ARPost

AUGUST 3, 2022

But, we’ve never dedicated an article to actually exploring the platform. As a platform for free virtual spaces that doesn’t require a VR headset, it’s how many people experience VR for the first time. If you have, we hope that you’ll still enjoy this article. It could be that we take it for granted. Everyone starts somewhere.

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The Ghost Howls

AUGUST 22, 2022

Many journalists wrote bad things about Meta’s M-word efforts: they said that Meta invested $10B just to have this cringy virtual world. As the release notes state, Oculus profiles will “evolve” into a new Meta Horizon profile, while ‘Friends’ will become ‘Followers’. Some articles about the metaverse.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 3, 2022

VR had a great Christmas, and in particular, Oculus Quest 2 had a great Christmas. If the kid is very young, there is also the problem that he/she is not able to distinguish what is real and what is virtual, and this may create a lot of confusion in his mind. limiting the time spent in VR) and also offer them parental control tools.

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Hypergrid Business

AUGUST 3, 2017

Eight year ago, when I first launched Hypergrid Business , virtual worlds offered a unique set of compelling features. There was presence, and immersion, and the ability to create your own virtual environments. At that time, virtual worlds were the only visible path to an interconnected metaverse of virtual environments.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 24, 2022

On one side, many of these games have a huge multiplayer component and acquiring Activision Blizzard, Microsoft gains a lot of expertise in how to manage virtual worlds that host many thousands (if not millions) of players at the same time. Linkintosh is the tool Mac VR devs were looking for. You decide what to think about it.

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 19, 2022

The reason why I think that this news is super-important is two-sided: On one side, it means that a platform with 50M of daily users is coming into virtual reality. Some months ago, the company behind it teased it was going to launch a virtual world, dubbed Oasis, that should have become “The Linkedin of the M-word”.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 25, 2022

I can’t guarantee that these predictions will come out to be true (I always joke about the fact that I miss many of the predictions about Meta/Oculus), but I think they will be worth reading anyway to understand what can be the trends to look for in this new year. So… let’s start! GENERAL TRENDS. This meme says it all.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 1, 2024

Some of them have been brainstormed with Lorenzo Cappannari with whom I wrote an article a few months ago and who I thank for the collaboration ). Virtual worlds like Fortnite, Roblox, or also RecRoom, and VRChat are becoming every day more successful. Of course not.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 23, 2020

Regarding me, I will probably publish a first impression article after some hours into the game, and then a full-fledged review when I’ll finish playing it. Oculus Del Mar” may be the next Oculus headset. After the leak was discovered, Oculus deleted everything. Oculus has made its GDC announcements.

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The Ghost Howls

AUGUST 16, 2021

Finally, Facebook has released passthrough APIs for Quest 2, so you can create AR/MR apps for the Oculus standalone headset. In an article I missed two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg states that he plans to make money on the metaverse selling ads, but especially with an internal market of virtual goods. AR/VR developers, rejoice!

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 10, 2022

So for today’s article, let me focus mainly on the non-CES-related news about AR and VR. Talking about more reliable leaks, developer Luboš V with the support of Basti564 has found references of a multiplayer Oculus Home in the Quest firmware, so it seems that very soon the home space of the Quest will let everyone invite more people.

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

I had a few friendly chats with him since he’s a nice guy… and quite soon I started Italianizing his name into “Cirillo” : this is how I will refer to him for the remainder of this article. To be more specific, it wants to create a complete set of tools that let you do this operation in a very easy and adaptable way.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 27, 2021

Oculus Quest 2 had a great Christmas. The sales of Oculus Quest 2 have been great during the holidays , and the Quest has been a Christmas gift very much appreciated by kids (but wasn’t there an age limit?). and you found this article for whatever reason, first of all, welcome to the club! Top news of the week.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 31, 2022

Meta abandons the Oculus name on Twitter. Some weeks ago, Meta announced that it was going to remove the name “Oculus” from almost all its products and services to substitute it with “Meta”. This week we had an important step in that direction, with the historical “Oculus” account on Twitter being rebranded to “MetaQuestVR”.

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 21, 2022

These are articles I would have probably not shared with you in the previous editions of the newsletter, but with this new format, I can at least acknowledge that these things have happened. The characteristic that I love more about this news is that corporates are trying to solve the problem of harassment in virtual worlds.

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

References found in the Oculus Quest 2 firmware by users Reggy04 and Basti564 highlight how the Quest 2 Pro should have: Eyes tracking Facial expressions tracking Eye relief knob Granular IPD adjustment External charging station. VR animation tool Quill has proved to be an interesting tool for creators these years.

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

But before talking about it, let me invite you once more to visit the Venice VR Expanded virtual worlds that we did in VRChat for the Venice Film Festival. Rumors hint to Oculus discontinuing the current Quest and selling the new one at $299 and $399. Walmart seems to have leaked the price of the upcoming Oculus Quest S.

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

The hype for the Apple Pro is starting to deflate and it is possible to see that from some cues: for instance, there are more critics of the headset and fewer articles are talking about it. Honestly, I’m glad about that, I was getting bored from reading only articles about it.

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The Ghost Howls

APRIL 17, 2023

But while this is the main topic of the article, the report actually provides much more interesting information when speaking about Meta. The cost is €399 + VAT , which is not cheap, but we have to remember that is an enterprise device, so its cost is higher than consumer devices like the Oculus Go.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 9, 2022

As a full disclaimer, this is a paid article that I’m writing for a recent collaboration I started with NVIDIA to help them promote GTC , NVIDIA’s flagship event, that this year will be held online on March 21st-24nd. You can discover more about the GTC and some of its cool XR sessions in the remainder of this article.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 17, 2022

The FTC has opened an investigation on Meta about its anti-competitive practices related to applications that propose services similar to its ones on the Oculus Store (Pepperidge Farms remembers when YUR was de facto cloned by Oculus Move). Some weeks ago, I have published an article about VR and its “kids issue”.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 1, 2021

Oculus has also partnered with Virtuclear to offer prescription lenses for the Quest 2 for $80. All the 3 major VR runtimes (Oculus, SteamVR, Microsoft) are now compatible with OpenXR , and this means that on the runtime layer on PC, now OpenXR has been fully integrated. You can now use consumer devices inside Oculus For Business.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 4, 2023

More info (HTC Vive Ultimate Tracker — Road To VR) More info (HTC Vive Ultimate Tracker — Upload VR) Valve releases its own version of Quest Link Out of the blue, Valve has launched Steam Link, which basically is… Oculus Air Link offered directly by SteamVR. But for now, we are not sure at all this is going to happen.

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The Ghost Howls

JULY 24, 2023

(Answer: probably just the possibility of the same community visiting different worlds together may be enough) Is monetization beneficial to virtual worlds? Answer: if people go to a platform just to make money, that platform is not going to succeed) Are today’s virtual worlds so different from Second Life?

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UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MARCH 28, 2017

In the middle of August 2012 I wrote my first article about Oculus. The 3D platformer “Lucky’s Tale” was one of the first Oculus Studios titles. Playful Corp’s Lucky’s Tale, like EVE: Valkyrie, was bundled with the Oculus Rift when it first started shipping. We’ve come so far in 12 months.

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

The company claims that the gloves have been made easier to wear and work also with standalone headsets like the Oculus Quest 2. Me playing with the gloves on an Oculus Quest 2. In the case of Oculus Quest 2, here is where you put the Oculus Touch controllers to track the gloves in VR. Senseglove Nova hands-on.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 31, 2021

” VR shouldn’t be used by children… Health and safety warning of the Oculus Rift DevKits (Image from Oculus Forums). When I started using virtual reality in 2014, the age limit for using the Oculus Rift DK 2 was 7 years, but then it was incremented to 13 years old. … but they use it anyway.

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ARVR

DECEMBER 4, 2020

Interhaptics provides hand interactions and Haptics feedback development and deployment tools for extended reality, mobile, and console applications. In order to achieve that, the virtual world you are interacting with should be as close to the real world as possible; visually, audibly and tactile-wise.

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 11, 2020

It doesn’t contain 100% the information of the written article, but it’s a very good summary. Being the lens transparent, you can see through it both the real and virtual world. The unit runs over a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Chipset , offering so more horsepower than the Oculus Quest.

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VRScout

FEBRUARY 20, 2019

Palmer Luckey is a tinkerer,” is how Time Magazine described the creator of the Oculus VR headset back in August of 2015. Since that article, Luckey’s “tinkering” has expanded into a full-blown technological revolution, earning him a whopping 2.3 I just want to augment my world.”.

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 22, 2022

Just Dance VR is also part of a big focus on Fitness by Pico , with Pico Fitness already being part of the runtime and tracking the calories you burn while using the headset (clearly inspired by Oculus Move) and sharing them to Apple Health (like Oculus Move). Pico Worlds in-world creation tools (Image by Pico).

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 1, 2022

I have been able to speak for almost one hour with Jeremy Bailenson , which is the professor at Stanford that is a legend in the VR field for his studies on interactions, psychology, and training in Virtual Reality. His lab was even visited by Zuckerberg before he decided to acquire Oculus. How different was it from today?

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 31, 2021

More info (Lumus Maximus glasses) More info (In-depth article on Lumus Maximus by Karl Guttag). I already expressed this doubt in a previous article of mine , and I repeat that IMHO the only hope for PCVR is PSVR 2, which may bring back the attention to VR titles with stunning visuals. Discover some cool reviews! But is it effective?

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Road to VR

NOVEMBER 3, 2021

In this article, I’ll share a summary of my impressions. Lynx wants to build the world’s most open and versatile device capable of both VR and AR. I imagined this must have been like when Oculus just started out. So we reached out to Lynx to ask for a demo and they invited us to come over. Introduction to the Lynx R-1.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 2, 2022

Goodbye Oculus brand. More info (Meta stores) More info (Oculus website disappearing). Some articles on the metaverse. This week I’ve selected the usual few articles that show you the nonsense of all the NFT hype and why owning an NFT does not imply that you actually own the asset. Confusion LVL 9000.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 16, 2022

Then, he donned an Oculus Quest 2, put a controller on the bike, and rode the bike while doing the VR game, with the real track mapped perfectly with the virtual track. The problem of moderation inside virtual worlds. Doing moderation of virtual worlds is incredibly hard because there are a lot of grey areas to consider.

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 14, 2022

A leaked image from the Oculus team shows that the company is working to implement body tracking inside the Oculus Unity SDK. Some articles on the metaverse. A good article on XR Must highlights the best work that has been presented at Sundance Festival New Frontiers this year. Other relevant news.

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