The XR Week Peek (2020.07.07): Facebook shows thin sunglasses, Iron Man VR gets released and more!
A bit late, but this new roundup of best AR and VR news of the week is out!
Before starting reading this summary, don’t forget to read my mega-post with the behind-the-curtains of the concert we organized on VRChat for Jean-Michel Jarre. I put inside it a lot of free information about the lessons we have learned organizing a huge musical VR event, and I’m sure it can be useful for you. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here: https://skarredghost.com/2020/07/04/how-to-organize-vr-concert-lessons/
Top news of the week
Facebook showcases VR headsets thin as sunglasses
A research paper that Facebook is going to present at SIGGRAPH presents the impressive work that Facebook has done in miniaturizing VR headsets so that they look like sunglasses.
Current VR headsets are big and bulky for various reasons, but the most important one is that the lenses and the display must be at a certain distance so that to guarantee the representation of virtual elements with a certain FOV. This distance forces the headsets to look like shoeboxes on our faces. If we could reduce that distance so that to put a tiny display that is just some millimeters away from the lenses, the headsets could be very thin.
And that’s exactly what Facebook has done: thanks to the use of innovative lenses, it has been able to put the lenses and the display very close so that the glasses appear so thin that they are like sunglasses. This has been possible thanks to the use of pancake lenses and holographic optics. Pancake lenses are lenses that not only refract light, but that feature multiple internal reflections of the light rays before they arrive to the eyes of the user. This means that these lenses can bend the light more than traditional lenses and so they can be closer to the display they are augmenting. Together with this, Facebook also employs holographic optics, which is a bit more difficult to explain, but basically, it is like a tiny plastic film that has saved inside the information on how to bend laser light rays in a particular way.
Mixing these two kinds of lenses and having the screen being not a traditional one, but a special laser-emitting screen, the result is the one of a virtual reality headset that is very thin, light, and comfortable.
Of course, this is still a research project, so, for instance, it works only with green light (I mean, there is also a prototype with all three RGB colors, but it is bigger and only sits on a desk), and there is no hardware on the glasses (no SOC, no tracking cameras, etc…). But it is nonetheless a very interesting project, that paves the way for future headsets.
When I asked optics expert Jeri Ellsworth (the CEO of Tilt Five) when she envisions this technology to be on the face of every one of us, she said “soon-ish”, and this makes me think about a 5 years timeframe. Not so long…
More info (Official blog post)
More info (Explanation on Upload VR)
More info (Very good explanation on Road To VR)
More info (Jeri Ellsworth saying this technology will arrive “soon-ish”)
Other relevant news
Iron Man VR gets released
One of the most awaited VR games of the moment, Iron Man VR, has been released as a PSVR exclusive developed by Camouflaj.
The reviews of the game are overall positive: first of all it is cool to embody Tony Stark and its alter-ego superhero Iron Man. Then the flying mechanic is amazing: it lets you fly and combat in the skies exactly as Iron Man does, and incredibly all of this is nausea-free and also works with the bad tracking of the PSVR.
But the game is not perfect: in some scenes the graphics appear underwhelming, some moments are a bit repetitive and especially the loading times take forever and this is frustrating. PSVR is really starting to show its age, and the PSVR gaming community can’t wait to upgrade to PS5 + PSVR 2 to solve all these problems (the new PlayStation has a SSD that could lower the loading times).
The overall rating from journalists is around 8 / 10. The final price is $40… If you are a fan of IronMan, run buying it!
More info (Review on Road To VR)
More info (Review on Upload VR)
More info (Editorial about PSVR showing its age)
More info (Tips&Tricks for Iron Man VR)
Facebook showcases AI 16x supersampling
Another amazing research project showcased by Oculus this week can enable high-resolution displays for the next generation of Oculus Quest.
We all know that one of the limitations that prevent VR headsets from having high-resolution displays is the required computational power. For instance, if you have an 8K display VR headset, you must have a graphics card with enough power to render all those pixels 90 times every frame, that is a very expensive and very big graphics card. This is a problem for PC VR headsets and it is not feasible at all for a standalone headset.
That’s why Facebook has investigated the use of AI supersampling. The idea is very simple: the graphics card renders a very low-resolution frame, then this frame passes through an AI-powered algorithm by Facebook that can boost its resolution of a 16x factor (4x for each side). Imagine if between the rendering of the graphics card and the image on your display there is a little Horatio Cane from CSI Miami that says “Increase the resolution of this image so that I can zoom it a bit”, and the image magically becomes from low-res to high-res in an instant. This is the power of artificial intelligence, it seems that pixels get generated magically, and so even a low-computational-power unit can render a high-resolution image suitable for high-resolution displays.
Of course, the reconstructed image is not exactly as the original one, but it is very similar. And the speed gain is impressive: a full-resolution reference scene that would take 140.6 milliseconds to render at 1,600 by 900 pixels can be rendered and then upscaled in just 44.08 milliseconds! It’s a 3X gain in rendering speed, impressive.
More info (Facebook AI supersampling algorithm)
More info (Official announcement on Facebook Blog)
Oculus Quest v18 adds colored Guardian and voice commands
One of the most impressive features of the Oculus Quest is the speed of the updates that Oculus is rolling out for it. Every 2 weeks we see new features popping up that improve the experience of its users.
This week Oculus has released two interesting features:
- It is finally possible to change the colors of the Guardian cage. Maybe this is not “useful”, but it is good to customize the VR headsets according to own tastes;
- In the US it is finally possible to give some vocal commands in English to the operating system. One that is very handy is for instance “Take a photo” that you can pronounce every time to ask the OS to take a screenshot of what you are seeing.
Update your Quest and try them today!
More info (Guardian colors)
More info (Voice commands)
Google acquires North
It is official: after we all heard the rumor that Google was acquiring North for $180M, the Big G has confirmed the acquisition, not disclosing the actual amount of the deal. The team at North will be acquired, but it will keep operating in its own region in Canada.
Of course, there won’t be any release of the Focals 2, that some journalists had defined as incredibly cool, and starting July 31st, 2020, users won’t able to connect or use their Focals or access their North accounts anymore. That’s a real bummer for whoever has bought the headset, but at least users can require a reimbursement of the purchase.
Let’s see if Google will use this acquisition to revive its original vision of the Google Glasses.
More info (Google acquires North)
More info (Official blog post by Google on the acquisition)
News worth a mention
Torch shuts down
Torch was one of the most interesting AR content creation app: enthusiasts from all over the world used it to easily create AR content like indoor navigation experiences. Suddenly, the company has just announced that it is shutting down its services. It has not explained the reasons, but most probably it will be something related to money (like lack of investments).
We all of the AR community liked Torch and we wish its creators to have better luck with their next adventure.
Karl Guttag blasts the HoloLens 2
Display expert Karl Guttag has finally bought a pair of HoloLens 2 and started examining its optics carefully. He has found that the “rainbow effect” claimed by some users is less noticeable than how it appears in the pictures, but after an attentive analysis, he has concluded that “an 800-by-600 fixed-pixel display would look better and sharper than the HL2’s display” and that “they are still putting lipstick on a pig”.
Have fun reading this huge burn… of which I understood like 50% of the various technical terms…
Facebook has improved the eyes of the “Codec Avatars”
We all know that Facebook is working on realistic full body avatars of VR users, dubbed “Codec Avatars”. In its latest improvement, the eyes of the avatars have been made more realistic thanks to the integration of eye-tracking data.
NextMind devkit is now available for preorder
BCI accessory for VR headsets NextMind, that lets your users interact with the VR elements by just using their thoughts, is finally available for preorder, after having become pretty popular during CES 2020. The price is $399. If you are into brain-computer interfaces, check it out.
Bollé launches the first “try-out” AR experience
Sports apparel brand Bollé has created an AR experience to try out their glasses. But this is not the classical try-on experience, like the ones that we have seen from many other brands, but it is defined as a “try-out” experience.
The fact is that Bollé proposes performance glasses for skiing and biking, and it is not interested in making its users see how they look with these glasses on, but it wants them to see what is the effect of wearing those glasses on their vision. So the promotional AR app makes the user see how the image from the camera gets affected by the virtual glass that the user is evaluating. An interesting marketing approach.
Sony Dreams adds PSVR support
Finally, the time has come for creative sandbox Dreams to add support for virtual reality. Now all PS4 users will be able to create virtual reality experiences without knowing how to code and share them with their peers.
Devs like me have no interest in this, but there are many creatives out there that can’t wait to have tools that make them express their talent without having to go through technical hurdles. So the new support for PSVR on Sony Dreams is something that can be very beneficial for the ecosystem.
The official launch date is July, 22nd. Get ready to create!
Some news about content
- Onward is ready to be released on Oculus Quest on July, 30th!
- Low-Fi adds Gameboy and SNES emulation inside its cyberpunk game. It is a nice easter egg, but you will be required to have the ROMs.
More info (Onward)
More info (Low-Fi)
News from partners (and friends)
Ergonomics expert Rob Cole has made some very interesting experiments with the Etee controllers by TG0, trying to hack them so that to make them more comfortable for hands of all sizes. You can read a detailed deep dive into his experiments on his blog.
Some XR fun
Someone asked on reddit how to check if there is a spider on his headset, and the answers from the community are pretty hilarious.
One of the good reasons to buy a Quest.
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