Happy Friday! Everyone's traveling back from the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco, the biggest event of the year for developers and the companies who need them. The games industry is now a 137 billion business, according to market research firm Newzoo, which projects the industry will grow to a staggering 180 billion by 2021. Mobile gaming accounts for about one-third of that. This dwarfs movies (16 billion) and music (38 billion).
The mega-conference attracts all the major players (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft), console platforms (Xbox, PlayStation), XR platform makers (Vive, HP, Magic Leap), tool makers (Unity, Unreal, Adobe), game publishers (Nintendo, EA, Niantic, Ubisoft) and just about everyone on the production side of the Immersive XR ecosystem. The companies roll out the red carpet (and the booze) at an endless string of parties to persuade developers to create content for their systems. Tech recruiters fawn over star developers, who are busy doing demos and attending seminars with esoteric names like "Procedural Mesh Animation With Non-Linear Transforms."
One of the highlights of the conference is the flurry of announcements from big players and small.
Google unveiled its new Stadia cloud gaming platform. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the vision is to make games accessible to everyone in the world. Google already hosts a huge cloud infrastructure that can handle the processing of high-resolution games that can be displayed and played on any device. Console games without consoles.
Oculus Rift S revealed at GDC and launching Spring 2019. The new headset sports improved resolution, inside-out tracking, and the new Oculus Touch controllers seen with the Oculus Quest. The Rift S is built in partnership with Lenovo and shares similarities to Lenovo’s existing HMDs. The headset itself is not a major upgrade to the Rift CV1, but Oculus hopes its accessibility and ease of setup will fill a demand for ease-of-setup consumer VR. Reviews were mixed.
HP announces new higher resolution HMD. The Reverb headset, set to launch in April, packs a pixel density 3.6 times as high as the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. At 2,160 × 2,160 per eye HP’s Reverb is aimed at enterprise use cases. The tracking system is the same inside out tracking of other Windows Mixed Reality headsets and the field of view remains at the current generation standard of ~100 degrees. The HP Reverb will be available in April for $600.
Multiplayer mode for Dr. Grordborts Invaders on the Magic Leap One shown at GDC. Weta Workshop’s new multiplayer mode for Magic Leap's flagship title was the talk of the show, with attendees lining up for hours to give the game a go. The multi-user game utilizes eye tracking and voice recognition to make player avatars more lifelike. It earned raves.
Unity adding AR Foundation to editor this summer for easier cross-platform AR development. “Developers can build an app once and run on both platforms,” said Dan Miller, XR Evangelist from Unity. AR Foundation aims to make AR development easier as an abstraction layer above ARCore and ARKit. You can find the AR Foundation update in the 2019.2 version of the Unity Editor.
Ubisoft’s Space Junkies in open beta through the 25th. The 2v2 zero-g shooter pits two teams of two against one another in an Unreal Tournament style space battle. The game itself is launching on March 25th but will be in free open beta until then. Space Junkies is cross-platform between PC VR headsets and PSVR.
Outside San Francisco's Moscone Center, there were only a few announcements of note.
AiSolve launches location-based VR title in partnership with Cartoon Network. The popular We Bare Bears can be found in AiSolve’s newest 3x3m LBVR installation. Food Truck Rush VR is a three player game requiring teamwork, puzzle solving, and speed as the Bare Bears are driven around their city cooking burgers for customers. The small footprint WePlayVR setup has haptic floors so players really feel the food truck as it buzzes through the city. A 3-month pilot launched in August 2018 at the Family Fun Center in Tukwila, Washington, and now the game will be available globally on any WePlayVR system.
ARtGlass augmented reality tour coming to Madame Tussauds in Washington D.C. Visitors to Madame Tussauds will experience holograms, historical video, 360 imagery, and spatial audio guiding them on a journey through American history. The installation will open its doors this summer.
"This Week in XR" is written and edited with Michael Eichenseer.
