I am back in Italy! The trip to the US has been incredibly interesting: I have met many amazing people and tried many innovative devices, so I have been very satisfied with having gone there. I still miss a bit having a walk around University Street in Palo Alto and seeing a lot of young people having fun in the restaurants. I’m sure I’ll return there.
But now it’s time to get back to routine work, so let me tell you about the most important news in AR and VR from this week.
Top news of the week
Meta Quest 2 has sold 10M units, or maybe not
The most important announcement of the week has been the one that never existed.
Going on the stage at an investor event, Qualcomm CEO and President Cristiano Amon has revealed that Oculus Quest 2 (now Meta Quest 2) has sold 10 million units worldwide. 10 million is the magic number indicated by some key figures in our ecosystem (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg, but also Unity CEO John Riccitiello) that should mark the beginning of the serious adoption of new technology.
With 10 million potential users, AAA studios start finding a market interesting. And if AAA studios start building great content around famous IPs, this will attract new users, and this bigger market will attract even more famous content creators, for a virtuous circle that makes the whole ecosystem grow. Even better, with 10 million people having a Quest, it is more probable that everyone has at least a friend that owns a headset: this means that more people can try the device at a friend’s home and then be convinced to buy one as well. That’s why 10M is such an important threshold: because it marks the beginning of the serious growth of a technology. iPhone 1 has also sold 10M units in the first year… and we know what it meant for the future of smartphones. For this reason, we all VR people started popping champagne at this news.
I was anyway a bit puzzled for the context of this announcement: I mean if it was so important, why was it mentioned by chance during a presentation by Qualcomm in a non-relevant event? And in fact, some hours later, Qualcomm has issued a statement saying that 10 million was not an official figure, but some third-party analysts’ estimates. The enthusiasm of the community settled down and we had to stop getting drunk with champagne. Nothing was true, 10M was just a hypothesized number.
What’s most probably happened is that someone from Meta made some phone calls to Qualcomm people asking why such an important announcement was made by Qualcomm, when of course it’s Meta that wants to announce such news. It is to be understood also if the number is reliable or not: it’s weird that Qualcomm needs third-party analysts to know how many Quest 2 have been sold when Qualcomm itself knows how many chips it is selling to Meta, so it has first-hand reliable data. Something smells fishy, and it is not clear if the number was correct, but Qualcomm had to backpedal to let Meta announce it itself, or the number was truly incorrect, and maybe represents the chips that Qualcomm has sold to Meta, but not the headsets that have already been sold. In whatever case, either we are at 10M sold Quest 2 or we are pretty close. We’ll soon arrive there, and that’s great.
In a piece of separate news, Meta is changing all the branding of the Quest to Meta Quest, and it is working internally to reduce the chances of future leaks and whistleblowers.
More info (Qualcomm and its 10M announcement)
More info (iPhone 1 selling 10M units in its first year)
More info (Meta Quest branding becoming widespread)
More info (Meta becoming more secretive)
Other relevant news
Roblox improves its VR support
Roblox is one of the most famous platforms of the moment, especially among very young people. It has more than 40M daily active users, and a thriving ecosystem of content creators that make a living by creating games for it. It is one of the most relevant 3D social spaces, together with Fortnite.
Roblox CEO has said in the past that he was intrigued by the Oculus Quest, and now it seems that the whole company is betting more on virtual reality. The new version of Roblox ships with a new VR system, that among other things, increases support for VR and especially for Oculus Touch and Valve Index controllers. The game already supported VR, but with this new update, VR content should work much better.
The news is huge for two reasons. The first one is that such an important platform found VR relevant enough to ship an update to improve its support. The second one is that all the users of this platform will be so more exposed to virtual reality, and some of them will buy a VR headset to enjoy the VR content available on it. This is huge news for all our ecosystem.
(Thanks to Mathew Olson for the tip)
Meta shows its work on haptic gloves
Sometimes Meta publishes interesting posts about its research work, and this week it has released an article detailing its project about building haptic gloves.
The article details all the work done until now to create haptic gloves, an ongoing research that may need 10–15 years to produce something that could appeal to the mass market. Creating such a device requires a lot of work in
- Hands tracking, because the gloves must detect the exact pose of all fingers
- Production systems, to be able to embed hardware directly into the fabric of the gloves
- Materials research, to create a glove that is comfortable to wear, resistant, and that can include many electronic parts in its fabric
- Force feedback, so that the gloves are able to simulate the forces applied by objects to the fingers
- Haptics, because the user must feel the touch of objects on his/her hands
- Human interactions, because Meta is interested in multiplayer interactions, so also in how two people having haptic gloves can interact together.
The company highlights it wants to build “soft, lightweight, stylish, comfortable, affordable, durable, and customizable” gloves that are able to simulate “a range of complex, nuanced sensations for the wearer such as pressure, texture, and vibration to create the effect of feeling a virtual object with your hands”.
The post shows fascinating work, but without revealing too much: it is just a teaser to attract more people to join Reality Labs. One of the things it reveals, though, is that haptic feedback is given inside the gloves by tiny “microfluidic actuators”, that is little balls inside the glove that inflate or deflate to module how much pressure is exerted on the skin in all the parts of the hands. Thanks to them, it is possible to offer a lot of different haptic patterns on all parts of the user’s hands.
But if you have read my article with my review of HaptX gloves, you may remember that it is exactly how HaptX works, and its technology has been patented years ago. For this reason, HaptX has issued a statement in which it recalls that it let many Meta engineers try its gloves to be friendly with another company in the community and now asks for a settlement for this patent infringement. It’s funny how Facebook changed its name also to start from scratch with a new clean reputation for Meta and now Meta starts immediately by infringing a patent with its first revealed work. This is not a good omen for the future of the company.
More info (Meta revealing its work with haptic gloves)
More info (Upload summarizing Meta’s post)
More info (Zuck trying the gloves)
More info (Boz trying the gloves)
More info (HaptX reacting to Meta’s post)
IAP and DLC are now admitted into App Lab apps
A little big news for all of us indie VR developers: finally Meta/Facebook has enabled all App Lab applications to sell paid IAP and DLCs. This means that we indies have finally new ways to monetize our content on our second-tier indie store App Lab. Finally, we can also offer freemium content, publishing a free app that works by selling additional content after it has been downloaded.
Considering that the big majority of indie VR games are on App Lab and not on the official Store, this is pretty good news for all the indie ecosystem.
The VR ecosystem looks like being heavily US-based
During my trip to San Francisco, I was surprised to see in every corner of the city ads about the Oculus Quest. This was pretty weird to me because I never saw a single one of them in Italy. I reported this to the community, and I got pretty interesting feedback.
First of all, it seems that commercials about the Quest are especially a thing in the US, with now something also starting happening in UK. People from other countries reported no ads and commercials about VR.
Then some content creators, both indies and famous studios, confirmed that most of the sales of their games come from the US. Some studios like Resolution Games, Cortopia, and Fast Travel Games, reported that 45–70% of their sales all come from the United States. This is also confirmed by the views on my blog, that from the vast majority come from America. When there was the recall of Oculus facial interfaces, the numbers about US were much bigger than the ones from Japan. There were around 4M interfaces in the US when the analysts talked about around 8M sold Quests worldwide, and this seems to point again to a 50% statistics.
I know that this is sparse data that has little statistic relevance, but all of this seems to point to the fact that the core of the Western VR market is heavily rooted in the United States. I know that the US are more technologically advanced and that being Meta there, it is easier for it to start conquering its local market, but as a European guy, I hope that in the next years the VR market becomes more evenly distributed.
More info (A user reporting about Latin America and XR)
More info (Some commercials starting happening in the UK)
More info (Some commercials starting happening in the UK / 2)
More info (Loco Dojo dev confirming stats about the US)
More info (Some important game studios confirming most revenues coming from the US)
More info (Resolution Games confirming most revenues coming from the US)
More info (XR Workout confirming most users coming from the US)
Huawei launches its 6DOF glasses
Do you remember the Huawei 6DOF glasses that I reviewed some time ago together with FXG’s Nikk Mitchell? Well, finally they have been released to the market, and you can either buy the 6DOF glasses or a 6DOF kit to apply to your existing Huawei 3DOF glasses.
Huawei has been the first one to showcase lightweight VR glasses that look like big sunglasses. Now the design has been used also by other companies, like HTC that has just launched its Vive Flow headset. The difference between Huawei glasses and Vive Flow is that Huawei glasses come with two 6DOF controllers similar to the ones of Oculus Quest 2, so they offer more possibilities and are great also to play games. On the other side, it seems that HTC at the moment is offering more content, with 100+ compatible titles with the Flow. Plus Huawei headset is compatible only with Huawei phones, while HTC is more open. Flow is also cheaper and available worldwide. But Huawei is a bigger company than HTC so these glasses have more potential to grow.
Huawei glasses are at the moment on sale only in China: the whole kit costs 4000 yuan (around $626), while the 6DOF upgrade kit costs 2000 yuan (around $313). I’m interested to see how well will they sell: Huawei is a company much bigger than Facebook, and it has the money and the talent to build great headsets… but at the moment VR just looks like a side project for it. Given the limited content and the price that is high for the average Chinese person, I don’t think that this edition of the headset will make strides in the market, but it can anyway be an interesting first step for the company, that can in the future release cheaper and more advanced devices.
(Thanks to Rob Cole for the tip!)
More info (Huawei glasses official page)
More info (Huawei glasses specifications)
News worth a mention
Nreal Light glasses are coming to the US
Nreal is finally ready to start shipping its AR glasses to the US, thanks to the support of Verizon. The sale of Nreal Light will begin inside selected Verizon stores from November 30, and online from December 2, for $599. These are the first AR glasses officially launched in the US, so it is like a landmark moment for the technology.
Two articles on the m**averse
You know that I like to share with you some articles on the m**averse, the few interesting ones among all the marketing junk out there.
The first one I am sharing below is about Tim Sweeney saying that the m**averse is a trillion-dollar opportunity. But more than this marketing fluff for his investors (that have given him 1B to chase the m**averse dream), it is relevant that he says that in his opinion, the race of the companies is to reach 1B users. In his opinion, the first company reaching 1B users in its ecosystem in the m**averse will dictate its standards to the whole m**averse. It’s funny how everyone talks about openness, about building the m**averse together, while in reality they just want to get to dominate it.
The second one is a post by Avi Bar-Zeev inspired by his talk at AWE in which he tries to classify the different kinds of meaning that companies give to the m**averse: for instance some are aiming at a recreation of Second Life (e.g. VRChat), while others are working on an outside AR development (e.g. Niantic). There’s only one m**averse, but there are many different approaches in building it, and it’s interesting to evaluate them all.
More info (Tim Sweeney on the M-word)
More info (Avi Bar-Zeev on the M-word)
CheApR is a cheap AR headset
I love projects by makers, and this week I got to know about CheApR, which is a DIY augmented reality headset that you can build for $80. It is not as advanced as a HoloLens 2, but if you like to build things by yourself, you may have fun while assembling it.
Discover Chemical Haptics
The University of Chicago is studying a new way to provide haptic feedback in VR on your face or your arm by using chemicals. The idea is to let some chemical substances touch your skin so that to give you special haptic sensations. For instance, menthol can be used to let you feel cold, while capsaicin is good to let you feel warm. The research also becomes a bit weird with the use of lidocaine to numb your touch sense for a moment, or sanshool to give you tingling sensations. I don’t know how all of this is safe for the health, but it’s for sure interesting research.
Discover some early Black Friday deals
This week I have discovered two new interesting deals for Black Friday:
- Puzzle Bobble 3D/VR: Vacation Odyssey is 30% off on all platforms
- Oculus Quest 2 comes with a $50 gift card for the shop you have bought it in. This means that if you buy it on the Oculus website, you have $50 to buy the games you like the most. This is very cool!
More info (Puzzle Bobble VR on Quest)
More info (Oculus Quest 2 Black Friday deal)
VR Awards have celebrated the best of VR
One of the most important ceremonies of our ecosystem is the VR Awards, and also this year they have awarded some of the best companies, people, and products of VR. This year, Demeo has been chosen as the best game of the year, while HP Reverb G2 as the best headset on the market.
(PS I’ve been one of the media partners of the event)
More info (VR Awards nominations)
More info (VR Awards winners)
Niantic starts experimenting with music events
Music events in XR are one of the biggest trends of the last months: the Travis Scott concert on Fortnite, the new concerts on Roblox, and also the Jean-Michel Jarre concert in VRChat I worked on are some relevant examples of successful performances of this kind.
The new entrant in the field seems to be Niantic. Ed Sheeran is expected to perform on Pokemon Go on November 22nd at 2 pm ET (11 am PT), even if it is not clear how this is going to happen. And deadmau5 has just announced that it will build a music-based game on the Lightship platform soon.
Music in XR seems to be an ever-growing trend.
More info (Ed Sheeran in Pokemon Go)
More info (Deadmau5 and Lightship SDK)
Some reviews on the Vive Flow
I have found on Reddit some reviews of real users trying the Vive Flow. One is overall positive, and one is overall negative. Enjoy them to understand better if this device is for you.
More info (Vive Flow review / 1)
More info (Vive Flow review / 2)
Some cool experiments with passthrough AR on Quest 2
Finally, we are seeing some interesting experiments with passthrough AR on Quest 2. On Twitter, I have found some cool videos, one about making a Minecraft-like construction mechanic, and another one that puts your furniture in another VR environment. Very nice stuff worth a watch.
More info (Quest Passthrough Experiments / 1)
More info (Quest Passthrough Experiments / 2)
Spatial goes NFT
Do you remember Spatial, the VR application for enterprise meetings that I defined as one of the most interesting in the market? Well, the company has performed a hard pivot, and now basically hosts exhibitions to sell NFTs.
I am a bit sad about this decision, but after I have read the Wired article about it, I can say I understand it. First of all, these exhibitions were much more profitable for the company, given the NFT hype, so the startup has just followed the money. And then, the harsh reality is that enterprise VR meetings weren’t doing great. Companies wanted something frictionless like Zoom meetings, and most meetings in Spatial (around 70%) were not performed in AR or VR, but on mobile or web, making it similar to Zoom.
Considering that most of the time, I use these platforms without VR as well because it is much more comfortable, I’m wondering if VR meetings are really a thing now. Because as I’ve always highlighted, VR meetings have a sense if you have to discuss around a 3D object, or if there must be physicality… otherwise they have no real advantage over Zoom, they just add the friction and discomfort of wearing a headset…
Some news on content
- According to a leak, The Mercenaries mode is coming to Resident Evil 4 VR in 2022
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar has been reviewed by Road To VR, but the feedback has been so-so
- Resolution Games has announced its new game Ultimechs
- Lucky’s Tale is back, with a surprise release on Oculus Quest 2
- Medal Of Honor arrives on Quest 2, with a huge storage requirement, and with the same problems as the PC version
- Ruins Magus is an interesting Japanese game looking for money to translate it to English
- Demeo is going to launch its third dungeon next month
- Biolum
has been released on PC.is going to be released on December, 2nd. It is a VR experience set in an underwater environment (Thanks Simplex for the correction) - ForeVR Darts lets you play darts in VR with your friends
More info (Resident Evil 4 VR)
More info (Warhammer)
More info (Ultimechs)
More info (Lucky’s Tale)
More info (Medal Of Honor storage requirement on Quest)
More info (Medal Of Honor review on Quest)
More info (RuinsMagus)
More info (Demeo)
More info (Biolum)
More info (ForeVR Darts)
News from partners (and friends)
My friends at Circuit Stream have a Black Friday deal they want to tell you about:
Circuit Stream has been a certified AR/VR and Unity educator since 2015. Their curriculums and programs have also been accepted and implemented by Unity Technologies. Until November 30th you can enroll in their 10-week XR Design, XR Development or Intro to Unity3D programs for 30% to 50% less. What sets them apart from other course providers are live online classes, engaging and helpful private community, and always up-to-date curriculum!
If you are looking to get skilled in real-time 3D or XR for the best price of the year, go and check out their Black Friday deals
Diagnosia is an interesting VR experience from the IDFA DocLab about psychology, internet, and mental disorders.
Some XR fun
The jobs in the future
Funny link
How you see yourself vs how the others see you
Funny link
Yeah, we like VRChat
Funny link
As a game developer, I can relate
Funny link
The birth (and the death?) of mixed reality videos
Funny link
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