The XR Week Peek (2024.01.23): Apple Vision Pro preorders have been opened, and much more!
This has been the week when the preorders of the Apple Vision Pro have been opened and shit just started getting real! I’m very curious about what Apple’s headset is going to bring to our ecosystem… and you?
There will be a lot about Apple in this newsletter, but don’t miss also the other important news, and the giveaway of keys for the amazing game Retropolis 2!
Top news of the week
Apple opens the preorders of the Vision Pro
On January, 19th 2024, Apple opened the preorders for the Vision Pro, its first XR headset. Finally all the details have been revealed, and we have been able to discover all the purchase options.
Vision Pro comes in 3 different storage formats:
- Vision Pro 256GB: $3,500
- Vision Pro 512GB: $3,700
- Vision Pro 1TB: $3,900
and in every box, Apple put the following items:
- Headset with Light Seal
- External Battery
- 30W USB-C adapter and USC-C cable
- 2 × Light Seal Cushions
- Solo Knit Band
- Dual Loop Band
- Vision Pro Cover
- Polishing Cloth
There are some (expensive) accessories that people can buy to enhance their experience with the headset, like for instance:
- ZEISS Reader Inserts: $100
- ZEISS Prescription Inserts: $150
- Official carrying case: $200
- Battery holder: $50
The headset could be bought only in the US and only by people with an Apple ID with the region set to US. Of course, some people from all over the world made some tricks to buy it anyway. The hype around the device and the very limited units available made sure that it went sold out pretty fast (as expected).
More info (Apple opens preorders for Vision Pro — Road To VR)
More info (Apple opens preorders for Vision Pro — Upload VR)
More info (Accessories available for Vision Pro)
More info (Some new Vision Pro orders are already slated for March)
More info (Vision Pro has gone sold out in minutes)
More info (A look at the Vision Pro from the point of view of a Southern American person)
We already knew a lot about the Vision Pro, so the launch didn’t reveal much new technical information about it. But we still learned something new, like the fact that there are 3 possible storage options (from 128GB to 1TB), that it has 16GB RAM, and that it uses the M2 chipset with 10 GPU cores.
On the software side, it supports AirPlay, so you can make other people see what you are doing in the headset if you want. It will also include a “Guest” mode for when you make your friends try the device and a “Travel” mode to use it on a plane.
For the launch of the device, Tim Cook shared a promotional video where you can see part of the manufacturing process of the Vision Pro, and it is pretty cool.
More info (Apple Vision Pro specifications)
More info (RAM and GPU cores)
More info (Airplay enabled)
More info (Guest mode and Travel mode)
More info (Tim Cook’s promotional video)
On the occasion of the preorder launch, Apple let some selected journalists have a second hands-on session with the device. It’s surprising to say that the feedback resulting from these reviews has not been fully positive.
Everyone loved the quality of the visuals, the usability of the gestures, and the impressive passthrough. But for instance, many felt the headset was heavy, and it seems that the comfort is pretty bad with the standard strap, that’s why Apple rushed to introduce a second (most comfortable) strap in every box. According to some people, it is hardly imaginable to use it for hours of work, so it can not truly substitute the screen of a Mac. The Verge journalist wondered what is its use case that makes it worth spending $3500 to have it. Upload’s Ian Hamilton complained that the demo session he had was very stationary and very rigid, in the sense that they made him try only specific things.
There is a 10-minute video released by Apple that shows how it is using the device, but it is fully staged, so it just shows a very clean experience with a lot of fake “Wow”s said here and there.
So it seems a very cool device, but not a perfect one. To know if it is really worth spending $3500 to have it, we need to wait for it to be shipped to people and hear their reactions after many days of usage.
More info (Hands-on Vision Pro highlights comfort issues — Road To VR)
More info (Hands-on Vision Pro highlights comfort issues — Upload VR)
More info (The Verge’s hands-on Vision Pro)
More info (Upload VR’s hands-on Vision Pro)
More info (Vision Pro may be too uncomfortable to work with)
More info (A video from Apple shows how it is using Vision Pro)
If you are not one of the lucky guys who have been able to buy the device, but you are in the US, you can still book a free demo in an Apple Store. Apple Store demos require a setup stage to configure the headset for you, and then there is a 25-minute session when you can mostly try 3D photos and videos and then you can enjoy having multiple windows around you, which is the specialty of “spatial computing”.
More info (Vision Pro store demos)
Regarding content, Apple is investing a lot to propose the Vision Pro as a media consumption device. So at launch, there will be 150 3D videos on Apple TV. Plus Apple is proposing some special content in its Immersive Video format, which is a high-definition version of the usual 180 3D. Disney+ will be available on the device, and you will be able to watch Disney movies in 4 marvelous immersive environments. Many streaming services will be available through their iPad apps, but some of them explicitly refused to be available for Vision Pro: Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube all didn’t make their iPad app available on Vision Pro, probably for competition reasons.
Mark Gurman talks about “230 visionOS native apps” being ready for release. We already knew about some of them, like the game Super Fruit Ninja, but we started to get information about the others, too. Twitter account M1Astra started sharing information about some of them, like an app about the Bible, a Lego building game, the J.Crew app to buy clothes in an immersive way, and so on. There is even Microsoft Word! It seems that there is enough content to explore for the first users.
Besides the apps, of course, there is Safari which opens for you the gates to all the web experiences… More info (Apple’s Immersive Video format)
More info (150 3D movies available at launch)
More info (Disney+ featuring 4 immersive environments)
More info (Netflix not available on Vision Pro)
More info (230 native apps on the store at launch)
More info (Super Fruit Ninja Screenshots)
More info (Lego Builder App Screenshots)
More info (Art Universe App Screenshots)
More info (Disney+ App Screenshots)
More info (Microsoft Word App Screenshots)
More info (J.Crew App Screenshots)
More info (Spatial Bible App Screenshots)
More info (The importance of Safari on Vision Pro)
Other relevant news
LG plans to release an XR headset next year
Electronic manufacturer LG is going to ship an XR headset in 2025. The company’s CEO Cho Joo-wan confirmed the plan to a reporter from the South Korean news website The Guru. It is not clear what this device will be, but a previous rumor talked about a collaboration between Meta and LG for the release of the Meta Quest Pro 2, which the same rumor set for 2025.
There is so a chance that LG is actually working on the Quest Pro 2, but it may also be that the CEO was referring to another headset. I guess we will have to wait until 2025 to discover what LG has in the works. May it be the SteamVR headset that it teased a few years ago and then disappeared? That would be an incredible comeback…
Varjo Aero has been discontinued
Finnish manufacturer Varjo has discontinued its first consumer-oriented headset, the Varjo Aero. A few months ago, the device had been discounted to $1000 (from an original price of $2000): I thought it was a move to answer the other prosumer-oriented headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond, but now in hindsight it is clear that it was a clearance sale. Varjo says “limited quantities” remain available from selected resellers.
From this news, it is clear that Varjo has stopped its efforts on the consumer market to focus on what it is good at, that is pleasing companies and enterprises with very high end headsets. The move from Varjo makes sense: its headset never took off, and now the Varjo XR-4 is on sale both for companies and for prosumers (there is a waiting list for people that want to buy it), so keeping on the market an old device whose sales were not skyrocketing risked just being a cost for the company.
News worth a mention
TCL is ready to launch RayNeo X2 glasses
TCL will launch a crowdfunding campaign in February for its RayNeo X2 AR glasses. These glasses bring with them two interesting innovations: the first one is the use of microLED displays; the second one concerns the headset being fully standalone. RayNeo XR does not require any connection with the smartphone, but it works as a standalone unit.
The glasses run on top of a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chipset, and the user can interact with them using a ring that goes around his finger. Thanks to the use of microLED, the display is very bright, but this comes at the cost of having just 25° of diagonal field of view. This device so brings many innovations, but they come with a hard price to pay.
TCL is running a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo for this headset, which is kinda a “whaddafuuuuuck” because TCL is a huge company, and for sure does not need to go on IndieGoGo to manufacture a device.
In any case, the launch of this device is expected for Q3 2024.
Hands-on sessions with Sony MR headset
I have found two articles about journalists who have been able to go hands-on with the just-announced mixed reality headset by Sony dedicated to enterprise usage. Both journalists praised the comfort of the device and the bright colors of the visuals. Also, the controllers seem well-shaped for use cases like prototyping and design.
More info (Hands-on Sony headset — CNET)
More info (Hands-on Sony headset — ZDNet)
Disney Research invented an omnidirectional treadmill
Disney Research has released a video featuring Lanny Smoot, the Disney Research Fellow and Imagineer that has just been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In the video, he shows various inventions of Disney Research and one of them is a sort of magic floorpad that acts as an omnidirectional treadmill that can also be used for Virtual Reality. It’s kinda cool stuff, even if I’m pretty sure it will never be released to the general public as a product.
Wi-Fi 7 may not be disruptive for VR streaming
Last week we discussed how the high bandwidth and low latency of Wi-Fi 7 may be very important to make the wireless connection of a headset to a PC perform almost like a tethered one. This week, a very interesting article by David Heaney informs us how this most probably is not going to happen: he states that while Wi-Fi 7 may still bring some improvements, the truth is that most of the latency in wireless streaming is in the frame encoding-decoding and not in the transmission. So even if we zero the network time, there is still a lot of latency because of decoding, and Wi-Fi 7 can do nothing about that.
PSVR2 may be a platform worth developing for
Reading the post-mortem of Suicide Guy VR Deluxe, an indie VR game developed by Italian studio Chubby Pixels, I’ve found a very interesting statement: “It is certainly a new platform on which it is commercially worth developing, since in just a month we already passed the 10.000 units sold of our VR game, and went on top 20 (PSVR2) games on the store for few days.”
If an indie studio says that it was able to sell 10K units of its game in a month on PSVR 2, it means that as a platform it is not that bad. I would be curious to hear the opinions of other creators, so if you have any data to share about your success on PSVR2 please reach out to me and let me know.
Discover XR at CES
This year, I didn’t manage to write my usual roundup of XR news at CES, but luckily I’ve found that Tom Emrich wrote a summary of the most interesting things he saw, and Charlie Fink made also an interesting roundup of the XR technologies that help in accessibility. I’m sharing them with you, so you can see what you lost in Vegas!
More info (Tom Emrich’s CES roundup)
More info (Charlie Fink’s CES accessibility roundup)
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners grossed around $100M
Skydance Interactive, the developers behind the very successful The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, has revealed that the whole franchise of the game has generated around $100M in revenues. Another success story in the VR space!
Some news about content
- Slender: The Arrival is coming “soon” to virtual reality
- Action game Tiger Blade is targeting Q1 for a Quest release
- VR multiplayer team shooter Vail is coming to a full release on February 15 for both Steam and Meta Store
- Grimlord, a Soulslike-inspired VR action RPG, is now available in Early Access on Steam and Quest App Lab
- Soundscape, which is defined by its creators as a “musical metaverse experience”, reaches PC VR next week
- Social VR space Helios VR has shut down
More info (Slender: The Arrival)
More info (Tiger Blade)
More info (Vail)
More info (Grimlord)
More info (Soundscape)
More info (Helios VR)
Some reviews about content
- Road To VR went hands on with BulletStorm VR and heavily criticized it.
Other news
Magic Leap gets another big funding round of half-billion dollars from Saudi Arabia
VividQ claims to have built the first lightfield hologram with retina resolution
Canon has unveiled many lenses and camera innovations dedicated to 3D VR content creation at CES 2024
News from partners (and friends)
Retropolis 2 keys giveaway!
My friends at Peanut Butter have just released Retropolis 2: Never Say Goodbye, the sequel of Retropolis, a game I personally loved, which mixed enigmas to solve, fun, and noir storytelling.
To celebrate the launch, they gave me some keys to share with you all to get the game for free! As usual, first come, first served.
Here you are some Quest keys:
AQQQK-76YTP-3FEGN-NGKC3-XGW7E
JY76G-KE9FP-RMPC6-FGHER-RP9G7
FN49N-TEQCF-TTF3G-YJMGQ-Q7TEE
PF4Y4-GAJHT-JPTN3–9E9E4-WQCCE
4XC3F-T76XH-7TCX3-XTMWC-F7HJM
6MJME-6QEHT-M3J7A-9XWX3–3WKW9
And this is a Steam key:
5BQ25-XF6DX-KP9FR
If no key is working for you, it means they have all already been taken. In this case, consider buying the game to support an amazing indie studio using the links here below:
Buy the game on Meta Quest Store
Buy the game on Steam
Some XR fun
No, I’m not envious of people that bought the Apple Vision Pro
Funny link
Thanks to you, Apple, people won’t confuse AR with VR anymore
Funny link
Will, you sneaky liar!
Funny link
What did Mario smoke?
Funny link
Well, at least people had fun. Sort of.
Funny link
I love Meta Support Agents… if they were the brain inside Terminator, the whole human race would be safe
Funny link
If you use ChatGPT to implement your company’s chatbot, be prepared for the consequences…
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
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
- Jonn Fredericks
- Jean-Marc Duyckaerts
- Reynaldo T Zabala
- Richard Penny
- Terry xR. Schussler
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Paolo Leoncini
- Immersive.international
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jake Rubin
- Alexis Huille
- Raghu Bathina
- Chris Koomen
- Cognitive3D
- Wisear (Yacine Achiakh)
- Masterpiece X
- Jennifer Granger
- Jason Moore
- Steve Biggs
- Julio Cesar Bolivar
- Jan Schroeder
- Kai Curtis
- Francesco Strada
- Sikaar Keita
- Ramin Assadollahi
- Juan Sotelo
- Andrew Sheldon
- Chris Madsen
- Horacio Torrendell
- Andrew Deutsch
- Fabien Benetou
- Tatiana Kartashova
- Marco “BeyondTheCastle” Arena
- Eloi Gerard
- Adam Boyd
- Jeremy Dalton
- Joel Ward
- Alex P
- Lynn Eades
- Donald P
- Casie Lane
- Catherine Henry
- Qcreator
- Ristband (Anne McKinnon & Roman Rappak)
- Dimo Pepelyashev
- Stephen Robnett
- KaihatsuJai
- Christopher Boyd
- Sb
- Pieter Siekerman
- Enrico Poli
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
- Liam James O’Malley
- Hillary Charnas
- Wil Stevens
- Brian Peiris
- Francesco Salizzoni
- Alan Smithson
- Steve R
- Brentwahn
- Matt Cool
- Simplex
- Gregory F Gorsuch
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Apple)
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