The Ghost Howls

MARCH 17, 2025

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics: passthrough camera access. Meta has just released the APIs to let developers access the frames grabbed by the front cameras of the Quest so that developers can craft applications that can understand the environment around the user. In this tutorial, I will explain step-by-step how you can create a project using Passthrough Camera Access of the Meta SDK , both starting from the samples and starting from a blank Unity 6 project.

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Road to VR

MARCH 18, 2025

The XR landscape has changed significantly over the last five years with the flourishing of standalone headsets and new entrants like Apple and (soon) Google. Despite all of that, the PC VR platform has continued a slow but steady growth. So much has happened in VR in last five years that if you had told me back in early 2020, I’m not sure I would have believed you.

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XR Today - Virtual Reality

MARCH 13, 2025

Immersive learning case studies from countless industries highlight the potential extended reality technologies have to transform how we build skills and knowledge. Research from Stanford University found that XR training can improve learning effectiveness by 76% compared to traditional learning methods. Immerse VR found that companies using its solutions for training report a 52% improvement in time to competence.

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AR Insider

MARCH 13, 2025

At SXSW, Apple debuted its immersive Metallica experience. AR Insider Editor at Large Emily Olman was on site to get a demo from Apple. She breaks down her observations on Apple's latest, and the broader return of cinematic VR. 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.

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Upload VR

MARCH 21, 2025

IO Interactive considers Hitman on PlayStation VR2 its chance at redemption, and we interviewed the studio alongside a hands-on preview to learn more. Third time's the charm might be the conventional saying, yet Hitman is pinning its hopes with attempt no.4. Previous versions of Hitman 3 for PSVR and PC VR had merits but ultimately fell short, and much has already been said about the widely criticized Quest 3 port last year.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 3, 2025

Today I want to tell you about a little but very cute project I’ve developed for Pico headsets. It’s called PicotionAI and it is a game that includes mixed reality, camera access, and artificial intelligence! As I have done in other similar cases, I’m telling you this story hoping that it can inspire you to do cool projects of your own.

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Road to VR

MARCH 20, 2025

Five years after Half-Life: Alyx reshaped expectations for VR gaming, Valve remains a quiet yet critical force in the industry. Despite little fanfare, the company has continued to shape the VR landscape through steady updates to SteamVR, integration with standalone headsets like Quest, and whispers of new hardware and games. Now, as the fifth anniversary of Alyx passes, the question looms larger than ever: is Valve still all-in on VR, or is it slowly retreating from the frontier it helped defin

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XR Today - Virtual Reality

MARCH 7, 2025

Rounding off a busy week for the XR industry, PIXO VR made further strides in bringing VR immersive training solutions to the forefront by collaborating with safety and regulatory compliance solutions provider J. J. Keller & Associates to scale and enhance workplace training into the latter’s portfolio of training services. The move allows J.

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AR Insider

MARCH 20, 2025

A subtle theme at SXSW was VR180. not because new hardware was pervasive, nor because everyone was buzzing about it, but if you looked closely you could connect the dots. Our Editor at Large Emily Olman reports. This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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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.

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Upload VR

MARCH 13, 2025

Valve is working on a "SteamVR Link Dongle", datamining reveals, and it could improve the reliability of wireless PC VR. VR enthusiast Brad Lynch's Discord datamining group have discovered multiple references to the device and its drivers in SteamVR code, including a vendor and device ID which Lynch claims suggests the device is "being finalized internally".

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Hypergrid Business

MARCH 5, 2025

OSgrid’s LBSA Plaza is the cross-roads of the hypergrid and a popular virtual hangout for developers, region owners, and metaverse travelers. OSgrid has entered emergency long-term maintenance after discovering that “all IAR files have been corrupted,” the grid announced yesterday. This is really bad news for residents who hadn’t yet had time to get their inventory backups downloaded ahead of the grid’s previously announced March 21 database reset.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 25, 2025

This newsletter is coming out a bit late and with a little less commentary than usual because Im overwhelmed by work at the end of this March. This is good in some ways, but less good in others. I hope youll enjoy this article: I think I have a good collection of interesting news, crazy things, and fun stuff, as usual! Top news of the week (Image by Bigscreen) BigScreen launches Beyond 2, and its already a hit Bigscreen announced its new headset, the Bigscreen Beyond 2, which is an iteration ove

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Road to VR

MARCH 21, 2025

Bigscreen launched orders for its upcoming Beyond 2 PC VR headset yesterday, which is boosting field-of-view and clarity thanks to the inclusion of a new pancake lens design. Now, the company says that within a mere 10 hours of sales going live, Beyond 2 has already outsold the original Beyond by a significant margin. In a series of updates on X, Bigscreen revealed just how well Beyond 2 was doing among PC VR enthusiasts. “In just the first 25 minutes, Beyond 2 outsold the first day of Bey

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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 - Virtual Reality

MARCH 11, 2025

This week, at the 2025 SXSW festival, alongside arts and technology, immersive technology innovator GIGABYTE announced a partnership with the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) to promote the deployment of an AI-powered XR content creation platform. The event is famed for showcasing the latest in arts and technology, and this year at the SXSW 2025 XR Lounge, the partnership underlined the events reputation.

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AR Insider

MARCH 10, 2025

In the Infinite Retina (Second Edition), Scoble and Cronin's combined expertise maps an enormous and ever-evolving landscape Spatial Computing, AI, the Metaverse, self-driving cars, and virtual beings. We give an honest review. This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Upload VR

MARCH 24, 2025

In 2012, Jonathan Coon backed the original Oculus kickstarter project and has a signed Rift DK1 to show for it. In 2025, Coon and a team of technology integrators developed a functioning 5,000-square-foot holodeck on a hilltop overlooking Austin, working through a collaboration between Pureblink , Agile Lens , and DBOX. This first-of-its-kind facility sells the idea of residing on the hill in a few years in a home with a "frictionless lifestyle".

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XR Today - Mixed Reality tag

MARCH 12, 2025

Wondering how immersive learning benefits teams across industries? Compelling research is quickly mounting up. Countless studies from world leaders like Accenture and PWC have shown that immersive training (using XR technologies) can improve knowledge retention, increase employee confidence, boost engagement, and even reduce training times. In fact, PWC says that immersive training helps learners complete training up to four times faster while ensuring they retain the knowledge they gain for lon

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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

The Ghost Howls

MARCH 18, 2025

This has been a very intense week for me, work-wise. Luckily, intense in a good way. And just when I thought I had already too many things to do, I had to add another task, because Meta decided to release camera access for Quest and I couldnt resist getting my hands dirty with it! Anyway, lets dig into the most interesting pieces of XR news of the week which are actually a lot!

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Road to VR

MARCH 24, 2025

We’ve been waiting to hear about Samsung’s entrance into XR for a few years now, with the company’s still unnamed mixed reality headset ‘Project Moohan’ set to debut sometime this year running Google’s Android XR operating system. Now, a report from ETNews (Korean) maintains the South Korean tech giant may also have a pair of XR glasses up its sleeves.

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XR Today - Virtual Reality

MARCH 6, 2025

While MWC 2025on the XR side of thingsprimarily focused on the surging AR smart glasses market and, of course, Samsungs Moohan, display technology leader TCL CSOT took to the event to unveil a new virtual reality display that promises competitive visual fidelity and low power consumption for headset vendors that wish to adopt its technology innovation.

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AR Insider

MARCH 6, 2025

We hear a lot about the visceral learning benefits of VR training. But how is it playing out today? What makes it effective? And what verticals and industries are applying it to best effect? This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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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

Upload VR

MARCH 21, 2025

A Valve Deckard proof of concept model had 2K LCD panels and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, though this doesn't mean the shipping Deckard will. Over the past four years Valve has repeatedly confirmed that it's working on a new headset, strongly hinting that it will have a focus on wireless streaming from your PC, and a job listing mentioned it having inside-out tracking, camera passthrough, environment understanding, eye tracking, and hand tracking.

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XR Today - Augmented Reality tag

MARCH 13, 2025

This week, Vuzix Corporation noted a major uptick in its hardware sales and adoption. This follows a period in 2024 when 2023’s third-quarter figures dropped due to lower sales of the M400 product in key areas like Asia. However, Xander is significantly reordering Vuzix Shield AR smart glasses that are helping to continue an upward tick for the veteran’s enterprise XR hardware vendor, which appeared to kick into action following the Q2 drop.

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The Ghost Howls

MARCH 13, 2025

Today, I want to discuss one of the XR technologies that has been getting more hype lately: smartglasses. I want to start my analysis with what I’ve seen at CES and then go beyond that and discuss what I envision for the future of this technology. Smartglasses at CES In the XR area (and beyond), smartglasses were one of the most popular technologies at CES.

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Road to VR

MARCH 6, 2025

Animal Company, the free-to-play early access game on Quest, nabbed the top spot for Quest’s highest-earning game this week , overtaking long-time viral hit Gorilla Tag in the weekly charts. Now, developer Wooster Games tells Road to VR it’s not only already profitable, but Animal Company has surpassed one million monthly active users (MAU), cementing its status as VR’s next big F2P game.

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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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