The XR Week Peek (2021.03.01): Sony confirms PSVR 2, Facebook teases Quest 2 Pro, and more!
March has just started… I hope it will be an amazing day for you and for all the AR/VR ecosystem! I will have probably something to announce soon, so stay tuned 😉
Top news of the week
Sony officially states it is going to launch the PSVR 2
PlayStation VR has been the most successful headset until now (if we exclude the crappy mobile viewers), but now it is pretty dated and people were wondering what Sony was going to do. The release of a new headset was being delayed too much, some VR content studios were shut down, and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s CEO statements about VR were pretty mixed. Some people started to think that Sony could have abandoned VR.
But this has not been the case: with a brief post on its blog, Sony has announced that there will be a “next-generation” VR device that will work with PS5, but that it will simply not be released this year. The new device doesn’t even have an official name, and the shared info is very scarce, but anyway what has been teased is already very interesting
- The new VR headset enhances everything from resolution and field of view to tracking and input;
- It will connect to PS5 with a single cord to simplify setup and improve ease-of-use while enabling a high-fidelity visual experience;
- It will feature controllers carefully studied for VR. They “will incorporate some of the key features found in the DualSense wireless controller, along with a focus on great ergonomics”;
- There will be a “new generation” of games and experiences for it;
- It is still under development and won’t launch in 2021.
So, there will be a new headset, it will be much better than the current PSVR, and it will be tethered because Sony wants to target real gamers, people that care a lot about the high-quality graphics of the games. The reference to the tether is a clear statement about the fact that Sony aims at offering quality, and it is not interested in the casual gamers that are the target of the Quest (for now). It will be very interesting to see what kind of devices will sell more: a VR headset linked to a very famous console or a VR headset that costs less and is more portable? I think that from the results of this battle, which will happen most probably in 2022, we will understand the trends that will drive the VR gaming market in all the upcoming years. For instance, if the Quest will sell much more than the PSVR 2, most probably this will decide the death of all the tethered market. If PSVR 2 will succeed, instead, we can have the market splitting in two, with some devs targeting the casual gamers and others the hardcore gamers. We’ll see…
But now, we have to wait. Sony will start soon to give the PSVR 2 devkits to some selected partner development studios, so the device is still not in the hands of developers that can create the content that could decide the success or the demise of the platform. I also really hope that some developers will leak some features of the device pretty soon…
More info (Sony announcing a new PSVR headset)
More info (Sony shipping the PSVR2 devkits “soon”)
Other relevant news
Facebook teases Quest 2 Pro, schedules 120Hz for Quest 2, and more!
Facebook is being very smart in keeping the attention high on Quest with fresh news every week, and this one is not an exception.
First of all there are the regular updates: Facebook is rolling out v26 runtime for Quest, that will introduce two new interesting features:
- Couch mode: basically, you tell your Quest where the couch is, so that it is always signaled in your play space, and you can sit on it without having to remove your headset;
- Vocal Commands: it’s a while that there is an experimental vocal mode to ask the Quest to launch games and do other operations, but now you can say “Hey Facebook” and give the command, wherever you are inside the UI of the device. This means that while you have the Quest on, your microphone data will be always listened by the device, and you can imagine my profound happiness in knowing this. I’m also very happy that I can say “Hey Facebook”, I really needed a reminder that I’m using a Facebook device. And yes, I use sarcasm a lot: “Hey Facebook, thanks for this”.
Oculus has also partnered with Virtuclear to offer prescription lenses for the Quest 2 for $80. You can now buy directly them on the Quest website, and this is a great piece of news for people tired of wearing glasses inside their headsets.
And that’s it for the news about the present. Let’s talk about the future instead. After the teaser of some weeks ago, Facebook has officially written in its timeline that is working on a 120Hz mode for Quest. The release date should be this month (March 2021), but the feature is flagged as “Experimental” and the confidence as “Medium”. So, we can expect a beta 120Hz mode coming in March-April. This will make the internal menus and some less graphical-intensive games a lot more fluid. The 120Hz mode on the Valve Index was great, and I’m sure it will be amazing on Quest 2 as well!
Regarding the future, the viral news of the week has been that inside his usual Instagram AMA, Andrew Bosworth was asked about a possible Quest 2 Pro, and he commented with “Interesting”, then winked, then he made appear an emoticon about being silent. This means that Facebook is working on a Quest 2 Pro, so that to target more premium users with a device that is more powerful and has a better resolution and comfort. Regarding if this is going to happen (maybe they are just experimenting on it) and when… well, we don’t know. But I guess we’ll discover it at the upcoming Facebook Connect…
More info (Quest 2 Couch mode)
More info (Vocal commands with “Hey Facebook”)
More info (FAQ on Vocal Commands on Quest)
More info (Virtuclear lenses)
More info (Experimental 120Hz mode coming)
More info (Video of Boz winking)
More info (Quest 2 Pro teasing)
SteamVR integrates full support for OpenXR 1.0
The latest update to SteamVR, version 1.16, now includes full support for OpenXR 1.0. This is news that will have massive consequences.
All the 3 major VR runtimes (Oculus, SteamVR, Microsoft) are now compatible with OpenXR, and this means that on the runtime layer on PC, now OpenXR has been fully integrated. This means that if you develop an experience using OpenXR, you can run it on Oculus, SteamVR, and Microsoft runtimes with no modification. You don’t even have to build it multiple times, you just build it once and it works everywhere! This can be the end of the development far-west of the previous years.
Now, we just need another layer to be integrated: the development one. Unity support for OpenXR is still in early beta, and so it’s not reliable yet to develop an OpenXR-compliant application in Unity. We Unity developers have still to use the current Unity tools that make us develop once, but then build for every different platform (like the ones I describe in this article). Unreal is already compatible with the framework, so in 2021 we’ll soon have also the tools ready to create OpenXR cross-compatible platforms. This year, the dream of developing once, build once, and deploy everywhere can become reality.
…unless Apple arrives and creates its own standard again…
Qualcomm announces AR Smart Viewer reference design
People at Qualcomm never rest, and they continuously create new reference designs to pave the way for future AR/VR products. This time, they have announced the “AR Viewer” reference design, to propose a new way of developing smartphone-connected AR glasses.
All the features of the proposed AR glasses are very similar to the ones already present in the market, like Nreal glasses. Visually, these glasses are also very similar: they are lightweight, and they have 2 tracking cameras and another camera for image analysis or mixed reality streaming.
But the real innovation lies inside the glasses. The glasses are not dull viewers, but they feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 chipset inside. This lets the glass offload a good part of the computation from the host machine and perform it directly on the device. This results in a -30% of battery consumption, which a piece of great news considering that we are all always tight on battery on our phones.
The new reference design has also optimizations that make it easier to create virtual monitors in the room. This feature has been exploited by Lenovo in its Thinkreality A3 glasses we talked about some weeks ago.
It is interesting that currently, this reference design is still a tethered one, but Qualcomm has already teased its roadmap where in the future the connection between the glasses and the phones will become untethered. That will be the moment when we can hope to wear these devices for a long time, even outside our house.
More info (Qualcomm AR Viewer — Road To VR)
More info (Qualcomm AR Viewer — Upload VR)
More info (Qualcomm AR Viewer — The Verge)
MWC Shanghai 2021 showcased some XR technologies
While in the West, exhibitions are a distant memory, in China, there has been the MWC Shanghai, where among all news about telcos and smartphones, there has also been the place for some XR devices (and for an XR party with free drinks organized by Eloi Gerard I wasn’t able to attend… damn).
I’ve added a roundup of the most interesting news in the links here below, courtesy of Tony Vrrool that has kindly sent it to me. Sorry if you have to use Google Translate, but the article is of course all in Chinese 😀
The most relevant piece of news for us in the West are all about Nreal:
- The Nreal Light is finally arriving in Europe and the US in Q2 2021;
- The Chinese company has also showcased an enterprise version of the headset. Currently, almost all of the glass-AR market is for enterprise, so this seems a wise decision. The Enterprise Edition features a more balanced design and eye-tracking;
- Finch and Nreal have developed a new controller that consists of a ring on your finger plus a bracelet around your arm. This should offer a more natural interaction than the one of standard XR controllers, but I have to say I’m pretty dubious that people want to wear two devices for every arm just to interact with XR…
More info (Roundup of news of MWC Shanghai 2021)
More info (Nreal Enterprise edition and launch periods)
More info (FinchRing controller for Nreal)
You can now use consumer devices inside Oculus For Business
This little massive news has undergone under the radar of almost all people in the VR ecosystem (apart from Niclas Johansson) and I’ve personally discovered it only thanks to the interview with Chris Koomen I had this week.
Facebook has updated its Oculus For Business service, and among all the new possibilities it offers, there’s one that is very compelling for Educational institutions and small-medium enterprises. Basically, you can go through the Oculus For Business channel and buy consumer Quest 2 headsets. You pay them just $299, they have the exact same runtime of the consumer devices (Oculus Store, etc…) and no facility for multi-devices management. They are standard Quests, the ones you can buy on Amazon, BUT they have a business licensing.
Technically, until now, you couldn’t use consumers’ Quests in all enterprise settings, it was against the terms of services. Yes, Facebook has never enforced this rule, but legally, it could have. Now instead, it directly allows you to buy consumer Quests via the Oculus For Business sales channels (so no, you can’t buy them on Amazon) and use them in your professional facilities.
This can have enormous consequences: no other headset with enterprise licensing costs as little as $299. And if it is true that a big enterprise (like KLM) prefers spending $800-$1000 and have a premium product with premium management service, a University doesn’t have the budget to buy many headsets that are that expensive, and the same holds for a small company with maybe 10 employees. For all these entities now there is the possibility of legally buying and using a super-cheap headset to experiment with VR. This can be MASSIVE: a trojan horse that can make Oculus become a leader in the enterprise market as well.
More info (Blog article about new Oculus For Business)
More info (Official page of Oculus For Business with consumer Quests)
News worth a mention
Virtual Desktop wireless streaming is now available on Oculus Store
With a surprise move, Oculus has finally let Guy Godin publish its Virtual Desktop wireless streaming feature in the official version on the Oculus Store. Hurray!!!
All the community asked for it, and it was dumb to keep people forcing to sideload the Wireless streaming because Facebook thought it didn’t offer the best experience to the user.
This news actually is a symptom of bigger news: Facebook’s change of mindset regarding its store. Boz has explicitly said this in the same AMA mentioned above. In the beginning, since the launch of Quest 1, Facebook had personally curated every title that was admitted into the Store, so that to be sure that when someone bought a Quest there was only high-quality content. But now the Quest is already very successful, so they can go to Step 2. In Step 2, the developers submit all the applications to App Lab, and from App Lab the most interesting realities emerge, and then Facebook promotes them to the store.
Consumers have now more control over Facebook’s choices for the Oculus Store. If all consumers want to pay for Wireless streaming, Facebook admits it. If all consumers buy an App Lab game about Potato Koalas that fight against Godzilla, that gets admitted on the Official Store. This is a healthier way to manage a store, and also gives Facebook the advantage of not having to individually review each title: they just watch the stats on App Lab and decide which team to contact to talk about collaborations. It’s a piece of great news, I’m happy that there has been this change of mindset.
More info (PC Streaming on Virtual Desktop)
More info (Bosworth’s AMA)
Facebook is considering facial recognition for its smartglasses
It seems that in an internal meeting, Andrew Bosworth (Yes, he’s everywhere) has talked about Facebook’s plans for the smart glasses that are going to be released this year together with Luxottica. He said that Facebook would be very interested in adding facial recognition to them so that the glasses could identify people by looking at their faces, but they are evaluating if implementing it or not.
The issues are mainly two: the first one is that it has to be verified if the law would allow something like that in the various countries (in some, using biometric information and face recognition is forbidden even for the police); the second one is that of course “a glass made by Facebook that scans the faces of all people around you” is not a great punchline for a new device. Maybe it is just a way to get a punch in your face.
So no, Boz, until Facebook will have a better reputation regarding privacy, I suggest you not to launch this functionality.
Plutosphere to launch cloud streaming service for VR
Plutosphere is going to launch a new service offering VR Cloud streaming for people wanting to use standalone VR headsets at home as if they had the computational power of a PC. The system has been tested by David Heaney of Upload VR, which has found that it was working almost as well as the local Virtual Desktop. And having tried a similar service, I can confirm that if you have a server close enough, cloud streaming can already be very interesting.
You can now create Ready Player Me avatars for VRChat
If you are into VRChat, you will be pleased to know that Wolf3D has launched its Ready Player Me avatars also on VRChat. You can take a photo from your webcam and have in some seconds an avatar ready to be used inside the social VR space. Yes, the system is experimental and there are still some issues with people from all ethnicities, but the startup is working on it.
More info (Ready Player Me on VRChat)
More info (Ready Player Me issues with people from a “diverse background”)
More info (My Ready Player Me avatar)
More info (Official page to make your avatar)
3M and Pegatron create a reference design for VR headsets
3M and Pegatron have just created a reference design for VR headsets that exploiting curved optics can be quite compact while still offering great performances. The device should also mount an XR2 reference design and offer mixed reality.
I want to underline from the press release the sentence “the field of view is 95 degrees and, because of the curved lenses, feels fully immersive”. I can’t wait to try this field of view that is smaller than the one of the other headsets, but it is CURVED, so it is FULLY IMMERSIVE.
Anything World makes you create virtual worlds with your voice
You know that I like talking with you about cool XR experiments, and Anything World is one of them. It is a software solution employing Artificial Intelligence that lets you create worlds on the fly by just telling what you want. So, you can say “There is a garden and 5 lamas inside”, and they appear in front of you. Even cooler, the 3D models of the lamas get downloaded from Google Poly (a-ehm, someone should tell the devs it is shutting down) and rigged on the fly by artificial intelligence, so they can move in the space. Then you can also stop by and talk with GPT-3 powered lamas, and have a natural conversation with them.
It is pretty cool, and there is already a Unity plugin so you can directly experiment with it. It is in very early stages, but it is a very promising technology for future immersive worlds, and also for storytelling!
nDreams create $2M development fund
VR development studio nDreams has just created a fund of $2M destined for indie studios. If you are a VR indie team and you’re looking for a publisher, nDreams can give you money and technical support, two invaluable resources in the gaming market!
An analysis on the VR storytelling landscape
I found a great article on Protocol that analyzes the lights and the shadows of the VR storytelling market. On one side, many creative people want to work with VR. On the other side, it is very difficult for a VR movie to become profitable, because the COVID killed many festivals (or reduced their importance) and consumers are more interested in buying VR games than VR movies. For this reason, many companies had to pivot away from making VR films, and this is a great pity.
Microsoft Ignite will be in VR
Yearly conference Microsoft Ignite will be held this year in virtual reality inside Altspace VR. But Alex Kipman (the father of HoloLens) has teased us that it will feature “more immersion than you’ve ever seen before”. Since it comes from Kipman, I don’t take this sentence lightly, so I’m very curious to see what they have cooked for us. We’ll discover it on March 2nd at 8AM PT.
In UK you can now buy a Quest 2 for £279
There’s an ongoing sale of Oculus Quest 2 in an UK store for just £279, £20 less than the usual price. If you are in UK, well, go buying it!
Some news on content
- Population One reveals its Season One and its $5 Battle Pass offering some cool skins for the game;
- Crashland revives on the Quest 2 (It was a game for DK1!!);
- UploadVR has reviewed Powder VR and it found it a nice skiing/snowboarding game;
- Star Wars Pinball VR is going to launch on Quest on April 29th;
- The Climb 2 is going to launch on March, 4th on Quest (finally!);
- Read the review of A Wake Inn by Upload VR;
- Spatial launches 2.0 version with the cool feature that you can scan an object with your phone and import it into your XR meeting on the fly! :O
More info (Population One)
More info (Crashland)
More info (Powder VR)
More info (Star Wars Pinball)
More info (The Climb 2)
More info (A Wake Inn)
More info (Spatial)
News from partners (and friends)
Scope AR has launched a service to create AR experiences easily without knowing how to code. And it works entirely on the web. A great thing for businesses that want to implement augmented reality.
“The Mars Virtual Reality (MarsVR) project has a goal to build an engineering-grade virtual reality simulation for future human Mars exploration, public outreach for STEM programs in schools and museums, and training for analog astronauts at our real-life Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) located in the Utah desert.”
You can support it on IndieGoGo now if you want!
Join the Immersive Wire newsletter by Tom FFiske, so that you can stay up-to-date with immersive news and at the same time have the chance to win an Oculus Quest 2.
Some XR fun
I wonder if this person uses the cables of the Vive to do BSDM games…
Programming jokes are always funny, because they’re true.
A Redditor has discovered that you can change the image to the “Disable Oculus Link” window, and the situation has gone out of hand…
Funny link / 1
Funny link / 2
Funny link / 3
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(Header image by Sony)
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