The XR Week Peek (2022.01.03): Quest 2 sales spark a debate on kids and VR, Apple hires XR communication rep, and more!
Welcome, 2022! This is the first newsletter of this new year, and I hope it will be a great year for every one of us.
I ended the last year with some good posts, like this one where I had an exclusive interview with Holoride, one of the hottest XR startups out there. Go reading it, if you missed it. I hope this new year I can keep providing you with high-quality content about AR and VR like all the past five years. Please support me on Patreon to help me in making this happen 🙂
This week has been a bit boring for what concerns XR news, but maybe next week with the CES will be more interesting. Honestly, I don’t expect huge XR news coming from this event, but I hope to be wrong. Fingers crossed.
Top news of the week
There is an ongoing debate about the use of VR by kids
VR had a great Christmas, and in particular, Oculus Quest 2 had a great Christmas. I’ve already talked about this in my previous newsletter: Quest 2 has been a popular Christmas gift, especially in the US, and according to some analysts, during the Christmas vacations there have been around 650,000 new downloads of the Oculus app, meaning that probably there have been around half a million headsets gifted. These are impressive numbers for the VR ecosystem.
From the videos shared on social media, it is clear that many of these headsets were gifted to kids. But the problem is that VR headsets should not be used by children younger than 13 years old because headsets have not been made to accommodate the head and the eyes of a kid, and so they may cause discomfort. If the kid is very young, there is also the problem that he/she is not able to distinguish what is real and what is virtual, and this may create a lot of confusion in his mind. Another area of concern is that current VR headsets have no parental control tools, and so kids can use them to play horror games or enjoy porn content, and this is not healthy for their wellbeing either. The presence of kids also creates problems for adults, that in social VR ecosystem are surrounded by kids that scream or ask too many questions, while the adults would just like to hang around and peacefully chat or play.
I’ve written a post highlighting these concerns and asking that we all cope with this problem: if parents do not want to respect the 13 years old limit, at least we should educate them on how to give their children a safe VR experience (e.g. limiting the time spent in VR) and also offer them parental control tools. And I’ve not been the only one being concerned about the “kids issue”: Scott Stein on CNET wrote an article highlighting why kids should have not been gifted a headset for Christmas (but many parents didn’t listen to him), and CNBC also wrote a post at the end of 2021 detailing the problem of kids in VR. With all these children entering VR now, the time is ripe for a debate on how to give them an experience that offers them safety and privacy. Just writing on a box “not suitable for people below 13 years old” is good to cover the a** of headset companies, but is not good to protect children that are using the headset anyway.
The people of the community got engaged with these articles and answered them in different ways, and this sparked a debate about the topic. Some people say that is only a concern of the parents, and we shouldn’t talk about it; others say that instead VR headset manufacturers should cope with it directly, and detect if a kid is using the headset and block him/her. Some people say that VR can be harmful to children, others say that it is not. Some people say that kids should not enter the VR worlds populated by adults, others say that it is ok to be mixed. There have been many different opinions that I have read these days. What is interesting, however, is that the majority of people agreed that we need to talk about this issue, and find a way to offer kids a safe VR experience. Of course, we also need the headset manufacturers, and Meta in primis, to participate in the debate and provide tools that help parents in giving their children a positive VR experience. I hope this is going to happen soon.
More info (650,000 downloads of the Oculus app this Christmas)
More info (Many children have received a Quest 2 this Christmas)
More info (My popular article about VR and the “kids issue”)
More info (Scott Stein on the Quest as a Christmas gift)
More info (CNBC on children and VR headsets)
More info (A research study on children and VR headsets)
More info (A dev talk on how to limit bully children in social VR spaces)
More info (Another dev talk on how to limit bully children in social VR spaces)
More info (A VR user complaining of the too many children in multiplayer VR experiences)
Other relevant news
Apple hires Meta’s XR Head of PR
A report by Bloomberg reports that Apple has just hired Andrea Schubert, Communications Director at Meta’s consumer hardware division for XR, including Portal, AR, and VR devices.
This is a piece of interesting news: if Apple needed to hire such a person expert with communications about XR products, it is probable that the launch of an Apple XR product is imminent. This would be another clue about Apple launching its AR/VR visor in 2022, as many other reports seem to hint. Of course, nothing is sure yet, but my experience says that when the rumors intensify too much, then there is something true behind them.
The US Army confirms IVAS deployment for 2022
One of the biggest endorsements for XR in the last years has been the $22B contract that Microsoft signed with the US Army to provide a modified version of HoloLens 2 glasses that should “improve the lethality” of troops. Given the importance of this contract, there was a bit of concern in the community when the news broke about its suspension, and some considered it as a sign that AR glasses are not a usable technology yet. After that, a new piece of news talked just about a delay and not cancelation of the program.
The good news of the week is that actually, the US Army has confirmed that the IVAS program has not been suspended and that it has only been delayed. The deployment is still awaited for 2022, and this means that AR headsets proved to be valuable for this use case, notwithstanding some problems they still have in the difficult environmental conditions the soldiers put them in.
Welcome 2022 in VR games
The year has just started, and it will be interesting to see what will be the news that will change the landscape this year. For sure we are all waiting for great VR content to come, and there are already some amazing games announced for the various VR platforms. Among Us VR, Cosmonious High, Green Hell VR are just some games coming in 2022 that may amaze the XR community, and we all hope to also see this year the release of the big titles Meta is working on like Assassin’s Creed VR or GTA San Andreas in VR. Let me link you some posts about these games we are all waiting for.
More info (Upcoming games in January 2022)
More info (The most important games we are waiting for in 2022)
News worth a mention
bHaptics announced TactGlove haptics glove
bHaptics, one of the leading companies for haptics in XR, has just unveiled TactGlove, a haptic glove for the VR consumer market. It is a lightweight glove very similar to the standard ones, that can provide vibrational feedback on all the ten fingertips of the hands. It can work with Quest 2 and it will cost $299.
Meta acquires AI.Reverie
Meta has acquired another startup, AI.Reverie, which was focused on training artificial intelligence systems using synthetic data. The use of synthetic data helps in training AI systems in a faster and cheaper way than using real-world data labeled by hand. The acquisition was performed in October and could be useful to also improve the AI systems that will run on XR headsets.
Researchers create a camera that is big as a grain of salt
A team of researchers from Princeton and the University of Washington created a new camera that captures good-quality images and measures in at only a half-millimeter. The study uses optical metasurfaces with machine learning to produce high-quality color imagery, with a wide field of view. This is impressive work, and maybe these technologies may be used in the future also in XR hardware.
A review of Arpara 5K headset
The popular Youtuber Sebastian Ang has made a live stream where he reviewed the Arpara 5K headset and compared it with Reverb G2 and Varjo Aero.
Facebook gives life to children drawing with AI
A new AI research project by Facebook gives life to the drawings of children, animating them using AI. So a kid can draw for instance a monkey, and the AI system can make it dance and walk in a credible way. I love this because these days I was exactly thinking of an XR system that gives life in 3D (AR or VR) to the drawing of kids, and the evolution of this AI system may be cool for that.
Two articles on the metaverse
Every week I share with you the few good articles I read about the M-word, in all the noise that there is out there. This week I found two that stood out:
- A full review of the metaverse and its ongoing research. It’s a scientific paper of 66 pages that could be useful for you as a reference if you work in academic research;
- A post on VentureBeat about AR being more important for the m**averse than VR. I’ve found it interesting because it helps in educating people that the m**averse is not just a VR game like in Ready Player One, but a pervasive technology. This article also provides interesting thoughts, like the one about our brain that still has to keep a mental model of the real world while we are in VR, and this creates a mismatch between the model of the real world and the one of the virtual world while we use VR.
More info (Academic survey about the metaverse)
More info (AR vs VR)
PCVR continues its struggle
The complicated moment for PCVR continues.
Valve has just published the list of the top games on Steam for 2021, and among the most grossing titles, there is no VR game released in 2021. This means that no huge VR hit has been released this year on Steam: in fact, one of the most awaited VR games of the year, Lone Echo 2, was exclusive to the PC Oculus Store. This shows that game studios are more interested in releasing big titles for Quest.
FitXR, one of the most popular fitness XR games, is following suit and is pausing development for Steam and PSVR, to focus at the moment just on Quest.
I’m not saying that PCVR is dead, because actually there have been successful titles released on the platform in 2021, but for sure it has lost its original appeal for many game studios.
More info (No top selling Steam VR game from 2021)
More info (FitXR pausing development on Steam)
Some news on content
- The VR mods for Resident Evil 2 and 3 are finally available on GitHub
- Upload VR has gone hands one with VR MMO Zenith during its beta period, and the journalist came out impressed by its current status. Let’s hope this will be a great game!
More info (Resident Evil VR mods)
More info (Zenith hands-on)
News from partners (and friends)
XR influencer Alan Smithson has written a post called “The Metaverse Manifesto”, inside which he defines some basic traits of the metaverse and identifies an ethical code we should adhere to while building it.
Learn more
Some XR fun
Who else reminds of the VGA ports and their screws?
Funny link
The right definition of “Metaverse Expert”.
Funny link (Look at the comment)
What to do with an Oculus Rift S in 2022
Funny link
Superhero games in virtual reality.
Funny link
This thread of us making fun of “meta-” definitions is pretty hilarious
Funny link
Predictions for PCVR in 2022
Funny link
Actually the Matrix was not that bad
Funny link
Let me begin this year in the best way possible!
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