I want to dedicate this newsletter to the memory of Rob Crasco, one of the best members of our communities, which has gone away too soon. He has always been supportive of me, and by speaking with him on Twitter and Linkedin I’ve always learned something new. He will be missed by all of us. On the last Twitter post on his timeline, there is a GoFundMe campaign to support his wife, in case you want to be of any help. May he rest in peace.
Top news of the week
Upload VR Winter Showcase brought many pieces of news about VR games
Upload VR has organized another one of its amazing VR game showcases. In this one, there have been many news about VR titles, some of which are distributed by relevant companies in our industry, and others made by indies. None of the news announced there has been disruptive, but many of them have been interesting nonetheless. Some of the most intriguing ones I’ve found have been:
- We have finally some new info about Behemoth, the new game by Skydance: Interactive, the studio behind the Walking Dead: Saint And Sinners. It is an RPG set in an unforgiving world, and the trailer is pretty cool;
- Vertigo 2, one of the most awaited sequels of the VR industry, is set to arrive on March 30th, 2023. A new trailer highlights the expected high quality of this game;
- Raw Fury is acting as a publisher of three portings of flatscreen games to VR: Call of the Sea,The Signifier, and Per Aspera
- Shooter Gambit has been delayed (again) to Q1 2023
- GameVroom is an application that lets you play SteamVR games on a big screen on your Quest. Until here, nothing new, but the cool side of this application is that it lets play games also in co-op together with your remote friends that can share the virtual room with the giant screen with you. A very interesting concept.
More info (All the announcements of the Upload VR Showcase)
More info (Behemoth)
More info (Vertigo 2)
More info (Raw Fury)
More info (Gambit!)
More info (GameVroom)
Other relevant news
Pico 4 market is growing
According to the Steam Hardware Survey, Pico 4 now represents 0.67% of the player base on Steam. This doesn’t seem an impressive number, but with its +0.48% month-over-month growth, it has been the fastest-growing headset on Steam for this month, and this is a sign that the sales of the device are not going that bad. Sure, the numbers are heavily influenced by the fact that the device has just been launched, but this big bump never happened for previous Pico headsets and this is a positive sign.
Bytedance keeps doing its best to entice people to buy its VR device: for the holiday, Pico has bundled the Pico 4 with 6 free games, including the popular hits After The Fall and Walkabout Mini Golf. This means that for this Christmas, Pico 4 plus 6 games will cost less than Quest 2 and two games… even if the two games the Quest 2 is bundled with are masterpieces like Beat Saber and Resident Evil 4 VR. Because of this, some people may decide to prefer Pico to the more popular Quest.
This offer will make sure that Pico 4 will keep growing during these holidays and this is good so that we will have more competition in VR.
More info (Pico is the fastest growing headset on Steam)
More info (Pico holiday bundle)
Snapchat experiments with in-lens-purchases
When talking about augmented reality, one company that is for sure at the forefront of innovation is Snap. And this week, it has confirmed this attitude.
At its Lensfest developer event this week, Snap announced that it now has more than 300,000 developers building AR products for its platform and that together, they’ve built more than 3 million lenses that have been viewed a staggering 5 trillion times. These stats are interesting, but what intrigued me the most is what they have thought about on the monetization side.
Snap is working with some selected content creators to build lenses that include buyable digital goods. This means that the creators can sell through the lenses some related digital items that viewers can buy using Snap Tokens. I see this as a way to port the classic in-app-purchases system to augmented reality lenses: you pay and you have more features for your lens, or you get an NFT associated with it, for instance. And it may make sense: lenses are very popular (as you can see from the numbers above), so it is a huge market that is currently unexploited. No one has found a good way yet to monetize them, yet, and it is so interesting that Snap is trying to experiment with new modes to do that. Let’s also remember that after iOS introduced new privacy features, all the most popular social media had a big decrease in revenues: they must find new revenue streams, so this experimentation is also a necessity for Snap.
I’m curious to see how this will pay off (pun intended). Let’s see in a few months what will be the data shared in this sense by Snap. I think a lot will also depend on what are these “goods” that can be bought and how interesting they will be for the users.
Does Palmer want Oculus back?
On Sunday I was reading some VR news, and I discovered that Anduril, the new company by Palmer Luckey, has just received $1.48 billion in Series E funding, for a new value of the company set at $8.48 billion. I tweeted the news saying that “Palmer Luckey is not doing that bad without Oculus…” and Palmer Luckey himself answered to me commenting “Without Oculus for now, anyway”.
That “for now” made all of us XR enthusiast to dream. What has Palmer in mind? It’s simply impossible he buys back the VR division at Meta: it is a strategic resource for Zuck, something he is investing in $10B every year. But it could be more probable that he wants to enter the VR field again, maybe buying back the Oculus brand that Meta doesn’t want to use anymore. I am very curious about what could happen… I would love to see Palmer back to VR, maybe with the old gang of Iribe and the other people…
More info (Anduril getting $1.48B of investments)
More info (Palmer Luckey commenting about Oculus)
News worth a mention
Steam removes sidebar info about VR experiences
On Steam, it has always been easy to understand what VR devices an application was compatible with: on the sidebar, there were all the details you needed. It was for instance written that an app was compatible with Rift, Valve Index, and required a large playspace for roomscale interactions. Well, all of a sudden, this is no more.
Valve has decided that Virtual Reality doesn’t deserve a dedicated sidebar, and has moved all the VR information about an application into the “System Requirement” section. This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, no one reads the System Requirements. Then, VR has so many special configurations that it needs a dedicated sidebar. This update is only going to generate frustration for the users, that maybe will buy a game just to understand later that it was dedicated to roomscale VR.
The removal of a dedicated sidebar makes me also think that now Valve considers PC VR less important than before. With the Valve Index being profitable but that never skyrocketed, while the Steamdeck has become an international success, probably Valve now is focusing more on other technologies and doesn’t think VR needs anymore a special treatment.
More info (Valve announcing the removal of the sidebar)
More info (News report and reaction from the community)
Fortnite is not coming to VR
Tim Sweeney has explicitly stated that Fortnite is not coming to VR, as was suggested by some rumors a few months ago. This news sparked an interesting debate on Twitter, in which Tim Sweeney himself participated. He stated that there’s not an ideological reason behind that, it is just that Fortnite is a game with fast movements, and so it is not ideal to be played in VR due to motion sickness.
More info (Fortnite not coming to VR)
More info (Twitter debate with Tim Sweeney)
Varjo launches XR-3 Focal Edition
With a dedicated event, Varjo has announced a minor evolution of his XR-3 mixed-reality headset. Dubbed “XR-3 Focal Edition”, it brings with it a few changes, like a better focus in mixed reality on the objects close to the user (in the 30–80cm range) and improved encryption and security of data so that it can be used also in contexts with very high-security standards.
Meta Quest is back in Germany
After having solved its problem with the German institutions, Meta has finally put the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro on sale in Germany again, just in time for the Winter Holidays.
FTC is enforcing its role against big tech companies
With the current administration, the FTC is seriously intentioned in battling the major tech companies and preventing them from acquiring too much power.
It’s already known that the FTC is trying to prevent Meta from buying Within and its fitness game Supernatural. This week we got to know new interesting details on the matter: it seems that Meta was developing its own fitness VR game, but then got to know that Apple was interested in buying Within. Fearing the possibility of losing an important piece of content on its store and seeing it become a competitor, Meta has proceeded in spending a lot of money to buy it. According to the FTC, this is anti-competitive behavior.
What was expected but still not announced is that the FTC is also trying to prevent Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard. This acquisition could give too much power to Microsoft and it could damage the customers by making all Blizzard games exclusive to Microsoft platforms, so the FTC is trying to prevent it.
More info (Meta buying Within because of Apple)
More info (FTC against Blizzard acquisition)
See the innovation from SIGGRAPH ASIA
SIGGRAPH ASIA has just taken place. You can watch two cool Youtube trailers to see some interesting research projects that have been showcased there!
(Thanks to Ivan Aguilar for the tip)
More info (XR technologies trailer)
More info (Emerging technologies trailer)
Some news on content
- The most important VR magazines have reviewed Hubris. They found it visually stunning, but so-so for the gameplay
- Nountown is an application that tries to teach you a language by putting you inside some situations in a foreign country. It is available on the Quest Store for $15
- Population: One will launch early access for its sandbox creation tools on December 14th. These will let players create custom games inside Population: One
- Horizon: Call Of The Mountain is going to be released on February 22 for PSVR 2. A new trailer that showcases a bit more of the gameplay has just been shown
- We have a new trailer for the Ghostbusters VR experience, and it contains also some visuals from the gameplay. Seems nice, but the trailer is a bit slower than I expected
- Upload has reviewed Compound and praised its replayability
- Tiny Island is a VR game where you are a god that interacts with the world just by using chopsticks. What could go wrong?..
More info (Hubris on Road To VR)
More info (Hubris on Upload VR)
More info (Nountown)
More info (Population One)
More info (Horizon: Call Of The Mountain)
More info (Ghostbusters VR)
More info (Compound)
More info (Tiny Island)
Other news
Someone decided to troll us all with the fake announcement of an Apple event on January, 12th
Quest Pro controllers now work also with Quest 2
Learn more (Quest Pro controllers work with Quest 2)
Learn more (How to use Quest Pro controllers with Quest 2)
Upload has reviewed the D-Link VR Air Bridge
Wear these AR glasses with shoulder stand if you want to give up on social life forever
This amazing experiment lets you open a real door to unveil a portal to a virtual world
Sony predicts the next technologies for XR visual displays
The new VR drama of the week is Virtual Desktop people ranting against their customers on Discord
News from partners (and friends)
Enjoy the Metaverse Safety Week
This week is the Metaverse Safety Week! MSW is an important event organized by XRSI that is made to foster awareness towards important themes like safety and privacy in virtual reality. Be sure to attend it!
Learn more
Some XR fun
What I think about the Apple XR headset
Funny link
I heard you like dancing…
Funny link
These new VR Vive Controllers are safe to be smashed against a wall.
Funny link
Should I buy a Valve Index?
Funny link
This is me when I play VR more than 30 minutes in a row
Funny link
A not-serious but definitely correct purchase guide for XR headsets
Funny link
Oh look, a VR patent. Oh look, a toilet. Wait wut.
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
- Cognitive3D
- Yacine Achiakh
- 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
- Ristband (Anne McKinnon & Roman Rappak)
- Stephen Robnett
- Sb
- Enrico Poli
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
- Liam James O’Malley
- Hillary Charnas
- Wil Stevens
- Brian Peiris
- Francesco Salizzoni
- Dimo Pepelyashev
- Alan Smithson
- Steve R
- Brentwahn
- Pieter Siekerman
- Simplex
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Pico)