Are you ready for a new episode of this roundup of the best XR news of the week? Of course you are… otherwise, you wouldn’t be here!
Top news of the week
Speculations and updates about the Steam Frame
The launch of the Steam Frame is getting closer, and we are keeping having updates and speculations about it.
For instance, we got to know that a new shipment of consoles arrived at Valve’s warehouse. New games every week become Steam Frame-verified (even the Half Life 2 VR mod is now verified). And Valve has reduced the requirements for a game to be considered Steam Frame-verified to 72 fps at at least 1,728 × 1,728 per-eye resolution.
But the news that caused more turmoil and debates has been Tyler McVicker forecasting a possible price of $1,500 for Valve’s upcoming headset. Tyler is probably one of the most famous leakers of everything Valve-related, but he’s also known for generating hype and not always being reliable. So, the fact that he says the Steam Frame may cost $1,500 doesn’t mean that this is really going to be the price. But still, the fact that someone who is known to leak stuff about Valve thinks that $1500 may be the price may make us think that the price of the Steam Frame most probably is going to be high. $1500 would be double what some people hoped the Steam Frame may have cost.
I personally still think that it is going to be cheaper than that, and probably will be in the $1,000-$1,200 range. Which is still a lot of money, especially considering that the specs of the headset are not really cutting-edge. This means that this headset will be a device for prosumers, Valve enthusiasts, VR enthusiasts… the usual niches of people buying expensive headsets. It won’t be a headset that will sell many millions of units like the Quest 2.
And probably it never meant to be, but a good number of people in the VR community thought this could have been the saviour of VR. But with that price, it surely is not going to be: we have seen too many times that people are not going to buy headsets that are this expensive (unless a new fantastic use case for VR comes to light).
Anyway, looking at the bright side, the Frame for sure will bring some innovations to the field, like the fact that it is an open headset and it is very comfortable… and hopefully some other companies will copy its best innovations. And for sure it will still have decent sales, and it will be sold out at launch. Because that’s the rule: every headset is always sold out at launch…
More info (Steam Frame may cost $1500)
More info (Half Life 2 VR mod is Steam-Frame verified)
More info (Valve lowers Steam-Frame verified badge requirements)
Other relevant news
VR mods continue to be published… but how much benefit are they bringing?
As I told you in a previous episode of this newsletter, thanks to AI, many flat-screen games are now getting the VR mod treatment. Every week I head to social media like X, and I read about new games being modded by someone in the community. Just to make an example, a fellow VR Ghost is now even modding the old Unreal Tournament game! (Btw, do you remember the map in the picture above? If yes, let me know in the comments or by answering the e-mail!)
This is all great. I love to see new games playable in VR; I love to see the enthusiasm of people modding together games and bringing them to VR. But how much is this helping the space?
In my opinion, not much. I’ll tell you why. First of all, it is giving a lot of options to PCVR enthusiasts, but PCVR is a niche. And unluckily, with the current prices of gaming PCs, I think PCVR is going to stay niche. And mods just pick people in PCVR who already own that specific game and want to mess around to install a mod. So every mod targets a niche of a niche. Someone checked the downloads of a Cyberpunk mod, and the count is like 2,000. We are for sure not talking about a huge success.
I think there is also cognitive overload. If there is only one mod published this month, everyone is going to speak about it, and many PCVR people are going to try it. But these weeks we are inundated by news of too many mods, and this means the users are going to download each a different mod, plus missing the news of the release of others, and so on. It is very confusing. Even the content creators are just hyping mods here and there, but not sticking to playing a game until the end.
The other question is who is going to play them. Our community for sure is happy. But how many flat-screen gamers are going to be interested in them? A minimal percentage, because if they were interested in VR, they would have already bought a headset. I doubt someone is going to buy a headset just to play a specific game in VR, unless they are super super fans.
So, again, this is great news for the PCVR crew, and I’m thankful to all people who are spending their tokens and their time to mod games for the community. But honestly, I don’t think this is going to have a huge impact on the VR ecosystem as a whole.
More info (The original UT being modded)
More info (Content Creators just hyping mods)
More info (Download numbers of a mod)
Virtual Desktop adds wired USB support for Quest
Virtual Desktop, probably the most popular PC VR solution for standalone headsets, just added wired USB support for Quest.
This is pretty huge because, aside from the official Quest Link support, almost no solution offers tethered streaming for Quest. Steam Link works only via wi-fi, for instance. Other headsets like Pico support wired streaming, but this doesn’t hold for Quest.
You may wonder why this is interesting, if Meta already provides tethered support for Quest. The problem is that everything PC-related on Quest is almost abandonware. For many of us VR players with an NVIDIA graphics card, Quest Link randomly crashes during the day. This has been happening for various months, and no one ever fixed that. So having an alternative to wired connections that’s more performant than Wi-Fi is definitely welcome for people like me.
The problem with these 3rd-parties solutions is that they can not passthrough the data about hands, eyes, and mixed-reality view from the headset to Unity for development. But for all the rest, I think that’s great VD finally also allow to do tethered streaming without crashes.
News worth a mention
Viture launches Viture Pro 2
Viture Pro 2 is the new product launched by Viture. It costs only $300, and features a virtual display with a 50° FOV, full HD resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, and 1,600 nits of brightness while weighing only 63g, which is lighter (and thinner) than the original Viture Pro
VR Games Showcase is back
I don’t know if it is a good idea to organize an event mid August, when many people in the world are in vacation. But the people of the VR Games Showcase decided it was, and so have organized a new VR gaming showcase for August 12th at 11 am PT. It has been defined as the “biggest show yet”, which is what they say every time. Let’s see what will be announced this time!
The “unexpected” success on Kickstarter
Last week, I predicted in this newsletter that the URXR One smartglasses would have crashed their Kickstarter goal in a very short time. And it actually happened. You may think about two possibilities: either I am a real magician and have some superpowers, or it is the usual pantomime that happens with these Kickstarter campaigns for hardware products that have already been built. You choose which one of the two options you prefer. This week, we had the final chapter that happens every time: journalists reporting about the campaign having been funded.
And it is not only Unseen Realities: also Memomind raised a lot of money, more than $1M, through Kickstarter. Good luck to both of them. And also good luck to their backers…
More info (URXR One funded through Kickstarter)
More info (Memomind glasses funded through Kickstarter)
NVIDIA’s XR AI is an interesting solution for enterprise
A few weeks ago, NVIDIA released “ XR AI “ in public beta, its open-source framework to let companies build solutions mixing smartglasses and AI. The framework comprises a backend that runs some LLMs locally on a workstation, and that can process the data of a company without leaking anything outside; and a frontend application that can be run on phones and glasses and that lets users speak with the AI. I tried this solution myself: I had some difficulties running it in WSL on Windows (it is made for Linux), but when I made it work, it worked really well and allowed me to run the client even on a browser on the TCL RayNeo X3 Pro glasses. I was just looking at something and speaking with the AI about what it was seeing. And that was working out of the box. Then companies can take this framework and build more complex solutions on top of it. It is definitely an interesting solution.
More info (XR AI released in public beta)
More info (My hands-on opinion about XR-AI)
Some news about content
- You can now get an early look at Escape Simulator 2’s VR mode in a recently unveiled VR open beta.
More info (Escape Simulator 2)
Some reviews about content
- Upload VR had a preview of Dream Hackers VR, and the journalist even defined it as “the game I’m most excited for in 2027”. That for sure got me curious about this VR action-adventure roguelike
- Cybercore Protocol is a mixed reality action game that blends elements of tower defense, wave shooters, and melee combat. It has a narrow scope, but it still seems fun
- G-Rebels lets you fly over a cyberpunk city. It reminds me of AirCar: the experience can be stunning… but it is currently in Early Access and may suffer from crashes
- Upload VR reviewed System Critical 3 and defined it as “one of the worst VR games in recent years”. The creator of the game didn’t take this lightly and went to X to say some not-so-kind words against the VR magazine and show a picture of the current rating of the game on the PS Store: 4.81. Time to grab some popcorn…
More info (Dream Hackers VR)
More info (Cybercore Protocol)
More info (G-Rebels)
More info (System Critical 3 — Review)
More info (System Critical 3 — Reply)
Other news
Beyond Frames sold the publishing rights to Combat Waffle’s games for $1M
XR Replay automatically records your last minutes of gameplay so you can’t miss your best moments
Enjoy these two videos of two amazing MR experiments, one made by Lucas Martinic and the other by Bradley!
(Thanks Ivan for the second link)
Learn more (Lucas Martinic)
Learn more (Brad Lynch)
A new research shows that Apple Vision Pro can make surgeons 19% faster
The community found a new exploit to have root access to the Quest 3, but Meta already patched it
It seems Unity now also asks to pay a fee for internal deployments of the apps you build through it
News from partners (and friends)
ZEISS invested in SeeTrue Technologies
ZEISS led a €2.2M investment round in SeeTrue Technologies, a Finnish startup specialized in eye tracking. I remember trying their solution in Helsinki three years ago and being positively impressed by it. They allowed eye tracking to work by having just one lifetime calibration per user. ZEISS invested in SeeTrue because its solution enables scalable eye-sensing capabilities with low power consumption and a small hardware footprint.
Compliments to the whole team!
Learn more
Some XR fun
Some feet on Reddit
Funny link
Steam Frame is launching tomorrow
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
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- Jonn Fredericks
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- Simplex
- Gregory F Gorsuch
- Paul Shay
- Paul Hadley
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And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Viture)