The XR Week Peek (2023.07.24): Apple opens applications for Vision Pro devkits, Meta may stop the production of Quest Pro, and more!
This week VR is dead again. Sorry to inform you about that. It’s been good to dream about the metaverse, but now we can all get back to frying potatoes at McDonald’s and binge on Twitter during the free time.
Ah no, not even that because also Twitter is dead. Now it’s called X and aims at becoming the Western WeChat. Luckily there is AR that is still strong, and we can hope to wear Google AR glasses soon… ah no, they are dead too. But we can still rely on Meta that is still spending billions on XR and… OH NO, THE QUEST PRO DIED TOO.
Long story short, this week has been a cemetery. Like an out-of-season VR Halloween. But I hope you’ll enjoy this newsletter coming from the world of the undead anyway…
Top news of the week
Apple starts accepting applications for Vision Pro devkits
Apple has started accepting applications from interested developers to get a Vision Pro to develop XR experiences. People that want to Apply must be registered Apple developers.
These are the conditions specified on the website:
We’ll loan you a Vision Pro developer kit to prepare your app for the launch of the new App Store on Vision Pro.
You’ll also receive:
- Help setting up the device and onboarding.
- Check-ins with Apple experts for UI design and development guidance, and help refining your app.
- Two additional code-level support requests, so you can troubleshoot any issues with your code.
This Apple-owned development device needs to be returned upon request.
The good thing is that the device is loaned for free (so developers don’t have to pay $3499 to have it) and that Apple is providing support for it. This is of course an application I’m doing myself very soon because I want to create content for this device.
More info (Application website)
More info (Upload VR reporting the news)
Other relevant news
Meta to end the production of Quest Pro, or maybe not
According to The Information’s Wayne Ma, Meta has stopped ordering components for Quest Pro from its suppliers and will end its production as soon as their stocks will end. Of course, Meta has plenty of stock of these components, but this means that it has already started the process to sunset the headset.
Ma also reported that Meta “suspended” the development of the planned near-term Quest Pro 2, confirming a previous report by The Verge.
According to people with knowledge of the matter, the reason for this decision is “poor reviews and weak sales”. This decision contrasts with previous statements of Meta spokespeople which said that the Quest Pro would have stayed in the market for a long time.
One of these people was Andrew Bosworth, which has rebuked the report, saying “not to believe everything you read”. For me this is not a fortunate sentence: this is what Alex Kipman said about the HoloLens, a few weeks before the whole Microsoft Mixed Reality division was disbanded and he was fired from the company. Bosworth also said that the rumors of a canceled Quest Pro 2 are not to be believed, adding that “there might be a Quest Pro 2, there might not be”. But this sentence means nothing, like the whole statement by Bosworth.
I don’t know if the Quest Pro has been killed, the only thing I’m sure of is that this headset has been rushed out and will never lead to satisfying sales for Meta. Quest 3 is where Meta should put its hopes.
More info (Meta may stop the production of Quest Pro)
More info (Meta CTO rebukes the report)
Meta to downgrade its first consumer AR glasses
The same report by Wayne Ma mentioned above also talks about the AR glasses that Meta is planning to release in the next years.
Meta is reported to launch a devkit of AR glasses, codenamed Orion, in 2024. In 2027, it should launch its first AR glasses for consumers, codenamed Artemis. According to the report, Artemis should feature downgraded features compared to Orion and in particular:
- Feature LCoS display (the same type used in HoloLens) instead of the innovative microLED, due to technical manufacturing issues
- Have a diagonal FOV of around 50 degrees, which is in line with other AR headsets on the market like Nreal Light, but inferior to the 70 degrees of Orion
- Include a 5G computing pack, but which won’t have special features like LiDAR scanning or projection of images to the outside world, as initially rumored
- Not support the neural wristband with the technology developed by CTRL+LABS
Basically, according to the report, Meta is going to ship in 2027 an improved version of Nreal Light. I admit I’m pretty confused by this: either the glasses are very cheap, or they have some special feature we don’t know yet, or it seems strange to me that in four years, the best that Meta can do is AR glasses with 50° of FOV…
Meta Quest v56 runtime brings interesting updates
The latest update of the Meta Quest runtime, the v56, is bringing some relevant updates to the device. The most interesting ones for me are related to hand tacking. Meta Quest will receive Hand Tracking 2.2, which makes the hand tracking more responsive to fast movements of hands: the system can so track the hands also when the user is playing fitness games like FitXR (or HitMotion: Reloaded). Meta has also released a small demo of a fitness game to prove how it works well. Quest Pro is also receiving a special hybrid mode, where both controllers and hands are tracked at the same time.
Quest Pro has also received local dimming activated by default: thanks to it the blacks on the headset will appear more black (a bit like on an OLED display), but at the price of having more blooming.
Other relevant features introduced in this update are:
- Facebook Livestreaming is also back, letting people share their gaming sessions directly on Facebook.
- Updates of the headset while it is recharging
- Live Captions will show floating subtitles for any playing audio in Home apps like Quest TV
- Button remapping, which will let you remap the buttons on your Touch Controllers (a great feature for accessibility)
- A Swipe keyboard to type more easily while in VR (I’m very curious to try this!)
It’s always impressive to see the fast growth of this headset, with constant updates over time…
More info (Meta Quest v56 update)
More info (Hand tracking fitness demo)
More info (A new demo for Quest similar to Space Pirate Trainer)
More info (Quest Pro now tracks hands and controllers)
Read the interview to Wagner James Au
I’ve read many interviews about XR and the metaverse, but rarely I’ve found one so interesting like Dean Takashi interviewing Wagner James Au (who is going to release his book). The podcast is quite long to read, but it has been worth my time. Inside there are some provoking thoughts about the metaverse in general which are good to challenge some assumptions we may have. For instance:
- Do we really have to think about the failures of Meta when thinking about the metaverse instead of focusing on the success of Roblox? (Answer: of course, no)
- Do we really need full interoperability on the metaverse, or do we just need some loose version of it? (Answer: probably just the possibility of the same community visiting different worlds together may be enough)
- Is monetization beneficial to virtual worlds? (Answer: if people go to a platform just to make money, that platform is not going to succeed)
- Are today’s virtual worlds so different from Second Life? (Answer: no)
- Do we really need 50,000 people to stay together in the same shard of a virtual world? (Answer: probably no, because anyway, we would be going to meet and interact only with a small subset of those people).
I suggest you take some time and read this post, because it has very cool insights.
News worth a mention
Sony shows the behind-the-scenes of PSVR 2
In a recent blog post, Sony Interactive Entertainment has shown the internal evolution of PSVR 2, from the initial experimentations to the final release. It’s interesting to read how they started working on it straight after the release of PSVR 1 and that in the beginning, they were unsure if using inside-out or outside-in tracking.
More info (Official Sony blogpost)
More info (Summary by Upload VR)
Pimax works for the release of Portal
Pimax Portal, the Nintendo Switch-like console by Pimax, has just been released on Amazon. In parallel, the Chinese company is reworking the VR shell that transforms the handheld console into a VR headset, to make it more comfortable. This reworking is going to introduce new delays to its release.
In a piece of separate news, I’ve found an interesting review of the Pimax Crystal, which confirms it has amazing screens, but is difficult to configure.
More info (Pimax Portal on Amazon)
More info (Pimax Portal VR shell is being reworked)
More info (Pimax Crystal review)
Lynx R1 may be close to shipping
The time has come. After more than 2 years of wait, the Lynx R1, the French mixed reality headset, may be close to shipping to its backers. My friend Thomas Boggini shared on Twitter a picture of the Lynx team sending him a T-shirt and a message thanking him and the other backers for the big support and promising a very close shipping of the device. I can’t wait to see what impact the Lynx will have on the XR community.
Mozilla Hubs changes its plans
Mozilla has announced an update to the pricing plans of the open WebXR social platform Mozilla Hubs. Now the full stack of the platform has been made opensource, and it will be easy for tech-savvy people to install it on whatever machine they want. For the more business-oriented people, instead, Mozilla has introduced a new “Professional plan”, which is quite expensive but offers dedicated assistance by Mozilla to configure the service and a custom subdomain address for every Hub. I think this new price offering satisfied the needs of all categories of users.
Meta updates Oculus Spatializer
Meta has released an update to its Meta XR Audio SDK which introduces a new “Universal HRTF” function that will make the spatialization of the sound around the user even more realistic than before. This is a very important update: remember that sound is as important as visuals to guarantee presence in virtual worlds. If you are an XR developer, I suggest having a look at how you can integrate this into your project.
Siemens invests more than $1B in the industrial metaverse
If you were looking for a good title to share with your boss to have more money for your XR project, you have found it. Siemens is going to invest $2B globally to foster growth and innovation. €1 billion of this money is planned in Germany, with €500 million for a new Technology Campus in Erlangen. The new campus is meant to become global development and manufacturing hub and nucleus for technology activities for the industrial metaverse. This means that Siemens is a firm believer that multiplayer XR technologies are going to be so beneficial for its long-term business, that it finds worth investing around $1B in them. If this is not a business validation… I don’t know what else it is…
More info (News on XR Today)
More info (Official Siemens blog post)
Some news about AI
AI is a technology that works very well together with VR, so it’s very interesting to follow its updates because they could lead to the development of new innovative VR experiences.
This week the following things happened in the AI world:
- A creator invented a generative-AI-powered virtual camera that can shoot photos in every place at every time
- Ilumine AI showed how it is possible to create virtual worlds by just starting from a single image. The team at ENGAGE already experimented with this and made ENGAGE work in an environment created by this tool
- Meta has released its new language model LLAMA 2 completely open source to everyone. It can even be used for commercial projects. It has quite beefy requirements for the PC, but Qualcomm has stated that it will try to make it work on its mobile chipsets. Considering that Meta and Qualcomm have a partnership over VR headsets, we are wondering if the plan is making LLAMA 2 work directly on Quest 3
- Apple is rumored to work on its GPT system as well, dubbed Apple GPT. It could be useful for its AR glasses and/or to substitute Siri
- The AI community noticed that the performances of OpenAI GPT 4 have decreased over time and it is wondering why
- GPT4All is an open-source project that makes you run GPT4 on your local machine, for added privacy and reduced costs.
More info (Paragraphica virtual camera)
More info (Ilumine AI system)
More info (Ilumine AI system in ENGAGE)
More info (Meta releases LLAMA 2)
More info (Qualcomm working on LLAMA 2 for mobile chipsets)
More info (Required specs for LLAMA 2)
More info (Apple GPT)
More info (Decreased performances of GPT 4)
More info (GPT4All brings GPT 4 on your machine)
More info (GPT4All official website)
Venice Immersive announces its official selection
Venice Immersive, one of the leading events about storytelling in VR, has just announced its official lineup of content. There will be 44 projects from 25 countries and 24 worlds in the Worlds Gallery. Also this year there will be some virtual counterpart on VRChat.
More info (Venice Immersive official selection)
More info (Interview to the curators)
World From Eyes makes you see through the eyes of people
The craziest project I’ve found this week is called “World From Eyes” which is a research that is aimed at making the fiction of CSI image analysis become reality. This AI system takes the reflections on the eye of a person and tries to reconstruct from them what is the scene that he has in front of him.
More info (World From Eyes project)
More info (World From Eyes research paper)
Enjoy the PlayStation Summer Sale
If you are looking for games for your PS5, this may be the time to buy them. The new PlayStation Summer Sales is going to bring discounts for nearly 25 PSVR 2 games, including Resident Evil Village.
Some news on content
- Touchly is a video player that aims at transforming flat content into volumetric videos
- Space Salvage is an upcoming single-player VR space flight game set to release at the end of the year for Quest and Steam VR
- Firewall Ultra is going to be released on PSVR 2 on August 24th. Preorders are now open
- Tea For God, one of the most mindblowing games for its ability to make you walk in a small environment making you believe its a big space, is finally launching a full version on all the major stores
- Google has finally released its Space Invaders AR game powered by ARCore
- ‘Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures’ gets a final teaser trailer
- ANNEX aims at bringing a new action-RPG roguelike to PC VR next year, and it’s just launched a Kickstarter campaign
- Titanic: A Space Between makes you go to the Titanic to investigate what happened to a woman
- Job Simulator has arrived onto Pico headsets
More info (Touchly)
More info (Space Salvage)
More info (Firewall Ultra)
More info (Tea For God)
More info (Space Invaders AR)
More info (Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures)
More info (ANNEX)
More info (Titanic: A space between)
More info (Job Simulator)
Some reviews on content
- Runner makes you feel like you are running a motorbike in an anime. Visually it’s beautiful, but it can be a bit frustrating because driving the bike is awkward and enemy bosses are too difficult to beat
- I Expect You To Die 3 feels a great game like the other episodes of the saga. It seems to push things just a little further than the other two games, and the environments feel richer.
More info (Runner)
More info (I Expect You To Die 3)
Other news
Apple will keep having an internal division dedicated to work only on the Vision line
Assassin’s Creed Mirage will support the electric suit OWO
A guy has ultra-modded its Quest 2 to add new features and a new cool design
E-ink-screen-based Sol Reader glasses for book reading get $5M of investment
A new version of the IVAS HoloLens will be deployed to the US Army for testing in the upcoming weeks
Unity development for Apple Vision Pro has some limitations
News from partners (and friends)
Participate to the 8th edition of SlashData’s AR/VR Survey
SlashData’s AR/VR Survey is still ongoing, and you can still participate in it and hope to win some cool prizes! Let me copy-paste for you what it is about:
AR/VR creators, this survey is for you. Which tools and platforms are you using to build mind-bending creations? Take the survey to help the global community learn more about the skills and technologies necessary to succeed in 2023 and beyond.
The survey takes about 15 minutes and covers VR, AR, and mixed reality sectors. It’s available in English, Chinese (Simplified), French, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Russian. Just pick a language you’re most comfortable with.
In return for your effort, you will enter prize draws for a chance to win a Nintendo Switch, Gift cards and Crypto to use towards your AR/VR project, swag, and more. If you have a few extra minutes, promote the survey for a chance to win up to $1,000 USD in cash in our referral program.
The survey welcomes creators of all profiles: no-code, developers, students, hobbyists, and professionals. Take the survey before it closes, on August 6.
Some XR fun
A new article on TechCrunch stated that VR is dead. Well, we had a bit of fun about it…
Funny link / The Original Article
Funny link / 1
Funny link / 2
Playing VR Cricket in the office is the best idea ever
Funny link
Remember: the Quest Pro is for WORK
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: :
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And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Apple)
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