The XR Week Peek (2022.07.04): Big tech companies perform budget cuts, Mojo tests its smart contact lens in-eye, and more!
Today is the 4th of July, an important day for all my friends from the US! I wish all my American friends to celebrate well.
I want to dedicate this newsletter article to my friend Mathew Olson, who at The Information kickstarted the “Reality Check”, a newsletter about XR which I received 3–4 times a week in my e-mail, and that was very well done. It has been one of my favorite newsletters about XR and I admit I have “stolen” sometimes some news from there. Mathew is now going on a new professional adventure and will stop curating that newsletter, and I just want to write these few lines to say how I am grateful for the good job he did in informing me and all the XR community. Good luck with your new job, Mathew!
Top news of the week
The economic situation is forcing major tech companies to perform cuts
These ’20s are really harsh years: a long pandemic, a terrible war, and a drought in some parts of the world have all exhausted us. And all these problems are also creating unfavorable economic conditions. Inflation here in Italy is ramping up, and the impression I have is that we are entering into a recession phase. I’m starting to see the effects of this in my everyday life, but I also see all the big companies becoming pretty concerned about this. Of course for some ad-based tech companies, the current economic situation is not the only problem, but there is another big one which is Apple and its new privacy features embedded into iOS.
The first company that got concerned about the budget has been Meta, which has already scrapped some projects and frozen hires in certain sectors. In a new internal memo by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, the company warns employees about “serious times” coming, and specifies some strategic goals to pursue. Among these priorities, there is the launch of Project Cambria in H2 this year, most probably during Connect. A thing I have appreciated about Meta is that it has canceled projects, but it has not fired anyone.
The same luck has not happened to employees at Niantic at Unity. The Pokemon Go company is going to fire 8% of its staff and cancel 4 ongoing projects. Unity, instead, is firing 4% of its employees, and this may seem weird considering that in the last months it has proceeded to hundred-millions-dollars acquisitions.
If I look at the overall picture, I’m quite concerned. Big companies are firing people. Investors are becoming more cautious about investments on risky projects like the ones about XR. Luckily the “metaverse hype” is still helping us, but what will happen when we will reach the trough of disappointment? I suggest everyone consider the possibility of harder times coming when defining the strategy of his own company.
More info (Internal memo by Meta’s Chris Cox)
More info (Meta still focused on launching Cambria)
More info (Niantic lays off 8% of its staff)
More info (Unity lays off 4% of its staff)
Other relevant news
Mojo Vision CEO has worn a working smart contact lens
Drew Perkins, the CEO of Mojo Vision, the company working on smart contact lenses, has fulfilled the dream he had envisioned 7 years ago: he finally wore in his eyes a functioning smart contact lens.
The test lasted around 1 hour and the lens was gradually turned on until it was completely working and he could read a text from a virtual teleprompter in front of him. It has been a watershed moment, because before this week many people were skeptical about Mojo Vision since they thought the hardware was cool but there was no way it could work safely inside a human eye. Now that the first test on a human has happened successfully, Mojo Vision has proven it can actually deliver its product in the next years.
The company has still a long work of testing and polishing to do, and the final goal is to refine the lens so much that it can be submitted to the FDA for approval. It’s incredible how we will have the first smart contact lens product before 2030… it seems like hardware coming from a sci-fi movie!
ARM has produced the first mobile chipset capable of ray-tracing
ARM keeps working on the design of innovative chipsets for mobile devices and this time has managed to bring great innovation to the field. Its new flagship Immortalis-G715 GPU will supercharge the Android gaming experience and among the list of features, it will include hardware-based ray tracing for the first time.
Ray tracing is able to provide more realism to CGI scenes: the meme with NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang showing games with RTX-ON and RTX-OFF has become very popular, so I guess you know what I am talking about. When I attended university, ray tracing was described to me as something that was impossible to obtain in real-time, so when NVIDIA finally enabled it in realtime on PC GPUs, it felt like an enormous step forward for technology. Now that I read that ARM has brought it to mobile devices, it seems like a miracle to me.
And there’s more. The new premium Arm Mali-G715 GPU also includes Variable Rate Shading, which is that feature also present in NVIDIA GPUs that lets you render different parts of the frame at different resolutions. This is of course the base technology needed for foveated rendering.
I am already dreaming of future mobile headsets (maybe the Quest 4) featuring hardware ray tracing and foveated rendering for amazing immersive graphics. Don’t wake me up!
News worth a mention
Meta adds Lionsgate movie streaming to Horizon Home
A few weeks ago, Meta has added the possibility to invite people to the Home space of your Quest 2 headset. This week, thanks to a partnership with Lionsgate, it has announced that users could watch together some 2D or 3D movies on a giant screen in front of them, for free. I think this news is relevant because it shows that Meta is trying to make the Home space richer in activities to do with other people and truly transform it into a social hub for every one of us.
I’m still not that convinced it will succeed, but let’s see if this and future investments will really be able to bring value to the users.
PSVR 2 will have eye-tracking from Tobii and maybe a detachable cable
We had some interesting news about PSVR 2. First of all, its eye-tracking technology will be provided by Tobii, one of the market leaders in the field. I mean, we all already knew that, but now we finally have an official confirmation.
Then, PSVR Without Parole has reported that Sony has learned from the errors of the PSVR 1, and so it has made the cable of the PSVR 2 detachable.
In the end, we have the first unofficial picture of a PSVR 2 headset in the wild. Ultrawings 2 developer Bit Planet Games has tweeted by error a picture of a PSVR 2 devkit, claiming later that it was a fake, or a Photoshopped image, or things like that. A bit like when your girlfriend finds you with another woman, and you say “It’s not as it seems”. (Maybe also in these cases saying that the other girl is a Photoshop can work?)
More info (Tobii will provide eye tracking to PSVR 2)
More info (PSVR 2 cable is detachable)
More info (First PSVR 2 picture in the wild — Road To VR)
More info (First PSVR 2 picture in the wild — Upload VR)
Niantic announces a new AR game, this time with NBA
Oops, Niantic did it again. It created a new geolocated AR game very similar to Pokemon Go, but with a different theme. This time it’s about basketball and it is made together with NBA. Dubbed NBA All World it will also let you have one-vs-one matches with other players, and will release with the next NBA season. I expect it to be a failure, like all the previous Niantic Pokemon Go clones, but I hope to be wrong.
Meta adds video recording settings on Quest, at least for developers
One of the most requested features by Quest content creators was the ability to modify the video recording settings when recording gameplay videos on the device. After many promises, we are seeing the first step in this sense. Now if you use the Oculus Developer Hub on your PC, you can record a video on Quest with the settings you want, including stereoscopic view and 4K resolution. We are still waiting for in-device tools, though.
HTC releases its “metaverse phone”
HTC has just announced its new phone, the Desire 22 Pro, and defined it as a “metaverse phone”. The reasons for this definition are mostly two: the first one is that it is the “perfect companion” (whatever it means) for the Vive Flow headset, and the second is that it includes a wallet for your crypto stuff. For the rest, it is a middle-range phone.
I’m sure that millions (or maybe even billions) of people will rush to the stores to buy it.
Thrillseeker tried to recreate the Ready Player One setup in real life
Youtuber Thrillseeker has made a cool experiment: he has tried to re-create in real life a fully immersive setup, a bit like the one in Ready Player One. For this, he used a treadmill, a haptic suit, haptic gloves, the most powerful headset, a scent emitter, and so on.
I loved the video for especially three reasons:
- It shows how VR is still early stages: it took him a lot to configure the hardware and the software of all these accessories together. There’s no easy way to have a realistic simulation that involves all the body;
- Even after everything was configured, there was no place where to try a similar system, because no software is compatible with all of this;
- When he managed to make everything work for a few minutes, his mind got crazy. He went in super-awe and was a bit “shocked” by what he felt. This was interesting because he’s a VR reviewer, so has tried many VR pieces of software and hardware, and seeing how his mind reacted to this new setup made me intrigued. Now I want to try it too.
NVIDIA and Siemens partnered for the “Industrial Metaverse”
No one had the need of speaking about the “Industrial Metaverse” until a few days ago when NVIDIA and Siemens defined their partnership like that. Marketing terms apart, their collaboration is quite interesting: NVIDIA brings to the table its Omniverse product, able to create scenes with high-quality graphics and simulations capabilities, and Siemens its Xcelerator platform, which can construct digital twins of industrial machines, and it is already integrated with many IoT services. Merging their expertise together, it is possible to obtain a digital twin of industrial machines with stunning graphics and high accuracy, in which many people can enter using VR and perform meetings and simulations. It’s not fun like Beat Saber, but it is something that can make industries spare a lot of money in maintenance.
More info — NVIDIA blog on the Industrial Metaverse
More info — Video that explains this partnership
IDC predicts Meta’s domination of the market to be challenged next year
Market analysts at IDC see that VR is growing year-over-year and that Meta is currently dominating the market, with 90% of shipments of headsets coming from the company in Palo Alto. But in the future, things may change: Apple, Pico, and Sony may change the current situation of the market. Especially Apple, which everyone is waiting for.
Some news on content
- Horizon: Call Of The Mountain promises to have multiple paths according to a gameplay video. It seems that this game has more depth than we have originally thought
- Blade And Sorcery Nomad is now the most sold game on Quest after Beat Saber. The game keeps having a huge success
- Ruinsmagus is going to launch on Quest on July, 7th
- Patchworld from Patch XR is going to launch on the official Quest Store on July, 7th. A well deserved promotion for one of the most original experiences of this year
- Immerse is bringing language learning to Quest for $45/month
- Kayak VR has been delayed to July 12 and will cost $19.50 on Steam
- Low Fi’s Quest spin-off Agency has been outsourced to an external company. I find a bit weird that a game that has not been released has already a spin-off, but that’s ok, as long as the result is cool
- F1 22 in VR is cool, according to Upload VR
- 3v3 spellcasting game Wands Alliances is out now for Quest 2.
More info (Horizon: Call Of The Mountain)
More info (Blade And Sorcery: Nomad)
More info (Ruinsmagus)
More info (Patchworld)
More info (Immerse)
More info (Kayak VR)
More info (Agency)
More info (F1 22 VR)
More info (Wands Alliances)
Other news
Beat Saber earned a bit less than $100M in 2021 alone
AIXR is opening an innovation center about AR/VR in UK
Discover 5 of the best XR experiences from Tribeca Festival
Meta’s Yann Lecun depicts his new approach for the future of Artificial General Intelligence
Meta releases three AI algorithms to synthesize immersive audio in a more realistic way
Bytedance acquires Chinese virtual social platform PoliQ
Read a long report about the Metaverse by Pew Research (It’s more than 200 pages, so of course I have not read it… I’m too lazy)
News from partners (and friends)
Participate in the Nreal Game Jam
AR glasses Nreal manufacturer is hosting an AR game jam with a total prize amount of $100K! Register to it and try to create in one month the best augmented reality experience for glasses. I will be also a judge of this initiative, so I can’t wait to try what you will be able to create!
The trailer to Return To Monkey Island is out!
This is not VR related, but who cares? Everyone loves Monkey Island! And I can’t wait to play this game! Because I’m a pirate…
Some XR fun
The Fight&Fuck VR experience
Funny link
A VR headset for us Italians
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:
- Alex Gonzalez VR
- DeoVR
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
- Jonn Fredericks
- Jean-Marc Duyckaerts
- Reynaldo T Zabala
- Richard Penny
- Terry xR. Schussler
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Paolo Leoncini
- Immersive.international
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jake Rubin
- Alexis Huille
- Raghu Bathina
- Jennifer Granger
- Jason Moore
- Steve Biggs
- Julio Cesar Bolivar
- Jan Schroeder
- Kai Curtis
- Francesco Strada
- Sikaar Keita
- Ramin Assadollahi
- Juan Sotelo
- Andrew Sheldon
- Chris Madsen
- Horacio Torrendell
- Andrew Deutsch
- Fabien Benetou
- Tatiana Kartashova
- Marco “BeyondTheCastle” Arena
- Eloi Gerard
- Adam Boyd
- Jeremy Dalton
- Joel Ward
- Alex P
- Lynn Eades
- Donald P
- Casie Lane
- Catherine Henry
- Sb
- Enrico Poli
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
- Liam James O’Malley
- Hillary Charnas
- Wil Stevens
- Brian Peiris
- Francesco Salizzoni
- Alan Smithson
- Steve R
- Brentwahn
- Simplex
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Image by Unity Technologies)
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