The XR Week Peek (2024.1.1): Quest is selling well for the holidays, UEVR injector released, and more!
Hello everyone and happy new year!!! It’s 2024, a new year when VR can be dead 🙂
I renew my best wishes for you, hoping that 2024 will bring you and the people you love everything that you have always wished for. And I’m sure that among these things there are my roundups of the best XR news. So here you are a summary of all the (very few) things in XR that happened during these Winter Holidays!
Top news of the week
Meta Quest had a great Christmas
All the indicators point to the fact that Meta Quest had a great Christmas like it has happened all the past years. This is noticeable especially by two things:
- The Meta Quest smartphone app, which is fundamental to configure the headset, has been the most downloaded app on the whole App Store
- The applications on the Meta Quest store have all seen a spike in usage these days. For instance, Gorilla Tag has now 2.5x more concurrent players than it had before Christmas. I’ve seen an increase in usage of my applications, too.
This does not mean at all that VR is getting mainstream or anything like that. But it means that VR is still appealing as a gift for Christmas, which is a positive thing, and so we are getting a lot of new users into our market, which is wonderful news. If I had to bet, I would say that more than 50% of these new users are getting the very affordable Meta Quest 2.
If you just received a Quest for Christmas and you are reading this post… welcome to VR!
More info (Meta Quest app has been the most downloaded app)
More info (Number of users of VR apps has increased)
Other relevant news
Praydog’s UEVR injector has been released!
The time has finally come: on the last day of 2023, Praydog has released to the world his first version of UEVR, a universal VR mod for all games made with Unreal Engine. It means that you can take whatever game made in Unreal Engine for flatscreen, apply this universal mod, and immediately transform it into a VR game! According to the first people who have used it, it is incredibly easy to use, and in a few minutes, you can port to VR all your favorite PC games (provided that they are made with Unreal Engine).
This is the best thing that has happened to the PCVR community in the last 2 years. With the success of standalone headsets, all game studios are focused on Quest, and no one is investing any more in high-budget games for PC VR. There are still some great games released once in a while, like Vertigo 2, but most of the time, people on PC VR don’t have enough content to play. With this universal mod, everything changes: PC VR people, as long as they are a bit tech savvy, can buy a flatscreen game and easily convert it into a VR one.
Theoretically, now, many AAA games have immediately become VR-compatible. In practice, remember that is still a modding tool, so the experience with the various games may vary, and some games may not feel great to be used in VR. Also, this is only for Unreal Engine-based games, the ones made with other engines can not be converted this way.
But still, this is massive news for VR, and a great way to start the new year for all the VR community!
More info (UEVR official website)
More info (The announcement of the launch on Twitter)
More info (Gamertag commenting on UEVR’s ease of use)
A look back at this year in augmented reality
AR expert Tom Emrich has written one of his amazing roundup posts in which he summarized how his 23 predictions for 2023 turned out to be. The post is pretty long, but it is worth a read during these vacation days because it well summarizes what have been the most relevant XR trends for the past year.
News worth a mention
Samsung may use Google Soli in its headset
Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm are building together a headset that may compete with the Apple Vision Pro. Last week I’ve already told you about two new chips that Samsung has built and that may be used in this headset. And this week I got to read that the device may use Google Soli for finger tracking. The Apple Vision Pro uses standard cameras to track the hands, but Google many years ago had already developed a technology, called Soli, which used radar to detect tiny movements of the fingers in front of a smartphone. The same tech can be a way for the new Samsung headset to reliably detect finger movements to be used as inputs. I’ve always been fascinated by Soli, and it would be great to see it used inside an XR device.
Snap may be in talks with OpenAI
According to a rumor, Snap is in talks with OpenAI to bring Chat GPT 4, with all its image recognition capabilities, to the Snap Spectacles smartglasses. This way the smartglasses could be able to understand what the user has in his surroundings.
PSVR 2 is now kinda usable with a PC
iVRy has finalized his hard work to make PSVR 2 compatible with PC so that it can be used for PCVR. He succeeded in his task, and even if the solution requires a custom hardware adapter and can work only with AMD graphics cards, it is still a remarkable achievement!
Meta Quest removes Chromecast streaming
One of the easiest ways to stream the content of your Meta Quest to a TV was through streaming to a Chromecast device. This was very handy to let everyone see what the VR user was seeing during a party. It seems that Meta is deprecating this feature, removing it from the next runtimes, and this is not good news.
Daily reminder about the future of displays
Micro-LED and Micro-OLED are the future of XR displays because they can make headsets smaller and with much brighter visuals. This article by MIT Technology Review gives you an overview of them.
One piece of news about content
- Timeless Heart VR is a narrative-focused game with a Japanese anime style, expected to launch in 2024.
Other news
Chet Faliszek (formerly at Valve) has made a video to comment on the current state of virtual reality. He’s not very positive about it
Game Informer has written an article about the QA process of virtual reality games. Spoiler: there is a lot of nausea and vertigo involved
One of the coolest videos I’ve seen this week has been about people playing tennis in colocated mixed reality on a real tennis field
Apple is trying to catch up with Google in mapping the world
P&C Solution is going to unveil its METALENSE 2 XR headset at CES 2024
News from partners (and friends)
Just happy new year
No promotion specifically for anyone today… just a big hug to anyone that supported me in 2023! And another hug to whoever supported me on Patreon.
You, whatever kind of support you gave me, are the best
My Patreon link
Some XR fun
The WTF of the week is Sony patenting a sort of huge feet trackball to use with PSVR 2. At least feticists would be happy with this one.
Funny link
Zuck, can you handle the truth?
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
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- Wisear (Yacine Achiakh)
- Masterpiece X
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- Jan Schroeder
- Kai Curtis
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- Marco “BeyondTheCastle” Arena
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- Qcreator
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- Francesco Salizzoni
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- Simplex
- Gregory F Gorsuch
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by VRROOM)
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