I hope your week has been great. Let’s dig into the most interesting XR news you may have missed!
Top news of the week
Boz talks about Meta’s shifting priorities
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the CTO at Meta, has released some public statements about the recent happenings at the company. He said that the layoffs and all the disinvestment in the space are due to “VR growing less quickly than we hoped”. Probably the huge sales of Quest 2 during COVID times gave the illusion to Meta that Quest 3 could have sold dozens of millions of units, but this didn’t happen.
Boz also hinted at a big shift in Horizon Worlds: the “metaverse” platform will be mostly dedicated to mobile phones from now on. He said that the company saw a “really, really positive pickup” for HW on mobile, so decided to pivot it that way. I admit I am very confused: while in VR, Horizon Worlds could have been the “metaverse” Meta was dreaming to build, on mobile, it is just another platform, which has to compete, by the way, with huge platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, or Zepeto. I really don’t know for what reason a kid should leave Roblox to join Horizon Worlds… to me it just looks like a strategy to increase the users in the short term (mobile is much bigger than VR), but with a lack of vision in the long term. We are already starting to see the effects of this decision: the very hated “Horizon Feed” on Meta Quest will finally disappear and be substituted by the Navigator.
From his words, it also seems that they will just let the VR gaming market be populated by indies: “We’re gonna let VR be what it is, what it does”, Bosworth said. “We’re gonna have focus a lot more on the third party content library, the ecosystem that’s developed there”. I think that a critical thing to understand about this sentence is how much they plan to invest in it: one thing is leaving just indies publish games in a small market and let many of them not earn enough money, and another is Meta actively supporting indies with funding and promotion. The rumors of the past weeks have led me to think of the first scenario, but I hope to be wrong.
Last, but not least, Meta is increasing its investment in smartglasses. And this is already happening: Meta has just launched the “AI Glasses Impact Grants”, nearly $2 million in funding, given in grants up to $200K to interesting projects involving smartglasses. This is amazing for glasses developers… but the problem is that this initiative is just “US only”, so I can not participate for now.
More info (Boz explaining the layoffs)
More info (Horizon Feed being replaced by Navigator)
More info (AI Glasses Impact Grants)
Other relevant news
Lynx unveils the R2 headset
The French startup Lynx has unveiled its new standalone mixed reality headset, the Lynx R2. I think it looks pretty interesting. These are some of its main specifications:
- Very wide 126° FOV (Horizontal), thanks to the optics provided by Hypervision
- Dual 2.3K LCD displays
- 24 PPD at the center
- Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset
- Full-color four-sensor Sony camera array that also includes depth sensing
- 6DOF head tracking, hand-tracking, controller, and ring tracking
Lynx also wants the R2 to have an open ecosystem, and the company will release many schematics to help the community mod the device. The device will also provide raw sensor access, allowing researchers to do what they want with the data from the various cameras.
As you can see, this looks like a good device with an interesting philosophy. I’m especially a big fan of the wide FOV and the open ecosystem. I would have hoped for a more powerful chipset and the addition of eye tracking, though, but I guess these have been ditched to keep the price low.
There are two big unknowns, though, that will be very important to understand its potential success: the price and the launch date. I hope the company will unveil them soon.
More info (Lynx R2 headset)
More info (Video of the unveil keynote)
News worth a mention
UG is a silent success story on the Meta Quest
While everyone talked about Gorilla Tag when the game exploded, strangely, almost no one in the communities is discussing UG, which is the latest big hit on the Quest Store. I already mentioned it some weeks ago in my Week Peek, but now I return to speak about it because finally Road To VR dedicated an article to it, with an interview with its creator. The game, which is about raising and managing dinosaur pets, has 245,000 reviews on the Quest Store, with an impressive rating of 4.9 stars out of 5. It is really a super successful game, and we should all be aware of it.
Some good and bad news about VR games
This week, we had a couple of pieces of good news about successful VR games.
Devs United Games said Real VR Fishing sold one million copies across all platforms since its launch in September 2019. And Owlchemy Labs shared that Job Simulator sold 6 million copies in its lifetime, and its latest game, Dimensional Double Shift, is already at 1 million copies distributed in just one year.
This is great to hear, but it is counteracted by really bad news: Mighty Coconut, the studio behind Walkabout Minigolf, is laying off people. The company reduced its size by a 25% factor circa, and the future DLCs will be $1 more expensive. The phone app would be paused, too. This is very sad news, and it’s even worse if you think that we’re talking about one of the most successful VR games. This means we are really in a complicated period for our ecosystem.
More info (Real VR Fishing)
More info (Job Simulator)
More info (Walkabout Minigolf)
VR predictions have gone so much down over the years
Matthew Ball has made an interesting graph (reshared by Nanea Reeves) about not only the shipments of headsets over the years, but also the predictions about the shipped headsets made by IDC over the years. And what is interesting to see is that while 10 years ago the predictions were very bullish (and also pretty unrealistic), now they are very low. There are many ways to read this graph, but one of them is for sure that the hype for VR is gone, and now we are remaining with the realization that we are still a niche.
Distance Technologies announces XR goggles for the military
We all know Distance Technologies for the AR windshield technology it is building, which is mostly intended for the military. Now the Finnish startup has announcedthe Field Operator HUD (FOH), which is basically XR goggles for military use, a bit like Anduril’s EagleEye. The purpose of the goggles is to take data from different sensors (e.g. thermal sensors or night vision sensors) and show them in front of the eyes of the user. This way, for instance, a soldier in a tank can see what is outside of the machine, even if he cannot physically see through the walls of the tank.
More info (Distance Technologies FOH)
More info (Official blog article)
Immersive basket is cool, but not ready for prime time
An interesting article on Upload VR reviews the recent NBA games broadcast with immersive live video by Apple on the Vision Pro. The post highlights how immersive and realistic watching basketball in this new way is. It is actually a marvelous experience that lets you understand, for instanc,e how tall these players are. But on the other side, the Vision Pro is too heavy to wear comfortably for the whole duration of a basketball match. Plus, the video of the match requires you to constantly rotate your head left to right to watch the action.
This means that it is a great use case, but we need more comfortable hardware, and we need to understand the best way to provide the direction of such videos before this use case can become mainstream.
Luke Ross removes all its mods
The drama of the week has been about the VR mods that Luke Ross offers via its Patreon page. Last week, CD PROJEKT RED issued a DMCA that forced Patreon to remove the mod. The company proposed to Luke Ross to make the mod free and to get donations in exchange for it, but he refused, underlining his huge work to create the mods. Then he started getting other DMCA notices, so in response, he removed all its mods, because he was afraid that too many DMCA notices could make him banned from Patreon. There were huge debates in the community about this, with some people saying that all mods should be free and paywalling them is wrong, others saying that he deserves to earn money for his work, and others saying that he overreacted to what happened. Let’s see what will happen next…
In the meantime, another modder, Nomoreflat, put all his mods online for free.
More info (CDPR suggesting to put the mod free)
More info (Luke Ross removing all his mods — Road To VR)
More info (Luke Ross removing all his mods, the news on Reddit, and the debates in the VR community)
More info (Nomoreflat making his mods free)
Some news about content
- Hivefall is a game available in Early Access through a special distribution channel: the Patreon of its director, Wim Buytaert, and a SideQuest page
Some reviews about content
- Salmon Man, the game made by the legend ValemVR, is a fun platformer that lets you move using a paddle
- Dread Meridian has great potential to be a horror game inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s novels, but it is currently too buggy
- Golden Gloves VR is a new contender in the VR boxing field. It looks promising.
More info (Salmon Man)
More info (Dread Meridian)
More info (Golden Gloves VR)
Other news
Supernatural has stopped updates, but luckily, there are many other valid alternatives to it
Viture answers to XREAL’s claims of patent infringement
Valve may be developing a color passthrough module for the Steam Frame
Rokid is now shipping its latest smartglasses worldwide
An interesting podcast featuring GamertagVR, SadlyItsBradley, and Shuhei Yoshida
News from partners (and friends)
Discover the XR+AI Spotlight!
I’m very happy to help Gabriele Romagnoli in promoting its XR AI Spotlight that just launched on Product Hunt (with also a new Pro tier)!
XR AI Spotlight is Gabriele’s weekly newsletter to help you stay up to date in 3D, XR & AI, and it has launched this week on Product Hunt with a Pro tier to add a ton of additional value:
— The top 10 tools, product updates and demo hard to find anywhere else
— The handbook on Gaussian Splatting with 200+ links to external resources
…Along with the weekly in-depth interviews with the founder and makers for all free subscribers
The Product Hunt Launch Discount and the Handbook on Gaussian Splatting are available only until the 28th of January.
Check it out!
Discover FM DUO camera!
Meet the FM DUO, a VR camera that is capable of filming up to 12K @30fps, and 8K @60fps. With built-in RTMP live streaming and 5G connectivity, the FM·DUO will immerse your viewers in real time! The FM·DUO features 2 full-frame CMOS sensors, with 6000 x 6000 pixels each. This allows for high-resolution zooming capabilities. Not only can you narrow in on one subject, but you can also focus on singular details of the subject’s facial expressions, clothing textures, and a multitude of other small details, enabling a much more immersive experience of VR video.
Some XR fun
This thread of memes created by AI is fun and creepy at the same time
Funny link
The ultimate strategy to win a VR boxing game
Funny link
The many uses of the Meta Quest
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
- Ilias Kapouranis
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- Immersive.international
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jake Rubin
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- Wisear (Yacine Achiakh)
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- Marco “BeyondTheCastle” Arena
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- 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 Lynx)
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