The XR Week Peek (2021.07.26): Facebook aims at the Metaverse, Quest 2 goes MR, and more!

vrcoin on July 26, 2021

I’m incredibly happy about having been hosted by Sebastian Ang (MRTV), one of my favorite VR content creators, in his weekly podcast on Youtube! We spoke about AR and VR for 2 hours and we were having so much fun that we could have gone on for other 2 hours without problems! If you want to watch the video of the recording, you can find it here: [embed]https://youtube.com/watch?v=6VSE1i1fFCI&version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent[/embed] And now, let’s start speaking about the best AR/VR news of the week! Top news of the week (Image by Facebook)Zuckerberg says that in 5 years Facebook will be a “metaverse company” The most viral XR article of the week has been an interview that Mark Zuckerberg had with The Verge. It’s a long post, in which Mark details the vision for the future of XR and for the “metaverse” that Facebook is going to follow in the upcoming years. Notwithstanding

Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Be ‘A Metaverse Company’ In 5 Years

vrcoin on July 23, 2021

Platformer’s Casey Newton interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his plans to make Facebook “a metaverse company”.If you’re not familiar with the term, “metaverse” simply means a massively social digital alternate universe. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, which also popularized “avatar”. Some consider individual platforms like VRChat metaverses, whereas others think the term should only be used singular to describe an open protocol-based system like the internet.

The XR Week Peek (2021.07.13): Lynx now aims at the consumer market, App Lab to enable DLCs, and more!

vrcoin on July 13, 2021

Sorry if this newsletter is one day late. 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. I have watched the final match with friends and we had a lot of fun, plus I felt that feeling of friendship, union, and happiness, that only sport can convey to people. Honor to all the other countries, some of them probably deserved more than us, but I think Italy won because we were a true team, a group of people that supported each other for a goal they craved to reach. We won with our heart, the big heart of us Italians ❤. Ok, enough with football… let’s get back to AR and VR… Top news of the week (Image by Lynx)Lynx now aims at an MR

VRdirect to Bring Competition in Training and Virtual Tours

vrcoin on July 12, 2021

Most XR companies aren’t afraid of some healthy competition. Hopefully, the virtual tours field can take a little more pressure, as German solution VRdirect plans an impending expansion to the US and UK. We got our hands on a demo and talked to Managing Director Dr. Rolf Illenberger to learn more. Meet VRdirect VRdirect is a platform for authoring and distributing VR content, specifically virtual tours and educational content using physical locations. The platform is essentially composed of Studio, their authoring tool, and distribution/viewing solutions. Depending on what hardware the viewer has access to, content created using the VRdirect Studio is viewed via a mobile app, a web player, or streamed to a VR headset. The company does offer production services, but the whole idea is that the content is easy enough for non-VR specialists in industry to create their own content in-house. “The software itself is supposed to

‘XR Casino’ Brings Cross-Platform Gambling To VR & AR

vrcoin on July 12, 2021

Bet on games of Blackjack and Roulette in this blockchain-powered virtual casino coming soon to major VR & AR devices.

XR Casino, Inc (“The Company”) has announced an official release date for its cross-platform gambling experience which allows users on VR and AR devices to bet real money on games like blackjack, roulette, and slots from the comfort of their own holographic casinos.

Firewall Zero Hour Kicks Off 7th Season With Operation: Rubicon

vrcoin on July 12, 2021

PSVR’s exclusive team-based multiplayer shooter Firewall Zero Hour is launching its 7th season this week.The game from First Contact Entertainment is kicking off its 7th season with Operation: Rubicon on July 13th. The update comes nearly three years after launch and doesn’t include new maps or contractors, but it does add more than two dozen new cosmetic rewards to unlock. That includes new trinkets, face paints and skins, and the legendary weapon skin Gilded Sten will be available to passholders who complete all 24 missions in Operation: Rubicon and spend 250,000 in-game Crypto.

There are some free mission rewards as well but the Rubicon Op Pass sells starting at $3.99 with 1 Hack Key included to immediately compete a mission and get its reward. Prices increase from there for more keys to jump past more missions and get the rewards. Keys leftover from last season are usable for Operation: Rubicon as well.
Firewall Zero Hour launched in August 2018, but we waited to review it until last year and gave it a 9/10 for its satisfying gun mechanics and excellent team-based gameplay. The game is also a showpiece for the PlayStation VR Aim Controller and features faster loading times and improved visual fidelity on PS5. We’re very excited to see it realized one day on the next-generation PlayStation VR headset, though there’s been nothing officially announced on that front yet.
Will you be playing Firewall Zero Hero’s latest missions? Let us know in the comments below.

Lynx R1: XR2 AR-VR Hybrid Ships 2022 For ‘A Few Hundred Dollars’

vrcoin on July 9, 2021

French startup Lynx is shifting strategy for its upcoming AR-VR hybrid headset, dramatically lowering the price to target consumers too.

Lynx R1 was initially announced in February 2020 as a $1500 product focused on businesses & professionals. It has the same Snapdragon XR2 processor found in Oculus Quest 2 & HTC’s Vive Focus 3. But whereas those headsets can only show a low resolution black & white view of the real world, Lynx R1 has two dedicated high resolution color cameras for passthrough AR.

Lynx to Launch MR Headset “below $1,000”, Kickstarter Coming in September

vrcoin on July 9, 2021

French startup Lynx announced its Lynx R-1 mixed reality headset last year. The standalone headset, which is capable of both VR and pass-through AR, was previously said to launch for business somewhere around the $1,500 price point. Now Lynx says it’s pivoting focus to include both enterprise and consumers, and will bring the headset down “below $1,000.” You can expect a Kickstarter sometime in September 2021, the company says.

Lynx founder and CEO Stan Larroque announced in the project’s July update a few key changes to its upcoming MR headset. You can check out the full 30-minute video at the bottom of the article.

SuperWorld Will Sell You a Share of the Brooklyn Bridge for 100 ETH

vrcoin on July 8, 2021

Have you ever been so attached to a place that you wished you could own it? Maybe leave something behind so that people who came to visit later could see what it meant to you? Or maybe you’re less sentimental and want to make money off of the idea of a place. Whichever of these describes you, SuperWorld can help. SuperWorld has divided the globe into billions of plots of land and is selling the “virtual real estate” associated with those physical locations. To understand more, ARPost talked with CEO and Co-Founder Hrish Lotlikar. The SuperWorld Metaverse Usually, when we say “virtual real estate” at ARPost, we’re talking about entirely virtual spaces. That’s not exactly what SuperWorld has in mind. Another term that you might need to relearn is “metaverse.” There are different ideas about what a metaverse might look like, and different people use different words. When some