During PlayStation’s gaming showcase today, the company showed off some new footage of the official PSVR 2 mode of Resident Evil 4 (2023) remake.
There’s no news on when to expect the game’s VR mode, which has been previously confirmed to arrive as a free DLC upgrade.
Just as we expected with the inclusion of PSVR 2’s more advanced motion controllers, in a PS blogpost the creators say you’ll be able to swing around the game’s iconic knife and wield Leon’s powerful and varied arsenal with an immersive and authentic feel.
Resident Evil 4’s VR mode is still in development, the studio says, so we’ll be waiting on more info and official release date.
The standalone VR market is continuing to grow, and with it, we’re increasingly seeing platform competition for quality content. Pico made its biggest push into consumer VR so far with the launch of the Pico 4 last year, and the company has been gaining ground on getting top VR content onto its store.
Top Quest Apps Showing up on Pico 4
Looking at the 20 best-rated apps on the Quest store (data as of April 2023), to date 70% of the list is available on Pico’s standalone headset:
Title
Pico 4
Quest 2
Moss: Book II
✔
✔
The Room VR: A Dark Matter
✔
✔
Puzzling Places
✔
✔
Walkabout Mini Golf
✔
✔
I Expect You To Die 2
✖
✔
Breachers
✔
✔
COMPOUND
✖
✔
Vermillion
✔
✔
Swarm
✔
✔
DYSCHRONIA: Chronos Alternate
✖
✔
PatchWorld – Make Music Worlds
✖
✔
I Expect You To Die
✖
✔
Moss
✔
✔
Red Matter 2
✔
✔
ARK and ADE
✔
✔
Ragnarock
✔
✔
Cubism
✔
✔
Ancient Dungeon
✔
✔
Into the Radius
✔
✔
The Last Clockwinder
✖
✔
Another way of looking at Pico’s content traction is by the 20 most-rated apps on the Quest store. Breaking it down that way (data as of April 2023), 50% of the list is now available on Pico.
Title
Pico 4
Quest 2
Beat Saber
✖
✔
Blade & Sorcery: Nomad
✔
✔
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
✔
✔
SUPERHOT VR
✔
✔
GOLF+
✖
✔
BONELAB
✖
✔
Vader Immortal: Episode I
✖
✔
Onward
✖
✔
Job Simulator
✖
✔
The Room VR: A Dark Matter
✔
✔
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted
✖
✔
Resident Evil 4
✖
✔
The Thrill of the Fight
✖
✔
Walkabout Mini Golf
✔
✔
Pistol Whip
✔
✔
Eleven Table Tennis
✔
✔
GORN
✔
✔
Virtual Desktop
✔
✔
Vader Immortal: Episode III
✖
✔
A Township Tale
✔
✔
Building good VR hardware is really just half the battle when it comes to being a serious player in the industry. The other half is getting compelling content onto the headset.
While Quest 2 still has a considerably larger library of apps and several big standalone exclusives (like Beat Saber) Pico looks to be doing a pretty good job so far in its push to legitimize its platform by making sure that some of the top VR content is available for its customers.
And there’s likely more to come. The company has yet to launch its latest Pico 4 headset in the US, which is a major VR market of both customers and developers. Without the US market in play, there’s less incentive for VR developers to bring their apps to Pico. But if Pico finally launches its headset in the US, it could be the nudge needed for more top VR content to make the leap to the store.
Special thanks to @CkYLee for helping to title availability on the Pico store
Sony revealed PSVR 2 outperformed the original PSVR in sales in the first six weeks, taking a strong early lead over the company’s first-gen PlayStation headset.
An investor relations presentation delivered by Sony Interactive Entertainment chief Jim Ryan includes some new information detailing PSVR 2 units sales relative to the original PSVR launched in October 2016.
According to a chart in Ryan’s presentation, Sony’s latest headset has sold 8% more than the original in the first six weeks, ostensibly spanning from its February 22nd, 2023 launch to April 5th.
Image courtesy Sony
The graph’s y-axis is unlabeled, although it’s likely those numbers are in the thousands of units, which would mean PSVR 2 sold around 450,000 units in its first week, trailing up to just under 600,000 at the six-week mark.
PSVR 2’s adoption curve is notably flatter than the original PSVR, which started at just north of 300,000 units in its first week, ending up at around 550,000 units by week six. When Sony last released sales figures in 2020, the original PSVR had sold around 5 million lifetime units. Notably, PSVR reached its first million in just under its five months.
PSVR 2’s game library consists of a few strong anchor titles, such as Horizon Call of the Mountain, Resident Evil Village, and Gran Turismo 7 while offering an array of upgraded PSVR content and newly ported Quest titles. Upcoming titles include Ghostbusters VR, Beat Saber, Crossfire: Sierra Squad, Resident Evil 4, Synapse, The Foglands, Green Hell VR, and Behemoth.
To keep PSVR 2’s unit sales above the original, the company undoubtably needs to focus on widening its content offering in the coming months. The company is hosting a PlayStation gaming showcase later today which we hope will reveal a little more about the company’s near-term content strategy for PSVR 2.
Apple has sent invitations to its upcoming WWDC keynote to select media outlets, including Road to VR.
Apple has historically not invited XR media to its events, let alone commented in any way on its XR R&D that has been reportedly happening behind the scenes at the company for years.
Road to VR is among the XR media outlets who have received an invitation to Apple’s WWDC keynote for the first time. Our friends at UploadVR confirmed the same.
It’s difficult not to interpret the invitations amidst the growingnumberofreports that Apple plans to reveal its first XR device at the keynote which takes place on June 5th at 10AM PT.
Apple’s official entrance into the XR space has been rumored for years, with many expecting it to be a boon for the industry thanks to Apple’s penchant for solving usability challenges, one of the core issues that has held XR back from more mainstream usage. Much speculation has happened about whether the company will lean most into AR, VR, or MR.
Alas, we’ll have to wait until we’re there to find out for ourselves just what Apple has up its sleeve.
The newly announced Budget Cuts Ultimate, which combines both Budget Cuts (2018) and Budget Cuts 2 (2019) stealth action games into a single experience, is set to launch on PSVR 2 and Quest 2 next month.
Budget Cuts Ultimate is set to bring both games to those respective platforms for the first time, launching on June 1st.
Originally released on PC VR and the original PSVR, Budget Cuts makes use of a unique portaling system that completely rethinks teleportation in VR as we know it. Not only can you pop around corners like a ninja, but also throw knives through portals, making for some compelling encounters with the world’s armed security robots.
Here’s a description, courtesy its developers Neat Corporation:
As your last human co-worker is hauled away, a mysterious briefcase from someone on the outside is delivered to your desk. You need to get to the bottom of what is going on at TransCorp.
Sneak around enemy robots by climbing through air ducts and service tunnels, or embrace violence by unleashing a fistful of knives, quivers of arrows, grenades, and coffee mugs onto their unsuspecting circuits. Once you’ve completed your mission, test your skills in the arcade with multiple modes, difficulty levels, and scoring.
You can wishlist the game on PSVR 2 here, and on Quest 2/Pro here.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of May 2023.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
A report from the Financial Timesmaintains Meta is currently in talks with AR headset creator Magic Leap to strike a multiyear deal, which could include intellectual property licensing and contract manufacturing of AR headsets in North America.
The AR unicorn is said to possess valuable IP regarding custom components, including its optics, waveguides, and software.
It’s said a potential deal may also allow Meta to lessen its reliance on China for component manufacturing. In 2019, Magic Leap partnered with manufacturing solutions company Jabil to create a Guadalajara, Mexico plant which the report maintains can assemble headsets in “the tens of thousands a year.”
Magic Leap 2 | Photo by Road to VR
Citing people with knowledge of the talks, the report maintains however a specific joint Meta-Magic Leap headset isn’t expected.
While both companies didn’t comment on a potential partnership, Magic Leap said this to the Financial Times:
“Given the complexities of developing true augmented reality technologies and the intricacies involved with manufacturing these optics, as well as the issues many companies experience with overseas supply chain dependencies, we have entered into several non-exclusive IP licensing and manufacturing partnerships with companies looking to enter the AR market or expand their current position.”
Since it exited stealth in 2014, Magic Leap has released two AR headsets, Magic Leap 1 and Magic Leap 2, which have been compared in functionality to Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headsets.
The company has raised over $4 billion, with minority investors including Google, Alibaba, Qualcomm, AT&T, and Axel Springer. Its majority stakeholder is Saudi Arabia’s state-owned sovereign wealth fund.
In addition to Quest Pro mixed reality headset, Meta has confirmed it’s currently working on its next iteration of Quest, likely Quest 3, as well as its own AR glasses. Meta started real-world testing of Project Aria in 2020, a platform for training its AR perception systems and asses public perception of the technology.
NOCK, the Rocket League-inspired VR sport that arms you with bow and arrow, is coming to PSVR 2 next week, bringing its fast-paced action to cross-platform online play.
First launched on Quest 2 in in early 2022, developing studio Normal says Nock will arrive on PSVR 2 on May 25th.
The studio says in a PS blog post that Nock will run at 90hz on the highest resolution with no foveation or reprojection. To boot, the team says there was enough leftover compute to render a second camera, letting live observers watch a match in progress, or stream to other platforms.
Nock on PSVR 2 is set to arrive with a free season pass, letting you unlock over 30 skins, bows, and blocks as you progress through the game.
The studio says its supporting cross-platform play with all major platforms. The game is currently available on Quest and Pico headsets, and is marked as ‘coming soon’ on Steam for PC VR.
The latest software update for Meta Quest, version v54, is now rolling out, bringing with it a few new quality-of-life features, such as new customization options for Home environments, in-headset app notifications, and better tracking for Quest Pro’s controller.
Customizable skyboxes let you change the sky above your head in your Home space, so you can choose from a number of presets, or even upload your own skybox to get the perfect atmosphere. Meta says its goal is to make Home Environments more personalized and customizable in the future.
The update also introduces in-headset notifications for 2D apps, such as Messenger, letting users interact with these apps without leaving their current game or app.
Meta says you’ll also be able to consolidate messages from the same source to streamline your notification feed, toggle a ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, or disable notifications entirely for specific 2D apps. App notification are an opt-in feature that should prompt the first time you open a compatible app, so you won’t just start randomly receiving stuff, which is reassuring.
Additionally, Meta says v54 has improved Quest Touch Pro controller to enhance positional accuracy. Meta says these updates are gradually rolling out to all headsets.
Rube Goldberg Workshop is now available on Quest, letting you make tons of different crazy—dare we say—Rube Goldbergian machines.
Built on Quest’s Presence platform, users can choose to play either in virtual reality or mixed reality, the latter allowing you to use your own room and surfaces to build your creations.
The game includes over 80 different components, including toy cars, gears, books, rubber balls, bowling pins, and cannons. There’s no time limit or scores, only your own imagination to build whatever your please.
The game was developed by Free Range Games in association with the Rube Goldberg Institute, which helped the team pattern their components off Rube Goldberg’s actual drawings—illustrating contraptions intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way.
“Certain objects [Goldberg] loved to draw, like the extending boxing glove, are iconic. We have a fun update coming very shortly after launch with a bunch of new objects inspired directly from his cartoons,” Free Range Games Producer Stephen Scholz says in a Meta blog post.
You can find it on Quest 2 and Quest Pro today on the Meta Store, priced at $10. As you’d imagine, only the Quest Pro packs colored passthrough, which is featured in the trailer above.
First it was the desktop. Then the laptop. And now, the… spacetop? That’s the category that Sightful hopes to carve out with its new “augmented reality laptop” which combines a pair of augmented reality glasses with a keyboard, allowing you to put a huge virtual desktop in your backpack.
Stealth startup Sightful today revealed Spacetop, an “augmented reality laptop” that turns a pair of AR goggles into a large virtual desktop computing environment. The company announced that it is soliciting interest for those who would like to be part of the product’s early access launch, which will cost $2,000 for the complete Spacetop computer. Purportedly only 1,000 units will be available at the outset, with shipments beginning this July.
Sightful, which was previously called Multinarity, says it has raised $61 million in funding to date, with its lead investors being Corner Ventures and Aleph Capital.
While we’ve seen many other ‘virtual desktop’ applications in the PC VR and standalone space, Sightful is trying to close the loop on making virtual desktop productivity… well, actually productive.
Image courtesy Sightful
The company is hoping its all-in-one product—which essentially consists of the bottom half of a laptop, a pair of tethered AR goggles, and a custom software environment—will make for a streamlined virtual desktop experience that’s easy to use. Spacetop has a sort of dock in which to stow the glasses, and a ‘lid’, allowing the entire unit to be portable.
Image courtesy Sightful
Sightful says Spacetop uses a pair of customized Nreal Light AR goggles with 6DOF head-tracking, a 53° field-of-view, and 1,920 × 1,080 resolution per-eye.
Inside the Spacetop base (which includes a full keyboard, trackpad, and USB & DisplayPort ports) is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, along with enough battery for a claimed 5 hours of work. There’s even a built-in webcam for video calls (though you might look a little strange wearing sunglasses with a cord coming out of them while you’re on video).
Image courtesy Sightful
And yes, you read that right; with a Snapdragon processor this won’t be running Windows but rather the company’s own ‘Spacetop OS’, which we presume is built atop Android, though the company hasn’t said anything about compatibility with Android applications; instead it seems the first version of Spacetop will run almost exclusively on web apps, providing an essentially unlimited virtual desktop upon which to place them.
If you’ve ever used a Chromebook, you’ll know that you can actually get quite a bit done these days operating purely on web apps, but anyone hoping for serious desktop productivity and applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Blender, you won’t see them on Spacetop any time soon.
For what it’s worth, the company isn’t trying to hide that fact.
“Sightful is encouraging people who love to be first and look into the future, who work on the go, who live largely in Web apps to come and purchase […] Spacetop,” the company says in its announcement. “Potential customers looking for a hard-core gaming rig or a video-editing monster machine would be better served to wait for a future generation.”
Image courtesy Sightful
The company also says at this point it isn’t focused on leveraging the unique 3D or spatial capabilities that come with AR (no 3D models floating in the air in front of you), nor are they working on any novel inputs (no special gestures to move windows with your hands); all of which is a good idea in my book—its good to walk before you run.
While Spacetop’s focused features and all-in-one design may have some benefits for virtual desktop productivity, the key challenges to unlocking this use-case are about more than just about creating a dedicated software environment and packaging everything together.
Over the years I’ve tried countless variations of XR headsets and virtual desktop software, including using them with a dedicated keyboard, mouse, and even a full Mac and Windows environments. Despite having all of the actual computing power and features I need for my daily workflow, core issues relating to the displays remain; notably: field-of-view, resolution, sweet spot, and comfort.
While the Nreal goggles aren’t terribly heavy, their relatively tiny field-of-view is in direct conflict with the idea of having a massive virtual desktop ready whenever you go. Instead of rotating your head and eyes just a bit to see one monitor or the other with real side-by-side monitors, you’ll need to move your head way more to bring a comparatively sized virtual window ‘into frame’, which can become uncomfortable quickly.
This issue is often amplified by a small sweet spot on many headsets which means that as you rotate your eyes the display becomes blurrier at the edges, meaning you need to nearly center your entire head on any window you want to see at maximum fidelity.
And considering the Nreal goggles use transparent displays, this makes resolution and legibility a challenge because the windows floating in front of you will always have some level of transparency.
As someone who has tried many similar solutions over the years, the pros have yet to outweigh the cons. I don’t personally see Spacetop (or for that matter, any virtual desktop application) catching on in a big way until it’s capable of essentially a perfect replication of a basic 1080p laptop display as it would look in real life right in front of you, let alone an unlimited virtual desktop with a plethora of application windows floating around you.
eMagin, the US-based developer and manufacturer of OLED microdisplays for AR/VR headsets, announced a merger agreement with Samsung Display, a subsidiary of the Korean tech giant. Samsung says it anticipates “significant potential growth” of XR devices.
The company announced in a press statement that Samsung will acquire all outstanding shares of eMagin common stock on a fully diluted basis for $2.08 per share in cash, totaling approximately $218 million.
Founded in 2001, eMagin has created head-mounted displays to showcase its OLED technology since the release of Z800, which launched in mid-2005. Since then, the company has focused on creating VR headset prototypes to further showcase its high-density OLED microdisplays while also providing its displays for integration into aircraft helmets, heads-up display systems, AR/VR headsets, thermal scopes, night vision goggles, and future weapon systems.
President & CEO of Samsung Display, Joo Sun Choi, says the acquisition comes along with expectations that XR devices will have “significant potential of growth in the future.”
“This agreement is a validation of our technical achievements to date including our proprietary direct patterning (dPd) technology, provides a significant premium for our shareholders, and represents a win for our customers and employees,” said Andrew G. Sculley, eMagin’s CEO. “By teaming with Samsung Display, we will be able to achieve the full potential of our next-generation microdisplay technology with a partner that can provide the resources and expertise we will need to scale production. Moreover, our customers will benefit from resulting improvements to our production capabilities in terms of yield, efficiency, and quality control.”
The merger will very likely allow Samsung to exclusively manufacture micro-OLED displays using eMagin’s direct patterning display (dPd) technology, which boasts higher efficiencies and brightness since its displays use RGB emitters instead of traditional displays, which typically use a white OLED with a RGB color filter.
The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2023, whereby eMagin will continue to maintain its operations and facilities in Hopewell Junction, NY. The merger agreement has received unanimous approval from eMagin’s Board of Directors, and stockholders holding around 98% of eMagin’s total voting power have committed to voting in favor of the transaction.
