The XR Week Peek (2021.03.16): HTC launches Tracker 3.0, Facebook has 10,000 people working on XR, and more!

I’m writing this roundup of news with a huge headache and a real will to sleep, so forgive me if there are some errors. It’s because tomorrow the SXSW 2021 starts and together with VRrOOm we have created the virtual spaces for it on VRChat! We feel honored, amazed, but also… a bit tired (like Forrest Gump would say). But I promise you that visually it will be amazing, and there you will also be able to find some nice easter eggs!
 
Come and visit it! Here you are the trailer if you want to discover more:

Top news of the week

HTC launches Vive Tracker 3.0 and Facial Tracker

In the end, I was right. HTC was not teasing a new standalone headset, but a new Vive Tracker.
 
 The Vive Tracker 3.0 is 33% smaller than v2 and has +75% of battery life. It is also 30% more expensive, for a final price of $130 each. I know that many of you won’t be excited by this news, but remember the Vive Tracker is one of the most successful accessories ever created by HTC. It is used in LBVR, in enterprise installations (e.g. for training), and also for full-body tracking by all people performing in VRChat. A new more powerful Tracker is very welcome by all these people. Yes, the 30% price increase is not appreciated, but, well, we know HTC. The launch date is on March, 24th, 5 days before the Kickstarter launch of Tundra: a good way to ruin the party to its competitor.
 
 Together with the tracker, HTC has also launched the Vive Facial Tracker, a weird thing that you can attach to a Vive Pro so that it tracks the lower part of your face. This can be used for enterprise experiences, or to enhance your social VR life on platforms like NeosVR, where you can have your mouth realistically reproduced in VR. The Vive Tracker is coming on the same date and at the same price ($130) as the Tracker 3.0.
 
 For sure this tracking addon has its market, but I think it’s very nichey, plus, weirdly, it is only compatible with the deprecated Vive Pro and the enterprise Vive Pro Eye (no, it’s not compatible with the Cosmos). Plus it’s even weirder that HTC needed 2 years to bring it to the market (it was announced in 2019).
 
 In all this weirdness, I discovered that there are various professional people interested in buying it: when I asked on Twitter who was going to buy this, some people answered positively: some planned to use it for training purposes (like my friend Sam), others for acting in VR, others just to experiment. So yes, it seems that there is a market for this product, and its release is not a crazy move as it seemed to me in the first place.

More info (New products by HTC)
More info (Sam Watts claiming to be interested in the Face Tracker)

Other relevant news

10,000 people are working on XR at Facebook

Zuck has released an interview to The Information and inside it, we can find the interesting information (pun intended) that now more than 10,000 people are working on AR/VR at Facebook. This is an enormous number: this means that now 15–20% of the total Facebook workforce is on immersive technologies, even if XR is currently a very little revenue stream for the social media giant.

From this number you can see the big commitment of Facebook to VR: Facebook wants to dominate the next computational platform and is doing everything in this sense. 10,000 people mean at least 1.2B spent every year on XR, just for the workforce. This is a number that is bigger than the whole turnaround of HTC, Pico, and other companies that are considered as Facebook’s competitors. It’s hard to compete with Facebook when it has infinite money.

For sure, as someone pointed out on Reddit, that number includes people in every kind of role, from game developers to customer support not to mention researchers. And the number is also that big because Facebook had no hardware department, so it had to create everything from scratch (i.e. Apple already made hardware, so it already had the infrastructure to build it and just added XR people on top of this infrastracture, while Facebook could not). But it is impressive anyway.

In the interview, Marky Z also gave us a bunch of other interesting info:

• The company is already working on Quest 3 and 4. This comes as no surprise since the hardware is always built in this kind of iteration cycles. When Magic Leap One was revealed, Rony Abovitz stated he was already working on Magic Leap Two and Three, for instance;
• Facebook believes a lot in having avatars that truly represent ourselves in XR, and it is a field in which they will invest a lot. In September, the new Facebook Avatars will come and substitute the current Oculus avatars. Facebook Avatars are the ones used in Horizon, and will become the official avatars in all Oculus ecosystem (just to wipe away the name “Oculus” from another product);
• They are very focused on offering low-cost VR so that the biggest number of people can use XR and connect with other people. This has of course nothing to do with gathering data from the biggest number possible of people. Absolutely Not.

As a side note, I have to say that Facebook is being very smart in keeping the attention high on its products: you may have noticed that in the latest weeks, one of the main news of my roundups has always been about Facebook: either is an interview with Zuck, an AMA made by Boz, a product announcement, a rumor, etc… Their marketing department is doing an amazing job in keeping the attention of the community high on Oculus and Facebook. Other companies should take note…

More info (10,000 people working on XR at Facebook)
More info (Why 10,000 is a reasonable number)
More info (Facebook already working on Quest 3 and 4)
More info (Facebook betting on avatars)
More info (Facebook aiming at low cost devices for widespread adoption)

Apple AR headset may have been delayed to 2025

Yes, we have rumors about Apple XR devices even this week. This time is again the turn of the Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, that is said to be very accurate on Apple rumors… so accurate that he predicted in the past that Apple AR glasses would have launched in Q2 2020. Then he said they should arrive this year.
 
 Now he accurately picked another number from his cylinder, and said they’re coming in 2025, because “Apple has no AR glasses prototypes” at the moment. Yes, a company that acquired Metaio, Primesense, Akonia, VRvana, and many others, for sure has no internal AR prototypes. It’s believable. They just bought those companies because they wanted to do something different from their daily jobs.
 
 Since his cylinder still had numbers, he also picked up 2022, the year in which the VR + passthrough AR headset by Apple, that will weigh 100–200 grams (it is made of thin air) and cost around $1000 will be released. It’s good that from $3000 we went to $1000 real quick. I hope that at the next rumor, it will cost $300, so I will be able to afford it. You will be able to control it with a ring on your finger, about which Apple has actually filed some patents.
 
 The very accurate analyst ended his forecast with the last theatrical shot, saying that by 2030 Apple will also have its AR contact lenses. But maybe it’s 2040… because when you are an accurate Apple analyst, you have an accuracy of 10 years.
 
 It’s a pity that he stopped here his accurate predictions. Maybe he could have forecasted an Apple brain implant for 2050, and Steve Jobs reliving in a giant I-Robocop armor in 2100. Or maybe 2200.
 
 Yes, Apple is working on XR glasses. But if everyone could stop throwing random info in the wild, that would be great.

More info (Mr.Kuo’s accurate predictions — Upload VR)
More info (Mr.Kuo’s accurate predictions — VR Scout)
More info (Apple’s real patent on a ring controller)

News worth a mention

Tundra Trackers will be priced at $95

HTC is not the only company working on a new version of the trackers. Tundra Labs is going to start its Kickstarter for the Tundra Tracker at the end of the month. The device is going to be retailed at $95, and its advantage will not only be the $30 less but the fact that its dongle can connect to more trackers together. This means fewer expenses and more ease of use for the enthusiasts using them.
 
 It will be great to see how this product will compete with the official Vive Tracker. It seems to be amazing, but we have to wait for some reviews to verify if it actually is.

More info

Read about Microsoft’s Ignite conference

As I’ve reported to you last week, Microsoft’s latest Ignite conference, where Microsoft Mesh was announced, was a true marvel, an example of how a truly immersive keynote should be held. My review hero Benjamin Lang has written a detailed review about it with many visuals, so if you have lost it, you can read this article to understand how cool it was.

More info

Facebook is working on next-gen technologies for XR

Facebook has unveiled two interesting research projects it is carrying on.
 
 The first one is in a long article about how Facebook envisions the user interface in our mixed reality future. It is an article with nothing very new, but the interesting thing is that they state they are working on immersive gloves and wrist interfaces based on Ctrl+Labs technologies to interact with XR.
 
 The second one relates to a system that tries to understand what is happening inside videos. The system tries to recognize the objects and the people involved, and also the actions happening. Of course, if this system becomes real-time, it can be used to help the user that is wearing AR glasses to understand what is happening around him.

More info (HCI of the future)
More info (AI for videos)

Why NFT are relevant, in XR and not

“NFT” is the buzzword of the moment. This technology based on the blockchain can be very important to create smart contracts and to define the unique ownership of digital items. It can be the foundation of the digital economy of the metaverse. I’ll link you here below an interesting article about the use of NFTs to sell art pieces and how it can be important for independent artists to sustain themselves.
 
 But at the same time, it is now subject to over-hyping and speculation, so you must also be very careful about it.

More info (Interesting use of NFT in art)
More info (Atari opening a casino in Decentraland)
More info (Overpriced CryptoPunk sale)
More info (Expensive items in Decentraland)

Facebook had only 3 people in the App Lab team

If you were wondering why your App Lab submission was taking so much to be approved, now you may know the answer. Andrew Bosworth has revealed that only 3 people are working in the review team. This is kind of absurd since Facebook knew that many developers wanted to join the new platform. It is like they wanted the approval process to be slow.
 
 Btw, Boz said they are planning to enlarge the team to guarantee faster future approval times (I’m still waiting after 5 weeks…).
 
 Luckily, some smart devs have been approved and every week we have new games coming to light on App Lab.

More info (App Lab team)
More info (New games on App Lab)

A researcher has found a way to create holograms in real time

Holograms can be used to create interesting digital representations of objects, that can be viewed from different points of view and with the correct depth focus. Unluckily, creating digital holograms is an expensive operation and can’t happen in real time. Or, better, it was.
 
 It seems that a researcher has found a way of using deep learning to generate holograms in real-time even on a smartphone. This can open the door to new research on holograms, and this can lead to innovative XR glasses in the future.

More info (Article about real-time holograms)
More info (Video about real-time holograms)

NVIDIA launches GTC 2021

NVIDIA is launching its annual GTC conference, and this year it looks very interesting, with very famous speakers. NVIDIA CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, will in fact host renowned AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun. GTC21 conference starts on April 12–16.

More info

Some news on content

• We finally have the launch dates for the alpha of the MMO Zenith VR;
• Beat Saber’s new update introduces new modifiers and multiplayer badges;
• Echo Arena’s Echo Pass is now live. Let’s see if IAP can work in VR;
• Konami launches a rhythm game for Quest, but only in Japan;
• Upload has reviewed and appreciated the shooter HyperDash;
• PlayAR is a collection of fun AR games to stay fit using your smartphone.

More info (Zenith VR)
More info (Beat Saber)
More info (Echo Pass)
More info (Konami’s Beat Arena)
More info (HyperDash)
More info (PlayAR)

News from partners (and friends)

My friend Giambattista De Giorgis has published a book about learning how to develop AR/VR applications in Unity. It is intended for people with no development experience, so if you want to get started with Unity, this can be the book for you! It is only in Italian at the moment, you have been warned 🙂
Learn more

Niclas Johansson has just announced XR4Work, a website where he and his partner will work “collecting, testing, and organizing the market of professional VR/AR apps in one place — as well as gathering first-hand user reviews from professionals just like you who have already started paving the way.”
Learn more

The Wild is hosting a webinar about how to choose the VR collaboration platform that gives your business the best ROI.
Learn more

I have supported XR Bootcamp and SideQuest VR in writing a cool guide on how to distribute and monetize your VR experience on Oculus App Lab! I think it is a very comprehensive guide and you should give it a look 😉
Learn more

Some XR fun

We can fly, Neo!
Funny link

Pi Day is a lie of the math lobbies
Funny link

How it does feel publishing on Oculus App Lab
Funny link

Gorilla Tag and its side effects
Funny link

As a developer, I can totally relate to this
Funny link

Zuck already knows what you want
Funny link

Do you mind giving me a little support?

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(Header image by HTC Vive)