The Ghost Howls

APRIL 13, 2022

At Laval Virtual, Ultraleap has just announced a hand tracking accessory for Pico Neo 3 (Image by Ultraleap). Together with the open store, also comes an open attitude towards accessories in general , with the intention to make the Pico Link compatible with a wide range of devices, starting from Ultraleap hands tracking.

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The Ghost Howls

JULY 10, 2023

And regarding the Quest Pro, he said that it has been rushed and that it has been released with interesting features like eye and hand tracking, but without seriously investing in them (e.g. Regarding the Quest line, he said that Meta pursued a low-price strategy too early, even before the device’s value could be perceived by people.

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

The damn coronavirus has arrived in my city in northern Italy, but I’m still alive and kicking, reporting you the most interesting XR news of the week! Developers are coming up with creative uses of Oculus Quest hands tracking. Oculus Quest hands tracking is being a success among developers. It is very interesting.

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The Ghost Howls

JULY 13, 2021

Probably I should tell you that I was busy with VR projects, but the truth is that I have been celebrating a lot lately, especially the recent victory of Italy in the Euro 2020 soccer championship. The standalone headset still features passthrough AR/MR, XR2 chipset, dual 1600×1600 LCD panels running at 90Hz, Ultraleap hands tracking.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 4, 2023

I’m back to Italy after my trip to Helsinki! It’s interesting that someone has already started modifying this application, and a guy already obtained a version that works just with hand tracking and no controllers. Is snow following me? Anyway, let’s have a look at the most relevant XR news of the past week!

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 2, 2020

The damn coronavirus continues to impact all our lives: the fact that many countries are applying restrictions on flights to and from Italy is, for example, creating various nuisances to my job. Developers continue to have fun with Oculus Quest hands tracking! Coronavirus impacts headsets production and kills F8 and GDC.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 30, 2023

This will be a newsletter written on the road: I’ve prepared the material in Italy, I’m currently writing these words from the Frankfurt airport (Germany), I will keep writing on the plane across the ocean and I will finalize everything in Sunnyvale (California, USA). But that’s just a speculation of mine.

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 6, 2022

In the long and troublesome travel back to Italy from AWE, I’ve lost the last flight and so I’m currently here writing my newsletter from the lobby of the hotel where I spent the night :|. Hello all from L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the small town of the Barcelona airport.

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The Ghost Howls

JULY 27, 2020

If not, well, let me make a recap: startup Lynx opened the preorders some months ago about a new standalone headset all focused on having both virtual reality and passthrough augmented reality , and featuring amazing capabilities like eye tracking, hand tracking, a new lens design, and 5G connectivity (through an add-on).

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 1, 2020

Mova will be a 6DOF headset with 2 tracking cameras, working natively only with hands tracking (there is a controller for fallback, though). Controllers are fundamental for interactions in most VR experiences and hands tracking is only good for watching videos, go on social XR worlds, and play simple games.

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Upload VR

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

We went hands-on with the Grand Getaway during its world premiere at Venice Immersive in Italy. Though my demo used controllers, I'm later told hand-tracking controls will be supported at launch. With Wallace muddling the dates for their upcoming holiday, the famous duo uses the iconic orange Rocket to make it in time.

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The Ghost Howls

APRIL 5, 2021

Today in Italy it should be the day when we go pic-nicking… but given the fact that we are in lockdown, I’ll just eat a lot at home While I send you a lot of good vibes, let’s see together what have been the best pieces of AR/VR news of this week, that has been incredibly interesting! (My Cubism is a great case study for hand tracking UX.

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The Ghost Howls

AUGUST 28, 2023

After a few days where we thought we were all living in a big oven, here in Italy we’re having the first taste of Autumn, with the temperatures going down and a lot of rain falling from the sky. in the reviews!

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The Ghost Howls

OCTOBER 26, 2020

Coronavirus is back in Italy and from yesterday we’re having new restrictions like a night curfew, some kind of shops closed, etc… I hope that you and the people you love are safe. Facebook has showcased how thanks to the use of hand-tracking gloves, it has been able to let people touch-type in VR.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 11, 2020

At the airport of Rome Fiumicino (the biggest in Italy), now there is a person going around with a big helmet able to detect even at a long distance the temperature of many people together so that to detect which ones may have a coronavirus infection. Furthermore, it has the advantage that it can work with Quest’s hand tracking.

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The Ghost Howls

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

Regarding the design, I personally like the design that makes the headset look faceted like a crystal , even if I don’t like that much the combination of black and violet colors… here in Italy, these are usually the colors of funerals, so they don’t make it that happy. The rear knob that makes the headset fit to your face.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 29, 2021

It’s a sunny lockdown day here in Italy, the sun is shining and the trees are blossoming. An interesting University research happening in Italy has found a way to estimate the respiratory rate and the heartbeat of a person wearing a VR headset just by using the sensors embedded into the device.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 9, 2020

As for me, I’ve been flooded by worldwide requests asking how I am here in Italy. The coronavirus outbreak is getting worse here in Northern Italy. We have more difficulties in going to Milan, that is the economical heart of Italy, and now a red zone with all its region. nReal adds hands tracking to its AR glasses.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 3, 2019

People have started fantasizing about eye tracking, inside-out tracking, super-hi-res display, hands tracking and all the features of this world, without realizing that such a headset would be so expensive that no one could afford that. The first VR theme park in Italy has shut down, for instance.

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The Ghost Howls

SEPTEMBER 11, 2022

There are also some small problems with the interactions: sometimes a click from my controllers gets interpreted as a drag operation because I slightly moved my hand while pressing the trigger button, so I have to keep my controllers very steady if I want to click on a button. Anyway, I have found the UX to be overall ok.

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

I am back in Italy! This was pretty weird to me because I never saw a single one of them in Italy. The trip to the US has been incredibly interesting: I have met many amazing people and tried many innovative devices, so I have been very satisfied with having gone there. Creating such a device requires a lot of work in.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 19, 2020

I have hugged Steven Sato, and it felt so special , since it’s a lot in Italy that we are not allowed to hug other people because of the pandemic. It was 5am in Italy during the networking. This is a prototype I did with the Cosmos XR plus the Cosmos embedded hands tracking. And then… me!

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 22, 2020

At the time of writing they are: United States Canada Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Iceland Italy Netherlands Norway Poland Republic of Ireland Spain Sweden Switzerland UK Australia Japan New Zealand Taiwan. You can check the countries available for delivery of a Business Quest at this link.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 4, 2020

While in Italy we get ready for the “Phase 2” of the lockdown, I write the best AR/VR news of the week just for you! This makes us think that PSVR 2 controllers will feature full hands tracking, and will so be very similar to the Valve Knuckles. Top news of the week. Image by Road To VR). Learn more and support this project.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 4, 2018

I have preordered mine immediately : I have taken a 32GB model for 219€ (this is the price here in Italy… in the US it is $199). As soon I’ll receive it, I’ll let you know my impressions with a hands-on review. Best Buy is ready for the Oculus Go launch tomorrow (x-post /r/OculusGo) from oculus.

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The Ghost Howls

OCTOBER 19, 2021

Vive Flow is a 6DOF headset that works with your Android phone as a 3DOF controller (hands tracking is coming in the future). After endless teasings and leaks, in the end, HTC has finally unveiled its headset: called Vive Flow, it is a lightweight device for media consumption.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 16, 2021

Google has partnered with FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles… do you know that Fiat is from my city in Italy?) This Nolo HMD features 2 front cameras for headset tracking and hands tracking, while the controllers (very similar to the Oculus Touch) use SodarTraq ultrasonic positioning technology (more or less like the Vive Focus Plus).

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The Ghost Howls

JUNE 4, 2023

The headset should also provide hand tracking, eye tracking and reverse passthrough , so people should be able to see the eye of the wearer. They are dubbed “Meta Touch Plus”, and they work (as I predicted last week) by fusing the data of IMU, IR LED tracking, and hand tracking together.

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The Ghost Howls

MAY 25, 2018

It can’t track your hand while it is near to your back, because your hand should be in the field of view of the cameras… we have to see how big is the FOV of this tracking. Furthermore, the accuracy has to be evaluated … hand tracking is damn hard and we don’t want our virtual controller to jitter.

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The Ghost Howls

AUGUST 12, 2021

The Achille’s heel of positional tracking is the light: if the room is completely dark, it doesn’t work anymore. Hands Tracking. HoloLens 2 has no controllers, but it lets you interact with the mixed reality elements through hand tracking, eye tracking, and voice commands.

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The Ghost Howls

NOVEMBER 10, 2019

If you will be in Italy, please come visiting me! HoloLens 2 is an amazing device, with a decent FOV, eye tracking, and hands tracking, that for sure will make many companies happy. Here you are the Eventbrite page ) I can’t wait to see who will win the VR Awards tomorrow !

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 22, 2021

As a long-time AR enthusiast, and one of the first to have tried Google Glass in Italy, I have to admit that I will consider AR mainstream only when it will be on glasses that we will wear all day , when we’ll live in a completely shared mixed reality world (the AR Cloud). Some will also feature tracked controllers.

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The Ghost Howls

APRIL 13, 2020

This week I have seen three amazing experiments with VR and hands tracking : A guy has transformed his fingers in a chorus singing ; Another one has used fluid simulation to let you interact with big bubbles in VR. If you grab it on Steam, it will be yours forever! Have fun with it. Some interesting VR experiments. Funny link.

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The Ghost Howls

JANUARY 9, 2024

Unluckily, probably I won’t be able to get the Apple Vision Pro, first of all, because I’m in Italy, and second because it would be a pretty hefty investment for me to buy a Vision Pro and a Mac to develop for it. Qualcomm has officially said that this is the chipset that the upcoming Samsung headset is going to employ.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 14, 2020

There are lots of grants around, and here we can participate in some research grants offered by Italy or European Union. Doing business in Italy is very hard now, but there are countries, for instance in Africa, that have not been much affected by the outbreak yet. Some countries are more “infected” than others.

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The Ghost Howls

JULY 3, 2023

More info (Mocopi to be launched in the US — Upload VR) More info (Mocopi to be launched in the US — Road To VR) Apple is not interested in controllers for the Vision Pro Apple strongly believes in eye and hand tracking as the main source of input for the Apple Vision Pro. I will leave you the link to donate for these two causes below.

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The Ghost Howls

APRIL 18, 2022

Anyway, today should be a vacation in Italy, but here I am writing this roundup for you, so if you want to show your appreciation, don’t forget to make a donation on Patreon ! This openness reflects also on the hardware side, where Pico has just announced a partnership with Ultraleap to bring its hand-tracking device to Pico via an adapter.

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