The XR Week Peek (2022.05.30): Niantic launches VPS, Pico launches Neo 3 Link, and much more!
Hello everyone from San Jose, California! I’m here ready to attend AWE… tomorrow I’ll start having the first meetings, and then from Wednesday, the real deal will begin! Don’t forget to read the coverage about it on my blog…
Before leaving you to the news, I have to publicly compliment Emerson for having given the most correct answer to my contest. I made a troll Twitter contest in which I used some regular sunglasses gifted by Nreal to my friend Eloi Gerard and asked people what smart glasses were they… he guessed may be Nreal or just a pair of regular sunglasses, so he went close enough. Emerson, you have the eternal glory for this.
Top news of the week
Niantic releases Visual Positioning System
Niantic has finally launched its VPS (Visual Positioning System), a solution that will allow developers to create AR applications that are persistent and shared in various locations in the world with centimeter accuracy. VPS is a technology that implements the AR Cloud and creates a bridge between the real and the virtual world. Using the algorithms acquired with 6D.ai, Niantic can so finally let developers offer augmented reality experiences that are shared and persistent in a location, that is exactly what we need for our mixed reality future. This is the reason why I think this announcement is so important.
VPS won’t be available worldwide, though: the company is enabling its VPS system in select cities — San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle — for a total of 30,000 VPS localization points which represent 10 × 10 meter playspaces in which developers can build AR experiences. By the end of the year, the cities will hopefully be around 100.
What is impressive is that using the technology acquired with another startup, which is The 8th Wall, Niantic has also teased that VPS will be available also for WebAR experiences. This will make the experience even better for the users since they will be able to enjoy shared persistent AR with no friction and no need to download anything.
(And on a separate note, thanks to Niantic, now The 8th Wall offers its services at a much cheaper price).
The company has also announced Campfire, a social layer that will let Pokemon Go and Ingress players to communicate, play together, and make new friends.
I think that what Niantic is doing is great, and can enable developers to create the next generation of AR experiences. The limit will start to be the device, that is the smartphone, which is unsuitable to enjoy augmented reality experiences. The circle will close with the release of XR glasses, and we know that Niantic is also working on a reference system for them.
More info (Niantic releases VPS)
More info (VPS for WebAR)
More info (Campfire)
More info (New prices and features for The 8th Wall)
Other relevant news
Pico launches Neo 3 Link in Europe
The preorder period for the Pico Neo 3 Link, the first consumer-oriented headset launched by Pico in the West, has just finished, and now the device is available in stock on Pico’s website in selected European countries.
This is the start of the beta period for the Neo 3 Link: Pico invites its users to provide feedback to “actively influence the development” of the headset and related runtime.
I’m following the developments of Pico’s headsets pretty closely because I think that it is the first time that a company tries to seriously compete with Meta in the standalone consumer market. This launch is very important and I’m curious to see what will be the future developments of its.
More info (Pico Neo 3 Link now available in Europe)
More info (Pico Neo 3 Link launched at Laval Virtual)
PSVR 2 is going to have 20+ launch titles
The more we go on, the more we have details on the upcoming PlayStation VR 2. This time we don’t have more info about the hardware, but about the software.
In a new business briefing for investors, the company stated that the headset should launch with 20+ titles. Some of them should be developed by first-party studios and others by third-party ones via dedicated partnerships. Jim Ryan, the head of PlayStation has confirmed that the company is spending “considerable money” to have the right content at launch.
We don’t know much about this upcoming content, though. This week we had anyway the confirmation that Fast Travel Games is working on two titles for this headset. And Sony will give a “Sneak peek” of PSVR 2 games at its upcoming State Of Play event on June 2nd at 3 PM PT. I sincerely can’t wait to see what they have cooked for us: I think that content will be one of the factors that will decide the success of this headset (content is always the king), so seeing what will be the upcoming games will be very interesting.
As for the launch date and price of the headset, we don’t know much. It seems that Sony is hoping for a Q4 release in time for the holidays, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks that delays will bring the release to Q1 2023.
More info (20+ launch titles for PSVR 2)
More info (Sony investing money for the games)
More info (Fast Travel Games building two games for PSVR 2)
More info (Upcoming Sneak Peek of PSVR 2 content)
More info (PSVR 2 may launch in Q1 2023)
Meta is experimenting with Cloud Rendering for Quest
A new leak shows a Redditor using an Experimental feature in the Quest 2 menu to play a game in a cloud-rendered session. Of course, this option is hidden from all of us, so probably the secret user is a beta-tester of this functionality that leaked it.
The system is called Avalanche, and it would let Quest 2 users play games rendered by a powerful server and then streamed to the Quest so that it would be possible to play games with complex graphics on a standalone device like Meta’s one. According to the leaker, the game was playable, but the overall quality was not that good. This would explain why the feature is still under internal testing.
I think this is very interesting: cloud rendering would let Meta solve the main problem of the Quest, which is its limited processing power. And having the service integrated into the headset would make it incredibly user-friendly because it would not require the user to configure complex third-party services. But I would wait to rejoice from it: VR requires a very short motion-to-photon latency, and as of today no cloud rendering service can offer such low latency in every possible location of the user. Solutions like VR Desktop even struggle with local streaming, so you can imagine how it is difficult to offer reliable cloud streaming solutions. We’ll need years to reach that level of performance and reliability. Furthermore, it is not even clear how Meta would offer such a service: cloud rendering servers are very expensive, so I guess this would be a paid feature, not a free one.
Notwithstanding all of this, it is cool that Meta is experimenting with this feature and I’m curious to see when they will be able to deliver it (probably in beta).
Lynx raises $4M to build its headset
French startup Lynx has raised $4M to keep building its mixed reality headset. This money will be used to secure the supply chain to manufacture the Lynx R-1 and to work on future editions of the device.
I’m personally very happy about this news because I know Stan, the CEO of Lynx, and I know how he and all the team are working hard on the device. And I think this piece of news is very important for two reasons:
- The lead investor is Somnium Space, the social XR/Web3 world. Somnium is already an investor in XTAL, and it is so strengthening its position as a leader both in the software and the hardware necessary to access virtual worlds. It is a company to keep an eye on;
- Lynx has stated that it wants to use this money to become the “European Champion of Mixed Reality”. This shows the growing trend of European companies to try to create a new technological hub that can compete with the US and China for this new tech revolution.
News worth a mention
Magic Leap has sold units of its first device for $550
Magic Leap has decided to put on sale its remaining units of the Magic Leap 1, its previous device, for just $550, which is something like a -75% discount on its standard retail price. The device has gone sold out pretty fast, because, for that price, it was a steal, especially for developers that want to experiment with XR. This sale showed that (of course) at a reasonable price, AR headsets have the potential to sell well in tech communities.
Apple may unveil RealityOS at WWDC
At the upcoming WWDC, Apple may unveil its operating system for XR glasses, dubbed RealityOS. The company has just filed a trademark for it, and this may mean that it will unveil its name at its upcoming event. Most probably, it won’t also unveil the glasses, but it may just talk about upcoming features for Apple XR developers. Let’s see if this is finally the right time for a reveal…
More info (RealityOS trademark)
More info (Robert Scoble’s take on Apple’s reveal strategy)
Snap shares lose -30% of its stock value
It is a terrible moment for tech companies: after Meta and Unity, also Snap stock has lost -30% of its value after the CEO has announced that the company won’t be able to reach its estimated earnings goals. The reasons are always the same: the not favorable moment in the economy, the War In Ukraine, and the new Apple privacy policies, which are killing the revenues of all ad-based companies. As a result of this, Snap will have to slow down its hires and growth plans.
Interestingly, the common reason for the fall of these companies is Apple’s decision to block the tracking of ads on iOS. You may agree with this decision or not, but it’s anyway worrisome how a single company may destroy the economy of many other ones. This is why Tim Sweeney, talking about the metaverse, rants about how we should avoid having again companies like Google and Apple that may decide the destiny of the others thanks to the immense power they have. He states “Apple, under its terms and its stated interpretation of its terms and its rights, can just pull any app down for any reason — or no reason — and take over its entire business for itself, as they did in pushing all the ad networks off of iOS and tripling their revenue by stealing everybody else’s revenue all at once”. I think he’s right, we need to avoid having powerful platform owners in the future, but is it possible to obtain this?
More info (Snap shares losing value)
More info (Tim Sweeney talks about the metaverse)
Quest 2 to release Room Setup
A new cool functionality is coming to Quest 2: it will be possible for the user to manually define the shape of the room he’s playing in, including the position of furniture and desk. This room configuration can then be used by Quest applications to perform some special effects, like for instance putting some virtual objects on your table. According to Meta, the procedure is fully manual because, with current Quest cameras and chipset, the automatic version was not reliable enough.
More info (Quest 2 room setup)
More info (Why the feature is manual)
LivingCities comes out of stealth to propose a hybrid plaform
LivingCities is a new promising startup that has just come out of stealth. Its co-founders are top-notch experts (like Matt Miesnieks or John Gaeta) who are working on a platform that wants to bring in VR the spirit of real places and let the real place influence its virtual version, and the virtual version influence the real one. The concept is still very vague, but is very intriguing: if the team manages to deliver, it can crack the formula for hybrid virtual worlds.
More info (LivingCities on Forbes)
More info (Official launch blog post of LivingCities)
The Metaverse hype is growing strong also in China
The Metaverse hype is present also in China, and many Chinese companies are working on projects related to virtual worlds. For instance, Tencent has worked together with Addidas on a “metaverse festival”, while Alibaba seems ready to launch a virtual world for Taobao’s 618 e-commerce festival.
More info (Adidas and Tencent)
More info (Alibaba)
The “metaverse” was not a key topic inside “Microsoft Build”
Microsoft Build is one of the most important yearly events organized by Microsoft. This year, the CEO Satya Nadella has talked briefly about the metaverse efforts of the company, but without putting too much stress on it. He said what we already know: Microsoft is interested in the “enterprise metaverse” and soon we will see more immersive versions of Microsoft Teams. There’s still no word on when Mesh will be released.
Meta details its research on lenses and avatars
Meta keeps performing amazing research in the XR field. This week we had details on two research projects: a lens with a variable focus that may solve the vergence-accommodation problem; and an AI system that builds realistic simulations of the muscles, bones, and joints that enable humans to move, which can help in building more realistic avatars.
More info (Dynamic-focus lens)
More info (AI system for bones and muscles)
Watch a developer use a cardboard box in VR
A developer had the great idea to tie an Oculus Touch controller to a cardboard box so that the box can be ported into VR and be used as a magical box with which the user can interact. It’s a simple but effective trick that leads to amazing results. Please watch the video and enjoy this mind-blowing creation.
This guy lives in 2042.
Some news on content
- Road To VR has reviewed very positively The Last Clockwinder, highlighting its pleasant graphical style and the quality of its puzzles
- First Person Tennis is the first tennis game to land on the Quest Store
- Flight Simulator is releasing an expansion to bring missions related to the movie Top Gun: Maverick
- Drunk or Dead 2 is a hilarious VR game where you have to keep being drunk not to become a zombie
More info (The Last Clockwinder)
More info (First Person Tennis)
More info (Flight Simulator)
More info (Drunk or Dead 2)
Other news
iFixit will sell spare parts of Valve Index to let its users repair it by themselves
The Public Test Channel of the Quest runtime contains a fix for the Oculus Link stuttering on Windows 11
Google Imagen is an impressive AI system able to create images just from text descriptions
A new report talks about harassment at Microsoft’s Mixed Reality team
News from partners (and friends)
Discover the Metaverse Summit
The “Metaverse Summit” is an upcoming event about XR and Web3:
Metaverse Summit, July 16–17th in Paris, is an International Convention Celebrating Technology and Creativity around Metaverse.
Metaverse Summit is a place where you can foresee the future of the metaverse unfold right in front of your eyes. From virtual worlds to blockchain, our speakers and the sponsors will showcase the potential of the metaverse. Come and join us on the 16th and 17th of July in the historic city of Paris.
The two-day event will be second to none as it will bring together the builders, entrepreneurs, investors, experts from blockchain, 3D Creation, Virtual Worlds, Social Spaces, Gaming, VR/AR, Web3 and beyond to create synergy and develop the projects.
Metaverse Summit is offering a 15% off the ticket to all the Ghost Howls readers! Use the link below to exploit this offer.
Learn more (Official Website)
Learn more (Purchase discounted tickets)
Some XR fun
A bit of boomer humour about virtual reality.
Funny link
Horizon World is releasing in Europ… ah no.
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
- Raghu Bathina
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
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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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