As you’ve read in my other article written today, this is a special day for this blog… but it is also Monday, so I won’t skip writing a new amazing roundup of AR/VR news 😉
So, wishing you a happy Ferragosto (the name of today’s holiday in Italy), I leave you to the best XR news of the week!
Top news of the week
NVIDIA and other companies show their best at SIGGRAPH
Every year the SIGGRAPH is an event where companies showcase the best technologies they have for 3D content. This year has been not an exception in this sense. Meta has let the public try its prototypes, including the Starburst headset, which thanks to its very high HDR is able to render lit scenes in a very realistic way. Many people that tried it came out impressed by it. Also, another startup showed how it is able to change the texture of a moving piece of clothing in augmented reality in a very realistic way. But the company that for sure made the most noise with its announcements has been NVIDIA.
Jensen Huang and its executives have performed many announcements regarding NVIDIA technologies, and the most relevant are:
- A new platform for creating avatars, NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine. Thanks to it, it will be possible to create realistic avatars that understand natural language easily and even without having computational power in the local machine. Avatars will also be able to express emotions with their face;
- Plans to build out Universal Scene Description (USD), so that it can accelerate its development and adoption. NVIDIA has partnered with Pixar, Autodesk, Siemens, and other important companies to develop a roadmap for the development of USD. The next features to be added are support for international character sets, geospatial coordinates, and real-time streaming of IoT data. NVIDIA wants USD to become the HTML of the metaverse;
- Major extensions to NVIDIA Omniverse, the computing platform for creating virtual worlds and digital twins. New connectors are in development and finally also popular software like Unity and Blender will be able to connect with Omniverse.
- Tools to supercharge graphics workflows with machine learning. Among these tools are included NeRF, body tracking, and reconstruction, reconstruction of 3D elements from one or more 2D images, reconstruction of 360° 8K panorama from a set of images, and much more. NVIDIA and ILM have also showcased DeepSearch, an ML tool that is able to let you perform a search in a large subset of unlabeled 3D elements by using natural keywords.
It’s good to see so many innovations coming from SIGGRAPH. XR and AI are two technologies that empower each other, and I can’t wait to see what will come in the future.
(Disclaimer: I am collaborating with NVIDIA for the GTC promotion, but this post is not part of our collaboration)
More info (Summary of NVIDIA news from SIGGRAPH)
More info (NVIDIA neural graphics)
More info (NVIDIA updates on USD)
More info (NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine)
More info (NVIDIA Omniverse new connectors)
More info (Playlist of NVIDIA news videos)
More info (AR startup for clothing)
More info (Meta Starburst hands-on)
Other relevant news
Apple MR headset may cost $2000+
The rumors about the Apple headset have started to intensify and converge on what they suggest. This week, Mr. Kuo, a popular Apple analyst, has said a few interesting predictions about the upcoming headset. First of all, according to him, the announcement of the HMD is still set for January 2023 with a cool launch event. Apple should sell the device at a premium, around $2000–2500, and for this reason, it is not expected to sell more than 1.5M units in 2023. But according to Kuo, this headset will be “the biggest thing since the iPhone”, in the sense that Apple AR glasses will be huge in the upcoming years.
What I want to highlight once more, after having stressed it already in a previous post of mine, is that this first edition of the headset is probably not going to disrupt our industry. 1.5M units is less than what the Quest sells in one year. It’s more like a glorified devkit, a device that Apple will sell to start promoting augmented reality and have some prosumers buy it and use it so that they can prepare for the glasses which will come in a few years. So please, don’t over-hype this device to then be disappointed.
Pico 4 may launch in September
Analysts are not only publishing rumors about the Apple headset, but also about other headsets, like the Pico 4.
Brad Lynch has found on some Chinese social media the list of the specifications of the headset, which may feature:
- 2160×2160 per-eye resolution
- 105° FOV
- Mechanical IPD adjustment
He also published some sketches, which show a headset that look like big glasses, very similar to how we know Cambria will be.
A Chinese analyst has added to these rumors other info, and he says that the headset will launch in September, so before Cambria, and will be heavily subsidized by Pico, so that it can compete with Quest and Cambria.
All of this point to the fact that Bytedance, the owner company of Pico, is serious about becoming the most credible Meta competitor. And I hope so, because we absolutely need a competitor…
More info (Pico 4 leaked specifications)
More info (Pico 4 launch date and price)
New headsets are coming
It is not only Meta and Pico. Given the current trend, many companies, especially Chinese ones, are willing to launch new headsets that aim at competing with Quest or Cambria. From my experience, these clones are often good on paper but mediocre to use, but sometimes some of them are actually good.
Lenovo has for instance just announced in China the Legion VR 700, a device that looks inspired by the Pico Neo 3, which was already a copy of the Meta Quest 2. The teased features are a 4K display and XR2 chipset, something that doesn’t surprise us much. It should launch on August, 18th and it is not clear if the launch will be only in China or worldwide.
From Asia is also coming the YVR2, a headset with pancake lenses and a look that seems heavily inspired by Cambria. With a 95° field of view and 1600×1600 per-eye resolution, it seems that its specifications are more bound to the current status of pancake devices, though. My friends at Crazy Kung Fu have tried it and said that it is actually not bad.
More info (Lenovo Legion teaser image)
More info (Lenovo Legion announcement image)
More info (YVR2 info)
More info (Opinion on YVR2)
News worth a mention
New rumors about Meta headsets
This week I have found two rumors about upcoming Meta features, one about Quest and the other one about Cambria:
- It seems that Meta is working on a ‘Smart Compose’ and ‘Smart Reply’ for Messenger in VR. These are solutions where the AI suggests you the answers, so you don’t have to type them in VR, which is uncomfortable. I just hope that this solution is better than the auto-answers on Linkedin, which are terrible and make you sound like a chatbot
- The usual Brad Lynch has reported that probably the chipset in Cambria will still be a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2, but with a slight change in architecture that will let it have around 20–30% horsepower more. Add to it the fact that in Cambria the XR2 is not underclocked, and you obtain a much more powerful experience than on Quest 2.
More info (Messenger inside Quest)
More info (XR2 in Cambria)
XRAI and Nreal offer AR for deaf people
A great product for deaf people comes from a collaboration between Nreal and XRAI. It will be possible to use XRAI software on Nreal Air glasses so that people with hearing impairments can read in AR the transcription of what the people around them are saying. This is amazing for accessibility.
Metaverse “real estate” is going down and down
The sales of virtual lands in the metaverse are going worse than ever, and now the mean value of a virtual lot has gone down 85% with regard to a few months ago. To make things work, the celebrity investor Mark Cuban has just commented on metaverse real estate saying that it was “the dumbest idea ever”.
Honestly, I agree with him. And I hope this crash will help in stopping this stupid speculation.
More info (Price of virtual land goes down 85%)
More info (Mark Cuban talks about metaverse real estate)
Some news on content
- Tennis League VR from my friends at Anothereality has finally been launched on App Lab. If you like tennis, check it out
- App Lab game ‘Dead Second’ has released an update to improve its features
- Fist Of The North Star is a VR experience that lets you read a famous series of manga. It costs a whopping $145 on App Lab
- VR mod of Half-Life 2 to enter public beta this September
- Luke Ross is going to release a new VR mod for Final Fantasy 7 (Thanks Stefan Köhler for the tip)
More info (Tennis League VR)
More info (Dead Second)
More info (Fist Of The North Star)
More info (Half-Life 2 VR Mod)
More info (Final Fantasy 7 VR Mod)
Other news
Meta Quest 2 alone now accounts for more than 50% of headsets on Steam
Sidequest is not accepting Gorilla Tag clones anymore, re-opening the debate on how much control an open platform should apply
I just discovered that there are haptic displays that you can touch and feel the texture of the objects that you see
Synchron has implanted its BCI in a US patient for the first time, without having to drill his skull
Mundocrypto wants to set a new world record making 7500 people use VR in the same physical event
Discover the team behind Nofio, the upcoming wireless adapter for Valve Index
News from partners (and friends)
MUTEK enters the XR field
MUTEK is an electronic music and digital arts festival that has gained worldwide recognition for showcasing cutting-edge audiovisual performances for the past 23 years. It has now entered the XR field with two interesting initiatives:
- An Immersive Collection, which explores the transformation of the work of 5 AV artists into extended reality formats as an entirely new genre of audiovisual XR art pieces
- An Independent XR Study, which aims at crafting a report about XR for what concerns storytelling, location-based entertainment, and festivals.
Learn more (MUTEK Immersive Collection)
Learn more (MUTEK Independent XR Study)
Register for NVIDIA GTC
Don’t forget that I partnered with NVIDIA to promote the GTC… so if you register to the GTC and then in September you watch one of its sessions, you have a chance to win an RTX 3080 Ti extracted only between my EMEA followers (i.e. people from Europe and the Middle East). Don’t miss this opportunity!
The Glimpse Group may have become one of the biggest companies in XR
With Brightline Interactive joining it, the Glimpse Group may have become the largest independent software and services company in the immersive technology sector. Quite a big result for this company focused on immersive realities!
Some XR fun
Let’s listen to what Meta AI thinks about Mark Zuckerberg.
Funny link
The difference between 720p and 4K
Funny link
The beauty of the graphics on Quest 1.
Funny link
Machine Learning has still a lot to learn
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
- Qcreator
- Anne McKinnon
- 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
(Header image by NVIDIA)