Today is the last day of the Carnival celebrations, and there are many people having fun in the streets here in Italy. On my side, I’ll just celebrate by eating some typical sweeties of this period.
I actually have a second reason to celebrate: Feedspot has put me in 3rd place in its classification of the best 60 Virtual Reality websites, ranked by authority. I’m just behind the sacred websites Road To VR and Upload VR. If you see the classification, you notice that there are some issues, like the mention of the Oculus website, that is no more. Plus, being in the field, I know there are magazines far better than mine (e.g. MIXED) that are not mentioned. I know I should not be in the 3rd place, and probably not even the 4th or the 5th. But, I don’t care, let me just savor this moment that rewards me for the big work of the past 8 years as a blogger. And let me thank you all for your big support that led me to this result!
Top news of the week
Valve Deckard may be launched in 2025 for $1200
There is a new rumor about Valve Deckard, and for once it doesn’t come from our usual source. This time it’s been the turn of data miner “Gabe Follower, who in the past has already provided reliable leaks, and that has claimed that Valve Deckard should be released in 2025 for an amount of around $1200.
Gabe Follower also maintains Valve is also set to ship games or demos “that are already done” specifically for Deckard. Tyler McVicker (Valve News Network) says that there could be a demo application also from the Half-Life universe.
As for the operating system of the device, it should be SteamOS, the same as Steam Deck. And indeed the device should be able to play SteamDeck flatscreen games, but on a big screen in VR. This is also possible because the Roy controllers associated with this headset have the same controls as a gamepad.
A note on the price: the device has a premium price ($1200), but according to Gabe Follower, it is still sold at a loss. This makes us think that the headset has very high-end specifications, something that would make the classical Valve fan happy.
More info (Valve Deckard to be released in 2025 for $1200)
More info (The headset could come with a Half-Life demo app)
Other relevant news
Sony permanently slashes the price of PSVR 2
Finally, Sony has permanently cut the price of the PSVR 2 headset. Starting this month, the headset is priced at $400 (€450 / £400 / ¥66,980), for which you may decide to buy just the headset or get it bundled with the Horizon Call of the Mountain game (since the price is the same, I wonder who the hell is going to buy just the headset).
PSVR 2 has always been a good headset, but its price was insanely high (more than the PS5 itself). When a few weeks ago, Sony started discounting it, the device started to sell much better, so it seems to me a great decision that now they have applied a permanent discount. PSVR 2 has not a great library of exclusive games, but now there is quite a good number of games available, and thanks to the PC adapter, it is possible to play with it also the PC games on Steam. $400 seems like a good price for it, in my opinion. I’m not expecting its sales to skyrocket, but I can envision PSVR 2 becoming a better ecosystem now.
Quest goes always more into Free-to-play
Meta is reiterating that given the new young audience of Meta Quest, developers should aim at releasing free-to-play games. In a new post on X, the company stated that now free-to-play experiences account for more than 70% of the time that people spend on Quest.
Developers are so starting to follow the freemium trend. Fast Travel Games just made Mannequin free to play. And the latest game by Owlchemy Labs, Dimensional Double Shift, which is free to play, just reached 500K downloads as a testament that this strategy works.
There are anyway a couple of considerations that I want to add to Meta’s statement. First of all, when you push the free Horizon Worlds experience in front of everyone every time and let the Horizon Store be plagued by free shovelware content, it’s easy that the time that people spend on free to play increases. I’m not saying that the store wasn’t going towards this dynamic anyway (all stores go in that direction, sooner or later), I’m just saying that for sure it was facilitated.
The second, and very important one, is that I’m not seeing any statistics on revenues. If people play my game for 10 hours a week, but my revenues are $5, my studio closes anyway. The fact that revenues are not mentioned in the post makes me think that the data was not good enough to be published. And even if it was published, it would be heavily skewed by the huge numbers of Gorilla Tag. The question I ask Meta is: what is the median value of the revenues of a free-to-play game on the Horizon Store? This is what can help us developers in deciding if this is really the best business model for us.
More info (Free-to-play accounts for 70% of the time people spend on Quest)
More info (Mannequin)
More info (Dimensional Double Shift downloads)
Meta announces Aria 2 glasses
Meta has announced Aria Gen 2 glasses, an evolution over the previous Project Aria. Remember that Aria is not a commercial device, but a pair of glasses featuring many sensors that are meant for research purposes. Aria can record data about your body and the environment around you so that you can train AI models that require data from the point of view of the user (e.g. it is very useful for training artificial intelligence models dedicated to AR).
Aria Gen 2 will feature an overall increase in the specs of the device. The device includes an upgraded sensor suite, including an RGB camera, position-tracking cameras, eye-tracking cameras, spatial microphones, IMUs, barometer, magnetometer, GNSS, and custom Meta silicon. It has also new sensors: a photoplethysmography sensor for measuring heart rate and a contact microphone to distinguish the wearer’s voice from that of bystanders. It now also features onboard speakers for audio output. But the biggest innovation is that now the device features a powerful custom Meta chip and so can perform on-device onboard positional tracking, eye tracking, and hand tracking, as well as speech recognition. This is in stark contrast with the previous Aria glasses that could only record data that then you had to analyze on a computer.
All of this package of innovation happens to weigh only 75g, guaranteeing 6–8 hours of active use.
Aria has currently been distributed only to very close partners, but general availability for research centers is expected to happen later this year.
More info (Aria Gen 2 glasses — Road To VR)
More info (Aria Gen 2 glasses — Upload VR)
Meta refreshes its enterprise and educational offering
Meta has just updated its offering for universities and enterprise companies.
The new Meta For Education program is now generally available, after a long beta period in which its services have been improved. Meta has never been fully clear about what this service is, but from what I’ve understood, it allows universities and schools in general to buy headsets for their students, together with two facilities. The first is a service (MDM) to manage the fleet of devices that the school is buying, allowing the school to bulk install content on them or to run content on them at the same time for all the students in the class. The second is a catalog of content that is useful for educational purposes provided by Meta and 3rd party partners that the schools can have access to. Additionally, Meta and VictoryXR have also developed over 30 “metaversities” with the Engage XR platform to create digital twin campuses for remote student interaction.
Meta added some stats to confirm that using VR in education is working: according to Meta, of the 43 schools already using VR & mixed reality, 87% of students reported “feeling more engaged and interested” in their lessons, 85% of teachers found it to be “a valuable tool to enhance their teaching”, and students also experienced a 15% improvement “in their academic performance on multiple-choice assessments” (Quote from Upload VR). As usual when I see this kind of statistics from a headset vendor, I wonder how much the data analysis has been objective…
Meta For Education is inserted inside the bigger program of what was called “Quest For Business”. This week, Meta has announced a refresh of its whole business offering, that has now the name “Horizon Managed Solutions”. The services offered are not much different than before: user management, device management, custom store, dedicated assistance, and so on. But there are some substantial differences: for instance, while before you were forced to use the device management solution by Meta, now you can integrate Horizon Managed Solutions with third-party MDM solutions like ArborXR, ManageXR, or Microsoft Intune. This is a huge upgrade because companies usually have already their MDM and would like to stick with the one they already have instead of using another one just for the headsets.
As for the price of these enterprise solutions, Upload VR summarizes them very well:
Under Meta for Education Quest 3 is priced at $630, and Quest 3S at $400 for the 128GB model or $500 for the 256GB model. These prices include two years of Meta Horizon managed services, the core backend for mass device management, which afterwards costs $24/month per headset for Shared Mode.
Unlike for businesses, though, Meta for Education offers the ability to unlock “lifetime” access for $100 per headset. Thus, organizations could buy Quest 3S headsets with “lifetime” access for $500, or Quest 3 for $730.
As you can see, enterprise headsets are slightly more expensive than their consumer counterparts, but the big problem is actually the subscription service that is activated after two years. Customers from the education world have the opportunity to remove the subscription by paying $100 una tantum, making the offering more palatable.
More info (Meta For Education now available — Meta blog)
More info (Meta For Education now available — Upload VR)
More info (Meta For Education now available — Road To VR)
More info (Meta Horizon Managed Solutions — Meta Blog)
More info (Meta Horizon Managed Solutions — XR Today)
News worth a mention
HTC launches “VIVERSE Worlds” platform
HTC has just launched its new platform, dubbed “VIVERSE Worlds”, with the aim of being the “Youtube of 3D Content” (I’ve heard a similar claim a million times from different products). VIVERSE Worlds is a platform that hosts 3D and VR experiences, with the interesting twist that it is fully web-based. This means that you can integrate VIVERSE Worlds content very simply in your website using an iFrame and that as a user you can try any experience without having to install anything. The experiences are also poised to run at good performances thanks to the use of Vive Polygon Streaming technology, which streams to the client device only the polygons that have to be rendered, making experiences more lightweight to execute.
It’s for sure an interesting approach and it will be interesting to see if this differentiating factor will pay off.
More info (HTC VIVERSE Worlds — Road To VR)
More info (HTC VIVERSE Worlds — Upload VR)
AMD is launching its new graphics cards
AMD is now launching the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards it had announced at CES. The cards will ship on March 6, with MSRPs of $550 and $600 respectively. They are meant to compete with the NVIDIA RTX 5070, and potentially also with the RTX 5070 Ti, offering a similar price and competing performances.
They also introduce AMD’s second-generation AI accelerators which power FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS. They also support DisplayPort 2.1a, which could drive future 4K per eye headsets with 120Hz refresh rate or above.
More info (AMD’s new graphics cards — Upload VR)
More info (AMD’s new graphics cards — The Verge)
Winlator can make you play Windows games on Pico 4 Ultra
I’ve found on YouTube a very interesting video by Virtually Real, in which he makes Crysis run on the Pico 4 Ultra. To do that, he uses Winlator, a Windows emulator for Android. In the comments, he also writes about other games he tried, like Fallout 3, with good results. This opens up the possibility of playing (rather old) Windows games natively on your headset!
The XR community keeps complaining about the Horizon Store curation
People in XR are complaining about the Horizon Store curation, and in particular how now the store is full of shovelware. On Reddit and X people are sharing videos of them scrolling the Horizon Store page just to find crappy clones of Gorilla Tag. A Redditor has even calculated that of the 126 games released the past month on the Horizon Store, 57 involve “gorilla” or “tag” in their name. That’s unbearable.
More info (BMFVR showing the status of the store)
More info (57/126 games are clones of Gorilla Tag)
Meta is discontinuing Move
Move, the fitness tracking application running on Meta Quest, is being discontinued by Meta. Meta claims that Move relies on discontinued technology, so it should be removed so that Meta can keep improving its runtime. Actually, if Move still relies on legacy technology, it means that it has never been refactored to use new technologies, and this means that Meta was not investing many resources in it because it had not many users anymore.
This is very sad news, if we consider that Meta basically killed the business of the startup YUR to launch its own identical service (Oculus Move) to then just abandon it now, a few years later. It would have been better to leave the business to those who were passionate about it.
Meta shows its last work in the field of realistic avatars
Meta Reality Labs and the University Of Munich have just published a very interesting research project called Avat3r. This research system is able to create the head of a realistic avatar of a person by just using 4 photos taken by an iPhone (actually, the results are still decent even if you use just one). The avatar is able to replicate quite well the facial expressions of the user. The visual appearance of the avatar face is striking, also thanks to the rendering via Gaussian Splats.
A new research project with taste in VR
The Ohio State University has published an interesting research project involving the emulation of virtual taste. Like many other similar solutions, the e-taste interface releases small particles of flavor in the mouth of the user when it is instructed to do so. In one of the experiments that were carried on, the available flavors were lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup, or coffee.
Taste emulation is still in the early stages, but I’m happy to see that there is ongoing research in the field.
More info (Taste emulation experiment)
More info (The research paper describing this experiment)
Discover The VR Critic
If you like to read reviews about VR content, you will be very happy to know that an Australian VR enthusiast, Dr Luke Buckmaster, has just launched his website called “The VR Critic” where he’s going to review many VR experiences. The website has been 4 years in the making (yikes!) because Luke wanted to have enough reviews ready before launching it. Last week the website launched with more than 100 review articles published.
I wish this new VR website a lot of success!
Some news about content
- Steam Next Fest brought more than 20 free VR demos to the community
- Stratogun is a nostalgic flatscreen shoot ’em up launching with VR support later this year
- Sportvida CyberDash, which is designed to deliver stress relief through intense physical challenges, is set for a full launch on Quest and PC VR next month
- Orion Drift, the new game by the studio behind Gorilla Tag, has been launched in Early Access
- Symphoni blends conducting with spellcasting in a new mixed reality rhythm game that is reminiscent of Maestro. It’s set to launch on March, 6th for $19.99
- Not Like Us by Kendrick Lamar is now available as a DLC for Beat Saber
- GORN 2 is slated to arrive “later this year” on the Meta Quest platform, Steam, and PlayStation VR2. It promises similar gameplay to the original game but with some innovations
- VR time travel adventure Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate confirmed a March 27 release on Quest and PlayStation VR2
- Alien: Rogue Incursion’s first major Quest 3 patch is now live, promising atmospheric visual enhancements and many more fixes
- Farming Simulator VR is now available on Quest headsets, priced at $25
- Upload VR has published its usual roundup of minor XR news called “XR News Round-Up”
More info (Steam Next Fest)
More info (Stratogun)
More info (Sportvida Cyberdash)
More info (Orion Drift)
More info (Symphoni)
More info (Beat Saber)
More info (GORN 2)
More info (Gameplay video of GORN 2)
More info (Wanderer)
More info (Alien: Rogue Incursion)
More info (Farming Simulator VR)
More info (XR News Round-Up)
Some reviews about content
- NinjaGuyVR tried every Steam Next Fest VR demo. Most of them had serious problems
- Orion Drift was reviewed both by Upload and Mixed. The game seems promising, with a bold “metaverse” vision, but in this Early Access version is still very incomplete. Especially the onboarding needs a lot of improvement. It is fun, but it is not exactly an Echo VR successor as some people were hoping for
- Retronika is a nice racing action game, with good visuals and good gameplay variety
- Detective VR lets you play as a detective in mixed reality. There is room for improvement in its gameplay, but it is an interesting game nonetheless
More info (Steam Next Fest)
More info (Orion Drift — Upload VR)
More info (Orion Drift — Mixed)
More info (Retronika)
More info (Detective VR)
Other news
GTA 6 aims to become a metaverse platform with its “Project Rome”
VR can help you achieve lucid dreaming
Stress Level Zero explains why targeting only PC VR is not profitable enough for a gaming studio
Lumus claims to have a waveguide that offers “high quality >75° Field-of-View that fits a glasses form factor”
Google may be experimenting internally with boards supporting the future Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 3 chipsets
News from partners (and friends)
Cause+Christi launches SHIP HAPPENS
Creative studio Cause+Christi is launching in partnership with HTC VIVERSE its first ever free-to-play fully WebXR-delivered immersive escape room game: “SHIP HAPPENS”. It is the first fully interactive game from the well-known studio and it has this plot:
The year is 3025. You are an Earth-born engineer assigned to a corporate-owned Loot Transport Ship. You have awoken from cryo-slumber to find everyone missing and the ship in disarray. Hmm…
It is free to play, so if you are intrigued by this concept, click the link below and play it!
Learn more (Discover SHIP HAPPENS)
Learn more (Play the game)
Some XR fun
You can fully trust OpenAI. Sort of…
Funny link
At least she’s good at cooking…
Funny link
Everyone Loves Horizon Worlds. Sort of…
Funny link
The current situation of VR gaming studios
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
- DeoVR
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
- Jonn Fredericks
- Jean-Marc Duyckaerts
- Reynaldo T Zabala
- Richard Penny
- Terry xR. Schussler
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- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
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- Mark G
- Simplex
- Gregory F Gorsuch
- Paul Shay
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Afference)