This week came with two great pieces of news for me. The first one is that the bond between me and VRrOOm has become a bit more official, and we’ll keep innovating the virtual events sector together for a while. The second one is that we of New Technology Walkers have just launched our fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded for Vive Focus 3. I’m super-happy with the projects I’m following and the talented people I’m collaborating with, and I’m sure I’ll do great things with them in the future!
Top news of the week
Venice VR, Burning Man, and TGS show the beauty of virtual events
It has been a huge week for events in virtual reality, thanks to three important initiatives of this kind: Venice VR Expanded, Burning Man, and Tokyo Game Show.
Venice VR Expanded, the VR section of Venice Film Festival, has been richer than ever. The curators have chosen many amazing storytelling VR experiences in the official selection, but also many other VR experiences of every kind that are out of the contest. It’s intriguing that for the first time a game, The Last Worker, is included in the official selection with the other experiences that are more devoted to telling a story. Venice VR Expanded is being held both at Venice Lido and in VR, with a world in VRChat built by VRrOOm that recreates the exact atmosphere of Venice and lets you appreciate little VR teaser experiences built by creators.
I have collaborated to the development of this world, and I invite you all to visit it by looking for “Venice VR Expanded 2021” in VRChat worlds. Apart from some quirks and bugs, people that have visited the world have given me great feedback, and everyone has especially loved climbing the tower and finding the easter egg that there is on top of it!
It is the second year in a row that Venice curators chose to have an event in virtual reality associated with their festival, and the results have always been amazing. Our VRChat world has already had thousands of visitors, which proves how there is a place for high-quality content inside social VR worlds.
This week also the digital Burning Man festival was at its peak, offering a fully digital experience encompassing six digital worlds, one of which is in virtual reality, inside Altspace VR. I’ve read various reviews about this event, and it seems that also this year the virtual edition is huge and is full of so many artworks and worlds that is impossible to see all of them. The digital edition carries on the spirit of freedom and the craziness typical of Burning Man, and dozens of thousands of people are appreciating it.
Long-time Burners anyway highlight how this digital festival can’t feel the same as the real edition, where you are in a real desert together with thousands other people, doing crazy stuff. One of the problems, for instance, is that in Altspace VR you can’t have more than 40–50 people in the same room, so you can’t have the impression of being inside a big crowd like in the real festival. These are typical problems of VR events, and we’ll need some years to solve them.
The final amazing news of the week is that the Tokyo Game Show will be held in virtual reality this year. I’ll be completely honest with you: I had even no idea that there was a Tokyo Game Show, so why is this news so important? Because I’ve learnt that TGS is a very big gaming event and it features major Japanese brands like SEGA, Konami, and Square Enix, and this year it will be held all in VR. It is the first time that a famous gaming event, not related to VR, is held completely in virtual reality. It’s a milestone for VR events, and it will also be a testbench to evaluate if VR suits gaming events.
As you can see, even if the pandemic is less strong than before, VR events are still very strong, and they are even gaining importance. I hope they are here to stay because working on them I have been able to appreciate how amazing they are.
More info (Venice VR Expanded description)
More info (Highlights from Venice VR Expanded)
More info (The Last Worker is in Venice VR official selection)
More info (Virtual Burning Man review / 1)
More info (Virtual Burning Man review / 2)
More info (My interview about Virtual Burning Man)
More info (Tokyo Game Show being in VR)
More info (Tokyo Game Show lineup)
Other relevant news
iQiYi launches its QiYu 3 headset
iQiYi, something akin to the Netflix of China, has just launched its new standalone VR headset: it is called QiYu 3 (奇遇3, that means “Adventure 3”) and it is pretty interesting.
Its specs make it more powerful than Oculus Quest 2:
- 2K x 2K resolution per eye
- 90Hz refresh rate
- Qualcomm Snapdragon XR 2 chipset
- 8GB DDR4 RAM
- Mechanic IPD adjustment with exact setting of your measure
It also features a big library of video content (thanks to iQiYi main business) and a catalog of seriously good VR games like Arizona Sunshine, Swarm, Mercenary: Silicon Rising, Zombieland: Headshot Fever.
All of this for the competitive price of 3,499 RMB (approximately $540) to preorder it.
It seems a very good headset, apart from the terrible exterior design that looks like the son of an Oculus Quest 2 and a Vive Cosmos. We have no reviews about it, though, so if you want to buy it be careful because VR devices can’t be judged on paper: I’ve already tested some VR headsets from China that had amazing specs and then had problems like chromatic aberrations that ruined the whole experience.
I think it’s interesting because it seems that iQiYi is following the same route as Pico: designing a headset similar to the Quest 2, getting some porting of cool Western VR games, and try to attract some tech enthusiasts in China to grow the VR ecosystem there. And I know that other brands want to follow the same path, so I guess that the Chinese government is pushing in this sense.
This can have the double effect of jumpstarting the XR consumer ecosystem in China and creating new Chinese competitors for the Oculus Quest, especially now that ByteDance has acquired Pico. I think that we are just in the beginning, and both these operations will require years, but I’m happy to see something moving in XR in China for all the friends that I have there.
Let’s see how this new wave of Chinese VR headsets will change the technological landscape.
Apple AR/VR headset may rely on a nearby iPhone to work
The latest news on Apple’s upcoming AR/VR visor comes from The Information, which in a report reveals how Apple is working on making its upcoming headset not a fully standalone, but something that works thanks to the processing power of a nearby iPhone.
This would have the advantage of letting Apple create a device that is lighter and cheaper, that so won’t cost $3000 as previously rumored. Considering that most Apple fans already have an iPhone, this may seem a reasonable request for its potential users.
It seems that Apple is working closely with TMSC to create custom chips that are highly specialized in streaming data so that the headset can stream fast data to and from the iPhone. Apple is being Apple, and of course, it is not going to offer a tethered experience, but the HMD should connect wirelessly through a special high-speed network to the phone.
As always with all rumors about Apple devices, take this with a kilo of grains of salt, because we don’t know what is happening at Cupertino, and all rumors until now have been confused and conflicting with each other.
More info (Apple XR headset working together with an iPhone)
More info (NWN doubting on next year’s release date of this device)
News worth a mention
Lynx unveils the final design of its headset
French startup Lynx is one of the companies to follow in 2021 since it has promised to offer a hybrid AR/VR headset with a price of just a few hundred dollars. A crowdfunding campaign is starting soon, and yesterday its CEO Stan Larroque has revealed the final design of the headset, which you can see here above. As you can see, it looks very different from its competitors.
Some food for thoughts about the metaverse
Avi Bar-Zeev has written another fantastic article with very practical insights into what the “metaverse” could or could not realistically be. Given his wide expertise on the topic, what he says is incredibly smart and I suggest you all give it a read.
The Abba return with a virtual concert
Popular pop band Abba is returning after many decades with a virtual concert in which they sing again represented by digital avatars of when they were young, already dubbed “Abbatars” (LOL). The first news about the concert talked about holograms of the singers, but in the end, we got to know that it will just be the usual Pepper’s Ghost technique applied on a real stage. Cool, but I expected something more cutting-edge.
Mamma mia, Abba are back!
More info (Abba’s virtual concert)
More info (Stage design of Abba’s virtual concert)
SlimeVR’s crowdfunding campaign is now open
SlimeVR is a system that employs very simple trackers to let you have your full body in VR in popular applications like VRChat. A complete full-body VR set is less than $300, much less than you would need by using Vive Trackers.
SlimeVR’s crowdfunding campaign on Crowdsupply has already surpassed its original threshold, proving once more how big the market for full-body VR is, especially on VRChat.
Discover China’s XR developer ecosystem
VRCORE, a very smart Chinese VR market ecosystem analysis company, has just released a free report on the Chinese XR developer ecosystem. It is interesting to read it to evaluate the differences with the Western one (for instance Huawei VR, Vive Cosmos, and Vive Focus have some interest from developers), but also some commonalities (the biggest part of developers is targeting Oculus Quest, even if theoretically it shouldn’t work in China). It’s a good report to understand better the Chinese AR/VR scene.
AI can now reconstruct fingers’ poses
A new amazing research project is able to reconstruct the pose of our fingers in VR. The system tracks the hand (just the back of the hand) of a user interacting with real objects, and then an AI is able to reconstruct the pose of the virtual fingers by just analyzing the shape of the virtual object the user is interacting with.
This is overly cool, and I think that similar projects may be very helpful to give our virtual hands a realistic appearance when they interact with virtual objects, even if controllers have limited sensing capabilities.
Shariing is a SteamVR addon for enterprise demos
Shariing is an add-on for SteamVR that lets a person seated at the computer guide the user employing PC VR by drawing visual cues in front of his vision in real time. It is an amazing product for giving demos, but currently, it is aimed only at enterprise customers given its hefty subscription price.
Owlchemy Labs announces Cosmonius High
Owlchemy Labs, the game studio behind Job Simulator, has just announced its next game Cosmonius High, to be released next year. Cosmonius High is about using your superpowers to fix problems that happen in a crazy school in outer space. Like all Owlchemy Labs’s games, it features colorful visuals and very funny humor. I have to say that it seems a bit too “childish” from the trailer, so I’m not sure it will be my piece of cake, but I’m pretty sure it is an amazing game given the pedigree of the game studio.
Some news on content
- Beat Games has launched the Skrillex Music Pack for Beat Saber, priced at $11. Upload says it is a good music pack, even if the difficulty levels of the tracks is becoming too variated to continue to make sense
- Brink is going to launch on September, 9th for Steam VR and Quest, bringing amazing locations scanned in high quality for you to travel virtually
- No Man’s Sky has a new update called Frontiers, that makes even better this VR-compatible game
- Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge — Last Call, the last episode of the saga, is launching for Quest only on September, 15th
- Konami is releasing its rhythm game Beat Arena worldwide
- Neko Atsume, a PSVR-compatible game featuring overly-cute kittens, has finally been released in the US after it was released in 2018 only in Japan. The US will be hit by storm by the tenderness of these cats
- VR modder praydog has shown early footage of the VR mods he is building for Capcom’s recent remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3
- Hockey VR lets you train your hockey skills in virtual reality and it has been released on App Lab for $4. The game studio also sells a real stick you can attach to your Quest controllers to train better. I can’t wait for the fail videos of this game
- A demo of Hellsweeper, the game from the devs of Sairento VR, is now available
- A dev has created a cool passthrough AR app that helps you in learning how to play the piano
- A new game mode is being tested in beta for Pavlov and is called “Hidden”: one player is invisible and has to chase all the other ones. This mode has strong Predator vibes and it seems a lot of fun.
More info (Beat Saber Skrillex Pack)
More info (Beat Saber Skrillex Pack hands-on)
More info (Brink Traveler)
More info (No Man’s Sky — Frontier)
More info (Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge — Last Call)
More info (Konami’s Beat Arena)
More info (Neko Atsume)
More info (Resident Evil 2–3 VR Mod)
More info (Hockey VR)
More info (Hellsweeper)
More info (AR Piano for Quest)
More info (New “Hidden” mode for Pavlov)
News from partners (and friends)
I make my most sincere compliments to Kent Bye for its 1000th episode of the “Voices Of VR” podcast! It’s a big milestone and in all these 7 years he has always provided high-quality content to the community. I wish him to keep up his great work and arrive to the 2000th episode with even more success he currently has 🙂
Learn more
Puzzling Places has finally landed on the official Quest Store! This innovative game by Realities.Io that offers 3D puzzles scanned with photogrammetry and that has a big community of passionate gamers has been released for $15. I invite you all to check it out because it is amazing.
Learn more (Review by Road To VR)
Learn more (Preview video by me)
Some XR fun
Remember: there are no girls in VRChat
Funny link
Look, a new VR game!
Funny link
VR has been important for men of culture during Covid lockdowns
Funny link
VR has failed completely in providing the world the most important things it needed
Funny link
The best trailer of a VR game you’ll see today. Literally.
Funny link
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