Happy VR Summer! This is the first day of this sunny season (if you live in my same hemisphere of course), and I hope that you won’t have any Summertime Sadness like Lana Del Rey, but you all will enjoy the sun, have some relax, and forget for a moment all the hard times we are living in.
 
Before leaving you to the news, I invite you all to register for this month’s Awe Nite Florence, the last episode of the season, with the top influencer and inclusion advocate Christopher Lafayette, that will speak together with Ippolito Caradonna and Giovanni Landi. You can’t miss it: register now on Meetup https://www.meetup.com/it-IT/awe-nite-florence/events/277257140/

MEGA-GIGA NEWS OF THE WEEK

Hitmotion: Reloaded has been released on SideQuest

New Technology Walkers (NTW) has released on SideQuest a free demo of HitMotion: Reloaded, a fitness XR game that was already one of the launch titles of the Vive Focus Plus. In this game, you have to punch some targets very fast while dodging bars that attack you, for a very intense training experience.
 
This is the game that everyone was waiting for, even more than Half-Life 3, Lone Echo 2, or Beat Saber 4. The entire community is completely getting crazy for it and you must download it from SideQuest, and try it out.
 
And no, I’m not writing it because I’m the lead developer of the game. Absolutely not. Trust me.

More info (SideQuest VR download page)
More info (Launch blog post)

Top news of the week

Facebook starts experimenting with ads in VR games

Facebook has just announced that it is starting to experiment with in-game VR ads: when playing a VR game, you could see some billboards with ads in them, in places where they don’t disturb your play session too much. Developers can decide if opting-in or out to ads, and where to put them. Users may decide to hide an ad or explore it. Facebook will analyze and store how the users will react to the different ads, and will also merge the data about what apps the user uses in VR with his/her behavior on the Facebook social media to propose more relevant ads.
 
The experimentation will start with some selected game studios, and the first game hosting ads should be Blaston by Resolution Games. Facebook is also experimenting with other kinds of ads that have a shape more suitable for VR (so not only billboards but maybe also 3D elements)
 
The piece of news has been received with much happiness by the VR community, that was so eager to have banners in VR: memes of happiness have been shared all over the social media, Blaston has been awarded many 1-star reviews by VR users that wanted to thank Resolution Games for this amazing piece of news (they really wanted to see ads inside a paid game), joyful boycotting campaigns have started, the announcement post by Boz has been commented so much. Thanks, Facebook for having listened once more your community and have given us with what we really wanted in VR. Ads and profilation have always been our wildest dreams for VR.
 
Sarcasm apart, as I have written in a long editorial yesterday, Facebook is just being Facebook. It is an advertisement company, and we all knew since the beginning that it went to VR with the idea of profiling people and propose them immersive ads. It is its business and it will keep pursuing it. And until there will be a valid competitor, it will just continue its march towards the full domination of XR. The backlash of the community will be over in 1–2 weeks, and then Facebook will continue business as usual.
 
It’s just Facebook’s DNA, and personally, more than blaming them, that are doing what they have always done, I blame the fact that there is no one stopping all of this from happening… or at least regulating it.

More info (Announcement blog post)
More info (Boz announcing the news on Twitter)
More info (My long editorial on Facebook and its advertisement efforts)

Other relevant news

PSVR 2 may release during Holidays 2022

According to a report from Bloomberg, Sony may release its much-awaited next-gen PSVR headset (which I informally call PSVR 2) during Holidays 2022. This means the end of next year.
 
This is very interesting: it means that Sony is leaving another year to Facebook to gain market shares with the Quest. The only possible explanation is that according to Sony’s projections, the VR market may truly become profitable for a console manufacturer around 2022–2023. We all know that Microsoft too is waiting before introducing VR for the Xbox because the VR market is too little for them, and Sony seems to follow a similar strategy, not investing too much until next year. This seems an indication that in 2022–2023 we may have much more mainstream penetration of virtual reality, also thanks to the efforts that Facebook is carrying on.
 
Together with this piece of news, Bloomberg also reported that PSVR 2 will feature an OLED display manufactured by Samsung. If this will be confirmed, it means that PSVR will be the only headset still featuring an OLED and not an LCD display, giving it an edge in terms of color vividness, but also possibly causing problems like smaller fill factor. I’m very intrigued by this… and the more I hear about the PSVR 2, the more I would love to try it.

More info (Bloomberg’s report on PSVR 2)
More info (Road To VR reporting the news)

Oculus Quest introduces multi-tasking in Runtime v30

Oculus Quest introduces a new update to its runtime every month, and this month we have other amazing features introduced on the standalone headset.
 
The most important of them is multitasking: finally, you will be able to use contemporarily multiple windows with 2D applications inside your Quest. If you have already tested multi-tabs inside Oculus Browser, you know what I’m talking about because the mechanism is very similar: you can have up to 3 windows that can be positioned in a semicircle in front of you, with one window straight in front, one on the left, and one on the right. This can be very important for working in VR, and it is another cool feature of the Infinite Office suite that promotes productivity in VR. I also predict that soon Facebook will let you use standard Android apps in VR, and this will give even more value to this multitasking feature.
 
Other features introduced in v30 are:

• Better handling of the microphone, that can so be switched between a party and the multiplayer game you are playing with your friends
• Air Link being released on Oculus Quest 1
• Accessibility options for people with color blindness.

The update pace of the Oculus Quest is impressive.

More info

News worth a mention

Realmax is going to launch new glasses soon

At the Better World Summit for 5G+AR, RealMax’s CEO Wei Rongjie has just teased Realseer, AR glasses with lenses just 7mm thick and a field of view (FoV) of 70 degrees. He says they are coming soon and with the stylish appearance of standard glasses. I’m intrigued by this, and I can’t wait to hear more!
 
The bad news is that tracking seems devoted to external modules like Nolo…
 
(Thanks David @spatialpixels for the tip!)

More info (Tweet about the news)
More info (More images and info from Reddit)

Some interesting research projects

As always, I like to read about interesting research projects and this week there have been three that got my attention.
 
The first one, more than a research project is an in-development product: Kopin has announced its P95 optic module, which is all-plastic pancake lenses. Pancake lenses allow for smaller headsets, but usually, they are difficult expensive to manufacture. Thanks to this all-plastic design, Kopin has managed to create lenses with very high quality and affordable prices. The problem is still in the FOV: they just allow for 95° diagonal visuals, and this is a bit little for VR. All of this is interesting, but it is not clear how and when they will be implemented in some headsets.
 
The second one is a research project by Cornell University and Samsung that have created together a metalens that can change its optical properties using voltage variations. This means that they have invented a lens that may change its focus depending on the voltage that is supplied to it, allowing the lens to become varifocal. This could be massive for future varifocal headsets. This is still at the research stage, so don’t expect it to reach the market soon.
 
The third one is a Facebook AI project that lets you write a text in an image with the same style as another text that is portrayed in a photo. This can be very useful for automatic translations in AR glasses: when you look at a sign in a foreign country, you could be able to see its translation in your language automatically. And differently from now, when these translations are just horrible text lines superimposed to real images, you would see the translated text with the same style as the original one, fitting perfectly in its location. This is just fantastic.

More info (Kopin’s pancake lenses)
More info (Cornell’s metalens)
More info (Facebook’s text style copy tool)

Charlie Fink talks about Tribeca

Every year, VR journalist Charlie Fink visits the Tribeca Film Festival and tells us his experience with the VR experiences he finds there. This year is no exception, and Charlie has visited both the physical and the virtual location of the event, describing the most important artworks he has tried. If you are into storytelling, you should give it a read.

More info

Carmack’s brutally honest reviews are back

At every Oculus event, John Carmack is used to trying the VR experiences that indies are developing and give them very honest feedback on how to improve. Since physical events are still not a possibility, Facebook has decided to turn this into a series of blog posts where Carmack reviews some indie experiences.
 
In the first post, Carmack analyzes a simple game on App Lab called Space Shooter, and he blasts it completely, saying that the game wouldn’t have succeeded even on an Atari machine.
 
I have mixed feelings about this. On one side, I love it, because Carmack’s feedback is very valuable and can help all the indies that are reading his posts. On the other side, writing a public very negative review on a game that is clearly been developed by some inexperienced team with zero budget is not a positive thing for the team itself. Every time someone will look for that game, he would find as the first result on Google the negative review by Carmack. Probably it would have been better to write the review without specifying the name of the game, in my opinion.

More info

Red 6 raises $30 Million for in-flight military AR training

Red 6 is a startup that has created the Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System (ATARS), which lets pilots experience training scenarios while flying. This is pretty cool: you are a top gun, and thanks to a special AR helmet, you can see virtual planes around you with which you can perform some dogfighting or other training operations. This can help in providing better training for warplane pilots.
 
The company has just raised $30 million to continue its mission in improving the ATARS platform.

More info

Some news on content

• Demeo’s much-awaited first campaign DLC “Realm of the rat king” is releasing on June, 28th
• Waltz of the Wizard is going to feature a free DLC called Natural Magic which will add a new “simulated magic” system to expand player capabilities
• Road To VR and Upload VR has gone hands-on with the demo of I Expect You To Die 2, and found it a good sequel of the first game, even if it doesn’t add much innovation
• Road To VR and Upload VR has gone hands-on with Larcenauts: from the reviews, it seems a well-crafted game, even if it still needs polishing and balancing
• A former Nasa VR engineer has made a VR version of Donkey Kong, but unluckily, it won’t be published
• Transformers: Heavy Metal is the new Pokemon Go clone that Niantic is developing around a popular IP, this time in collaboration with Hasbro.

More info (Demeo DLC)
More info (Waltz Of The Wizard)
More info (I Expect You To Die 2 — Road To VR)
More info (I Expect You To Die 2 — Upload VR)
More info (Larcenauts — Road To VR)
More info (Larcenauts — Upload VR)
More info (Donkey Kong VR)
More info (Transformers: Heavy Metal)

News from partners (and friends)

MIAT has interviewed me to talk about VR, storytelling, and the vision of the future. They are still promoting their immersive storytelling masterclass, so if you are interested…
Learn more

Some XR fun

Never trust a girly avatar on VRChat
Funny link

The best part of Facebook’s VR ads is the memes that the community has created about this news!
Funny link / 1
Funny link / 2
Funny link / 3
Funny link / 4
Funny link / 5
Funny link / 6
Funny link / 7
Funny link / 8
Funny link / 9

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• DeoVR
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