Today is a bit of a special day for this newsletter because this article you are reading is the 250th roundup about XR news I’ve written! If you make the calculation, it means that it is almost 5 years that every damn weekend I collect the best news of the week in AR and VR (and the “mmmmmmmetaverse”) and I organize them for you! If I think about it, I can feel all the fatigue and the time I spent in the process, but I’m happy doing that because I know it is useful to many of you from the XR communities. So, let’s make a little toast to celebrate this announcement, and… now let’s get back to work: what are the pieces of news I have selected for you this week?
Top news of the week
Meta announced interesting games at its Quest Gaming Showcase
On April, 20th, Meta had its Quest Gaming Showcase, an online event where it announced the most important upcoming games for Quest for the next 12 months. It’s been a short live stream in which we have been delighted by the announcements of some sequels of famous games, some brand new games, and also a few surprises.
Overall, it has been a good showcase of games, but we have all been left with the impression that something was missing. The event was not as cool as we hoped for: we had no explosive news (e.g. Half-Life 3 for Quest) and not even updates on the most awaited games for Quest (e.g. Splinter Cell VR, GTA San Andreas for Quest). To make a comparison, if the gaming showcase were a joke, we would now be smiling but not laughing out loud. Maybe Meta could have organized it better, or maybe this is what is needed by the current status of the market, which is still niche.
By the way, the most important announcements, in my opinion, have been:
- NFL PRO ERA, the first VR game officially licensed by the NFL. In this game you can become the quarterback of your favorite American football team and lead it to the victory;
- Red Matter 2. This game promises to have astonishing graphics, even better than the ones of Red Matter 1, which is still one of my favorite games for Quest;
- The Mercenary DLC for Resident Evil 4 VR. Finally, we’ll have in VR The Mercenary gaming mode for RE4: it lets you play a shooting game in the RE4 setting, and win customizations, game modifiers, and upgrades rewards for your characters. It also features a leaderboard so that you can challenge the other players;
- Bonelab, the sequel of Boneworks, which will be available also on Quest, with the same physics engine that made Boneworks famous on SteamVR;
- Ghostbusters VR. This was the final big surprise of the event: Sony Pictures and Meta, in partnership with nDreams, will bring the famous franchise to virtual reality.
As you can see, very interesting news, but nothing mind-blowing. The other announcements have been:
- The first trailer for Among Us VR;
- Schell Games partnering with Meta for 3 VR games;
- Espire 2, the sequel of the stealth game Espire;
- Moss 2 arriving on Quest 2 this summer;
- RPG Ruinsmagus coming to Quest;
- A new DLC for Beat Saber called Electronic Mixtape.
And that’s it! I honestly hope we’ll have more unexpected announcements about VR games in the remainder of 2022…
More info (Video of the Showcase)
More info (Roundup of the Gaming Showcase)
More info (NFL Pro Era)
More info (Among Us VR gameplay trailer)
More info (Among Us VR will be available for PSVR 2)
More info (Schell Games will develop 3 more games for Quest)
More info (Red Matter 2)
More info (Espire 2)
More info (Moss 2 on Quest)
More info (Ruinsmagus)
More info (Beat Saber Electronic Mixtape)
More info (Resident Evil 4 VR — The Mercenaries)
More info (Bonelab announcement)
More info (Bonelab physics quality)
More info (Bonelab PC vs Quest graphical quality)
More info (Bonelab aims at 120Hz on Quest 2)
More info (Ghostbusters VR announcement)
More info (Ghostbusters focused on Quest 2 at launch)
Other relevant news
Pico may launch its Cambria competitor before Meta
Interesting news arrives from China: a market analyst reports that Pico may launch its next-generation VR headset in September, aiming at beating Meta and its launch of Cambria. The new headset should be not a Pico Neo 4, but more something like a Pico Neo 3 Pro/Plus, exactly like Project Cambria won’t be a Quest 3. The characteristics should be very similar to the ones of Cambria: pancake lenses, very high screen resolution, and additional sensors. The price should be aggressive, exactly like the one of the Pico Neo 3 Link, with Bytedance subsidizing the hardware costs with its ads business on TikTok/Douyin.
We have no official confirmations on this rumor, but it doesn’t seem unrealistic to me. When launching the Pico Neo 3 Link, Pico has stressed many times that they have a roadmap to launch interesting headsets aimed at competing with the “market leader”. And the purchase of the Pico Neo 3 Link comes with a -35% discount on an “upcoming headset”. Plus, Pico has completely copied Meta with the Pico Neo 3 (which is a clone of the Quest 2), so it wouldn’t be weird if it took inspiration from Project Cambria, too (from what we know, and what leaked from its Chinese manufacturers). On the other side, Bytedance launching a headset in September would mean that they are not truly interested in the current “Beta Period” for the Link, and that they are already assuming the Link will be a success, and this would be a bit weird.
For sure, the idea of the Pico Cambria launching before the Meta Cambria sounds fascinating and would be a clear message to Meta that Bytedance has a clear intention of being a serious competitor of its. I’m grabbing popcorns… and a Pico headset 😉
There are leaks on Assassin’s Creed VR
We had no official news on Assassin’s Creed VR from the Meta Gaming Showcase, but with perfect timing, we had leaks on the game exactly this week.
The game should be called Assassin’s Creed Nexus and feature 16 missions including the most famous assassins: the first leaked one has been Ezio who will perform a mission in Italy, but there should be also Ezio, Kassandra, Connor, and Haytham.
The game has everything you’d expect from an Assassin’s Creed title, with stealth movement, pickpocketing, lock picking, combat, climbing, and even the leap of faith. The Leap of Faith jump should be pretty cool, with the player spreading the arms in T pose to jump from the buildings.
Movement should be either smooth or by teleportation. To prevent teleportation from making the game too easy, there will be some mechanics that will make sure that even if you are teleporting, the enemies may spot you.
Regarding the combat, your hidden blades are extracted by holding down a button and flicking your wrist, which you can then use to stab your enemies. The number of needed stabs to kill an enemy depends on the enemy type and if he is alerted or not.
After the initial leak, Redditor /u/Echiketto shared a short video of the current status of the initial menu of the game, and also answered some questions about the preview build he played. He defined the game as “a cash grab”, but also a high-tier VR game. He confirmed that it will be available only for Meta headsets, but then another Redditor claimed he played the game also on Windows, so maybe it could be available both for Quest and for “Rift”. He also talked about in-game cutscenes, about the environments being mostly static for now and the campaigns being linear, without side missions.
What I find weird about the leak is that he shared just a video of the menu and not also of the gameplay. He wrote in the Reddit post: “A beta build of the game leaked a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to preserve much besides the main menu and mission selection screen.”
Actually, this makes no sense to me: what does he mean by “preserving” the content of a demo? An APK is an APK, you launch it and you play it, there is no way you have just a piece of an APK. And you can make a video of all its parts by just using the Quest menu. My impression is that this is a controlled leak from Meta itself: they couldn’t announce anything official at the Gaming Showcase, they saw the community was complaining about it, and so they released an unofficial leak, that totally BY CHANCE can only show a menu and not the gameplay. Come on…
More info (Leaks on Assassin’s Creed Nexus)
More info (Video of the game menu shared on Reddit)
Meta releases hands tracking 2.0 for Quest
Meta has just released the v2 of its hand tracking system for Quest. According to the related blog post, the improvements are impressive: the new algorithm is able to:
- Improve overall the tracking quality
- Be able to cope with fast hands movements
- Be able to cope with scenarios with one hand occluding the other
- Detect new kinds of gestures of the hands
Now it is so possible to make the two hands interact with each other, and some gestures like clapping become possible. Some developers (like Dennys of Hand Physics Lab) have already had early access to it and have stated that the improvements are impressive. Even a boxing game like Liteboxer is now possible without controllers!
The rollout has started the past week, and in some days we all should receive it. But the applications won’t use it automatically, but they have to change a little flag to enable the use of this new hand tracking algorithm. This means that you can test it only in experiences whose developer has enabled it.
I’m pretty intrigued by this because I think hands tracking has huge potential for applications that need lightweight interactions (e.g. a movie player), but until now the one on Quest was not super reliable, especially when the two hands were close. With this new version, the situation seems much better, and this can foster a new wave of hand-tracked applications. It also comes at the right time: Pico probably is going to release its hand-tracking solution these weeks, and Meta is showing it that it is far ahead of it for what concerns performances. I’m also curious to try it to see how it does compare with Ultraleap tracking. I’ll keep you posted about my findings 🙂
More info (Official blog post about Hand Tracking 2)
More info (Road To VR reporting the update)
More info (Developers implementing it share their impressions)
More info (Hand Physics Lab developer compares the two versions of the tracking)
Mark Zuckerberg may be teasing Meta Stores
The Zuck has shared on Facebook a picture of him playing with the Quest in a place with a big screen mirroring the content of the headset, people watching him, and around some shelves with headsets on. In the comment on the photo, he asked people to guess where he was at.
It is clearly a teaser of something, and the most probable guess is that he’s teasing new upcoming Meta stores where people can try the headsets before buying them. We already had a leak about this a few months ago, and this picture seems to confirm that they are becoming reality.
This can be huge because we all know that XR must be tried before people can buy it, so Meta NEEDS having places where people can try and buy its hardware. One of the biggest assets Apple has is its stores, and now Meta wants to copy it also about this feature. I think it is a fundamental decision, that may make Meta reduce its operational gap when compared to Apple, even if I think that the branding gap is still enormous.
News worth a mention
Amazon may be working on an XR device
A job listing from Amazon may point to the interest of the company in developing an XR headset. “You will develop an advanced XR research concept into a magical and useful new-to-world consumer product” states the job description and the mention of “XR” and “product” makes us dream.
Amazon is the only major tech company that has not revealed its XR plans, yet, but of course it can’t miss the next technological revolution, so we can expect it to try to launch its glasses, too.
More info (Job listing spotted by Protocol)
More info (Upload VR reporting the news)
Air Bridge manual leaks online
The manual for the Air Bridge, the Wi-Fi dongle to use the Quest wirelessly as a PCVR headset, has leaked online. I think that now there are very few doubts left about this becoming a new product from Meta which will let also people with a bad router use the Quest with the Air Link with optimal performances.
Canon announces Mreal X1 AR headset
Every year we hear Canon announcing a new very expensive passthrough AR headset for industrial usage. This year is no exception, and the Mreal X1, which evolves the previous Mreal S1, has been unveiled. I can expect it to cost more than $10,000 and since we are too poor to afford it, I can avoid telling you what are its specifications.
Some articles on the metaverse
Here are the best collections of articles on the M-word that I’ve read this week:
- J P Morgan has released a small whitepaper about the economic possibilities of the metaverse. It has some interesting insights, especially about what should be improved to have the real metaverse and not just some virtual worlds;
- Géraldine Fauville and other five professionals have written a whitepaper about the “metaverse for education”. It contains good insights for people in the educational field, and how they can use XR technologies to perform better their job
- The blog New World Notes has analyzed the numbers of the decentralized worlds like The Sandbox and showed how they are much lower than the ones shared by other worlds like Rec Room and even lower than the current Second Life community. The reason is that to have a high MAU (monthly active users) count, you should provide real value to the community. Money speculations and even famous brand engagement can give you just small spikes, but not a consistently high number of users. It seems that current virtual worlds are repeating the same errors that were happening during the Second Life hype.
More info (J P Morgan whitepaper)
More info (Education in the metaverse)
More info (Decentralized worlds having small MAU)
More info (Big brands being useless to increase the MAU)
Two interesting research projects
This week I’ve read about two interesting research projects in XR.
The first one uses touchless haptic devices to provide haptic sensations on the face. Probably you have seen those ultrasound emitters that can give you slight touch sensations and are implemented in the haptic devices by Ultraleap and Emerge. Well, the idea of some researchers has been to apply some of those below the headset, so that they can give touch sensations to your lips, teeth, and cheeks. This can make eating in VR more realistic for instance. And yes, also porn (you were all thinking about it already, don’t lie…).
The second one is called Phorhum and it is a project by Google Research about reconstructing the 3D model of a person, with all its clothes, from a single photo. The algorithm also tries to reconstruct the occluded parts of the body and the clothes. Its results are quite impressive.
More info (Mouth haptics)
More info (Phorhum)
GPU prices are going down
Finally, the prices for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards are going down. There is more offering and less demand, so scalpers are started having a hard life in selling them at stellar prices as before. This is great news because it means more people will have powerful PCs for VR.
The Mall wants to bring shopping centers to virtual worlds
Alan Smithson’s MetaVRse company has created The Mall, a huge virtual world, accessible via the Web, all devoted to simulating a huge shopping center. It’s an ambitious project, with 100 floors and 100M square feet where to showcase and sell products.
I will follow this project with interest: I’m curious to see if people want to have in virtual worlds a similar shopping experience they have in real life, or if they want to go to the practical 2D interface that Amazon uses.
Luke Ross is bringing VR to Elden Ring
Elden Ring has been until now the game of the year, and the popular modder Luke Ross is working on a VR mod for it, which for sure all the community will love.
Ross is very famous in our community, and his VR mods are bringing him around $10,000 every month in (very well deserved) Patreon donations. In an interview with PC Gamer, he also made a very interesting statement: in his opinion, motion controls have come too soon to VR, and if VR would have kept using the gamepad, it would have been easier for AAA studios to implement VR in their existing games, and so VR would now have many more official hybrid VR games. Of course, we all know that controllers like Oculus Touch contribute a lot to immersion in VR, and I personally couldn’t live without them, but I can also see the truth in his provoking statement.
More info (Elden Ring coming to VR)
More info (Luke Ross earning 10,000$ every month)
Some news on content
- Relaxing city simulator Little Cities has been delayed to May to make room for the launch of Cities VR (which probably has better connections with Meta)
- F1 22 is getting VR support in July. This is great news for all the fans of racing games
- We have a new trailer of The Last Worker, and the more I read about this game, the more I am intrigued
- Room Of Realities is a co-op escape rooms game, releasing in 2022
- The Last Taxi, a game where you are a Taxi driver in a futuristic city, has been announced
- Field Of Vision, the indie team behind Crazy Kung Fu, has launched a fun passthrough AR game that lets you build a dungeon in your home
More info (Little Cities)
More info (F1 22)
More info (The Last Worker)
More info (Rooms Of Realities)
More info (The Last Taxi)
More info (Passthrough AR dungeon)
Other news
A “whistleblower” shares negative views about Kura, the startup claiming to be able to build high-FOV lightweight AR glasses
The Upload VR Summer Showcase returns in June
Facebook releases VRS, a new optimized format to represent streams of data to be used in AI algorithms, as opensource
Rokid and ARM China partner to develop future chips optimized for immersive applications
According to some Meta employees, Mark Zuckerberg is now obsessed with the idea of the metaverse
The BBC has created a report about all the barriers for disabled people in using XR software and hardware and how we can overcome them
(Thanks to the two Ian Hamiltons for this tip)
News from partners (and friends)
Check out my companies!
I don’t have special news by partners to share, so since it is the special 250th roundup, I will make a shoutout for the teams I work with:
- New Technology Walkers, the development studio. If you need to create some cool VR experience, call NTW. And don’t forget to check out our fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded! It has been the first mixed reality fitness game (we had passthrough AR in 2019), so it’s kinda of a special experience
- VRrOOm, the XR event studio. If you want to exploit the metaverse hype and have some festivals, events, concerts, or performances in a virtual world, we can help you. We already won many awards for our work, so we can offer you the coolest events you can imagine 😉
Learn more (New Technology Walkers)
Learn more (HitMotion: Reloaded)
Learn more (VRrOOm)
Some XR fun
This meme of mine about the “metaverse” is getting viral again, so let me re-share it!
Funny link
We of the press are used to receiving weird communications…
Funny link
This is the proper way to comment about an NFT project made just to speculate on the hype
Funny link
There is only one metaverse
Funny link
The secret dream of all XR developers
Funny link
Donate for good
Like last week, also this week in this final paragraph 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:
- DeoVR
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And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Meta)