitor of Pokemon Go, but actually it has not even survived its initial rollout. This shows that I’m terrible at making predictions 😀
The reason for this failure has been of course the coronavirus: people are not going in the streets anymore and so geolocalized games are losing importance.
Some news on content
- Intriguing Puzzle game Eye Of The Temple is releasing on PC VR headsets in Spring 2021;
- We have a new trailer for Hitman 3, that will be playable on PSVR soon. The trailer confirms that all the Hitman trilogy will be ported for VR, but you will only be able to use the gamepad;
- Pavlov releases a massive WW2 update that includes tanks;
- Mare is a game with stunning visuals for Quest;
- Blaston is a good game to make fitness while having fun in multiplayer;
- Doom 3 is now playable on the Oculus Quest thanks to a modder. This way, the original promise made by Oculus to have Doom 3 in VR has somewhat been fulfilled.
More info (Eye Of The Temple)
More info (Hitman 3 VR trailer)
More info (Hitman trilogy in VR)
More info (Pavlov)
More info (Mare)
More info (Blaston)
More info (Doom 3)
News from partners (and friends)
You all know that we have organized a big concert with Jean-Michel Jarre and that it was a huge success. I’m linking here below some articles about it, plus a post about VRChat highlighting that between our event and the official NYE event, VRChat hit its highest record of 40,000 concurrent users (and in fact, its servers crashed).
As a bonus, I’ll also add the article that shows that our Venice VR Expanded has won the XR Must award of best XR event of 2020! We are so proud of that!
Learn more (Postmortem of JMJ concert)
Learn more (Article about JMJ concert in Italian)
Learn more (VRChat hitting 40,000 consecutive users)
Learn more (Venice VR Expanded winning the Best XR Event Award)
Some XR fun
Facebook will have a more stylish way of banning people in AR
Poor Trump, I guess he’ll have to buy a Vive Focus Plus now
The new Oculus Quest can make me live amazing advent…ah no
The Oculus dance
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(Header image by Lenovo)