The XR Week Peek (2022.11.01): Quest Pro gets released, Quest 3 slated for 2023, and more!

vrcoin on November 1, 2022

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE! Even if it is not part of the Italian tradition, probably Halloween is the right festivity for me, since I’m a ghost :). And in fact, for me, this one has been a pretty cool week: HTC Vive has selected me as one of the top 100 VR influencers (whatever this word means), Adello magazine featured me in its online publication, and today my company Vrroom will be a host of the afterparty of the Unity Unite event, with a concert of Blu DeTiger inside VRChat (Look for Unite2022 tag and you’ll find the world). So many exciting things are happening and I’m thankful to you all for the support you are giving me ❤

Top news of the week

Quest Pro launches, but the reaction of the community is mild

On October, 25th, the Meta Quest Pro has been officially launched, and the people who preordered it started to receive it.

As was predictable after the specs and the price of the device were unveiled, it has not received stellar reviews. There are three main critics:

The price is too high, like 4 times the price of a Quest 2
There is not a clear use case yet. Face tracking and mixed reality are cool, but there is no app truly exploiting them
Some features are still lacking. For instance, it is a mixed reality headset but can’t do environment understanding

I think that part of the problem is a misunderstanding on purpose: Meta is selling the device as a prosumer one, but also as an advanced way to play games. This is the same confusion that created issues for HTC in the past with the Vive Pro, for instance. People think it is a gaming device, but then the price doesn’t match their expectations, and so they get angry. And besides that, the headset should be a “business” one, but Meta does not have yet a clear business offering, yet. I think Pico is the only company making a good choice of clearly separating the business and consumer lines.

The other part of the problem is due, as per my speculation, to Meta wanting absolutely to take this out before Apple could release its headset, to have a first-mover advantage over it. The problem is that for this reason, it has rushed the launch of a device that has no “wow feature” or “killer application”, and so this is not going to impact at all the future launch of Apple Reality.

Don’t misunderstand me, the headset has also its good sides, like great lenses and amazing controllers. All the reviewers highlight it is better than Quest 2, but for most people, there is no real value to justify the $1500 price tag yet. Probably its launch should have been planned with more care.

After the release, we started getting a few more interesting tidbits of info about it. For instance, the full light blocker to have proper VR isn’t shipping until November (another disappointment). The eye and face tracking can also work via Quest Link (but maybe only for developers). There are new complaints about Meta’s privacy policy on eye tracking, as my friend Avi Bar-Zeev points out. You can do with the Quest mixed reality WebXR applications (and this is incredibly cool). And especially we started seeing some fantastic experiments made by developers with it: I’m linking here below my favorite one (which you MUST absolutely see) about someone making a “scratchable” virtual reality that unveils the real reality that is beyond it.

I’m pretty convinced that the Quest Pro will unveil its value in the next 12 months, after Meta will have improved its runtime and the community will have created some interesting content for it. But for now, it doesn’t look like a must-have.

Other relevant news

Meta Reality Labs’ revenues fall down, as the interest in the metaverse

Meta is in a sort of financial trouble: because of the bad economic conditions, the new privacy policies on iOS, and the fierce competition of TikTok, its revenues are not growing anymore. And its investment in the “metaverse”, which costs $10B/year, is a money pit that becomes harder to justify when the traditional business is not growing as before. Even worse, the “metaverse” division of the company, Meta Reality Labs, had for the first time a decline in revenues: a pretty massive one, considering that it made 50% less money than one year ago. The reason is the raise in the price of the Quest 2, which makes it less appealing.

All this combined made sure that Meta lost again stock value, and now the company is worth what it was 7 years ago. Investors are getting mad at it, and are all questioning if the investments in the metaverse should continue or if Meta should focus more on the cash-cow business, that is Facebook and Instagram. The press is happy of bashing Zuckerberg and Meta for the problem it is having, and everyone is mocking Zuck’s idea of the “metaverse”.

And while I’m not a huge fan of Meta, I see this situation as pretty dangerous, because if everyone criticizes the idea of the “metaverse”, this pessimism is going to create issues for all of us in the field: this negativity may scare investors and big brands from associating themselves with the metaverse. For this reason, I’ve written an article in which I somewhat defend Meta (yeah, it sounds strange to me too…) from all the clickbait bullshit that there is around and can hurt us all. The metaverse will come, but slowly, and exactly as it was stupid all the hype around the technology one year ago, it is stupid again all the disappointment that there is now towards it.

More info (Meta Reality Labs’ financial troubles — Forbes)
More info (Meta Reality Labs’ financial troubles — Road To VR)
More info (Meta Reality Labs’ financial troubles — Upload VR)
More info (Business Insider criticizes Meta’s metaverse)
More info (Snap CEO criticizes Meta’s metaverse)
More info (My editorial about the negativity on the metaverse)

Meta confirms Quest 3 is coming in 2023

We were all suspecting it, but now it is official: Meta has announced that Quest 3 is coming in 2023. I guess the announcement was made to give investors hope after the release of the very negative financial data of Meta Reality Labs.

We have no further info about it, apart from the fact that it will be a consumer-oriented device, priced around $3–500. We can also guess that the release will happen during Meta Connect 2023. Brad Lynch shared a few rumors about it a few weeks ago, and if they are true, the headset should be very focused on mixed reality. I’m sure we will have more rumors in the next few months. In the meanwhile, I’m excited to know more about it!

More info (Meta confirms Quest 3 for 2023 — Road To VR)
More info (Meta confirms Quest 3 for 2023- Upload VR)

HaptX announces the new generation of its haptic gloves

HaptX has unveiled its next-generation VR gloves. Dubbed HaptX G1, they are much smaller and cheaper than the previous version, and so present an important evolution for all the haptics space. The problem is that the basis for this comparison is the previous DK2 model, which was incredibly big and expensive (the rumored price was around $20K), so the result is still far from being consumer-oriented.

The gloves still require a big box to work, but now the box is smaller and can be worn as a backpack, and also the gloves are smaller and more comfortable than before. They keep their specialty of offering touch sensations on all the different parts of your hand through the use of very small inflatable balls that can apply a “textured” haptic sensation by inflating and applying pressure on your skin. I tried HaptX at AWE last year and I was impressed by what it can offer. The price is still very enterprise-oriented, but it is now at $5600, which is still a lot, but like a quarter of what it was before.

The road towards believable consumer haptics for XR is still long and difficult, but I’m very happy to see this step forward and I wish good luck to HaptX!

More info

News worth a mention

Neal Stephenson talks about his company Lamina1

Neal Stephenson has co-founded a Web3 company called Lamina1, with the idea of building a new blockchain the right way, so that it is sustainable and that has around it an ecosystem not focused on speculation, but on giving value to content creators. This seems a fascinating vision, and he explains it a bit better in this new interview with Fast Company.

More info

New York Times talks about the UX of immersive journalism

The New York Times has published a very interesting article that explores how the user interface of immersive journalism could be. In particular, it investigates how it is possible to build an informative AR experience that can accompany an article.

More info

Enjoy Quest Halloween sale

If you want to buy some VR games, this is the right moment to do that. On the Quest Store there is an interesting Halloween sale going on!

More info

Mixed reality content starts to surface

As I’ve said before, many developers are experimenting with the Quest Pro, and this week we had two interesting pieces of news about MR games. First of all, Demeo has finally released its mixed reality mode. And the developer of Cubism is working on a laser avoidance game in mixed reality!

More info (Demeo in Mixed Reality)
More info (Laser avoidance game in Mixed Reality)

Some news on content

Visually stunning adventure game Hubris is coming to PC VR headsets on December 7th, and on Quest and PSVR 2 in 2023
Wooorld is now available for Quest 2 and Quest Pro for $15 on the Meta Quest Store. This experience is a bit like Google Earth VR, but with a totally different take on earth Exploration
Firmament, the new experience from the studio behind Myst, is delayed till 2023
Broken Edge, the multiplayer VR sword fighting game, is set to launch on Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets on November 17th
Dr Beef’s VR mods of games like Doom may soon come to Pico 4
Hell-arcade shooting game Desperate: Vladivostok is coming to Quest and PC VR on November 3

More info (Hubris)
More info (Wooorld)
More info (Firmament)
More info (Broken Edge)
More info (DrBeef’s VR mods)
More info (Desperate: Vladivostok)

Other news

VRChat adds hand-tracking support and now it is possible to use it completely without controllers!

Learn more

Doing drone shots with your phone is now possible thanks to NeRF!

Learn more

Very cool infographics about the currently available headsets and their positioning in the market

Learn more

The Africa XR Report tells you what is happening in immersive realities in Africa

Learn more

See the various components that make up the Pico 4

Learn more

News from partners (and friends)

Follow me on Youtube!

Since I have no friends’ news to report, I just invite you to also follow me on Youtube, in case you aren’t already doing that! I don’t publish often, and my videos are not the best ones you can find… but you can still find on my channel some interesting XR content.

Learn more

Some XR fun

This is actually a serious piece of news, but it made me laugh. Someone put some chickens in virtual reality and saw that they are happier. And those chicks have a better VR setup than me!
Funny link

Using Quest outside is not a good idea, probably
Funny link

It’s the same for me when I talk about VR
Funny link

The new guide about how to write content about the metaverse
Funny link

Donate for good

Like last week, also this week in this final paragraph I won’t ask you to donate for my blog, but to the poor people that are facing the consequences of the war. Please donate to the Red Cross to handle the current humanitarian situation in Ukraine. I will leave you the link to do that below.

Let me take a moment before to thank anyway all my Patreon donors for the support they give to me:

Alex Gonzalez VR
DeoVR
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And now here you are the link to donate:

Support The Red Cross in Ukraine

(Header image by Meta)

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This article was originally published on skarredghost.com

Category: Uncategorized
Tag: augmented reality, virtual reality, week peek