Road to VR

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

Team Beef’s unofficial VR ports of classic Id Software games are undoubtedly fan favorites, letting you go head-first into a rash of ’90s retro titles like the original DOOM.Now, Id Software co-founder and former Oculus CTO John Carmack says he tried lobbying the Microsoft-owned studio for the chance to get those ports offered as official VR versions on Quest, but was unfortunately denied. “I tried we had a conversation with the powers that be at Id Software, and I even offere

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

These days I feel better, so this newsletter is coming on time again (yay!). Its been a good end of the week for me: on the work side, I have broken the news about camera access on Android XR (more on this later on), while on the personal side, I managed to cook some good Italian pasta here in China for some friends (Ive brought some ingredients from home, of course).

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XR Today - Virtual Reality

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

The XR world is a growing space of opportunity. While headset news dominates and steals headlines, the ways in which immersive RT3D technology is used today reach many users in manufacturing, industrial, factory operations, and more. As use cases emerge, grander deployments of immersive solutions will follow. But with this comes challenges. For its second year in a row, XR Today compiled the thoughts of industry leaders on how to tackle the industry of tomorrow.

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AR Insider

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

What's the state of the VR today? Where is value being created? And who's leading the way? These are questions our research arm recently tackled in its annual state of spatial report. This week, we excerpt some of the insights around VR's place in the mix. This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Speaker: Chris Paxton McMillin, President of D3 Training Solutions

To avoid awkward and sometimes disastrous learning content, instructional designers must use authentic translation in the right context to get optimal results. For example, even a simple phrase like “got milk” translates to “are you lactating” in Mexico. Can you imagine what a straight translation might do to your course? With over 317 million people in the US and over 6.7 billion potential customers in the world, personalizing training seems logical.

Mexico

Road to VR

FEBRUARY 13, 2025

Developers of mixed reality games have been clamoring for passthrough camera access on Quest for a while now, something now-departed Meta VP of XR Mark Rabkin said would come with the release of a new camera Passthrough API sometime in early 2025. Now, Google has confirmed that Android XR includes access to passthrough cameras, letting developers fine tune their mixed reality experiences from the get-go.

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XR Today - Virtual Reality

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

This week, a new immersive training solution for businesses debuted. VR Vision, a turnkey XR solutions provider, launched Vision Portal, a virtual reality immersive learning platform that the firm is debuting in an effort to improve efficiency, safety, and skill development. VR Vision claims that it works with a strong portfolio of industry-leading clients, including Toyota, Coca-Cola, and Siemens, to help produce solutions that match the journey of boosting workplace transfer and training opti

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AR Insider

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Cybersecurity continues to grow in step with the need to keep consumers safe in their digital interactions. This applies to XR, given even greater levels of sensitive data e.g., tracking and other biometrics than 2D media. What can be done about it? This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

Sony introduced hand-tracking support for PSVR 2 back in December, offering up the ability for developers to update their games and let players go hands-on thanks to the headset’s on-board tracking cameras. Now, beloved wizardry game Waltz of the Wizard (2019) is the first to implement hand-tracking on PSVR 2. Waltz of the Wizard has grown leaps and bounds since it was first released as a free demo for HTC Vive in 2016, where it first let players muck around in a tower-top alchemy lab.

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Upload VR

FEBRUARY 9, 2025

John Carmack described PC VR as "a boutique niche", standalone VR as "the biggest win that VR ever had", and Beat Saber as "far more important than Half-Life: Alyx". In a post on X , the former Oculus CTO once again clarified his position on standalone and PC VR, a position he has held for more than a decade. Whenever I post something critical of Metas handling of VR, there are always some old timers that pile on with Yeah!

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With a rapidly changing economy, Avangrid Renewables looked to virtual reality to develop a standardized form of immersive training in order to onboard and upskill technicians faster than ever before.

Virtual Reality

XR Today - Augmented Reality tag

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

Recently, frontline AR solutions provider Vuzix debuted AugmentOS , a dedicated operating system for workplace immersive human-computer interfaces. The OS is ready for Vuzixs portfolio of products, allowing end-users and developers to use products such as the Z100 smart glasses, which include AI functionality integration. AugmentOS is debuting as version 1.0.

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AR Insider

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

For the seventh year in a row, the Industrial IMMERSIVE is returning to bring together industrial, energy & engineering immersive tech leaders, end users, XR, Spatial Computing, 3D, Reality Capture, Digital Twins and AI solution providers to share first-hand experience, insight and advice for implementing and scaling immersive tech programs in enterprise operations.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

A big sale on PSVR 2 pushed the headset’s holiday sales volume on Amazon US higher than might have been expected, selling nearly five times more than last year. PSVR 2’s Black Friday and holiday sale brought a huge 42% discount on the Horizon bundle of the headset , dropping the US price from $550 to $350. Predictably, the sale increased the sales volume of the headset, but by even more than one might have expected.

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Upload VR

FEBRUARY 8, 2025

Announced by 2K and Firaxis Games, Sid Meier's Civilization 7 VR is coming to Quest 3 this spring. Sid Meier's society-running strategy saga has been around since 1991, with the series iterating on its unique turn-based play style since its inception. Announced at the Civ World Summit today, this foray into VR is a new direction for the influential 4X series.

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Speaker: Nik Gowing, Brenda Laurel, Sheridan Tatsuno, Archie Kasnet, and Bruce Armstrong Taylor

With 191 country signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement now hard at work in the race to zero carbon by 2050, much of the heavy lifting in ecosystem sustainability falls on the shoulders of the world's densely populated urban centers. This conversation considers how today's AI-enabled simulation media, such as AR/VR, can be effectively applied to accelerate learning, understanding, training, and solutions-modeling to sustainability planning and design.

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XR Today - Augmented Reality tag

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

Recently, Qualcomm AI Research made several strides in promoting the evolution of XR by promoting new AI data sets to improve human-computing understanding in various business use cases. Specifically, the Qualcomm AI subgroup published various research datasets on common emerging technology use cases for businesses, including virtual and augmented reality applications.

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AR Insider

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

Paramount Pictures Gladiator II premiere in Times Square shattered the traditional movie launch, blending film and technology in immersive ways. How was it done? The project's creators break it down for us. This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

Sid Meier’s Civilization VII is coming to PC and console on February 11th, but now developer Firaxis and publisher 2K Games say a version of the game is also releasing on Quest this Spring. The Quest exclusive game is said to be “a distinct version of the game made exclusively for Meta Quest 3 and 3S,” letting you build your own civilization from a first-person perspective and tower above the map in both VR and MR modes.

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Upload VR

FEBRUARY 13, 2025

The official NBA Apple Vision Pro app now has Tabletop, a diorama-scale virtual representation of the live game you're watching. Tabletop shows in addition to the 2D livestream view you see floating in front of you as a large virtual screen, giving you the benefits of both. Note that the 2D livestream view is not visible in the screen recording below, due to the DRM protection system it uses. 0:00 / 0:27 1 Footage from Ian Panchvre.

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Speaker: Richard Goring, Director at BrightCarbon

Remote meetings are here to stay - and many are BORING. If you are trying to engage your learners (or any audience), compelling content is critical. But trying to create stimulating content with the same tools you’ve always had is hard, right? Thankfully, wrong! Terrific tools in PowerPoint along with visual assets help you create the kind of dynamic content you need to capture your remote audience’s attention, with functions that allow for interactive sequences and navigation.

How To

XR Today - Mixed Reality tag

FEBRUARY 13, 2025

News recently emerged from the AndriodXR camp, highlighting a core development insight, which some call a benefit boosting the new operating system above the veteran firm Meta. The XR developer community is celebrating the AndroidXR feature, that being the platform’s offering of passthrough access, a feature Meta Quest developers do not yet have.

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AR Insider

FEBRUARY 13, 2025

What's the trajectory of Apple Vision Pro and the rest of its spatial road map? We pan back in the latest episode of ARtillery Briefs and triangulate likely directions based on Apple's motivations. In other words, it's time again to follow the money. This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 14, 2025

Onward (2020) , the tactical mil-sim shooter from Meta-owned Downpour Interactive , is getting a big 2.0 update soon. It’s been a long time coming too, as the game’s last major update was nearly one year ago. Onward hasn’t been abandoned, although it has seen fairly light updates in the year since the studio released its big ‘Mercenary’ update, which brought to the game in February 2024 a PVE mode and various graphic tweeks.

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Upload VR

FEBRUARY 10, 2025

Waltz of the Wizard is the first game on PlayStation VR2 to support hand tracking following today's free update. While Waltz of the Wizard initially introduced hand tracking back in 2020 on Quest 1, developer Aldin Dynamics revealed the PS VR2 edition now supports all hand tracking features currently available on Meta Quest. This allows for controller-less grabbing, touching and throwing of objects, alongside a gesture system used to communicate with your companion, Skully. 0:00 / 0:52 1 We've k

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Speaker: Treion Muller, Chief Strategy Officer at ELB Learning

Since when has learning and development (L&D) become such a negative experience with its intended learners? Could it be because learners have been conditioned by very poor learning experiences over the past two decades, combined with the kinks of technological innovation? Or is it because learning has typically been designed as a one-size-fits-all solution, despite the fact that humans are not clones?

Technology

Charlie Fink

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Kavan Cardozas short is a Star Wars universe masterpiece. Made with Google Veo AI, it will be taken down hours after I publish this.

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AR Insider

FEBRUARY 13, 2025

This week on Spatial Beats, Anduril wins the coveted U.S. Army IVAS contract out from under Microsoft. We have these and other items from the intersection of XR and AI, through the eyes of Charlie Fink. This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 14, 2025

Steel Wool Studios announced the release date of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic earlier this week, coming to PS5 and PC on June 13th. While the game was previously shown on PSVR 2, the studio has now removed any mention of PSVR 2 support, which is raising some eyebrows. Initially shown at PAX West 2024 in a playable PSVR 2 demo, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic was ostensibly set to be a VR and flatscreen hybrid offering from the XR studio.

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Upload VR

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

Palmer Luckey's Anduril is taking over the US Army's IVAS HMD program, replacing Microsoft's customized HoloLens solution. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program was first announced back in 2018 , and in 2021 the contract was awarded to Microsoft , with a stated value of up to $21.88 billion over 10 years for more than 100,000 headsets.

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Speaker: Micah Eppler, Account Executive for Rehearsal of eLearning Brothers

Did you know that companies such as Paychex, 3M, and Honeywell are getting better results by incorporating video-based practice and coaching within their L&D strategy? From sales pitches to soft skills, learners are becoming top performers by applying and validating knowledge transfer using the unique benefits of video. Whether used as a stand-alone application or integrated with a learning platform, video-based practice and coaching platforms give learners the ultimate opportunity to repeatedly

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