The XR Week Peek (2022.03.14): Niantic acquires 8th Wall, Magic Leap 2 previews are positive, and more!
Hello everyone from Austin, Texas! Here it’s being amazing for me: together with VRrOOm’s Maud Clavier we are going around for the SXSW event meeting interesting new people and trying some XR experiences! I will write a little report soon, in the meanwhile, you can enjoy a video of me riding a mechanical bull shot by Charlie Fink: https://twitter.com/CharlieFink/status/1503181777963307009 . Can you imagine something more Texan than this?
Top news of the week
Niantic acquires 8th Wall
With an unexpected move, Niantic has acquired the 8th Wall, one of the best (if not the best) providers of developer tools to create WebAR experiences.
Niantic defines it as its biggest acquisition up to date: the 8th Wall was a well-funded startup, that always proved to be interesting since its beginning, and then find its right path when it pivoted to WebAR. It was able to provide an SDK and various templates to make companies create easily robust AR experiences that ran directly from the web, without forcing the user to download an app, as it happens for AR applications made with ARCore/ARKit. The 8th Wall was considered the gold standard for commercial WebAR, and its SDK, while very expensive, was used to create many marketing experiences for some big famous brands.
I think this acquisition is very strategic for Niantic: with Lightship, Niantic is trying to offer developers tools to create shared multiplayer AR experiences that are aware of the surroundings of the user. With the 8th Wall expertise, it will be able to let developers create outdoor shared experiences that also work without downloading an app. This could be a great feature: having the possibility of accessing a shared augmented reality space with just a link, sounds a lot like the evolution of the internet, that is the M-word. I mean, before with a link you accessed a web page, and now you access a shared virtual 3D space… isn’t this the metaverse we have always talked about?
More info (Official acquisition announcement post)
More info (Road To VR reporting the acquisition)
Other relevant news
First previews show Magic Leap 2 qualities
This week some selected journalists from popular online magazines like CNET and The Verge have been able to have a preview of the upcoming Magic Leap 2 glasses. And their feedback has been quite positive.
The glasses appear like an incremental evolution of Magic Leap 1, and they share some of its problems: the field of view is still limited, the computational unit to be attached to the belt is a nuisance, its lenses are quite opaque, you can’t wear them with prescription glasses, and so on. But it brings many innovations:
- the field of view is much bigger, especially on the vertical side, and this makes the visuals much more enjoyable
- the controllers now feature inside-out tracking with onboard cameras. This is the same technology we have seen teased for Meta Project Cambria, and makes sure that the controllers can be tracked in whatever position they are, even behind the head of the user
- the double-focus-planes feature, which was not working well, has been removed
- a new special dimming feature has been added: it lets the glasses make parts of the lens (or even all the lens) darker, so that the glasses can work in very bright environments, like the ones of surgery rooms. Imagine this as a feature that makes the lenses become similar to sunglasses lenses.
The reviewers talk about a very good device, and CNET even defines it as the best AR glass up to now. This is great: with the new management, Magic Leap is transitioning from a company making a lot of promises to one that is much more practical. It is less sexy, but more reliable. Its future is still unknown, but I think it is on the right path. I can’t wait to discover more on Q3 2022 when the headset should be launched.
More info (Magic Leap 2 preview on The Verge)
More info (Magic Leap 2 preview on CNET)
Holoride is coming to Audi cars this summer
You know that I am very interested in the startup Holoride. It is promising in-car VR entertainment system, that offers VR experiences whose movements are synchronized with the ones of the car, for an experience that is nausea-free and feels like the one of an amusement park. I have also tested the system myself and wrote a review about it here.
This week at SXSW Holoride has announced that the sensors that detect the car movements to make the system work are going to be installed in Audi sedans and SUVs this summer. This is the first step to making the system available to car passengers.
I’m intrigued by this type of entertainment because it is something completely new, and that could scale very well in our future when there will be only self-driving cars and we will need to change our car experience: there will be no more drivers, just people enjoying their trip. This news is cool because it shows that Holoride is becoming a reality: car manufacturers are implementing sensors for it in their new cars, so they are believing in it (or at least, its first partner, Audi, believes in it). Furthermore, with the new cars released with the sensors on, we will be able to discover soon if people like this new form of entertainment.I literally can’t wait.
Apple chips may be its secret weapon for XR
The new Apple M-series chips continue to make strides in the tech communities: they are proving to be fast and reliable while being small and consuming little battery power. Apple is publishing benchmarks on how they can compete well with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs: it claims they have the same power as an NVIDIA RTX3090 while draining 200W less of power. These claims have to be verified by independent reviewers, but even just the fact that we are talking about this shows the revolution they represent.
Rumors say that these chips will be implemented inside the upcoming Apple XR visor: an initial rumor talked about the M1 chip, while a new one by Brad Lynch says that even the new M2 could be a possibility. If these rumors prove to be true, it is possible that the Apple headset has a processing power that is far superior than all the other standalone headsets on the market: remember that the Quest has far inferior performances than a PC, while an M1 chip is comparable to an NVIDIA graphics cards. This would mean a total disruption of the XR market, and wouldn’t even be a surprise considering that when Apple enters a new market, it always creates disruption.
Meta has been warned.
More info (Apple M chips)
More info (Rumors on M2 chips in the upcoming Apple headset)
News worth a mention
Google and Waymo evolve NERF to cope with cities
NERF algorithms let you reconstruct artificially the view of a landscape from a certain point of view given a set of photos from other points of view. They don’t reconstruct the 3D model like in a photogrammetry system, but they use AI to provide the image of the new point of view. They can be an alternative mode to let you see a new environment in VR: instead of creating the 3D model of the place, you feed the system with a few photos and let the magic happen.
Well, this week Waymo and Google have presented their work with Block Nerf, a variant of Nerf that is meant for large environments like cities. Using the images taken from a car navigating around the blocks, the system is able to reconstruct whatever point of view of the whole neighborhood. The secret to doing this is dividing the whole problem into small problems of the reconstruction of every single block independently (hence the name Block Nerf)
VR users grew up in 2021 by 11%
Valve has published new stats about SteamVR usage, and it officially announced that VR users in 2021 grew by 11% if compared to 2020, with VR sessions going up 22% in the same period. 11% is not huge growth, but it is also not bad if we consider that 2020 was a great year for VR with the launch of Half-Life Alyx, while in 2021 there has been no disruptive title for PC VR. This confirms that PC VR is growing, but much slower than standalone VR.
Shiftall MeganeX has been delayed
Shiftall MeganeX, the very slim SteamVR-compatible headset announced at CES 2022, has been delayed from “spring 2022” to “end of 2022”.
Tundra is trying to face the chips shortage
Tundra is trying to do whatever it can to face the current chip shortages. To supply new trackers to the many people in the VR community that want to do full-body tracking, it is going to get the necessary components via resellers, at the price that the cost of the trackers is going to grow. The company has so managed to put a new batch of trackers on sale, but they have been acquired in a few minutes. The next one is coming in a few weeks. This chip shortage is creating a lot of problems for our XR field.
More info (Tundra coping with the shortages)
More info (Tundra Trackers stock finished in minutes)
Some news on content
- Beat Saber OST 5 has been launched
- NERF Ultimate Championship is officially heading into closed beta in “mid to late March”
- Both Upload and Road To VR have tried music creation Virtuoso and found it a great application to let hobbyists create their songs in VR
- Demeo is coming to flatsceen PC. Owners of the VR version will get the PC one for free, and vice versa
- Cave Digger 2 is going to be released on App Lab and SideQuest
- Hauntify lets you enjoy a scary adventure in passthrough AR on multiple floors with your Quest!
More info (Beat Saber)
More info (NERF Ultimate Championship)
More info (Virtuoso — Road To VR)
More info (Virtuoso — Upload VR)
More info (Demeo)
More info (Cave Digger 2)
More info (Hauntify)
Other news
Quest Fitness Tracker “Oculus Move” is Getting Baked into Apple Health & Oculus App
Many Quest users this week complained about seeing their apps disappear or not being able to log in to the device. Meta should have solved the issue.
Learn more (Road To VR)
Learn more (Upload VR)
A VRChat creator has managed to make a bridge between VRChat and Raspberry PI
Shape XR is working on anchoring 3D elements to real objects in passthrough AR
Unity has partnered with Insomniac to build a metaverse for immersive live performances
News from partners (and friends)
Discover NVIDIA’s four pillars of XR
I have had a very interesting interview with NVIDIA where the company unveiled to me its 4 pillars of XR, explained what is Omniverse in a clear way, and told me when 5G cloud rendering can become a reality. It’s a very interesting article, and if you have not read it, you should!
Learn more
Some XR fun
You thought in 2022 we could have flying cars. And instead we have…
Funny link
I’ve seen many videos of people falling while in VR. But this one surprised me :O
Funny link
Oculus, this is sexist…
Funny link
If you use VR with a laptop, you know the pain.
Funny link
Donate for good
Like last week, also this week I won’t ask you to donate for my blog, but to the poor people that are facing the consequences of the war. Please donate to the Red Cross to handle the current humanitarian situation in Ukraine. I will leave you the link to do that below.
Let me take a moment before to thank anyway all my Patreon donors for the support they give to me:
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And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Niantic)
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