This week is all about next week as the 32rd edition of the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Festival gets underway in Austin, TX. What started as a music festival in 1987 has since become an international celebration of pop culture and marketing. Film, Interactive, and Edu conferences have been added over the years, all with broad agenda which also treats games, politics, art, comedy, and medicine. Brand activations by big tech companies are everywhere, including many big media companies like HBO, NBC, CNN and, now, Amazon. Many people now attend SXSW exclusively for these satellite events and skip the expensive official SXSW conference events which require a $1,325 badge.
Some of those in Austin will head directly to San Francisco, where the Games Developer Conference (GDC) gets underway on March 18th. Due to the epic success of mobile gaming, the games business (mobile, console, PC) is now bigger than the movie and music businesses combined. GDC has grown commensurately. Unlike the mashup pop culture celebration of SXSW, GDC is laser-focused on people who make games.
This three-part series on Magic Leap an entire chapter in my upcoming AR-enabled book about AR, 5G and AI, Convergence, How The World Will Be Painted With Data, is now up on Forbes. The piece came from a series of interviews I did with Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz over the past several months. I was also able to interview John Gaeta, Magic Leap's SVP, Creative Strategy, Rio Caraeff (Chief Creative Officer), and Omar Kahn (Chief Product Officer) in order to tell the story of the company's origins, the technology needed for spatial computing, and Abovitz' expansive vision for world painted with data, the magicverse. One thing that isn't said explicitly in the story, but is the inevitable conclusion of the book, is that spatial computing, and the devices to do it, are dependent on the successful rollout of ultra high-speed latency-free 5G mobile networks. Together with spatial computing, this will create a platform capable of dramatically disrupting business and culture.
They're still buzzing about the HoloLens 2. Introduced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona ten days ago, with some controversy arising from Microsoft HoloLens honcho Alex Kipman's assertation the field of view is "almost twice as big." A jump from 32 to 54 is not 100%, it's 61%. Let the social media backlash begin! Lost in the hubub were several related announcements from HoloLens partners, including Mozilla. Mozilla is bringing Firefox to the new Hololens. The Mozilla team is working directly with Microsoft to bring the immersive web to the Hololens 2.0, opening up the platform to WebXR, which will be more important as bandwidth speeds increase.
Meanwhile, back in the world of VR, the largest prize pool yet for VR esports at $250,000. Oculus and ESL are partnering up to host the third season of a VR league. This season will include the games Lone Echo, Echo Combat, Onward, and Space Junkies. The Grand Finals will be held at Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, UK.
After layoffs on the VR team at Valve, Gabe Newell says “nothing has changed.” The 13 layoffs included a VR engineer amongst other VR team members. After a small uproar amongst the VR community on Twitter and Reddit, Newell responded to concerns Valve was reducing efforts in VR. He stated bluntly that “nothing has changed," and given recent work teased out on Valve’s upcoming Knuckles controllers, the VR community sighed in relief.
Stress Level Zero teases out new game using Valves Knuckle controllers. The gameplay of Boneworks mirrors a VR Half-Life title from Valve. While Valve hasn’t released much about their upcoming VR titles, they have shown off their Knuckle controllers. Stress Level Zero’s upcoming title utilizes features that are unique to the Knuckles. Such as the pressure sensors in the grip. It looks like Stress Level Zero is vying for permission to help Valve build their popular franchises for VR.
Creators of Rock Band, Harmonix, launch new VR title Audica. The rhythm game features a new take on VR rhythm games, a space where BeatSaber has dominated. Audica players use guns to hit targets on beat to music, while BeatSaber players use swords. It’s too soon to tell if the new take on a rhythm game will find an audience like its block slicing counterpart.
"This Week in XR" is written and edited with Michael Eichenseer.
