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This Week In XR: Walmart Backs Microsoft Bid, Unity’s IPO, Apple Acquires Spaces VR App

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Hickory Dickory Do, Walmart’s After TikTok, Too, joining Microsoft’s bid, which is competing with Oracle, Softbank, and perhaps others to acquire the social media juggernaut. TikTok’s parent, China-based ByteDance, needs to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations before November 23rd, or risk being shut down by the US government. Tik Tok could fetch more than $30 billion, valuing each Tik Toker at more than $100. Might Costco and Netflix deliver their own joint bid? Or Uber and Comcast? Think big, people! To add even more spice to the stew, the recently appointed Tick Tock CEO, Kevin Mayer, the guy who launched the wildly successful Disney+ and then famously left Disney for this gig, resigned with the company’s blessing after being sidelined during negotiations. Kevin, here are your big bags of money. Thank you for playing Tik Tok dough.

Unity files for IPO, revealing they lost $160 M last year. Users are up to 1.5 million. Unity faces tough competition from Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Epic, also a private company, was valued as over $18 BN in a recent round of financing. Unity’s IPO is expected set its value north of $15BN. VC Sequoia Capital owns 24%, and Lightspeed Ventures 14%. Investors and employees are going to go ca-ching!  

Some fear Facebook is about to sunset the Oculus brand, and they are probably right. Following the unthinkable betrayal of sunsetting of Oculus accounts in 2023 (28 months from now) Facebook combined its VR, AR, and Portal teams into the Facebook Reality Lab, and rebranded Oculus Connect as Facebook Connect. The newly branded Facebook Connect (FBC) is scheduled for September 16th. Should we be surprised? Who would buy Palmer’s house for $3 BN, spend five years fixing it up, and walk around calling it “Palmer’s House?” 

Facebook’s Horizon is finally here, having been introduced in the fall of 2019. Invites to the closed beta are going out to select users. Our friend Cathy Hackl shared her first spawn in the new world above. And then all of a sudden, Horizon was all over social media (how does Cathy always get there first?). There’s a lot more here. And the Verge just dropped this story about it.

New season of Fortnite won’t be coming to an Apple device near you. At the top of the week, a judge answered Epic’s call for injunctive relief by slitting the difference. Apple can keep Fortnite out of the app store, for now, but they cannot block apps built on Epic’s Unreal Engine. Meanwhile, the new season of Fortnite, which started yesterday, is not available to iOs mobile users.

VirBELA increased revenues by 260% between Q1 and Q2 as events and workplaces went digital. Its parent, eXp Holdings (NASDAQ: EXPI), has seen its stock soar in value, from $7/share on March 19th, to $41/share today. eXp recently reported its most profitable quarter ever. Congrats to VirBELA founder and President Alex Howland, and eXp founder and CEO Glenn Stanford, who liked the virtual campus Howland built for him so much he bought the company. 

Apple Acquires Spaces. Brad Herman and Shiraz Akmal spun their VR company, Spaces, out of Dreamworks with Comcast backing. They were was making good headway in location-based entertainment when the pandemic hit. The team quickly pivoted to building an online VR collaboration tool, also called Spaces, which received rave reviews from PCVR users. Last week, the company announced the new Spaces collaboration site was shutting down, prompting speculation their time had finally come. Indeed, it has. Well played, gentlemen.   

Apple wins another XR related patent for a high-end predictive, foveated mixed reality HMD. The device would capture image data for augmenting the world surrounding the user and also predict a user’s head movements to pre-generate visuals on the fly. Further evidence that Apple is working on multiple XR products. One recently leak patent suggests they are working on several different kinds of head mounted displays  

Qualcomm announced they will bring Ultraleap’s controllerless hand-tracking tech to XR HMDs using the Snapdragon XR2 chipset, which means just about every standalone XR device, including HoloLens and Quest2, which should be here by the end of the year. Quest and HoloLens already have their own hand tracking tech, so it’s not clear how or if they’ll use this feature.

Burning Man Opens a week of creative mayhem on the virtual playa this week. If you’ve got a VR headset, a PC, or smartphone, there’s a place for you to burn. Here’s the official list of events and places from the BM blog, and things to do on the virtual Playa from Techcrunch. 

The Messy Truth is a VR experience series from activist and MSNBC commentator Van Jones. The one we tried lets you experience what it’s like to be a black guy in a routine traffic stop. It's really powerful. If you have a Quest you can download the full experience directly from the website here.

The Weather Channel is doing that AR thing again to produce hyper realistic, data-driven, simulations of what storm surge may actually look like at a given localization, which will allow for the audience to place themselves into the scenarios. Sounds scary, looks amazing. Stay safe everyone!  

“This Week In XR” is now a podcast! Each week, Paramount Pictures Futurist Ted Schiowitz, Professor Author Charlie Fink, and a special guest, bat around the headlines. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or on iTunes. 

What We’re Reading

Can VR Save Virtual Events?

MetaVRse no-code-required XR engine for enterprise just got a rave review from influential blogger and developer Tony “Skarred Ghost” Vitillo. 

“This Week in XR” is written and edited with Micahel Eichenseer.

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