The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 24, 2023

One of the traditions of this blog is my usual greeting message for the Winter Holidays … and this year could not be an exception. So, if you celebrate Christmas, I wish you would spend a wonderful day with your family , feeling joy, happiness, and human warmth. I hope you will receive wonderful gifts and that Santa Claus will surprise you with what you always wanted.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Christmas is getting closer, but I have still to buy a lot of gifts, to be honest. Is there a gift you VR people would like to have from me? If it is so, please let me know this by answering this post! For now, the best gift that I can give to you is telling you what have been the best pieces of news of the week in XR… Top news of the week (Image by Upload) Upload had its usual cool gaming showcase Upload , with the sponsorship of Perp Games, has just had its usual Winter Gaming Showcase.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 10, 2023

On the occasion of Metaverse Safety Week (which I invite you to check out), I had the amazing opportunity to speak with Kavya Pearlman , the head of XRSI , who is fighting for fundamental rights like privacy and safety in the metaverse. We talked about the sweet spot between human rights and technology advancements, how to guarantee a safe environment for children in immersive worlds, and how we hope the metaverse of the future could be.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Last week I was able to sneak into Varjo headquarters to try the latest XR-4 headset. Is it as cool as the marketing materials promise? Read this post and you will discover it! Varjo XR-4 Varjo XR-4 promotional image (Image by Varjo) Varjo has just announced its latest flagship headset: the XR-4. XR-4 offers many improvements over the previous XR-3 model , which was already considered an impressive MR headset.

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 24, 2023

After the latest Unite event, Unity has released in Open Beta the tools to develop applications for the Apple Vision Pro. The development packages are usable only by people having Unity Pro or Enterprise, but the documentation is publicly available for everyone to see. At VRROOM , we have a Unity Enterprise subscription, so I’ll be able to get my hands dirty on the SDK pretty soon. hoping to make for you my classic tutorial on how to develop an application with a cube for this new platform

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 23, 2023

This year I was too busy with my daily work to attend AWE Europe (and I was pretty sad about that), but luckily I had an opportunity to do an expected final trip of the year. I’m pretty excited to tell you that I’m flying to Helsinki, Finland to attend MatchXR! MatchXR is a cool event to connect to the Finnish and northern Europe XR community in general.

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 21, 2023

The past week has been a pretty interesting one for the tech world: between Microsoft Ignite, Unity Unite, and the OpenAI drama, there has been a lot to follow. I’ll try to summarize all of that, especially for what concerns the announcements related to our XR space. And in this newsletter, you will also find some cool freebies: the keys to get a cool VR game for free, and a huge discount (… and maybe even more) to go to the Immersive Tech Week in Rotterdam!

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 19, 2023

I’m finally back to writing articles after a long time. And since it’s Sunday and it’s a bright day outside of the window, I want to restart writing articles with something bright and funny … a satirical post about all the hype around technology that I’ve seen these months. I hope you will move some muscles around your lips while reading it… The iPhone moment The only true iPhone moment In my 9+ years in XR, I’ve heard countless times that something that

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

Finally back to normal with these newsletters! Let’s dig into the most interesting pieces of news of this week! Top news of the week Meta and Tencent are bringing the Quest to China According to the latest rumors, after one year of negotiation, finally, Meta and Tencent have found an agreement to bring the Quest to China. But it won’t be the Quest 3 to be distributed there, but a “cheaper version” of the VR headset, which may be the rumored $199 Quest 3 Lite device that many analysts are specula

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The Ghost Howls

OCTOBER 11, 2023

A bit late, but here I am again writing for you about the best XR news of the week! The past week most of the debate has been about Quest 3 vs Apple Vision Pro, and I’m pretty sure that the battle of Meta vs Apple will be something we of the XR community will talk about a lot for the next months… Top news of the week (Image by Meta) New rumors hint at a cheap Quest 3 coming in 2024 Mark Gurman, the famous Bloomberg journalist who spread a lot of rumors and leaks about the Apple Vision Pro for mo

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The Ghost Howls

OCTOBER 8, 2023

There’s been a very interesting piece of news that the last week went below the radars of many XR magazines but that I think it’s worth talking about : CREAL has announced the commercial availability of its lightfield solution for XR glasses for 2024. Why is it cool and why should we matter? CREAL’s Light Field “display” CREAL showcasing its technology (and the news of the day) CREAL is one of the most interesting startups for what concerns XR display solutions.

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

The Tokyo Game Show, one of the most important gaming events in the world, is happening these days. Like the past 2 years, there is also a digital edition of it that lets you enter into a virtual world dedicated to the event, and that is also accessible in virtual reality. This space was designed and developed by the Japanese company Ambr , which has its own “metaverse platform” called xambr.

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

The keynote of Meta Connect 2023 finished a few instants ago, and if you follow me on social media, you know that I’ve not been enthusiastic about it, to say the least. But let’s anyway analyze together what have been the most important pieces of news we got from it! IMHO this #MetaConnect2023 keynote was the worst ever, with no surprise announcement, and with AI totally stealing the spotlight from XR #VirtualReality #Meta pic.twitter.com/z0M4CG0MhF — TonyVT SkarredGhost (@Skar

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

Two days ago I was reading an interesting editorial about PSVR 2 by Scott Hayden, and my mind started wandering about the current moment of virtual reality, the stasis we live in, and our expectations for the upcoming headset. In this article, I’m going to tell you all the thoughts I had. The new “Autumn” of VR If you’ve read some of my articles this year, you know I’m defining this moment as an “Autumn” for virtual reality.

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The Ghost Howls

AUGUST 28, 2023

After a few days where we thought we were all living in a big oven, here in Italy we’re having the first taste of Autumn, with the temperatures going down and a lot of rain falling from the sky. I’m in that situation where I don’t know if being happy or not: on the one side, having some fresher air is welcome, but on the other side, this means that the Summer is beginning to end, and this makes me a bit sad.

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The Ghost Howls

AUGUST 21, 2023

It’s been a very pleasant week for me: on the 15th I celebrated the 7th Birthday of my blog , and it was terrific to receive greetings, compliments, and kind words from many people in the community! I’ve even been mentioned on Forbes by the amazing Charlie Fink ! I thank you all for the love you made me feel that day, I’m still blushing! And what is a better way of celebrating my blog’s birthday than writing a new fantastic roundup of the best XR news of the week?

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The Ghost Howls

JULY 24, 2023

This week VR is dead again. Sorry to inform you about that. It’s been good to dream about the metaverse, but now we can all get back to frying potatoes at McDonald’s and binge on Twitter during the free time. Ah no, not even that because also Twitter is dead. Now it’s called X and aims at becoming the Western WeChat. Luckily there is AR that is still strong, and we can hope to wear Google AR glasses soon… ah no, they are dead too.

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The Ghost Howls

JULY 22, 2023

A few weeks ago, Ultraleap announced the Leap Motion Controller 2 , the successor of that Leap Motion Controller that got much recognition from makers and research centers. This week, I received a sample of it and I opened its box. I have not had the occasion to test thoroughly the device yet, but since I saw a bit of radio silence about it on the main VR outlets, I wanted to share with you some early photos and videos.

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 19, 2023

Another week, another roundup! I didn’t forget my promise of a big article about the Vision Pro, I just had to postpone it because I was too busy. But it’s coming this week, so be prepared… Top news of the week (Image by Google) Samsung may have changed its plan because of the Vision Pro announcement We just finished reporting the rumors about the Vision Pro and we start now reporting the rumors about the next big headset , the XR device that Samsung is designing together with Google and Qualcom

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 18, 2023

I’m back to telling you about some hands-on sessions I had at AWE in Santa Clara, California. And today there are a two I’m sure you will find interesting… XTAL 3 Presentation of XTAL 3 headset One thing I’m very happy about having tried at AWE is the XTAL 3 headset by Vrgineers. I was very curious to try this device since when I read its hands-on by Upload VR, in which David Heaney claimed it was the first wide FOV headset without peripheral distortions he had tried.

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 12, 2023

Exactly one week ago, Apple announced the Apple Vision Pro, its first XR headset. This has been a piece of massive news, which most probably has started a new course for VR. And for this reason, I’m preparing a dedicated special roundup of posts to read just dedicated to it that I will publish in the next 2 days. Today, I want to turn the spotlight on the news that have been obscured because of the hype about the Vision Pro.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 23, 2023

It’s been a strange week. On the technological side, it has been exciting. Since there is the possibility that Apple announces its headset soon, all the companies are rushing to announce what they have in the pipeline before the big day. This means that these days we are going to have a lot of announcements. This and the next editions of the newsletter are going to be full of cool pieces of news.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 22, 2023

When I visited China at the beginning of the year, I had the pleasure of visiting Netvios offices in Guangzhou and speaking with Anjie Cao, the CEO of the company. She gave me a very interesting presentation about the status of VR in China and the difficulties of launching a VR game there. In this article, I collected the most interesting tidbits of that presentation to share with you, so that if you want to start distributing your content there, you know what you have to do.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 21, 2023

While everyone is focused on every minimal update on the Quest operating system, Pico has just added to its runtime a feature called Spotlight that makes it become the to-go device for VR demos in exhibitions and B2B settings. Let me tell you everything about it! Pico 4 Spotlight – Video I’ve come back to making videos, and I made a fantastic new Youtube video where I explain what is the Spotlight feature and why it is very handy when you have to demo a VR application to other people

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 15, 2023

It’s time for another roundup of amazing XR news. Are you ready? Top news of the week (Image by Google) Google announces important AI and XR news at Google I/O This Google I/O has seen immersive realities back to the menu. During the keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai and his collaborators announced interesting features both for AR and VR. I’ve written a dedicated news roundup article dedicated to Google I/O today, so I won’t go deep into details here and I invite you to read that post (linked here belo

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The Ghost Howls

APRIL 29, 2023

When I was at AWE Europe in Lisbon at the end of 2022, I had the opportunity of meeting with ONTOP ‘s CEO Nuno Folhadela and try its very interesting solution, called ARcade Sports, which showed me that multiplayer mobile AR can be fun. I absolutely wanted to write for you a review about this experience of mine, but then for various reasons, this post remained in my backlog for too long.

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The Ghost Howls

APRIL 22, 2023

I was reading Mark Gurman’s latest rumors about the upcoming Apple headset, and I found his article very intriguing. But not much for the rumored specifications of the device, but more for the applications that were reported to be present at the launch. Let me explain to you why. Apple Reality may be the new iPad Apple Reality (the rumored name of the device) should run the following applications, as reported by my friends of Road To VR : iPad apps adapted for mixed reality : Calendars, Co

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 27, 2023

This has been quite an interesting week. We had at the same time the Game Developer Conference (the GDC) and the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) by NVIDIA, so we had lots of announcements about 3D technology in general and also about XR. Since there are these two conferences with a very similar name happening at a similar time and a similar place, I wonder why they don’t unify them in a single one called GTDC, or GXC, or something like that.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 26, 2023

Today I want to tell you about s ome very short hands-on sessions I had during my attendance at the SXSW festival. They were all very interesting experiences, but given the very short time I had with these devices, what I’m going to write can’t be considered a real review, but more some kind of first impression. Vive XR Elite Finally, I’ve been able to put a Vive XR Elite on my head.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 23, 2023

Today is the day that I publish a post that (because of my work) I’ve postponed for too much time: my hands-on with Vitruvian VR, one of the funniest VR machines I’ve tried in the last months. Vitruvian VR Me, happily trying Vitruvian VR at AWE Europe in Lisbon Vitruvian VR is an Italian startup whose mission is to build a machine that can make the user move in the air, as if he is flying, while immersed in virtual reality.

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 17, 2023

It’s one of these days where I’m thinking about myself and my career in XR over the years. I don’t define myself as “successful” by any means, but still, after more than 8 years in this field, I’ve gathered some experience in the various jobs I’ve done in this ecosystem, and I had my share of joy and awards won.

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

I’m back in Italy! Just the time to eat some homemade pasta and I got a cold, which mixed with the jet lag of the trip from China, means that I’m truly having some great days But nothing can stop me from writing the roundup of the best AR/VR news of the week for you, my lovely readers! So get ready to read some interesting XR news… Top news of the week (Image from Brad Lynch) Meta to launch Quest 3 in 2023, despite the layoffs During the latest earning calls, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 3, 2023

The time for the big reveal has come. You know that I’ve been very busy the last few months with a project I was working on. Finally, I can tell you what I was working on: a cool platform for VR concerts that you will be able to join on January, 10th! VRROOM. I started collaborating with the company VRROOM in 2019, where together with the CEO Louis Cacciuttolo I investigated how to produce VR events and shows.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 2, 2023

HAPPY 2023! I wish you all that your dream may come true in this new year. And I know that one of your dreams was having a weekly roundup of the best XR news… so… here you are! Top news of the week. (Image by HTC Vive). HTC’s new headset may be called Vive XR Elite. Thanks to the support of the community member Inscothen, I have discovered that the Korean website of HTC may have leaked the info about the upcoming headset that the company should unveil at this CES.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 1, 2023

Let’s start this 2023 with a leak! I’ve been tipped about the fact that the Korean store of HTC may have accidentally leaked the name of the new Vive headset that will be revealed at CES… and maybe also its price. The Vive “Flowcus” HTC has been teasing a new standalone headset for months , without sharing much if not some images revealing some small details of the device.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 30, 2022

For this end of the year, I want to talk about one of the big trends we are experiencing in the immersive realities ecosystem: the growing attention to mixed reality. All the new headsets (starting from Quest Pro and Pico 4 ) are featuring color passthrough vision and this trend is here to stay because every headset that has been announced in the latest weeks has this functionality, too.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 27, 2022

Welcome to the last newsletter of 2022! It’s been an interesting year for XR, and I’m glad that we did this journey together. Thanks for the trust you are giving me and for reading this column I publish every week… I hope it has been useful for you this year and that it will still be next year. Before we start digging into the news, let me wish you a Merry Christmas (if you celebrate it) and a happy new year!

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