The Ghost Howls

AUGUST 15, 2021

August, 15th is a special day in Italy: it is called “Ferragosto”, and people go out with their friends and families and grill some BBQ in the parks, have picnics, or just chill together. Almost no one works, and people are focused on enjoying good food and good company.

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China Unity Technology Italy 390

The Ghost Howls

MARCH 21, 2021

When a journalist of IGN Italy was trying to install the new Xbox Wireless Headset on the platform, he was greeted with an Italian message saying “The VR goggle must be updated”. Vive Facial Tracker works also with non-HTC headsets. Learn more (XR Collaboration) Learn more (Unity College). (Image by Microsoft). Some XR fun.

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Sony Controllers AR Haptic 436

The Ghost Howls

JUNE 1, 2020

HP and Microsoft have a long track in offering enterprise hardware, so this headset may battle HTC on his own land (B2B). First of all, Peter Chou, ex founder of HTC , has launched his startup XrSpace, with his first VR headset Mova (that you can see in the header image of this post), together with its social XR platform Manova.

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Magic Leap AR China Unity 238

The Ghost Howls

APRIL 27, 2020

Another busy week has passed by, and here in Italy we just got the news that lockdown measures will start to loosen from next week, but the road to go out as we wish is still long. We’re looking for a Unity dev for a freelance gig lasting 1–2 months, ideally from Italy or a nearby country (for easier management).

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Course Magic Leap AR Oculus 271

The Ghost Howls

MAY 17, 2021

Image by HTC Vive). HTC launches Vive Focus 3 and Vive Pro 2. In the end, the rumors were correct and HTC launched two headsets at VIVECON: the Vive Pro 2 and the Vive Focus 3 Business Edition. But this device got also some criticism: first of all , HTC has not released new controllers and still sells it with the old Wands.

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Eye Tracking HTC China Amazon 368

The Ghost Howls

JUNE 27, 2022

It’s hot and the drought is creating some issues here in northern Italy. We have lots of non-news about Apple’s XR efforts. The hype around Apple glasses is huge , and everything that gets shared about Apple and XR gets many views. This is the story of my life for half of the posts I read about Apple. Useless news.

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Apple Ukraine Eye Tracking Groups 329

The Ghost Howls

MARCH 2, 2020

The damn coronavirus continues to impact all our lives: the fact that many countries are applying restrictions on flights to and from Italy is, for example, creating various nuisances to my job. The only company not much affected by it is HTC, that manufacturers its headsets in Taiwan and not in Mainland China.

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Hand tracking AR Oculus HTC 238

The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

Italy won the Tennis Davis Cup, and that was pretty cool to see (the match between Sinner and Djokovic was just incredible). More info Discover Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro cost estimations A Chinese firm has tried to estimate the cost of the components of both the Quest 3 and the Apple Vision Pro. Will we meet there?

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Augmented Reality Apple Samsung Ukraine 362

The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 22, 2021

As a long-time AR enthusiast, and one of the first to have tried Google Glass in Italy, I have to admit that I will consider AR mainstream only when it will be on glasses that we will wear all day , when we’ll live in a completely shared mixed reality world (the AR Cloud). Facebook and Apple will jumpstart the smartglasses ecosystem.

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Augmented Reality Magic Leap AR Apple 487

The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 20, 2021

From time to time, I like to look at the adoption graph of XR shown by John Riccitiello (the CEO of Unity) in 2017 , where you can see that the real acceleration of immersive technologies should start around 2022-2023. Companies like Pico, HP, Valve, and HTC are already performing very well in this sector. The rise of enterprise.

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Virtual Reality Trends China HTC 527

The Ghost Howls

MAY 4, 2020

While in Italy we get ready for the “Phase 2” of the lockdown, I write the best AR/VR news of the week just for you! At the same time, Apple having always mediocre graphics cards on its laptops and its closed ecosystem have not helped much either in keeping this VR support alive. Image by HTC Vive). HTC launches Vive Sync.

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Virtual Reality Machine Learning Augmented Reality Oculus 227

The Ghost Howls

JUNE 4, 2023

I need to rush out this newsletter episode because otherwise tomorrow Apple launches its headset and no one will read my articles: everyone will be too busy reading “The top 5 features of the Apple headset” or “The 7 reasons why the Apple headset can revolutionize peeling potatoes”. How is Apple going to sell this headset?

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Apple Gaming Hand tracking Leap Motion 344

The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 10, 2019

If you will be in Italy, please come visiting me! Is Apple partnering with Valve on AR? A report by DigiTimes claims that Apple is partnering with Valve for the production of its AR glasses. More info (Apple and Valve partnering) More info (Road To VR’s skeptical editorial on the news). Image by Eurogamer).

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Augmented Reality Google Machine Learning AR 165

The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 20, 2022

I work with VRrOOm on VR events, and this let me even be featured on the Unity blog , but how these events will evolve in the long run when the pandemic will (hopefully) end is a mystery. We only lack the Zombie apocalypse… and for this reason, I have played Resident Evil 4 VR … you know, to train for it, just in case).

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Apple Virtual Reality Italy Course 525

The Ghost Howls

JULY 3, 2023

It was our hope for Google entering the AR race together with Meta and Apple. We already saw this problem happening when HTC departed from the Steam platform to build its Viveport store because hardware sales were not enough to have an ambitious business. Muse looks a lot like ChatGPT integrated inside Unity.

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Google Gaming Unity Machine Learning 276

The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 8, 2021

Today is a special day in Italy when families prepare the Christmas Tree, so I decided to publish a very special post that is a big gift to the whole XR community. Even the big players like Sony, Apple, and Microsoft have substantially reduced their production estimates for 2022, whilst processor manufacturers talk of delays into 2024.

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Controllers Haptic Hardware Simulation 504

The Ghost Howls

MARCH 23, 2020

Jokes apart, before starting, let me send a big hug to all of you that are in quarantine because of the coronavirus and thank all the people that in these days have cared about me after having heard the sad news about Italy (Simon, David, Daniel, Suzie, Mark… John that has been so kind… Sebastian, and many others!). Top news of the week.

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Oculus Magic Leap AR Augmented Reality 205

The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 20, 2020

I’ve preordered my basic $299 one (€349 in Italy) and it will arrive on October, 15th. This kind of seamless interface is great and it is exactly the same one that HTC already offers with the Vive Focus Plus and Viveport Streaming and that I’ve tried and appreciated. Rift line gets discontinued.

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Oculus AR Data Gaming 545