The XR Week Peek (2024.02.13): People are experimenting with Vision Pro, Ubisoft is disappointed by the VR market, and much more
In this crazy rollercoaster that is life, a new week has started, and it is so time for me to write my roundup of the best news of the week. Since we are still in the hype phase for the Vision Pro, this roundup will still be centered a lot on Apple’s device, simply because almost all the VR magazine articles, the Tweets, and whatever people in XR are saying, at this moment is always about the Vision Pro. If we keep going this way, I’ll have to rename this newsletter to the Vision Pro Week Peek… and paywall it at 99$/month, because everything Apple-related must be classy and expensive…
Top news of the week
People keep experimenting with the Apple Vision Pro
The Apple Vision Pro is out in the wild and the whole XR community is still in hype mode, trying to discover all the secrets of the device.
iFixit published a new episode of its teardown of the headset, in which analyzes its display. It’s remarkable that with the micro OLED display that Apple uses, a single pixel of the iPhone 15 Pro Max can fit 54 Vision Pro pixels. A single pixel is just the size of a blood cell!
Some YouTubers weren’t so kind when disassembling the device: they tried to break the device to verify its resistance. It turns out from their analysis that the Vision Pro front glass is very resistant, but it’s covered by a plastic film, so it can be scratched pretty easily.
More info (People are testing the durability of the Vision Pro)
More info (Jerryrigeverything scratches the glass of the headset)
More info (iFixit Teardown ep. 1)
More info (iFixit Teardown ep. 2 with the analysis of the display — Upload VR)
More info (Full Video of iFixit Teardown ep. 2 with the analysis of the display)
Also, the display expert Karl Guttag started experimenting with the headset and managed to record the foveated rendering in action.
In the meantime, The Reverend Kyle at Upload VR tried to use the Vision Pro with glasses and verified that it works, but the space is very narrow, so you risk scratching the lenses of the headset with the lenses of the glasses.
More info (Karl Guttag started analyzing the Vision Pro)
More info (Wearing the Vision Pro with glasses)
We keep having reviews about the Vision Pro, and I want to signal to you two pretty original ones.
One that I loved was by an almost blind guy who tried the headset and reported that he was able to see better with the Vision Pro than with naked eyes or glasses. It is not the first time that I have heard this kind of feedback, and I started wondering if there could not be a market for passthrough glasses for people with eye impairments. Kudos also to the accessibility options of the Vision Pro, which let him use the headset even if he had problems keeping the eyes still (he could set up the head as the pointer).
The other relevant review comes from a Christian Pastor, who defined the Vision Pro “A step forward for the Antichrist”. I guess we will all go to hell, guys. The good news is that we will spend eternity in good company talking about immersive realities…
More info (A blind guy tries the Vision Pro)
More info (The review about the Antichrist)
One of the experiments that people tried as soon as possible has been connecting the Vision Pro to a PC to use it as a PCVR headset. Surprisingly, people managed to do that, using the open-source wireless streaming solution ALVR. The problem is that the Vision Pro has no controllers, so if you want to use it with SteamVR, you have to do the trick of using your base station-tracked controllers together with the Vision Pro after you have calibrated the position of the headset with the ones of the controllers.
After they noticed that there was interest in the community, both iVRy (which you probably remember for the system for connecting your PC to the PSVR2) and Guy Godin from Virtual Desktop announced that they are working on integrating Apple’s headset with SteamVR. But it will not be an easy task, because iOS is much more a closed system than Android…
More info (People are using ALVR to connect the Vision Pro to Steam — Road To VR)
More info (People are using ALVR to connect the Vision Pro to Steam — Upload VR)
More info (A video showcasing a person playing Beat Saber with Vision Pro and Index Controllers)
More info (iVRy is working to integrate Vision Pro with SteamVR)
More info (iVRy and Virtual Desktop working to integrate Vision Pro with SteamVR)
Talking about the app ecosystem, new applications get unveiled every day. YouTube, after the initial denial, admitted that in the future is going to launch a native app for Apple’s device. Also, DeoVR is coming with its immersive video service (… bringing with it also the compatibility with SLR, I guess: we’ll finally have the Apple Vision Pr0n). And on the headset of the moment, we had to have the technology of the moment: ChatGPT is being released for VisionOS, too.
More info (Youtube on Vision Pro)
More info (DeoVR on Vision Pro)
More info (ChatGPT on Vision Pro)
In the meantime we keep seeing videos of people doing weird things with the Vision Pro: the latest craze that I saw was someone skydiving with the Vision Pro on.
Talking about the viral videos of people driving a Tesla with the Vision Pro on, you may be disappointed to know that a few of them were staged, and so not real at all.
More info (Road To VR on the weird things that people are doing with the Vision Pro on)
More info (Parachuting with the Vision Pro on)
More info (Some Vision Pro videos were staged)
According to Mark Gurman, many people in Apple are thinking that the Vision Pro may need a few generations before becoming mainstream. Many Apple devices needed them: the iPhone itself, which is much glorified, became truly widespread only with the iPhone 4. So the Vision Pro may need time to start becoming popular.
Talking about the present, a good way to increase the sales numbers is for sure launching in China: according to some rumors coming from Chinese magazines, the launch may happen in April-May. Since “Vision” there is a trademark of Huawei, in China, the headset may be called “Reality Pro”, which is how we thought it was called before its official announcement.
More info (Apple Vision Pro succeeding after a few generations)
More info (Apple Vision Pro may launch in China in April)
Other relevant news
Ubisoft is not satisfied with the sales of Assassin’s Creed on Quest
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has reported to investors that the sales of Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR on Quest have been fine, but they were expecting more, so in the end the company is pretty disappointed with the sales numbers. The result of this is that Mr.Guillemot has stated that Ubisoft won’t increase its investments in XR, but will just keep an eye on this promising technology until it takes off. This has been the exact statement of the Ubisoft CEO:
“We have been a bit disappointed by what we were able to achieve on VR with Assassin’s Creed. It did okay, and it continues to sell, but we thought it would sell more, so we are not increasing our investment on VR at the moment, because it needs to take off.
We have been very impressed by what Apple came up with, and we think it’s fantastic hardware, but we continue to look at this VR business as something that we have to look at but not invest too much in, until it grows enough.”
This is a bad piece of news for our ecosystem, but I’m honestly not surprised at all by it. We all know that XR is a growing field, but it still has not enough people in its market to gain the interest of major companies like Ubisoft. Ubisoft is used to thinking of various millions of players for every one of its AAA games, but these numbers are impossible when the whole market is made of 20M headsets, a good part of which is actually unused. We will arrive at the point when VR will be mainstream, but this is still going to take a few years.
More info (Ubisoft is disappointed with the VR market — Road To VR)
More info (Ubisoft is disappointed with the VR market — Upload VR)
Disney invests $1.5B in Epic Games
After a bad piece of news, it is the turn to talk about a good one. Disney has just invested $1.5B into Epic Games, to create together with Epic a metaverse platform for Disney.
The word “metaverse” is actually never mentioned in the announcement, and Disney describes the goal of the deal as building a universe together with the company behind Fortnite: “In addition to being a world-class games experience and interoperating with Fortnite, the new persistent universe will offer a multitude of opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters, and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more.” Blablabla it’s a Disney metaverse platform, but without using the word metaverse because it’s not cool anymore.
So Disney, after having dismantled its division working on the metaverse, is actually investing a lot of money into the metaverse. That’s very good news for all of us.
A study warns us of the side effects of using passthrough
Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, headed by the mythical professor Jeremy Bailenson, has carried on a study on the side effects of using headsets with passthrough augmented reality, like Quest 3 and Vision Pro. The study highlights how the vision mediated by screens is not the same as our standard vision and takes with it side effects due to the distortions of the passthrough, the limited field of view, the slightly distorted depth perception (objects are farther away than they appear), and the difficulty it has in portraying realistically objects that are close to the face.
The researchers urge the need for more studies to verify that the technology is actually safe for our eyes and our minds before it starts being used by many people for many hours a day, for gaming and for productivity.
News worth a mention
Horizon Worlds is now one of the top 10 most used apps on the Quest Store
Meta’s Horizon Worlds is now one of the 10 most downloaded and used apps on the Quest Store in the US. To be exact, it is in the 8th place, and Zuckerberg proudly mentioned it during the latest Meta earnings call.
In the end, Zuck did it and managed to get some traction for Horizon Worlds. But how did he do it? Well, this success of Horizon is due to two main reasons:
- The platform evolved, and the new creation tools let Meta’s internal studio develop higher-quality content like Super Rumble or Citadel, which have decent graphics and are actually fun
- Meta started to shove Horizon down our throats every time we open a Quest, even if we have no interest in entering there. It’s hard not to be one of the top 10 apps on the Store if every Quest user sees Horizon everywhere in the operating system UI. I wonder what the antitrust would say on that if it weren’t sleeping.
Frame smartglasses are all about AI
Brilliant Labs, the same startup behind the smart monocle, has announced Frame, a new pair of smart glasses that give you multimodal “AI superpowers”. Through these glasses, you can frame a pair of sneakers and ask what is the model and where to buy them, look for nutrition information about the food you are eating, and so on. They are all about analyzing what you are seeing and giving you more information about it.
If you want some more technical info about this gadget, I can tell you that AI-wise, it uses OpenAI for visual analysis, Whisper for translation, and Perplexity for web search. The glasses also use a 640 x 400-pixel color micro OLED screen that offers a roughly 20-degree diagonal field of view (which is very small, just suitable to display some contextual information). The weight is very small: we are talking about a number inferior to 40 grams.
Frame starts shipping on April, 15th for $349. It seems to me quite an interesting gadget for the techie people who would love to experiment with the everyday use of AI.
Some news about content
- Fast Travel Game announced BlackForge, a VR weaponsmithing sim, coming later this year
- Hero brawler Brazen Blaze just had an open beta session
- We have a new trailer for the adventure game Epyka
- Astro Hunters, an action game featuring an explorable open world, is coming in Q3 2024
- Heartshot, a PC VR narrative espionage thriller, will reach Steam Early Access soon
- Masters of Light, a new action game powered by hand tracking, is reaching Quest this Spring
More info (Blackforge)
More info (Brazen Blaze)
More info (Epyka)
More info (Astro Hunters VR)
More info (Heartshot)
More info (Masters Of Light)
Some reviews about content
- Border Bots, a game where you impersonate an inspection agent, offers a very polished experience mixing the best aspects of Job Simulator and “Papers, Please” (including the humor of these experiences)
Other news
Ultraleap’s hand tracking has been integrated into the latest MR reference design by EmdoorVR
Analyzing the latest Meta Reality Labs revenues, we can estimate Quest 3 sold 1–1.5M units in Q4 2023
News from partners (and friends)
Kevin Williams is now an Ambassador for EAG
The team behind the Entertainment, Amusement, and Gaming (EAG) Expo has selected Kevin Williams, an esteemed consultant on location-based entertainment, to become its Ambassador and Advisor. Kevin Williams stated that “With the explosion of XR in LBE, far beyond just VR, AR, and MR — I am honoured that the leading UK trade association and event organizer with the respected EAG gathering, has asked us to support the creation of these co-located events. Looking forward to welcoming the first supporters of this new endeavour soon.”
Some XR fun
This is how Horizon Worlds reached its success
Funny link
In 2024 we will all look like trendy robots
Funny link
Well, well, this may cause a riot in Apple headquarters
Funny link
The dream interface of the Apple Vision Pro
Funny link
This guy is so happy of having his new Vision Pro… I wonder why
Funny link
The Wish version of the Vision Pro
Funny link
The Simpsons already predicted the Apple Vision Pro
Funny link
We should give this headset a new name
Funny link
Donate for good
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(Header image by Apple)
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