The XR Week Peek (2021.10.19): HTC launches Vive Flow, Magic Leap 2 announced, and more!
I’m in the middle of this crazy October in which everything is happening in VR and I’m overworking like crazy. By the way, it’s a positive period, after all. I’ve just been interviewed by XR Must and I’m visiting an amazing XR company (you’ll discover which one very soon…), so things are going well. I send you good vibes so things go well for you too!
Top news of the week
HTC launches Vive Flow headset for relaxation, priced at $499
After endless teasings and leaks, in the end, HTC has finally unveiled its headset: called Vive Flow, it is a lightweight device for media consumption.
Vive Flow is a 6DOF headset that works with your Android phone as a 3DOF controller (hands tracking is coming in the future). It is very lightweight (it is like very thick and bulky sunglasses) and comfortable because the glasses do not contain the battery, and in fact, they have to be plugged into a power source (your phone, laptop, power bank, etc…). It can let you play lightweight VR applications, and also mirror the screen of your phone, so you can for instance watch Netflix on a big virtual screen. Here you are the list of the full specifications
- Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1
- Display Type: LCD
- Display resolution: 3.2K
- Framerate: 75Hz
- FOV: 100 degrees
- Weight: 189g
- Audio: integrated speakers and microphone; support for Bluetooth headphones
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C
HTC advertises it as a headset for relaxation and productivity because it wants to position it as a different product than a gaming machine like Oculus Quest 2. This is a smart idea because relaxation is a very big market (think about all the ASMR channels that are on Youtube) and the new comfort offered by this headset is ideal for that use case. The compact form factor and great comfort make it also ideal for those categories of people that value these features more, like for instance women and the elderly (my mom confirms it). It is to be verified if really that big market is interested in VR, though. Analyst Anshel Sag suggests possible enterprise use cases inside hospices and hospitals, for instance.
The reactions of the community have been pretty mixed: on one side the new form factor has been appreciated by many, but the price of $500 made many people skeptical about this device, especially if compared to the undercost Quest 2, that even if it is aimed at a different market, has similar possibilities and costs $300. Other people also complained about the promotional images, that don’t show the real glass, but just photoshop renders.
Reviews follow a similar route: first testers say that the headset is comfortable, but the use case has to be proven, and the same holds for the price.
A piece of very interesting news about this headset, which has been reported by few people, is that the Chinese company 7Invensun has already developed an eye-tracking module for it, making Vive Flow even more interesting for enterprise uses.
Protocol has also unveiled that HTC is working on its own social VR space (the meta… you got it) called ViveportVerse, based on Mozilla Hubs. The project seems not ready yet, though, since at the launch event of Vive Flow there has been no mention of it. It will be interesting to see its differences with Horizon Worlds… for sure the use of Mozilla Hubs means that it will automatically work on all devices, and it could be accessible by following a simple link.
A final notice… at the launch event of Vive Flow, DJ M1n0t0r (Minotron for his friends) has also said my name on the stage :O, since we are collaborating on a project for Flow 😉
More info (HTC launches Vive Flow)
More info (Vive Flow may become compatible with iPhone phones in the future)
More info (The importance of comfort for some categories of people)
More info (The Verge complaining about the Photoshopped images)
More info (Vive Flow hands-on on The Verge)
More info (Vive Flow hands-on on Upload)
More info (Anshel Sag on the enterprise uses of Vive Flow)
More info (Eye Tracking module for Vive Flow)
More info (ViveportVerse)
More info (Recording of the launch event at M1n0t0r’s performance timestamp)
Other relevant news
Magic Leap 2 has been teased
Magic Leap is back: CEO Peggy Johnson has just unveiled in a post on the company blog the Magic Leap 2, the new version of the AR glasses from the company in Florida.
The headset looks like an improved Magic Leap 1, lighted, slimmer and more elegant, and with a single cable on the back. Ms. Johnson also claims that ML2 will have the biggest FOV in the AR market (with the exception of RealMax, of course), with double of the field of view area of Magic Leap 1. Oddly, the company has chosen to increase the vertical field of view more than the horizontal one, and we don’t know if it has been a design choice or it has been something forced by the chosen technology. According to optics expert Karl Guttag, the new FOV should be 43.5° x 50°.
Another interesting feature is “segmenting dimming”, that makes people see augmentations also in highly-lit environments: Ms. Johnson claims that this can be very useful for surgeons in operating rooms for instance. Regarding clarity, she just says that his headset has improved “color fidelity,” “text legibility,” and “image quality,”
We don’t know further details, like if there are still the two planes of focus, or what is the resolution of the visuals, or to what kind of machine the device is attached. But from this first glimpse, we can already see how the new Magic Leap will be: and it seems more a step forward than a complete revolution of the device.
Karl Guttag has analyzed the headset from the images and the provided specifications and he is quite disappointed by it: he especially claims that it doesn’t look like a headset built for enterprise, but more like a new device that was already half-built when Ms. Johnson arrived and so has been just rebranded for the enterprise. Previous ML CEO Rony Abovitz has answered his article saying that Karl always strives for perfection and so criticizes every headset currently on the market.
The device will be sold exclusively as an enterprise device, starting from 2022. Ms. Johnson has stressed many times this enterprise focus, and I appreciate that she is giving a clear direction to the company. She has also added that some companies are interested in licensing ML technology to build consumer glasses and ML is open to that.
Together with the glimpse of the future, Magic Leap CEO has also announced that the company has just received $500M of fresh funding, for a new valuation of the company at $2B: this number is distant from the $6B of the glorious times of the startup, but it is still a big amount of money, considering that Magic Leap risked a financial crack some time ago. I think this money is the proof that investors trust Peggy Johnson and her ability to give a solid plan to the company.
More info (Magic Leap 2 and $500M funding)
More info (Magic Leap licensing its technology)
More info (Peggy Johnson’s announcement post on Magic Leap blog)
More info (Karl Guttag’s critics to the device)
Pimax and Varjo are ready to announce new headsets
In this Techtober we can’t spend a week without having new announcements of XR headsets, accessories, or software. And the upcoming weeks are no exception, with Varjo and Pimax promising to announce new products.
Varjo is organizing an event for October, 21th in which it will be announcing a new device. The sentence “Highly anticipated product release” and the fact that previous CEO Urho Konttori has clarified on social media that it won’t be an announcement only for enterprise, made everyone pretty excited about this news. The most popular speculation is that the Finnish company is going to announce a new prosumer headset, priced around $1000-$1500, and featuring its famous retina-resolution display, that gives you perfect clarity at the center of your vision. If it will happen, people wanting an amazing PCVR headset will consider this instead of an Index or Vive Pro 2.
Pimax instead has teased its upcoming product codenamed “Reality” and has announced that it will be “a new product that’s several generations ahead of anything currently on the market”. At the event, it should just tease the new device, to then announce it formally at CES 2022. We can expect it to be an HMD featuring a resolution and FOV even bigger than the ones that Pimax offers today (maybe 16K with 200°FOV?), but maybe they have some aces up to their sleeves (retina resolution as well? Or some haptic accessories?). The event had been planned for October, 20th, but then it has been delayed to 25th. I can’t say I am surprised that this new Pimax headset already starts with a delay…
More info (Varjo’s event)
More info (Pimax’s event)
Facebook to hire 10,000 people in EU for the m***verse
Facebook keeps running fast towards its vision of the m***verse, both from a hardware and software standpoint. This week, the company has announced it is going to hire additional 10,000 people to help in developing the m***verse, and all these new hires will happen in the Europen Union, and in particular, inside Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Ireland .
I wonder why the decision of not hiring people only in the US and I have given myself these possible answers: it can be so that they can work on Facebook’s data in Europe so that to comply with GDPR; it can be to work with strategic European partners, like Luxottica; it can be because the m***verse infrastructure needs to be distributed all over the world, and so they need people in every place to work on it; it can be for the lower cost of developers in Europe compared to the United States. These are the first theories that have come to mind.
UPDATE (2021.10.19): Road To VR also suggests that this hiring can be used to have a strong voice on regulations happening in Europe.
These huge numbers show once more how Facebook can work at a speed and with funds that few other companies have: I don’t think that Valve or HTC can plan to hire 10,000 additional people so fast. Facebook already had around 10,000 people working on XR and these new hires means doubling the workforce in immersive technologies.
For sure, as a European and an Italian, I am quite happy about this news: many talented European people will find a job in a big important company with such a big vision without having to move too far from home. This is positive for the European XR ecosystem. On the other side, you know, Facebook…
VR training goes big with Accenture and Bank of America
This week we had two big news that endorsed the importance of training in virtual reality.
The first comes from the major consultancy brand Accenture, which has just announced that it is going to deploy 60,000 Oculus Quest 2 headsets for the training of new employees. Accenture’s Julie Sweet highlighted how in a time where people work from home, the company needs new tools to train its employees in an effective way and also to create a bond between the new employees and the company. VR came into mind as the ideal tool to provide both. We have not many details on how this training will be implemented, but according to Accenture’s Nick Rosa, it is the biggest deployment of VR headsets in a company. This is an enormous endorsement for virtual reality, and the previous use of 17,000 Oculus Gos by Walmart pales in comparison.
The second big piece of news comes from Bank Of America, which has just confirmed that it will train 50,000 of its employees with virtual reality. The bank institution has already performed a pilot on 400 people, and since the results have been very encouraging, it has decided to expand it to a big chunk of its employees. Virtual Reality will be used for training, but also to evaluate the performances of the employees so that to understand where they should improve.
These results are not bad for a technology that has died 3 years ago…
More info (Accenture to deploy 60,000 VR headsets)
More info (Accenture’s Julie Smith on employees’ onboarding)
More info (Bank Of America’s use of VR headsets for training)
The AR program for the US Army gets delayed
When Microsoft won a $22B dollars contract with the US Army to develop a special version of HoloLens that could increase the “lethality” of troops, the news made strides worldwide. We have all seen those images of soldiers with modified HoloLens with night and thermal cameras and we have read about soldiers testifying how these proved to be interesting devices to coordinate better between team members during the operations.
But it seems that things are not going as expected and so the US Army has delayed the project by 1 year, postponing the “VAS Operational Test and fielding to a date later in FY22 [2022]”. It seems that the AR headset posed some logistic problems to the troops (for instance, they have to wear batteries on their body to power the glasses for hours) and that the AR technology was not as ready as the soldiers expected it to be. So more time is needed to solve the issues.
Personally, I found this understandable: it is an R&D project for now, and it is part of the research process to find some unexpected problems and spend time to solve them. But of course, I understand that is not a piece of good news for the reputation of AR.
News worth a mention
Facebook is working on a big dataset of POV videos
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) is working with 13 universities to create a big dataset of videos with first-person point of view. Datasets are important to train AI models and big datasets like ImageNet, a hand-curated collection of millions of photos, have made possible the development of many AI/ML algorithms used today.
FAIR noticed that there was no big dataset with videos taken from the first-person point of view, so there was not enough data to train AI algorithms that should for instance recognize objects and actions from the point of view of a robot or a person wearing AR glasses, so it started the project Ego4D together with some worldwide universities to work on it. Some people have been equipped with cameras to wear on the head, and have spent many hours a day recording their activity, to provide long shaky videos from their first-person point of view. The images of those videos have then be labeled by hand in Rwanda so that to have a corresponding ground truth of what can be seen there to be fed to the AI algorithms during training.
These videos will then be used to train the AI models that will most probably run on Facebook AR glasses to make them understand what is happening around them. From a technology standpoint, this is great news, because this data set will help a lot the research in AI, AR, and robotics. On the other, as you can guess, it poses some serious privacy concerns.
Tap is back with a wrist bracelet
Do you remember Tap? It was a wearable device with the shape of a knuckle that you could wear on the hand and use it to touchtype text on your mobile phone by just tapping your fingers on whatever surface. It was like having a keyboard everywhere you wanted (You can read my review about it here).
Well, the company has just announced its evolution: called Tap XR, it has the shape of a wristband and it promises to let you write text inside an AR/VR headset without the need for you to use a keyboard, but just using your finger movements. It looks interesting.
Lone Echo 2 is one of the best games of 2021, but…
Lone Echo 2 has finally been released after many delays! All the reviews highlight how this is a game with stunning graphics, that paired with its beautiful environments and immersive zero-G movement, put you in awe. Visually speaking, it is probably the best game of 2021.
But the game is also a bit slow, the story a bit subpar, and it has not the same spark of innovation as the first title. Probably it could have been better, but it remains anyway a very good game, and it even got a 100% score on VRFocus.
More info (Review on Upload VR)
More info (Review on Road To VR)
More info (Review on VR Focus)
Amazon Glow is a video projector for kids
Amazon has just announced Glow, a product to make people interact and play with children remotely. Glow is a video communication device, like Facebook Portal, that also embeds a video projector. The video projector can show fancy images on the desk where the device is located, and the kids can interact with these images by touching them with their fingers. This way it is possible for distant parents to play with their children remotely.
Facebook teases some early-stage prototypes
Many companies are announcing new headsets this month, so Facebook has decided to tease some future devices it is working on to steal the attention from the competition. So since Varjo is going to launch a retina-resolution headset and HTC has launched a slim headset, Zuckerberg and Boz have shared on social media two images of them wearing what is supposed to be a retina-resolution headset prototype and a slim-headset prototype. Honestly, I wonder what was the need to do that, considering that all the community already thinks that Facebook Connect is the most important event of the month.
I’ve found also interesting that Boz also shared another picture of him wearing what looked like a Quest glued to the headmount of the Rift S. This doesn’t seem to refer to what a competitor is announcing, so I speculate is one of the early prototypes of the upcoming Quest 2 Pro.
Microsoft X-Rings is a controllers that can change its shape
Microsoft has just showcased one of its research projects about VR controllers: called X-Rings, it is composed of a device that using some moving rings can roughly recreate the shape of an object. This way when you grab an object in VR with your controller, the controller gets the shape of that object and can offer you more realistic haptic sensations.
NVIDIA CloudXR is now available on Google Cloud
NVIDIA CloudXR is probably the most mature solution to provide cloud rendering. You could already set up easily your cloud rendering services using this technology on AWS and Azure, and now you can also do that on Google Cloud, thanks to machines already available on the Google Cloud marketplace. Cloud rendering is the future of XR, but remember that in the present, it can be quite expensive.
Exploit the discounts on Oculus Store!
To celebrate the first anniversary of Oculus Quest 2, Oculus is offering a few interesting bundles and discounts on more than 30 games! Also, for the launch of Lone Echo, there is a bundle with Lone Echo I and II together.
It’s the right time to buy some games!
More info (Oculus Quest 2 Anniversary Sale)
More info (Lone Echo bundle)
Some news on content
- Creed: Rise To Glory has just reached the milestone of 1M units sold among all the available platforms! Kudos to Survios for this great result;
- Resident Evil 4 is launching in a few days (on 21st) and the Oculus Japanese commercial about it is pretty creepy;
- RagnaRock is going to launch on Quest Store on the 21st (the same day as RE4VR… this is a weird choice…).
More info (Creed)
More info (Resident Evil 4)
More info (RagnaRock)
News from partners (and friends)
The fantastic Max Noir is trying to create the VR ecosystem in Uganda and she’s asking for our help on Patreon! Donate to help her in this noble cause 🙂
Learn more
Some XR fun
Yes, we had funny images for the launch of Vive Flow, of course.
Funny link / 1
Funny link / 2
Zuck, you are confusing my sexuality
Funny link
Oculus has now its logo with a “broken” design. There are some funny theories about it, and some are sick burns
Funny link / 1
Funny link / 2
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(Header image by HTC Vive)
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