Tomorrow I’m going to fly to China for a long trip that is going to last a few weeks. It is going to be a very exciting journey and of course, I will keep you posted about the most important things that I will do there! For now, I’m preparing for the big journey and setting up some strategic meetings… don’t forget to contact me if you are in one of the cities I will go to (Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Beijing) and you want to meet me!
But today we still have a thing to do: let’s analyze the best XR news of the week! In the last few years, the summer has been mostly boring, but this year, we keep having interesting AR/VR things to talk about every week, and this is cool!
Top news of the week
Meta is completing the transition from App Lab to the Horizon Store
As promised a few weeks ago, Meta has performed the migration of all the applications on the indie store App Lab to the main Horizon (Quest) Store. As long as the applications respected some basic guidelines, they have been migrated, with the developers being offered the option of marking them as “Early Access” or delisting them. This means that finally, all indie apps are now searchable and discoverable, exactly like all the big-budget games. We don’t have league-A and league-B stores anymore, we just have one single store for all the applications.
Many developers like me received an email with the news that the transition has been finalized, but actually, I think Meta has still a lot of work to do. First of all, at the time of writing, the interface of the Quest Store on the website still features an “App Lab” section. Then, many users on Reddit are complaining because their store page is cluttered with low-quality Gorilla Tag clones. Probably Meta should improve its search criteria to suggest to the users only the apps they may like the most.
The migration of indie apps to the main store meant one thing: my majestic app “The Unity Cube” is now on the main Quest Store! And if an app with just a cube has been promoted to the main store, it means that the store is really open to every kind of app, no matter how absurd or simple it may be. Personally, I love openness, so I think this is a great thing…
(PS The Unity Cube has been featured on Road To VR for being on the Horizon Store… long live The Cube!)
More info (App Lab merged into the Horizon Store)
More info (How developers could prepare for the migration)
More info (Road To VR featured The Unity Cube)
Other relevant news
Meta reportedly canceled Quest Pro 2
According to a report from The Information, Meta has canceled its current plans for the Quest Pro 2: the headset codenamed “La Jolla”, that was set to be launched in 2027 with the support of Codec Avatars will never happen.
It seems that the reason for this decision has been that Meta wanted to keep the price below $1000, but that was not possible with micro-OLED displays in 2027. But I think that other reasons contributed to the cancelation of Quest Pro 2:
- Quest Pro 1 was a flop
- Apple Vision Pro is not selling well, so Meta feels less of the need to rush on an expensive high-end device
- This headset should have been manufactured by LG, but the partnership with LG finished soon after having been started
Boz commented on the rumor saying that Meta is always working on many prototypes at the same time, and the cancelation of some of them is a normal thing. Probably this is a hint to the fact that a Quest Pro 2 may still happen, but not with the La Jolla model.
Meta and Snap are going to present their AR glasses
Both Meta and Snap are going to introduce at their flagship event a new pair of advanced AR glasses.
We already know that Meta is going to show some amazing AR glasses at Meta Connect on September 25th. Zuck, Boz, and all the Meta gang already released very bold statements to the press saying that it is one of the most advanced tech objects ever created by humanity, raising a lot the expectations.
But these glasses will just be an expensive prototype to show the vision that Meta has: they will be only manufactured in minimum quantities and mostly used for internal demos or experimentations from partners.
According to a report from The Verge, Snap is instead going to reveal the 5th generation of Spectacles glasses one week before at the Partner Summit in Los Angeles on September 17th. The glasses should improve the AR features of the previous generation, while also increasing the field of view and the battery life. Exactly like the previous generation, these glasses should be available only for developers and content creators, so they would not be a product to be put on the general market, yet.
Even if both companies are not going to launch a pair of AR glasses, it’s good to see some new movement happening in AR. Slowly, but we’ll get to the lightweight AR glasses we can wear all day…
More info (Snap and Meta glasses)
More info (Snap is going to launch the 5th generation of Spectacles)
Google acquired Ant Reality
Ant Reality was a well-known Chinese brand working on XR glasses. Recently, the focus of the company was on creating reference designs for AR optics. At AWE last year, it showed a technology for AR glasses able to deliver 120° FOV with 3K resolution. That was pretty cool.
According to the very informed Chinese magazine Vrtuoluo, Ant Reality has been acquired by Google. The report by Vrtuoluo shows proof of the acquisition of the technology by Google, and I’ve also verified that Zheng Qin, the founder of Ant Reality, has now moved his working location to Mountain View, which is… you know. And the website of Ant Reality does not exist anymore.
So Google is keeping to silently and relentlessly working on AR glasses. The acquisition of Ant Reality, whose technology can be used to build high-FOV AR glasses, is proof of that. And it happened without much fanfare: I discovered the news only thanks to a tip by Serge Be, and actually, Vrtuoluo reported it one month ago. After the PR disaster with Google Glasses, Google has become very cautious in its communications about XR, but it seems to still be committed to building the technology of the future.
I’m personally happy to see that Google is very active in working on XR: as I always say, the more players in the field, the better for us…
More info (Vrtuoluo reporting the news [in Chinese])
More info (Tip by Serge Be)
News worth a mention
A developer found a new way to get access to passthrough images
A VR developer called Julian Triveri has found a smart way to access the camera feed on Quest from Unity. If the application uses the Media Projection APIs (basically the ones used to share your screen on Zoom), it can have access to the texture of the screen. If the application is running in passthrough mode, this means that you can have access to the passthrough stream shown on the screen. This method is much better than the one proposed last week because it is much smoother to use. But at the same time, it is still hacky: the frame you access contains the passthrough plus all the application elements, it requires the user to confirm the start of the stream, and it prevents the recording of the app. Still, it is very cool to use for prototyping with passthrough access for research purposes… and in fact I have an experiment in mind to do with it… I’ll keep you posted!
Meta may still be working on a smartwatch
Evan Blass is someone who is not new to leaks. This week he posted an image mentioning five Meta Quest products with codenames: Meta Quest Hawaii, Meta Quest Moku, Meta Quest Ford, Meta Quest Belmont, Meta Quest Coconut (this will make my friend Mikko happy), and Meta Quest Vega 1&2. Since the profile is blocked, I’m going to post here also the text of the post: “One of these may be a watch, I’m told — the follow up to a killed model codenamed Milan — while the Vegas are tipped as two generations of budget Quest headsets.”
So it seems that Meta is working on many products and one of them may be a smartwatch… maybe that one for controlling XR with the brain signals that Meta teased months ago.
You can now access your Quest Gallery from the web
A little big improvement of the latest runtime of the Quest is that finally, you can access all your media captured on the Quest from the web. If you agree to share your content with Meta, you can just log in to your Meta account in a browser and access all the media that you have on Quest. This is very handy if you are a content creator.
Discover the nominees for the XR Awards
AIXR’s VR Awards is one of the most well-known award institutions in our field. This year the awards have been rebranded from VR Awards to XR Awards to encompass all the immersive reality technologies. AIXR has just published the list of all the finalists for each category… compliments to all of them! The winners will be announced in a few months.
Two very cool mixed-reality demos
This week I have watched two very cool MR demos and I want to share them with you:
- Javier Davalos from FigminXR showed an impressive demo where the light emitted by a virtual object illuminates both the physical environment around it and the hands of the user. It’s amazing.
- 2Sync published a trailer where it transforms a room into its virtual reality counterpart: for instance, the real table becomes a virtual crate, and the sofa becomes a virtual bed of a dungeon game. This is one of my visions for the future of mixed reality.
More info (FigminXR demo)
More info (2Sync demo)
Virtual Reality helps people with spinal cord injury
Research Scientist, Professor Sylvia Gustin, is using VR to give again the sense of haptics to people who lost it because of spinal cord injury. Thanks to a virtual experience that makes the user see that he/she is using the feet, and some haptic device that makes this sensation even more realistic, it is possible for the brain to rewire some behaviors and re-learn how to communicate with the feet. Thanks to these, some patients started to feel again some sensations coming from the feet and this is amazing.
Some important news about content
- We have new info about one of the most awaited games of the year: “Batman: Arkham Shadow”. A new gameplay video shows us how it is playing the game and it seems pretty cool. Furthermore, we now know that the release window is October 2024
- Gorilla Tag developer Another Axiom has released a teaser trailer of its new upcoming game: Orion Drift. It is an incredibly ambitious project, a big world made of floating spatial stations where the players can move like in Gorilla Tag and play many games
- Road To VR went hands-on with “Action Hero” and found the game intriguing, but at the same time, in this “preview stage,” it seems to lack some depth. The developers promised an action movie experience, but for now, the spectacle is lacking
More info (Batman: Arkham Shadow)
More info (Orion Drift)
More info (Action Hero)
Some news about content
- Snapstick is an absurdist comedic VR puzzle game, coming to Quest on October, 3rd
- Train Sim World series is coming “soon” to Quest headsets with a new urban train simulator
- Virtual tabletop platform All On Board! netted another official license with the sci-fi strategy management hit Terraforming Mars
- Oktoberfest: The Official Game lets you enjoy the Oktoberfest on the Quest and has just entered a closed beta stage
- Wall Town Wonders is shaping up as a mixed reality town builder through the lens of The Borrowers, and it is set to launch on Meta Quest in Q4 2024
- Devin Reimer’s AstroBeam aims at building more impactful VR characters powered by large language models
- VR interactive anime film Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom is coming to Quest on October, 3rd
- Polybius is a bizarre and trippy VR shooter available on Steam
- Grokit Cancer Blaster aims to raise awareness for children’s cancer in September. Fuck cancer
More info (Snapstick)
More info (Train Sim World)
More info (All On Board)
More info (Oktoberfest)
More info (Wall Town Wonders)
More info (Astrobeam)
More info (Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom)
More info (Polybius)
More info (Grokit Cancer Blaster)
Other news
Styly unveiled new competition “Newview Awards” dedicated to XR creators
Daniel Beauchamp made another one of his amazing prototypes
Registration for Meta Connect is now open. You can register to get news about the event
Gabriele Romagnoli (whom we all love) created a curated list of 250 MR apps for Quest
XR Design Community published a video full of very interesting pieces of advice for designing gaze+hand interactions
HTC launched no-code creation tools for its Viveverse metaverse
Escape From Dalaran is an official World of Warcraft VR 4D experience that Activision-Blizzard offered to Gamescom visitors
News from partners (and friends)
Just a big hug to you all
Let me use this space for partners and friends to thank you for reading this weekly column and to send you a big virtual hug. You are amazing!
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Some XR fun
My daily life with the Quest Guardian boundary system…
Funny link
Donate for good
Like last week, also this week in this final paragraph I won’t ask you to donate to my blog, but to the poor people who 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
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And now here you are the link to donate: