I’ve been sick this weekend. I’m getting better, but I’ll need days to fully recover, I still feel like if I was hit by a train. I’m doing my best to work, and I don’t want you to miss this appointment with my news roundup, so I’ve prepared it the same… I just warn you that my usual commentaries will be shorter this time. Send me hugs 🙂 Top news of the week Zuckerberg sets the Metaverse for 2030 and beyond The Zuck has had the hard task to speak with Meta’s investors and tell them that while the revenues of Reality Labs are increasing thanks to Quest 2, actually all the “metaverse” division is losing $3B a quarter. Zuck has explained to them to be patient because the Metaverse, which no one knows what actually is, is happening beyond 2030. So all these huge investments will pay off in the very long run.
If you are a Quest owner you probably have heard of SideQuest. If by some miracle you haven’t heard of SideQuest, you are in for a treat.SideQuest is a VR content platform that gives users access to thousands of VR apps, experimental games, demos, and even full VR game releases. But what is App Lab? SideQuest and App Lab often get confused, and in this sponsored post, we will clarify the difference and the relationship between them, as well as explain how you can access thousands of new VR games that are not listed on the official Oculus store. If you missed SideQuest’s first article, check it out at this link. SideQuest SideQuest has been around since the release of Oculus Quest in May 2019, and it has been a valuable part of the VR gaming community ever since. SideQuest allows users to discover thousands of new VR titles,
On Thursday, April 21st, in Italy there has been the first edition of the On|Metaverse Summit, an amazing hybrid event of which I have been a co-organizer. It’s been the first time I worked on such an ambitious conference, so let me tell you something more about it and about the lessons I’ve learned in the process… especially for what concerns the differences between organizing physical and digital/VR events! (Yes, this is one of those days when I write a long informative post about a personal experience I had… have fun reading this during your weekend!)
Today is a bit of a special day for this newsletter because this article you are reading is the 250th roundup about XR news I’ve written! If you make the calculation, it means that it is almost 5 years that every damn weekend I collect the best news of the week in AR and VR (and the “mmmmmmmetaverse”) and I organize them for you! If I think about it, I can feel all the fatigue and the time I spent in the process, but I’m happy doing that because I know it is useful to many of you from the XR communities. So, let’s make a little toast to celebrate this announcement, and… now let’s get back to work: what are the pieces of news I have selected for you this week? Top news of the week (Image by Meta)Meta announced interesting games at its Quest Gaming Showcase On April, 20th, Meta
Enter the Coachellaverse. Everyone’s favorite music & arts festival Coachella is currently underway in Indio, California. This year’s event is expected to attract over 750,000 attendees as people from around the globe gather to celebrate music, art, technology, and everything in between.This year, Coachella took its first steps towards creating its very own metaverse. Referred to by event organizers as the Coachellaverse, this incredible digital experience allows fans from all around the world to interact with the festival in a brand new way using a combination of immersive technologies. This virtual platform features everything from AR technology and video games to NFTs and an interactive online community where you can connect with attendees, both on-site and at home, as well as with artists, creators, and other surprise guests. [embed]https://youtube.com/watch?v=ukXA44w_U20&version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent[/embed] Coachellaverse is a huge turning point for the annual festival. As hundreds of brands integrate themselves into the metaverse, organizers
Spanish retail banking financial group CaixaBank is “entering the metaverse” through imaginLAND. This virtual destination and immersive event series is an extension of imagin, a “digital services and lifestyle platform” backed by CaixaBank. We’ve seen American financial technology groups try to “ape into” the metaverse with limited success, but CaixaBank has a different plan. Another Look at Fintech in the Metaverse If you’ve been following the gradual entrance of companies – particularly fintech companies – you might have thought of the JPMorgan lounge launched in Decentraland last month. While initially exciting and certainly still promising, the actual lounge saw little fanfare and little utility, according to emerging tech writer Lily Snyder, who visited the lounge early on. However, CaixaBank has big plans for imaginLAND. The company plans to develop new virtual experiences and services on a regular basis and renew the content available every month. imagin’s first content in the
Who else remembers Moon VR Player? It was a video player for virtual reality headsets, able to play both 2D videos, 360 videos, and 360 VR videos which was quite popular back in the Gear VR days. But after a while, it kinda disappeared from my radars, without any explanations. I almost forgot about it, when a few days ago I got contacted by the company, because it is now back to business, and it has even just released a new version of its player, with interesting features, like passthrough AR support. We started chatting, and I found their comeback story very interesting, so I decided to interview them. Here you below you can find what the Moon VR guys told me: Hello Randolf, can you please introduce yourself to my readers? My name is Randolf, Chief Growth Officer at Moon VR. I am a serial entrepreneur and marketer
Geenee AR’s unique software uses full-body tracking to let you wear NFT clothing and accessories.Geenee AR has partnered with Ready Player Me to help bring your digital identity to the real world. Similar to many of the AR filters you might find on Snapchat or Instagram, the experience uses full-body tracking to layer a virtual avatar, along with accessories such as NFTs, virtual clothing, and other features, over your real-world body in real-time.The best part is no coding is required. You simply drag and drop your Ready Player Me avatar directly into Geenee’s WebAR Builder platform and the software does all the work for you. You’re then free to create fun photos and videos of yourself “wearing” your digital counterpart.In an official statement, Cory Grenier, CEO of Geenee AR said, “No other avatar platform has built a scalable, interoperable metaverse-ready product like Ready Player Me, so it was a natural
HTC shared a curious tease that reveals a new Vive product which appears to be part of a system leveraging the company’s Vive Trackers for virtual productions.
HTC’s Vive brand has been exclusively focused on XR technologies, but late last week the company teased a new Vive product that is likely more tangential to the XR space than part of it.
The new product was shown pictured essentially in full, which gives us some strong hints about what it will do.
Image courtesy HTC
The small box clearly has a display which shows that it can detect three Vive Trackers and four SteamVR Tracking base stations. And while the DisplayPort, HDMI, and three USB ports might suggest this is a compact PC that can handle its own VR rendering, other hints point toward a less powerful, purpose-built control device for detecting, capturing, and relaying the position of the trackers.
Why might you want such a thing? Virtual production—using mixed reality-like technologies for shooting film productions—is the obvious answer. This is bolstered by the ‘Timecode’ and ‘Genlock’ readouts on the box’s display, which are commonly used to keep film and audio equipment in perfect sync.
Positional tracking is hugely important in virtual production, especially for tracking cameras, whether you’re shooting entirely against a green-screen or an LED wall.
In the first case, precisely capturing the movement of the camera makes like much easier in post-production when CGI comes into play. Instead of manually aligning the real shot against CGI elements, the virtual camera can be easily aligned to the real camera to keep everything in sync.
If shooting against an LED wall (a large panoramic display that shows background imagery rendered in real-time at the time of filming), you need to know the precise position of the real camera in order to have the background imagery move realistically in real-time.
Beyond camera tracking, accurate position tracking in production can be used to track props, actors, and more, which makes them more easily replaced or altered in post-production.
Of course, there’s plenty of positional tracking technologies that have been used in the film space for decades at this point… so why would HTC be getting into the game?
Well, compared to most of what’s out there, Valve’s SteamVR Tracking system is affordable, easy to set up, fairly precise, and dang cheap. And HTC is the leading provider of SteamVR trackers, small tracking pucks which are compatible with the system.
For around a thousand dollars—excluding the price of HTC’s new… let’s call it ‘Vive Tracker box’—you can have a reasonably sized tracking volume with four SteamVR Tracking base stations to precisely track three trackers (though hopefully the box will support more than just three, which would make the system easily extensible).
Compare that to something more commonly seen in the virtual production space, like OptiTrack, which can do more but starts closer to $10,000 and can easily exceed $100,000 if you want to increase the size of the volume.
Back to HTC’s new Vive product; it’s already possible to use SteamVR Tracking for virtual production use-cases, but it isn’t exactly a straightforward process. Not only do you need a dedicated PC with uncommon (in the film space) software installed (SteamVR), but you also need a USB dongle for each Vive Tracker that you plan to use.
The HTC Vive Tracker box is probably designed to be a turnkey solution that’s ready to go without any software installation or extra dongles, plus the ability to sync the positional tracking data timing precisely with other production equipment on set.
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The end goal here is not just for HTC to make money by selling the box, but also by selling more of its Vive Trackers. The company’s tracking pucks are popular among hardcore VR enthusiasts who want to do full-body tracking, but that’s a highly niche audience. General purpose tracking, for virtual production or otherwise, is a much larger potential market for HTC to tap, even if it does mean veturing a bit outside of what has been the usual wheelhouse of the Vive brand.
And while Vive tracker box probably doesn’t mean too much for the XR industry itself, it may tell us more about how HTC’s XR arm—Vive—is faring right now.
With its last four major VR headset releases seemingly not generating much traction for the company in the consumer VR space where it once dominated, Vive is veering into new territories in search of business. Beyond the Vive Tracker box here, another recent example is Vive Arts, the company’s effort to stake a claim in the NFT art scene.
So far HTC has not officially announced the Vive Tracker box beyond the teaser photo—so we still don’t have details like when it will launch, how it will be priced, or what specific features it will have—though we expect those details to come soon.
This article was originally published on roadtovr.com
