Felix & Paul, the studio known for its pioneering work in creating cinematic immersive films, is set to release the first installment in a new VR trilogy shot from the International Space Station (ISS), which is slated to offer stunning views of Earth from low orbit.
Called Space Explorers – Blue Marble, the first in the series is set to launch on Earth Day, April 22nd. The trilogy will be available for free on Meta Quest and Quest 2 headsets.
The immersive film series aims to provide a deeper understanding of our planet’s place in the universe and the importance of protecting it for future generations.
The first episode offers up an unobstructed, 360-degree view, filmed at the nadir of the ISS, which points directly at the Earth below.
The studio’s goal is to offer the viewer a sort of virtual ‘Overview Effect’, or a phenomenon that occurs when astronauts view the Earth from space and experience a profound shift in their perspective and understanding of the planet.
Founded by Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël in 2013, the studio has created a number of original immersive film productions, including The Space Explorers series, Traveling While Black, and Strangers with Patrick Watson. The studio has also created productions with existing franchises, including Jurassic World, Cirque du Soleil and Fox Searchlight’s Wild and Isle of Dogs.
Felix & Paul has won a host of awards over the years, including five Canadian Screen Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Daytime Emmy, along with numerous other awards and nominations.
You can catch Space Explorers – Blue Marble for free exclusively on Quest devices, with the first episode launching Saturday, April 22nd.
Enterprise headset maker Vrgineers has developed a portable VR combat flight sim system for training pilots on a wide range of combat aircraft, including planes and helicopters. The entire system fits into a single large case and can be deployed wherever it’s needed.
Image courtesy Vrgineers
Made from entirely commercially available off-the-shelf components, the system unpacks from a single large case with everything necessary get trainees into a simulated flight, including the company’s wide-FoV XTAL 3 headset, a computer that can power it, and a stick and throttle setup that mimics common combat aircraft. The company says that one person can get the system up and running within 30 minutes (you can see the whole process here).
Image courtesy Vrgineers
While Vrgineers is packaging all of the hardware together, partner Razbam Simulations is responsible for the simulated aircraft—including the F-15E Strike Eagle and its bevy of systems—which plugs into Digital Combat Simulator, a popular flight sim among enthusiasts and professionals.
Image courtesy Vrgineers
While the company says the system is designed for affordability, at the time of writing they have not released a specific price, though we’re guessing it will run in the tens of thousands of dollars—which seems like a lot but pales in comparison to many professional VR flight sim systems for pilot training.
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 April 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
Meta is the midst of a second large round of layoffs, and this time a number of employees in its internal VR studios have been affected.
Business Insider reported earlier this week that Meta was increasing its focus on gaming-related projects within its Reality Labs division. As other teams were expected to be dissolved in layoffs, the report held that gaming-focused teams would be safe.
However that report is now being rebuffed by a number of self-reported layoffs which have affecting Meta’s VR teams, including Ready at Dawn, known for the Lone Echo series, and Onward studio Downpour Interactive.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in March that 10,000 employees would be laid off. At the time, Zuckerberg said that, in addition to a hiring freeze, the April round of layoffs would affect tech roles, while a third in late May will affect business roles—all of it in service of what Zuckerberg dubbed the company’s “year of efficiency.”
As mentioned by MIXED, Ready at Dawn Senior Engine Programmer Thomas Griebel tweeted that around 40 people, or around a third of the studio, were laid off. This also included studio head Mark Almeida, who has been with Ready at Dawn since August 2016.
Acquired by Meta in 2020, Ready at Dawn announced in January it planned to shut down its popular free-to-play multiplayer game Echo VR, with plans to turn off severs come August 1st. At the time, the studio said the decision to shut down the game was “made for many good reasons and chief among them is the studio coming together to focus on our next project.”
Downpour Interactive, the studio behind VR mil-sim shooter Onward, is also seeing wide-ranging layoffs. We haven’t found a precise count of Downpour employees affected by the layoff round, however Producer Kaspar Nahuijsen called losing his colleagues to the purge “the toughest day” of his career.
Founded by Dante Buckley in 2015, and then acquired by Meta in 2021, Downpour Interactive’s latest claim to fame was porting the previously PC VR-only title to Quest and Quest 2. As a part of a wider transition by Meta to sunset the original 2019 Quest, Downpour announced Onward would no longer be playable on Quest 1 in any capacity after the July 31st, 2023.
As noted by UploadVR, founder and CEO Dante Buckely left Downpour/Meta last month.
The Guardian reports the latest round of Meta layoffs are affecting 4,000 employees immediately, which is a part of the 10,000 previously announced in March.
Vertigo 2 (2023), the sci-fi VR shooter adventure from Zach Tsiakalis-Brown, readily invites comparisons to Valve’s indomitable Half-Life: Alyx, but now the developer is taking another note out of Valve’s playbook by offering a way to create your own Vertigo-based levels and modes in an upcoming sandbox DLC.
Tsiakalis-Brown announced the level editor today in a tweet:
Tsiakalis-Brown says it will be a free update, and have Steam Workshop support, which means you’ll be able to share your creations much in the same way we’ve seen Half-Life: Alyx mods in the past.
The editor is said to be an in-VR affair, inviting comparisons to the Sandbox DLC released for Vertigo Remastered (2020 ), which includes what Tsiakalis-Brown called at the time “a vast expansion that brings new game modes, new weapons, and a level editor and workshop.”
“Let your creativity run wild and share custom levels with the world, or re-experience the campaign with remixed combat and a brand new arsenal,” the Vertigo Remastered DLC’s description reads.
You can follow along as Tsiakalis-Brown builds the sandbox DLC on Twitch here for more. He says he won’t stream the entirety of the sandbox’s development, although notes it’s “already looking better than the Vertigo Remastered sandbox.”
Red Matter 2, the sci-fi VR puzzle adventure for Quest 2 and PC VR, is bringing its best-in-class graphics and interactions to PSVR 2.
Vertical Robot says the sequel is slated to arrive on PSVR 2 “very soon,” noting in a tweet it will feature a smooth 120fps with no reprojection, foveated Rendering, 4K re-mastered textures, and enhanced lighting.
And while some may rightly bemoan it as another Quest 2 port, it’s really much more than that.
Launched in mid-2022 on Quest 2 and PC VR, Red Matter 2 features some of the most impressive graphics and immersive gameplay to date—of any VR platform—easily drawing comparisons to some of VR’s most visually intense games, such as Lone Echo and Half-Life: Alyx. It’s really that good.
Here’s the setup: in Red Matter 2, you take on the role of Sasha, an agent awakened in a lunar base by an undercover operative and tasked with uncovering the secrets of ‘Red Matter’, a mysterious substance introduced in Red Matter (2018).
The sequel introduces combat for the first time, which although not a high point, definitely makes for an interesting break from the game’s wide variety of puzzles. Enough said. Check out our spoiler-free review to find out why we gave it [8/10].
There’s no word on when we can expect the original Red Matter on PSVR 2. We’ll also be keeping our eyes peeled for a more precise launch date for the sequel, so check back soon.
Apple appears to be getting ready to unveil its first mixed reality headset at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. Now a report from Bloomberg maintains the Cupertino tech giant is also prepping a dizzying number of first-party apps, including gaming, fitness, video and collaboration tools.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is a lightning rod for all things Apple, and in his new info dump it appears we now have a pretty sizable list of first-party content coming to the still very much under-wraps mixed reality headset.
Here’s all of the major apps and features mentioned in the report:
iPad apps adapted for mixed reality: Calendars, Contacts, Files, Home control, Mail, Maps, Messaging, Notes, Photos, Reminders, Music, News, Stocks, and Weather apps.
FaceTime: conferencing service will generate 3D versions of users in virtual meeting rooms.
Freeform collaboration app: will let users work on virtual whiteboards together while in mixed reality.
Work apps: Pages word processing, Numbers spreadsheet and Keynote slide deck apps, as well as iMovie and GarageBand for video and music production.
Apple TV: both immersive sports content and traditional video content – the latter presented in virtual environments, such as a desert or the sky.
Apple Books: will allow users to read in virtual reality.
Fitness+: will let users exercise while watching an instructor in VR.
Multitasking & Siri: will be able to run multiple apps at the same time, floating within the mixed reality space. Siri voice control is also present.
Camera app: can take pictures from the headset.
Provided all of the above is accurate, Apple may be releasing the industry’s most feature-rich headset out of the gate, as it appears to be hauling in a ton of its mature and battle-tested ecosystem of apps.
It’s also said that gaming will be a major focus—a reversal from previous reports. This could mean we’ll see a wider push for Apple to court third-party developers soon after release, which is said to release a few months after is June unveiling, priced at somewhere around $3,000.
As for hardware, as many suggested in the past, Gurman reconfirms the existence of a dial crown similar to the one seen on Apple Watch, which will let the wearer seamlessly switch between virtual and augmented reality views.
Here’s a compilation list of alleged Apple MR headset features scavenged from previous reports—all of which you should take with a heaping handful of salt. We’ve broken them down into specs and design rumors:
Rumored Apple MR Specs
Resolution: Dual Micro OLED displays at 4K resolution (per eye)
FOV: 120-degrees, similar to Valve Index
Chipset: Two 5nm chips. Includes a main SoC (CPU, GPU, and memory) and a dedicated image signal processor (ISP). Chips communicate via a custom streaming codec to combat latency.
Battery: Waist-mounted battery, connected via MagSafe-like power cable to the headset’s headband. Two-hour max battery life, although hotswappable for longer sessions.
Passthrough: ISP chip contains custom high-bandwidth memory made by SK Hynix, providing low latency color passthrough
Audio: H2 chip, providing ultra-low latency connection with the second-generation AirPods Pro and future AirPods models. No 3.5mm and possible no support for non-AirPod BT headphones.
Controller: Apple is said to favor hand-tracking and voice recognition to control the headset, but it has tested a “wand” and a “finger thimble” as alternative control input methods.
Prescription Lenses: Magnetically attachable custom prescription lenses for glasses-wearers.
IPD Adjustment: Automatic, motorized adjustment to match the wearer’s interpupillary distance.
Eye Tracking: At least one camera per-eye for things like avatar presence and foveated rendering
Face & Body Tracking: More than a dozen cameras and sensors capture both facial expressions and body movements, including the user’s legs.
Room Tracking: Both short- and long-range LiDAR scanners to map surfaces and distances in three dimensions.
App Compatibility: Said to have the ability to run existing iOS apps in 2D.
Price: $3,000 – $4,000
Design Rumors
Outer Shell: Aluminum, glass, and carbon fiber to reduce its size and weight. Cameras are largely concealed for aesthetic reasons.
Presence Displays: Outward-facing display can show user’s facial expressions and also presumably eye movements. Said to be an always-on display similar in latency and power draw of Apple Watch or iPhone 14 Pro.
Dedicated Passthrough Switch: Digital Crown-like dial on its right side to switch between VR and AR.
Headstrap: Various available, including consumer-focused headstrap similar in material to Apple Watch sport bands with built-in speakers. Unspecified, but different headstrap targeted at developers.
– – — – –
As you’d imagine, Apple has confirmed absolutely nothing, so we’ll be tuning in for the June 5th keynote to see whether we’ll finally get a big “one more thing” moment we’ve been waiting for.
Horizon Worlds, Meta’s social VR platform for Quest, is only open to 18+ users for now, however the company says it’s expanding to include teens aged 13 to 17 in the US and Canada.
Meta says the new policy will go into effect in “the coming weeks,” effectively opening the company’s first-party social platform to its entire user base in those countries; Meta only allows users 13+ to actually use Quest devices.
To prepare for the wave of younger users, the company is also releasing some age-appropriate protections and safety defaults.
Safety features will include the ability for teens to control who they follow and who can follow them back. Profiles are also set to private by default, which obscures active status and location. Worlds and events will have content ratings, so younger teens can’t get in.
A new voice mode feature is also rolling out to everyone, which garbles voices of both unknown people and teen’s voices by default. Raising your hand to your ear temporarily lets you hear other users when voice mode is switched on, Meta says.
“We’re rolling out to teens slowly, so that we can carefully examine usage and are taking a phased approach before expanding more broadly,” the company says in a blogpost. “We can’t wait to see everything these new members of the community bring to Worlds.”
Parents and guardians can use the parental supervision tools to manage their teen’s experience and “support healthy conversations about safety in VR,” Meta says. To learn more, check out the new Family Center.
The company also released a safety tutorial to see the new features in action:
While Meta only just released official word of those changes to Horizon Worlds, the news was actually first reported by The Wall Street Journalin February, which was based on an internal memo that alleged the social VR platform was under performing and needed to increase user retention to keep up with the competition. According to the memo seen by WSJ,Horizon Worlds’ weekly retention rate was 11% in January 2023, which the company aimed to increase to 20%.
A goal outlined in the memo maintained Worlds needed to reach 500,000 monthly active users (MAU) in the first half of 2023, ultimately reaching the one million mark by year’s end. At the time, it was reported the platform was hovering around 200,000 MAUs, or just below the December peak.
There’s no telling when the flatscreen version of Horizon Worlds is due to arrive, however Meta maintained it would be opening the Quest-only social platform to Web and mobile devices “soon.”
Vinci Games, the studio behind popular VR basketball game Blacktop Hoops, has raised $5.1 million in a seed funding round.
The round was led by Makers Fund, with participation from Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Anorak Ventures, BonAngels, and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Vinci Games was previously supported by Y Combinator, and also successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign in September 2022 to the tune of $60,000.
The studio says the new funds will be used to develop Blacktop Hoops, which is currently available through Quest’s App Lab distribution channel for Quest 2, and on Steam for PC VR headsets.
First released in April 2022 in alpha, Blacktop Hoops now includes a number of online multiplayer modes, including 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 matches.
The streetball-inspired game, which has kicked off its open beta today, currently has a [4.9/5] star rating from around 9,000 users on App Lab, and a ‘Very Positive’ overall user rating from around 500 on Steam.
The open beta introduces to the game its first set of DLC, called the ‘Rising Legends Pack’, bringing five new AI bosses inspired by real-world streetball legends.
Founded by Oculus veteran Nathaniel Ventura and Maciej Szcześnik, former lead game designer of The Witcher series at CD Projekt Red, Blacktop Hoops is said to feature intuitive dribbling, dunking, and shooting basketball mechanics designed for VR.
“We’re excited to build the next generation of competitive sports in virtual reality,” said Ventura, Vinci Games CEO. “This round of funding helps us grow our team and build new groundbreaking features and content pushing the boundaries of VR. Blacktop Hoops has been designed from the ground up to be easily accessible for casual players with a high skill cap for competitive players; it’s extremely easy to pick up but difficult to master.”
During its time in Y Combinator, Vinci Games says it hope to build “Electronic Arts for VR sports games,” and that starting with Blacktop Hoops, it’s focusing on the “next-generation of arcade sports games for all platforms.”
Virbela has grown a lot over time but they’ve had the same avatar system for nearly a decade. If you open the app today, you’ll see a whole new avatar system. As impressive as it is, it might still have some growing to do.
Long in the Making
Virbela is a platform for remote work, education, and events. The platform consists of an open campus that anyone can download and use for free, and private campuses co-created with clients.
There was nothing wrong with the old campus, but it got a whole lot of new features as well as a beautiful graphics upgrade showcased at the Hands In Enterprise Metaverse Summit last year. An upcoming avatar system was teased at the summit, but no release date was given.
“Avatars are important to the virtual experience because they add fidelity to the world,” Virbela Art Team Manager Nicole Galinato said at the event. “Our users love the playfulness of the current avatars, but they want more features that they can identify with.”
Since the summit, the old avatars roamed the new world. It wasn’t a glaring mismatch, but the avatars were definitely from a different generation. The new avatars certainly fit into the graphically updated virtual world a lot better.
Old avatar (left) vs new avatar (right)
The New You for the New Virbela
The next time that you boot up Virbela, whether you’re a first-time user or just returning after a while, you will be greeted by the first page of the new avatar generator. Just like with the old system, you can join immediately with a default avatar and personalize it later if you want. If you’re not in that much of a hurry, you have a lot of playing to do.
You select one of three “body types” rather than gender, so all clothing and cosmetic options are open to all users. There’s also a custom gradient for specific skin tones and a number of features have an “advanced settings” button that opens up menus of highly customizable sliders. The update also brings several more hair and facial hair options.
“What really pushed us to create this new avatar system was more about this idea of inclusion and equity,” Virbela co-founder and President Alex Howland told me on the XR Talks podcast. “We are working with a very global population of users and we know the importance of the avatar for people to express themselves and explore their identity through their avatar.”
The update also brings new clothing options and customizations. Many outfits consist of a “top” and a “bottom,” with the top consisting of several layers each with their own color combinations, similar to the system that AltspaceVR used (RIP Altspace). I went with the three-piece suite, which means color options for the jacket, vest, and shirt. (Neckties are under “Accessories”.)
“We also wanted much more variability in terms of the ability to customize the avatar because we sometimes have populations of many thousands in the same space and you’d find too many avatars that looked too similar to one another,” said Howland.
Even after you’ve toured your new avatar through the campus, you can change it at any time by selecting the gear icon in the upper right corner to open the settings dropdown menu and selecting the “change avatar” item at the top. And do keep checking back. According to Howland, more is coming.
“This is what I’ll call the [minimal viable product] of this new system. It’s a system that we can build upon and continue to add assets to, whether that be more hairstyles, more clothing options, more cultural garb, that folks can use over time – eventually leading to things like more facial expressions,” said Howland.
The Complete Package
To return to Galinato’s concept that the avatars contribute to the immersion of the world itself, the more detailed and more personal avatars do seem more at home in the more detailed and responsive Virbela campus. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to attend a large event with the new avatars, but I’m sure that they’ll be a lot more colorful now.
PlayStation VR 2 launched in late February, and it wasn’t certain just how its smallish library of games would stack up in the headset’s first monthly top download report, which critically only accounted for the first week of user downloads. Now it’s clear: Pavlov and Kayak VR: Mirage are undoubtedly fan favorites.
Taking the top spot across the US & Canada and the EU is Vankrupt Games’ online multiplayer shooter Pavlov, which offers up a wide range of content beyond its classic 5v5 attack & defend mode.
Outside of being a popular game on basically all major VR platforms, Vankrupt is continuously expanding Pavlov’s modes, which now includes a murder mystery-inspired mode, a monster hunting mode which pits one player against nine others, and even a WWII map that lets you attack or defend Stalingrad in a 4v4 tank battle.
In PSVR 2’s inaugural top download list, Pavlov was rated number two across US & Canada and Europe, coming just below Kayak VR: Mirage, a kayak racing sim initially released on SteamVR headsets in 2022 by Amsterdam-based indie studio Better Than Life.
Kayak VR is still alive and kicking though, as it remains in the top three across the US & Canada, EU, and Japan, although it’s a good sign that any online multiplayer game is doing well on the platform, since it relies so heavily on populated servers to stay relevant.
Meanwhile, the platform’s premier single-player VR-native Horizon Call of the Mountain is no longer stacking up as the third most downloaded game in the US & Canada and Europe; it’s still remaining strong in Japan though.
That doesn’t mean people aren’t playing Horizon Call of the Mountain through. It’s important to note that the chart below is counting PS Store purchases and not bundled or upgraded content, which notably includes big titles such as Horizon Call of the Mountain, Gran Turismo 7, and Resident Evil Village.
Check out the full list below:
PSVR 2 March Top Downloads
US/Canada
EU
Japan
1
Pavlov
Pavlov
Kayak VR: Mirage
2
The Dark Pictures: Switchback
Kayak VR: Mirage
The Dark Pictures: Switchback
3
Kayak VR: Mirage
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution
Horizon Call of the Mountain
4
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution
Meta has introduced the Segment Anything Model, which aims to set a new bar for computer-vision-based ‘object segmentation’—the ability for computers to understand the difference between individual objects in an image or video. Segmentation will be key for making AR genuinely useful by enabling a comprehensive understanding of the world around the user.
Object segmentation is the process of identifying and separating objects in an image or video. With the help of AI, this process can be automated, making it possible to identify and isolate objects in real-time. This technology will be critical for creating a more useful AR experience by giving the system an awareness of various objects in the world around the user.
The Challenge
Imagine, for instance, that you’re wearing a pair of AR glasses and you’d like to have two floating virtual monitors on the left and right of your real monitor. Unless you’re going to manually tell the system where your real monitor is, it must be able to understand what a monitor looks like so that when it sees your monitor it can place the virtual monitors accordingly.
But monitors come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Sometimes reflections or occluded objects make it even harder for a computer-vision system to recognize.
Having a fast and reliable segmentation system that can identify each object in the room around you (like your monitor) will be key to unlocking tons of AR use-cases so the tech can be genuinely useful.
Computer-vision based object segmentation has been an ongoing area of research for many years now, but one of the key issues is that in order to help computers understand what they’re looking at, you need to train an AI model by giving it lots images to learn from.
Such models can be quite effective at identifying the objects they were trained on, but if they will struggle on objects they haven’t seen before. That means that one of the biggest challenges for object segmentation is simply having a large enough set of images for the systems to learn from, but collecting those images and annotating them in a way that makes them useful for training is no small task.
SAM I Am
Meta recently published work on a new project called the Segment Anything Model (SAM). It’s both a segmentation model and a massive set of training images the company is releasing for others to build upon.
The project aims to reduce the need for task-specific modeling expertise. SAM is a general segmentation model that can identify any object in any image or video, even for objects and image types that it didn’t see during training.
SAM allows for both automatic and interactive segmentation, allowing it to identify individual objects in a scene with simple inputs from the user. SAM can be ‘prompted’ with clicks, boxes, and other prompts, giving users control over what the system is attempting to identifying at any given moment.
It’s easy to see how this point-based prompting could work great if coupled with eye-tracking on an AR headset. In fact that’s exactly one of the use-cases that Meta has demonstrated with the system:
Part of SAM’s impressive abilities come from its training data which contains a massive 10 million images and 1 billion identified object shapes. It’s far more comprehensive than contemporary datasets, according to Meta, giving SAM much more experience in the learning process and enabling it to segment a broad range of objects.
Image courtesy Meta
Meta calls the SAM dataset SA-1B, and the company is releasing the entire set for other researchers to build upon.
Meta hopes this work on promptable segmentation, and the release of this massive training dataset, will accelerate research into image and video understanding. The company expects the SAM model can be used as a component in larger systems, enabling versatile applications in areas like AR, content creation, scientific domains, and general AI systems.
