Welcome to another roundup of XR news provided by your friendly XR Ghost. Are you ready to discover what has happened this week in immersive realities? I hope so!
Top news of the week
Meta launches Horizon Worlds in Europe and promises graphical improvements
This week the most important news has been one of the least interesting ones, which has anyway become viral because of Zuck’s inherent cringiness.
It all started because Horizon Worlds has finally landed in Europe, launching in France and Spain. This is good because it means that slowly Meta’s social VR experience is arriving in all the countries of the Western world. But the most interesting thing is that Mark Zuckerberg to announce the news has decided to shoot a virtual selfie with his cringy low poly avatar and behind him an empty world with a model of the Tour Eiffel and the Sagrada Familia that are worse than what you can obtain paying a 3D artist $2 on Fiverr. The horrible selfie soon became viral, and everyone has been talking about Horizon (and mocking it) for days.
I don’t know if it has been an intended move or if it truly happened by chance, but in any case, the news about Horizon has been the most discussed one of the week. Many journalists wrote bad things about Meta’s M-word efforts: they said that Meta invested $10B just to have this cringy virtual world. Honestly, as much as I don’t like some practices by Meta, I think that all this criticism was a bit unfair. You can’t evaluate how a platform is good just by a terrible picture, and Meta is spending $10B especially for the R&D of future technologies (and it has just won some awards at SIGGRAPH), not for Zuck’s selfies.
Zuck has answered the criticism teasing that Horizon is going to have new graphics. The new capabilities will be announced at Meta Connect, and Zuck showed a picture of his avatar and a world in Horizon with the new graphics, and the step forward is visible. I still don’t like the graphics of the new avatar, but I appreciate the step forward.
More info (Meta launches Horizon in Europe)
More info (Kotaku criticizes Meta for the selfie)
More info (Cix Liv criticizes Meta for the selfie)
More info (Zuck teases new graphics for Horizon — Upload VR)
More info (Zuck teases new graphics for Horizon — Polygon)
Other relevant news
Quest v43 update introduces Meta accounts
The time is now. After so much talking about it, finally, Meta is starting to ditch out the mandatory Facebook login for Quest and substitute the needed Facebook accounts with Meta accounts. Who wants can still connect his Meta account with a Facebook account for additional functionalities, though. As the release notes state, Oculus profiles will “evolve” into a new Meta Horizon profile, while ‘Friends’ will become ‘Followers’. Personally I find this change of name between Friends and Followers unfortunate, because friends are friends and not followers, but I guess that this enters into a bigger plan to create some kind of VR social network.
Quest v43 update is rolling out now, following the usual tactic to deploy it over time, so it may take some days to arrive to your device. But the good news is that finally, this feature is coming.
Pico 4 may be launched on September, 15th
According to analyst Brad Lynch, Pico 4 will be announced on September, 15th, so before the Meta Connect. If this happens, Pico may steal some customers from Meta, and officially start a true competition with it.
According to the latest leaks, these are the features of the upcoming device:
- Qualcomm XR2 chipset
- 2160×2160 per-eye resolution
- 105° FOV
- 72/90/120hz refresh rate
- Mechanical IPD adjustment
- 8GB RAM
- 3 internal cameras for eye and face tracking
It seems a device that is just slightly worse than Cambria (which has for instance 5 cameras for eye and face tracking and inside-out tracked controllers), but if it results to be much cheaper, it can be really a trouble for Meta.
News worth a mention
Logitech announces new audio accessory for Quest
Logitech has announced a new accessory for Quest: it is a set of over-the-ear headphones that give you a similar audio experience to the one of the Valve Index on the Quest 2. It seems a cool device and also has an auto-mute function that activates if you move the headphones to their resting position. It has a problem though: it can’t be used with Oculus Link, which is a problem if you planned to substitute your Index with a tethered Quest.
The Chorus headphones for Quest 2 are currently available for pre-order from Amazon and Logitech for $100 with a release date planned for September 2nd.
More info (Logitech Chorus — Road To VR)
More info (Logitech Chorus — Upload VR)
Lenovo announces its Legion VR 700 headset
As I forecasted you last week, Lenovo has launched its new headset in China: the Legion VR 700. The headset is reportedly based on a design by iQiYi (the Chinese Netflix), and has features very similar to the ones of Quest 2:
- Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chipset
- 3664 x 1920 pixels display
- 72/90Hz refresh rate
- 8GB RAM
- 256GB storage
It features the store by iQiYi, and this makes it launch together with games like Fruit Ninja and Arizona Sunshine. The starting price tag is 2,999 yuan (~$440). The price will increase to 3299 yuan (~$484) after the initial sales. Honestly speaking, it seems coming a bit late as a product, but let’s see if it manages to conquer shares in the Chinese market.
More info (Lenovo Legion VR700 launched)
More info (Lenovo Legion VR700 launch video)
Apple releases new interesting research on Nerf
There is a lot of hype on Apple’s research on Neural Radiance Fields, and their ability to reconstruct 3D scenes. Cupertino’s R&D has just announced a new algorithm, called NeuMan, which is a “NeRF representation of human together with the scene”. Long story short, it allows for insane stuff, like recording a person doing something in an environment, and then the algorithm is able to reconstruct the same video, but with the person doing other actions. It’s very cool, and I invite you to read about it.
More info (NeuMan announcement on Twitter)
More info (Official post on NeuMan)
Some articles about the metaverse
As every week, let me share with you the best articles I have found about “the metaverse”:
- The New York Times has written an interesting article about love and dating in the metaverse, and how virtual worlds help non-binary people in feeling more accepted
- An article details what are the legal aspects to care about if you want to start a company that deals with creating virtual worlds
- I have myself written an article highlighting how the “metaverse” has entered the Gartner hype cycle, with a 10+ years outlook (meaning the road to it is still very long).
More info (Dating in the metaverse)
More info (Legal implications of the metaverse)
More info (The metaverse in the Gartner Hype Cycle)
Genee AR solutions now available for free
Genee is an XR startup that offers full-body and face tracking solutions that works totally on the web. This means that you can use the Genee SDK to build a webpage that shows full-body AR effects of your users. This is very cool.
Genee has just changed its pricing tiers, and now the SDK is totally free for non-commercial applications: you can use it to experiment, and then you pay only when you earn money out of your product.
Read the comparison of the AR filters creator tools
Brielle Garcia is one of the best creators of AR effects out there, and she has thoroughly worked with all the available creation tools. She has compared Snap Lens Studio, Meta Spark AR, and TikTok Effect House and on Twitter has expressed her opinion on them. According to her, Snap is still the best, while Effect House is too new, so it’s the worst on the list. Interesting to know.
RIP FeelReal
Do you remember FeelReal? It got quite a decent hype a few years ago because it was a company that wanted to create a mask to let you feel wind, moist, and scents when you are in VR. It launched on Kickstarter with good success, but then a change in the American Law created trouble for it, because it had to adhere to the policies on electronic cigarettes. The project slowly faded away, and now according to a Redditor, all the webpage and social pages have been closed, so we can say it is officially dead. What a pity, it looked very promising.
Discover the new Humble Bundle
Humble Bundle has a new interesting bundle for us VR gamers. Dubbed Valiant VR, it offers 7 VR games (including Budget Cuts 2 and Into The Radius) which have a total value of 178,04€ for a ridiculously small price (less than 20€).
Some news on content
- The last game by Resolution Games, Ultimechs, launches on September, 15th
- Relaxing game Townscaper VR arrives on Quest and Pico in October
- Red Matter 2 has been finally launched. While you wait for my review to be published, you can read the two very good ones written by Road To VR and Upload VR
More info (Ultimechs)
More info (Townscaper VR)
More info (Red Matter 2 review — Upload VR)
More info (Red Matter 2 review — Road To VR)
Other news
SodaWorld, the first African “metaverse venue” has just got an investment from a Swiss fund
Snap has presented at SIGGRAPH a new algorithm to reconstruct 3D objects from photos
Tokyo Game Show returns to VR and it will feature important companies like Capcom, Square Enix, and Kojima Productions
The indie developer behind Virtual Battlegrounds has written a long postmortem about his experience
News from partners (and friends)
The Metaverse Safety Week returns in December
The Metaverse Safety Week, the annual event about safety, privacy, and inclusion in the metaverse hosted by XRSI is going to be live on 10–15 December 2022. It will be as usual a good occasion to listen to high-level speakers talk about how we can shape a “good metaverse” for our future.
Farcana Integrates Senso Glove
Web3-based shooter Farcana has just announced the integration of haptic gloves Senso in its application, so that to offer a more realistic experience to its players.
Some XR fun
Could the community not make amazing jokes about Zuck’s weird VR selfie? Of course not…
Funny link / 1
Funny link / 2
Funny link / 3
Funny link / 4
Funny link / 5
Do you like esports? Well, now that Excel has become an esport, too, you may like them even more…
Funny link
This bird is probably doing VR training to learn how to shit on my car
Funny link
How I code every day
Funny link
How to write the perfect article on the METAVERSE
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
- Chris Koomen
- 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 Mark Zuckerberg)