The XR Week (2022.01.24): Google AR headset is “Project Iris”, Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard, and more
The international situation scares me a bit, but I’m trying to focus on the good things that happened to me this week. The Oxymore musical VR experience we of VRrOOm have organized with Jean-Michel Jarre went great; someone posted a tweet where he shows he finished our game HitMotion: Reloaded; and one of my readers made an amazing meme about my tutorials. I can say it was a great week for me, professionally speaking… and I hope that the next one will even be better.
What about yours? Let me know how things are going for you!
Top news of the week
Project Iris is the codename of Google’s AR glasses
According to a report on The Verge, Google is working on AR glasses. This shouldn’t surprise us given the recent acquisitions performed by the Big G, but now we have more details about what is happening at Mountain View.
The AR headset is codenamed Project Iris, and it should be a standalone headset resembling ski goggles that is able to perform mixed reality. AR would not be provided with transparent lenses, but with passthrough AR. The report talks also about possible offloading of the computation of graphical elements in the cloud, so this could be the first headset implementing some sort of cloud rendering. The operating system should be Android, but it seems that Google is also building an operating system specific for XR. The product is still being built, and the expected release date is 2024.
At this moment, 300 people are secretly working on it, under the supervision of Clay Bavor, but many more will be hired in the upcoming months. Google is also hiring high-profile people for it, like Bernard Kress, principal optical architect on Microsoft’s HoloLens team, and Paul Greco, the previous CTO of Magic Leap.
All these intriguing details confirm that we should consider Google as a serious contender for the race to our mixed reality future (the M…), and this is good news because we need competition in our space.
More info (Report on The Verge)
More info (News reported by Road To VR)
Other relevant news
Microsoft is acquiring Activision Blizzard for $68.7B
The biggest news of the week has been the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft for $68.7B. It came as a complete surprise and has shaken the whole gaming ecosystem.
With it, Microsoft acquires many popular games like Overwatch, Starcraft, Call of Duty, and even Candy Crush. Many of these games will so be offered by Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, making Microsoft gaming subscription services always more enticing for the players. It is not clear if some of these titles may even become exclusive to it in the future. Of course, the FTC will have to analyze this deal before it can be finalized.
You may wonder why I’m talking about this piece of news in this newsletter if it is not related at all to VR. Well, the more we go on, the more the line between VR and non-VR-related news is becoming always more blurred, and this news has a kind of relevance for us XR enthusiasts, too.
First of all, a report by Bloomberg says that Activision was trying to find a way to sell the company given its always worse reputation gained with the recent harassment scandals. One of the first companies it was proposed to was Meta, but there was not much interest on Zuckerberg’s side. I think that Zuck is now all-in with XR, and all these games are not relevant to Facebook’s current strategy, so the deal has not been completed.
Furthermore, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has commented the news by explicitly talking about the Metaverse. “Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms,” he said in the press release. “When we think about our vision for what a Metaverse can be, we believe there won’t be a single, centralized metaverse. It shouldn’t be. We need to support many metaverse platforms as well as a robust ecosystem of content commerce and applications.”
I personally think that the mention of the M-word about this acquisition fits only in part. On one side, many of these games have a huge multiplayer component and acquiring Activision Blizzard, Microsoft gains a lot of expertise in how to manage virtual worlds that host many thousands (if not millions) of players at the same time. Also, given that it will own all these games, it will be possible for Microsoft one day to create a connection between them, creating the interoperability between virtual worlds that we all strive for when talking about the m**averse. It could also be that some of these games may support VR one day.
But these are just speculations about what “one day” may happen, or about what today “maybe” holds. As far as we know, considering that all these games are independent, they don’t support VR and that Microsoft, owning Minecraft and Altspace, already knows how to build a social virtual world, the mention of the “metaverse” seems just a way to mention the buzzword of the moment in a press release. Probably Nadella spun a wheel with written on it “metaverse”, “nft”, “web3”, and “5G” and added to the press release the one that randomly resulted from it.
More info (Microsoft acquires Activition Blizzard)
More info (Road To VR reporting the news)
More info (Bloomberg on Activision proposing to Meta)
News worth a mention
Varjo is working on cloud rendering
Varjo has revealed that it is going to offer an XR cloud streaming service for its enterprise customers. It should be the first cloud rendering solution offering “retina resolution” quality, and it would work by streaming the fovea region with high quality and the peripheral one with inferior quality.
The company is offering it so that its customers can work with Varjo headsets even if they have not a very powerful computer. I appreciate this solution on the technical side, but honestly, I don’t know if this is really what Varjo customers want: if a company can afford a $5K headset, then it can also afford a powerful computer to attach to it.
Meta releases runtime v37 for Quest
The new update for Oculus Quest brings with it some interesting features, like the tracking of the Apple Magic Keyboard, some updates to the UI, and a new menu for hand tracking. There is also a new feature that lets you transfer a link from your mobile phone to the headset, and this could be interesting to reduce the friction for people that want to try WebXR experiences on Quest.
HTC discounts its headsets
HTC has started a good discount on its headsets that will last until the end of the month. The full Vive Cosmos kit will be $499, while the Cosmos Elite will be priced at $399 for the headset only and $649 for the full kit. Vive Pro Eye will still be pretty expensive at $1,199. If you are looking for a new headset, then you may give a look at these offers on the Vive website.
The 8th Wall partners with Emodo for AR ads
The 8th Wall, one of the most important AR startups, has partnered with Ericsson Emodo, an ad network so that it will be possible to have native AR ads on web pages. This means that users can activate a try-on experience by just clicking on a banner.
I am not a huge fan of ads, but the fact that it starts to be possible to have AR ads on web pages show that the technology is growing and becoming always more mainstream.
Samsung Exynos 2200 introduces ray tracing on mobile
Samsung has just announced its new Exynos 2200 mobile chipset, powered by AMD RDNA 2 architecture. Among the many features of this piece of hardware, there is the one that it is able to perform ray tracing. This is incredible, and it means that we can start dreaming of having some ray tracing features on a standalone headset in the future.
Web3 and virtual lands
Every week I try to share with you some relevant posts on the M-world, and this time I propose you an article from Time that tries to analyze the phenomenon of people buying virtual land in worlds like Decentraland or The Sandbox. I like of this article that it tries to understand the Web3 world without judging it in a positive or negative way. You decide what to think about it.
Linkintosh is the tool Mac VR devs were looking for
An Italian dev has developed a little opensource tool called Linkintosh, that may help Unity3D Quest developers that work on Mac. Since Mac doesn’t work with Oculus Link, the only way these developers had to test their software was to build and run the application, with enormous waste of time. With this simple tool, it is possible instead to make some quick tests in play mode, because the pose of the headset is streamed from the headset to Unity. A little tool that can help many VR devs that use Mac.
(Thanks Marco Giammetti for the tip)
Read about the design of Stormland
Road To VR has published a new article where it details the design choices of a game. This time it’s the turn of Stormland: if you study UX or game design, you will love reading about how they designed weapon reload, locomotion, and other important features of the game.
“Flat Earth VR” is the new experience by Lucas Rizzotto
XR content creator Lucas Rizzotto did it again: he developed a cool VR experience that stems from an original idea. Called “Flat Earth VR”, it is meant to show you in virtual reality our Earth as if it were totally flat. It is going to premiere at the Sundance festival and be released in the following months. You can see something about it in the trailer, which is of course hilarious.
More info (Poster of the experience)
More info (Trailer of the experience)
Some news on content
- Hitman 3 on PC has finally VR support, but its implementation is quite bad according to the first reviewers. Luckily the team is reportedly working on improving it
- Wooorld is an interesting application for Quest that lets you enjoy in multiplayer the 3D reconstruction of various parts of the world
- Recombination is a VR musical experience all made with fractals. From the trailer, it seems very cool
- We have a new trailer of Unbinary, a VR adventure with a wonderful drawn art style
- We have a new trailer also for The Last Worker, another experience with a great art style, and with a deep focus on storytelling
- OtherSight is going to immerse you in some famous cities of the world reconstructed with photogrammetry
More info (Hitman 3 for PCVR review)
More info (Hitman 3 devs are working on improving PCVR support)
More info (Wooorld)
More info (Recombination)
More info (Unbinary)
More info (The Last Worker)
More info (Othersight)
News from partners (and friends)
Alan Smithson’s company MetaVRse is preparing a new project, the Mall Of The Metaverse. Details are very tight, but we’ll discover more in Summer 2022…
Learn more
Some XR fun
This is very NSFW, but also one of the best explanations of NFTs that I’ve read until now…
Funny link
One of the best memes on Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard.
Funny link
The true relationship between the VR community and the Web3 community
Funny link
Size matters
Funny link
I should put this on my office wall, with a frame around it.
Funny link
Instead of buying a Monkey JPEG NFT…
…consider donating to my blog on Patreon! Monkey JPEGs are totally useless, while I will use the money you will give me to keep writing articles on this blog to inform the whole AR/VR community! Isn’t this a better deal? I’m also cheaper than the $50K an NFT costs…
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