The XR Week Peek (2022.03.28): GDC, GTC, Snap’s acquisition of NextMind, and more!
Happy Spring, ladies, and gentlemen of VR! I hope this season will bring you joy, happiness, and love!
On this sunny day, let me tell you the most interesting AR/VR news from the past week…
Top news of the week
GDC 2022 featured many VR companies, but few announcements
You know well that I’ve been at SXSW, but, shame on me, I haven’t stayed a few days more to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It was a pity because many VR companies and professionals were there.
It has been interesting to watch the reportages of Alex VR and Skeeva from the show floor, where they met many game studios and had meaningful interviews with them. I’ll link to you the GDC’s roundups that they have published on Upload VR here below. It seems that GDC was one of the events to be to create connections with the VR gaming ecosystem.
The sad news is: it was not a meaningful event for announcements. Watching all the roundups, I haven’t found many pieces of news. Yes, Polyarc has declared that it wants to port Moss to other platforms beyond PSVR. Yes, Ramen VR has said how it plans to deploy the updates for the popular VR MMO Zenith. But they are just tidbits of information, and nothing more.
From the show floor, I have heard nothing mind-blowing, either. Road To VR reported about Manus VR’s new Quantum Metagloves with very precise hand tracking for enterprise use (cost: $9000). Upload reported that Sony showcased PlayStation to some selected partners, but no one could speak about what he/she has seen. The only one saying something public was Chet Faliszek (ex Valve) that claimed it was a “sooo good” experience. And that’s it.
I guess we have to wait a bit more for all the big announcements we are waiting for this 2022.
More info (GDC roundup 1)
More info (GDC roundup 2)
More info (GDC roundup 3)
More info (Moss to be published on many platforms)
More info (Manus Quantum Metagloves)
More info (Sony showcasing PSVR)
Other relevant news
Snap has acquired NextMind
The unexpected piece of news of the week is that Snap has acquired the BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) startup NextMind, for an undisclosed amount.
NextMind was a startup working on a device that could read brainwaves through EEG, to let the user select objects on a screen (or VR display) by just looking at them. Its peculiarity was the quality of the EEG sensors it was able to manufacture. NextMind already released a devkit in the wild, but after the acquisition, the device won’t be sold anymore.
The employees of NextMind will keep working on BCIs, as part of the R&D of Snap, to evaluate the integration of NextMind technology inside future Snap products. Of course, this is an acquisition to work on a long-term vision, not short-term releases. Probably the idea is to create a new system to let users interact in an easy way with future AR glasses by not only using the hands but also the intentions or the feelings of the user read by EEG. In this, Snap hopes to compete with Meta (that bought BCI company Ctrl+Labs) and Valve (who is collaborating with OpenBCI).
The acquisition left me puzzled because the devkit released by NextMind was nice, but nothing mind-blowing. In my review of it, you can read that it was able to detect what objects I was looking at, but only if they were showcased as elements pulsating with specific patterns. Basically, it was not reading my thoughts, and not even my intentions, but just analyzing my brain’s answers to pulsating patterns. If you built an application without these patterns, the device was useless… an eye-tracking add-on was more practical than the NextMind dev-kit in a VR scene.
Probably, NextMind had in its R&D more sophisticated technologies, and Snap is buying the company for them.
In any case, I’m curious to see what this acquisition will lead to…
More info (Snap acquires NextMind — Road To VR)
More info (Snap acquires NextMind — TechCrunch)
NVIDIA had its GTC event
NVIDIA has had its big company event, the GTC. I have collaborated with them in helping to promote it, and I hope that one of you won the RTX3080 Ti graphics card of the raffle I offered you 🙂
On the news side, the event was mostly about AI, which seems the new focus of the company. We had almost no news explicitly directed towards VR or AR. I have anyway selected four news that can be relevant for you:
- NVIDIA has announced a new GPU architecture, called Hopper, that represents the evolution of Ampere. As usual, Jensen introduced it saying that it was the biggest generational leap ever released by the company (he always says so)
- The first GPU released of the Hopper family will be the H100, targeted at data centers, that features impressive performances on AI tasks. It can train a model 6–7x faster than the previous data center GPU. This is incredible and will help the development of better AI algorithms (also for AR and VR)
- Omniverse is going to add new tools for developers so that development teams can work together in the creation of games using the integration provided by Omniverse, which merges the work of everyone out of the box. Also, Omniverse will be compatible with UE5
- NVIDIA has also showcased an instant NeRF solution that in a few seconds can analyze a few photos of an object and then let you see that object from all possible points of view. The object is not reconstructed as a 3D mesh, but the system calculates all the possible views of it via AI.
More info (NVIDIA newsroom page)
More info (NVIDIA Hopper)
More info (NVIDIA H100)
More info (Omniverse for developers)
More info (Instant NeRF)
Magic Leap 2 bridges AR and VR
The interest in Magic Leap 2 is growing. The company is clearly preparing for the launch, and it is sharing always more information week after week.
This week we had a full reveal of the headset, the controller, and the computational unit in a video that reveals all their external details. There were no surprises, but it was anyway interesting to see the device from all possible points of view.
We also had new hands-on feedback on it and they are all positive. One feature that is surprising to the first reviewers is the dimming, which makes the lenses (or part of them) very dark to highlight the augmentations in very bright environments (e.g. surgery rooms). This feature, since it makes the lenses quasi-opaque, is being seen by many as a bridge between AR and VR. If headsets like Lynx or Project Cambria implement AR on a VR headset, Magic Leap 2 implements a bit of VR on an AR headset. If the lenses become dark, you don’t see your surroundings anymore, but just the augmentations, and so you have Virtual Reality on an AR glass. And since we all hope to have in the future a device that can do both AR and VR, this technology looks very fascinating.
We have to still discover a lot about Magic Leap 2, especially its price, but what we know about it is quite promising.
More info (Video about Magic Leap 2)
More info (Magic Leap 2 bridges AR and VR)
More info (Positive hands-on Magic Leap 2)
More info (Another positive hands-on Magic Leap 2)
More info (More info on Magic Leap 2 dimming)
News worth a mention
Nimo Planet wants to replace your PC displays
Indian startup Nimo has just announced Nimo Planet, an AR glass that shows you up to six virtual monitors for your productivity. Nimo Planet has no tracking cameras and no controllers: it just wants to provide you with a standalone system to substitute your laptop/tablet when you are on the go. You connect to it a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and then you can browse the web and launch some apps (e.g. e-mail feed) to be productive everywhere you want. The device is not on sale yet, but there are thousands of people on its waiting list.
Bytedance increases its VR sales target
Bytedance, the owner of the VR brand Pico, has just increased its expected sales target of VR headsets for 2022 from 1 million units to about 1.8 million units. This proves the Pico Neo 3 is selling quite well in China… who knows if something like that could be interesting also here in the West.
Decentraland hosted the Metaverse Fashion Week
Decentraland has just hosted the Metaverse Fashion Week, a week of events featuring important brands like Estée Lauder, Tommy Hilfiger, and Dolce & Gabbana. The event featured catwalks, but also parties with performances by important DJs.
I don’t think a virtual fashion week can substitute the real one, especially in an environment like Decentraland where it is impossible to show clothes with their believable appearance. But at the same time, big events like this one can be interesting, fun, and creative enough to prove the value of VR events.
HTC adds more parental control tools to its headsets
Last week I praised Meta for finally taking action adding parental control tools to its device. But actually, HTC, once the biggest competitor Oculus had, added these functionalities to its devices one month before Meta, but the news was not reported by the main VR magazines. Kudos to the Asian company for this.
In VR the objects appear closer than they are
When you are in virtual reality, you see the objects closer than they actually are. I think it was only me that had this problem, but a new article published by the Iowa State University shows that this is a common situation: people doing the test had a perceived distance to virtual objects that was 75% of the real one.
New opportunities for VR creators
I want to signal you these interesting opportunities for VR creators:
- The newly created FOV Ventures has raised an $18M fund for European VR startups. If you have a VR company in Europe and you are looking for funds, you should evaluate applying
- Meta has started a new $500K fund to fund content for Horizon Worlds from creators of Oculus Start and Oculus LaunchPad. If you like to create content for social VR worlds, you may try to exploit this opportunity
More info (FOV Ventures)
More info (Horizon Worlds fund — Road To VR)
More info (Horizon Worlds fund — Upload VR)
Japanese startup H2L is working on a haptic bracelet
The Japanese startup H2L is working on a bracelet to provide haptic feedback of various kinds to increase immersion in VR worlds. Among these sensations, there is also pain, that can make games more intriguing to be played.
AI and AR can help us in shaping more geniuses
I want to share with you an article that is more on the psychological side and less on the tech side, but that made me think a lot. This post claims that in the last century we had almost no one recognized genius, and the reason is that our education system is just good-enough. Past geniuses usually had private mentors that were high-level intellectuals that helped shaped their minds when they were very young. This kind of mentoring is impossible with present-time schools, but it could come again with virtual agents powered by AI and seen through AR, who could foster the creativity and the problem solving skills of kids when they are young so that to make them smarter. Remember that the brain of young kids is highly receptive and it can create new connections between brain cells if stimulated properly. This means that with future education systems, we may have a more intelligent population.
Some news on content
- Tentacular is a very well-made puzzle game, and Upload highly recommends it in its review. You should check it out
- An official NFL Football game is coming to Quest and PSVR
- The VR version of Mothergunship, dubbed Mothergunship: Forge, is being released on Steam and Quest store on June 16th, 2022. From the early reviews, it looks a lot of fun even if it is a wave shooter: it is especially cool the possibility of building crazy guns in a modular way
- 1976 text-based title, Colossal Cave Adventure, is getting a full VR remake
- The developers behind the VR Japanese RPG, Ruinsmagus, have finally found a publisher and so can release the English version of the game this Spring
- Pianovision looks like the best AR app to learn to play the piano
- Virbela celebrates its 10th birthday and finally it is going to have a full restyle of its campus, which looked quite old
More info (Tentacular)
More info (NFL Football)
More info (Mothergunship: Forge)
More info (Mothergunship: Forge — Early Impressions)
More info (Colossal Cave)
More info (RuinsMagus)
More info (Pianovision)
More info (Virbela)
Other news
Meta may improve the recording tool on Quest 2 very soon
Microsoft and Nreal have developed a very interesting research project to help blind children in speaking with people around them
A Redditor has developed a crazy system that looks like a skateboard for locomotion in VR
Pimax published some updates about its upcoming Reality headset
A genius has found a smart way to cover the Oculus Home button on Quest controllers for public demos
It seems that Meta initially thought about marketing the Quest 1 as a productivity tool and not a gaming console
VR experience for AEC visualization The Wild has been acquired by Autodesk
News from partners (and friends)
Check out this job opportunity at IIT
IIT is looking to hire an XR developer for a project in partnership with INAIL about the immersive teleoperation of a robot. If you are interested, check out the offer here below.
Learn more
Some XR fun
The great recommendations by Meta
Funny link
The typical usage of a Quest
Funny link
Oh my God, I should run to recommend the Quest to all the students out there!
Funny link
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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.
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(Header image by Snap)
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