Quest 2 users have a few choices when it comes to cutting the cable and playing PC VR games over Wi-Fi. You can opt for something like a dedicated dongle, or simply configure your network for the most optimal Wi-Fi setup, which usually means having your PC connected directly to the 2.4/5Ghz router with an Ethernet cable and maintaining line of sight with the router. If your PC has Intel’s latest Wi-Fi 6e AX1690 card though, that’s about to change.
Intel announced at CES 2023 that they’ve partnered with Meta to make better use of its flagship Wi-Fi card by optimizing it for use with Quest 2, which means reduced latency and no need for Ethernet cables connecting to your PC.
As reported by Wi-Fi Now, Intel says its Killer Wi-Fi 6e AX1690 card is now capable of using its Double Connect Technology (DCT) for VR headsets like Quest 2. Although the product of an Intel/Meta partnership, Intel’s it’s likely other standalone headsets will benefit too, including Pico 4 and the newly unveiled Vive XR Elite too.
Intel says AX1690, which is compatible with the Intel’s 13th-gen Core HX platform, is capable of reducing overall wireless PC VR gaming latency from 30ms to just 5ms, essentially making it indistinguishable from conventional wired connections, such as Link. We haven’t seen it in action yet, so we’re reserving judgment for now, but it basically seems like having all the functionality of that slick $99 dongle from D-Link, albeit built into your PC gaming rig.
Image courtesy Intel
“I’m a firm believer that pushing the boundaries of wireless in VR and AR will only be possible if the whole industry work together,” said Meta Reality Labs Wireless Technology chief Bruno Cendon Martin. “I’m extremely happy to see the announce today by Intel Corporation Wireless CTO Carlos Cordeiro of the work we’ve been doing together to get Wireless PC VR to the next level with Meta Quest and Intel Killer.”
Intel also released a video to demonstrate the benefits of using two simultaneous Wi-Fi connections which enable VR headsets to wirelessly access data directly from a PC (1-hop) vs. through an access point (2-hops) for reduced latency and better PC VR gaming experiences throughout the home.
Ioanna is a writer at SHIFT. She likes the transition from old to modern, and she’s all about shifting perspectives. Ioanna is a writer at SHIFT. She likes the transition from old to modern, and she’s all about shifting perspectives.
The first ever orbital satellite launch from the UK — and Europe — is set for takeoff tonight (Monday, January 9). The so-called “Start Me UP” mission, led by US-based Virgin Orbit, will set out from Spaceport Cornwall at Newquay Airport at around 21: 15 UTC.
You can watch the launch via Virgin Orbit’s livestream below:
Founded in 2010, the Plantation, Florida-based company initially exited the gate with consumer ambitions for its first AR headset, Magic Leap 1 (previously styled ‘One’). After awkwardly straddling the segment with its $2,300 AR headset, the company made a decisive pivot in mid-2020 when co-founder Rony Abovitz announced he would be stepping down as CEO, positioning the company to reprioritize its future devices away from consumers. It has since released Magic Leap 2, which is largely targeted at enterprise.
For a while, Evernote was on top of the world. The Californian note-taking app surfed the 2000s tech productivity boom to become the leader in its field. But then it fell from grace, becoming sluggish, buggy, and expensive. Users abandoned the platform, heading in droves to other note-taking apps.
On one hand, this could be concerning for remaining users. Evernote will no longer be an independent company, meaning there could be huge changes to its current direction. But on the other hand… good?
I was an Evernote user for close to a decade before I switched last year. Things had simply gotten too bad with the bloated, slow, and cumbersome software, so I turned to Bear, a streamlined and beautiful bit of app.
With a new owner, Evernote now has an opportunity for a clean start. Bending Spoons already has a suite of consumer apps that are modern, powerful, and intuitive, and we have to believe the Italian company will use its expertise to shape a new Evernote.
The question is what should it do? How can Bending Spoons bring Evernote to its former glory? Well, we have some ideas.
Speed up Evernote apps
This was one of the main reasons why I moved away from Evernote. While I used and loved some of the app’s features (such as web clipping and document scanning), the main reason I used Evernote was for, well, notes.
While the speed of writing and searching on desktop was acceptable, the same wasn’t true on mobile devices — especially if they were a few years old.
If Bending Spoons wants to bring the shine back to Evernote, making its range of apps as lightning fast as possible would be a good start.
This is a photo of the old Evernote app from a meetup in Paris. Credit: Heisenberg Media
Remove the bloat…
In the mid-2010s, as Evernote was in the midst of accepting huge amounts of VC funds, the company diversified its offerings in order to open up more revenue streams. What that buzzwordy sentence means in human speak is Evernote jammed a whole load of features into the app and tried to be active on as many stores as possible.
Much of this was poorly planned and tested, leading to the software being infamously described as a “bug-ridden elephant” by Jason Kincaid.
While there have been upgrades to Evernote since that have improved overall performance, it still feels that the app is trying to do too much. Of course, having multimedia capabilities and integration into multiple apps is great for some people, but Evernote’s core mission should be note-taking. Instead, it feels focused on things like chat, calendar, and tasks, despite these areas of its software performing far worse than competitors.
Bending Spoons should either look at shearing back Evernote’s features, or allowing people to easily deselect certain features so the app can act as seamlessly as possible.
…but combine app functionality
Evernote has an array of different apps outside of its core bit of software — and some of these should be folded back into the main product.
Aside from Web Clipper. That’s still an excellent extension and app.
On one hand, combining these apps into Evernote is antithetical to the above point of reducing bloat, but hear me out.
The software has tried to do many of the things you don’t want a note-taking app to do. Why, for example, would I ever want to chat on the same thing I’m writing on?
But look at those apps above again. They include a sketcher, a document scanner, and a handwriting app — all things that are useful to taking notes. Instead of being walled off from Evernote and largely forgotten about, these should be key features to make the process of taking notes as powerful as possible.
Reduce Evernote’s price
Cost was a huge element of me abandoning Evernote. At the time, I was paying €70 a year to take notes. That’s a silly amount of money — especially with how I used it.
I never got anywhere near the allocated 10GB a month of storage, had no need of calendar integration or task management, and never found a reason to connect to Google Drive. So what was I paying €70 a year for?
Bear — my current app — costs me around €14 ($15) for the same period, and I can’t say I’ve missed any of Evernote’s features since my transition.
I understand there will be some power users who want to use a full suite of features, but I guarantee there are scores more who just want to clip sites and store notes. So why not introduce a tier that’s closer to €20 a year? Something that offers all the basic features that people need?
Finally, Evernote must respect users
If Bending Spoons wants to save Evernote and for it to reclaim some its former glory, the first thing it should do is respect users. Stop pushing upgrades on people at every single possible opportunity. Stop being so overly restrictive on the number of devices individuals can use the free version with. Stop ignoring users’ complaints.
Instead, there needs to be a culture of respect and dialogue, treating those who use Evernote like people, rather than walking dollar signs.
Yes, Evernote has taken a fall, but it still has a strong enough brand and enough fans to become special again. The days of the unbridled tech boom are done, but there’s still a place for excellent apps doing simple things well. Let’s see if Bending Spoons can make that happen.
Across Europe and North America, more and more people are deciding to ditch their reliance on public utilities such as water, gas, and electricity to live and operate independently. And they’re doing so for a number of different reasons — a desire to connect with nature, be more self-sufficient, save energy, or generally live a more sustainable lifestyle are just a few.
In The Netherlands, this kind of living is increasingly seen as an attractive, and viable, option; there’s a whole thread dedicated to self-sustainable living in the r/Netherlands subreddit, and in 2016 The Netherlands became home to the first high-tech off-grid pilot eco-village developed by ReGen Villages.
“When COVID hit, almost overnight there was an exodus from urban areas. People were looking to move to the suburbs or the countryside because they wanted to feel like they could provide for themselves,” says founder James Ehrlich.
ReGen developed “Village OS” software, which not only uses machine learning to design and plan off-grid neighborhoods, but also acts as a local server, monitoring the village’s infrastructure for risks and improvements. This “digital twin” Ehrlich tells TNW, can, “understand the various nutritional flows, if you will, across the neighborhood.”
To power the eco-villages of the future, we’ll need to rethink the way we collect, use, and share energy. Watch as tech expert, Erwin van der Zande, explains how we can make energy grids smarter and more efficient.
Ehrlich knows how to develop off-grid communities that house 400-500 homes, as well as planning the different systems that come into play involving food, electricity, and water, so it’s pretty safe to say he’s an expert in off-grid living. We asked him: how can the average techie live off-grid?
Power
When it comes to actually powering your off-grid home, there are a few different options.
First, Ehrlich tells TNW, whether you’re retro-fitting your traditional home to make it less reliant on public utilities or building an off-grid home from scratch, it’s worth looking into how you can improve its energy efficiency.
Your traditional Dutch row house, made out of brick, is an energy sieve. But by putting a south facing glazing across the back, like a little greenhouse that’s connected to the back of the home, you can improve the R-Value [or insulation] of the house overall. It generates heat that comes back into the house and creates a bit of humidity, which is really nice during the dry winters. You can grow things there, it’s a lovely place to sit, to have coffee, tea, whatever.
Perhaps one of the most common, and increasingly affordable, off-grid energy sources are solar photovoltaics (PV), or solar panels. Solar panels allow you to capture sunlight, convert it into electricity, and store it in a battery.
“Solar voltaic is something that a lot of people use as a supplement to power their home, but also as a means to power their electric vehicle,” Ehrlich says. “There’s various companies that have this kind of battery storage now, so the technology is going to get better and better. This means [people living off-grid are] able to reduce their overall energy usage.”
But solar panels aren’t the only option, and also aren’t the best one for regions that don’t see a lot of sunlight (ahem, the Netherlands).
“People who live in a moderately windy area could put up a small wind turbine that doesn’t vibrate and doesn’t make a lot of noise,” Ehrlich says. “They’re a little more expensive, and the efficiency isn’t quite there yet, but they’re getting better. The point is they can be a supplement to battery storage when you don’t get much sun.”
The past few years has also seen a swathe of smart composting tech that’s far less smelly.
If you’re considering wind turbines, it’s worth looking through local government guidelines, like the U.S. Department of Energy’s checklist, which asks questions such as whether your area gets enough wind, if there’s enough physical space around you, and if towers are allowed in your area.
“Wind turbine technologies are getting better, smaller, blade free, and noise free, and are easy to fold up in case of storms or bad weather,” Ehrlich says.
Electric vehicles themselves can also be used as power sources by acting as bidirectional chargers. Many EVs, including several Kia models, are V2D-enabled, which means they act as large batteries that can power electronic devices using an internal or external socket.
Other types of bidirectional chargers include V2G (EVs that export energy to support electric grids), V2H (EVs that can power homes), and V2L (EVs that can power appliances or other EVs). For example, the Kia EV9 set to be released in 2023, will have vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functionality, meaning your car could export energy to the grid when demand is high.
Food and waste
Living off-grid can also extend to creating a self-sustaining food source. In fact, one of the earliest inspirations for ReGen Villages came from Ehrlich’s encounter with a biodynamic farming community.
I stumbled upon this lovely community in Northern California of organic, biodynamic, small plot family farmers and started to learn about eco villages. These wonderful, small communities had essentially cobbled together passive home technology connected to heat exchange with early solar PV panels, solar thermal, and other things like bio waste, anaerobic digestion, biomass, and biogas. I was really just blown away by the resiliency these measures are able to sustain and by the delicious food that was being produced on site.
For ReGen Villages, Ehrlich has developed a system that relies on, “a combination of non tilled soil farming, with at least one to two meters of good topsoil [and] permaculture, which essentially creates a completely edible neighborhood. You replace, wherever possible, the foliage with things that you can eat.
Over a period of time these orchards and food forests really start to produce and over produce. We marry that with controlled environment farming, either heated greenhouses or non heated greenhouses, depending on where we are in the world. In addition, we also include aquaponic and aquaculture systems, freshwater shrimp, and several different species of fish.”
Boiling water is slow and inefficient considering how much you need on a daily basis.
For an individual looking to move off-grid, but not join an eco village, Ehrlich says the same principles apply: “We strongly recommend that people replace their lawn, wherever possible, so that it can be food bearing.” This also has a profound social impact. “If enough people do it, you start to have this dialogue with your neighbors about what you’re producing, what you have extra, and what they have extra. We see that in our community.”
Ehrlich also mentions “light animal farms,” such as chicken coops, a single cow, or smaller herds and flocks of sheep, goats, and turkey — and not just as a food source.
The animal waste is actually a food and nutrition source for vermiculture. Anaerobic digestion kicks in. You also get heat and energy from anaerobic digestion produced by compost piles. In addition to that, black soldier fly larvae and aquatic worms eat their own weight every day in food and animal waste. They then become the perfect food for the chickens, fish, and other small animals. So it’s really an amazing circle of life.
For individuals looking to go off-grid, there are traditional composting methods, but the past few years has also seen a swathe of smart composting consumer tech that’s far less smelly, and can be brought inside or into urban environments.
Water
Having access to clean water is an incredibly important aspect of off-grid living and, well, basic survival.
While boiling water can help purify water, it’s slow and inefficient when considering how much water you need to stay hydrated, bathe, and more on a daily basis.
There are plenty of consumer-facing water filtration systems that remove viruses, bacteria, and pathogens, at all different price points. Several blogs about off-grid living have reviews of various waterfiltrationmethods and hardware.
An off-grid future
As Ehrlich points out, a lot of these off-grid systems and technologies have actually been around for a long time:
When my father was a kid in the early 30s, he vividly remembered electric vehicles in New York City being used to deliver ice, and as taxi cabs and small buses. But there were very powerful interests that didn’t want to see people potentially generating their own power, running their own vehicles, and having no need for oil changes, tuneups, etc.
Buckminster Fuller, an American architect, once said:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
As consumer hardware continues to evolve, and communities like ReGen Villages make off-grid living increasingly normalized, an off-grid future is not as far out of reach as we may think.
Incorporating XR—the umbrella term for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality—in classroom education can make learning more fun. It can also motivate students to take their studies more seriously. A recent survey by XR Association (XRA) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) presented this conclusion based on a poll of over 1,400 high school teachers across 50 US states. Let’s look at the survey results.
Optimism High for XR’s Classroom Use
Foremost of the highlights in the nationwide poll was the finding that 77% of educators believe in the power of extended reality to ignite curiosity and engagement in class. This is especially important given that student motivation and morale are reported to have dropped in the 2020-2021 school year.
As Sean Wybrant, a computer science teacher at Colorado Spring’s William J. Palmer High School, put it: “Imagine how much better a student will understand what happens in Othello if they could actually step into the play and see it. Imagine how much better we could tell historical narratives if we could put people in recreations of famous situations based on documentation of those time periods.”
Secondly, XR doesn’t only make students eager to learn. Seventy-seven percent of teachers also see its potential in spurring interaction and building empathy among classmates. XRA says in its report that creating immersive worlds allows students to exchange ideas and understand each other in new ways.
Thirdly, 67% of respondents agree with XRA’s advocacy to incorporate extended reality technology into the curricula. Educators teaching the following subjects believe that course-specific XR experiences would be beneficial for students:
Earth sciences (94%)
Physics and space science (91%)
Math (89%)
English language (86%)
World languages (87%)
History and social studies (90%)
Social sciences (91%)
Computer science (91%)
Visual and performing arts (91%)
Physical education (88%)
Career and technical education (91%)
“To get a good sense of XR’s potential in schools, you have to ask the teachers and staff who will be administering this technology,” said Stephanie Montgomery, the XRA Vice President of Research and Best Practices. “The survey’s results suggest that VR, AR, and MR technology is well-positioned to become an essential teaching tool in school classrooms across the country.”
At the same time, 58% of the survey respondents said that teachers should get training for XR classroom use. Moreover, 62% believe in developing XR standards before integrating the technologies into regular curricula.
XR Association CEO Elizabeth Hyman believes in the extensive ripple effect that will result from making educators XR-ready. “If teachers understand XR technology and are empowered to contribute to the way in which it is incorporated into the curriculum, everyone—students, their guardians, and the surrounding community—will be able to take advantage of its benefits,” she said.
However, despite the positive outlook, 57% of teachers recognize the costs of using AR and VR devices and admit that access to funds will determine access to such technology. Nevertheless, poll participants believe XR’s benefits will extend beyond the classroom. Seventy-seven percent of teachers said the technology helps equip students with skills they can apply in their chosen careers, especially since, according to forecasts, jobs in extended reality may reach 23 million by 2030.
Myths About XR Classroom Use Debunked
The XRA-ISTE survey dispelled several myths about extended reality’s acceptance in education. One of these misconceptions is that XR is only for gaming. The poll results and teachers’ comments reveal that they are aware of the usefulness of this technology in geography, math, history, and other subjects.
Moreover, the survey response from educators refutes the popular notion that XR technology would not be the “best fit” for the classroom. Seventy-eight percent of respondents believe in the benefits of extended reality technologies in class.
Finally, the belief that XR will distract students from learning only got a 15% vote among the survey participants. The majority support the opportunities that come with extended reality when incorporated into lessons.
Teens Excited About XR
Earlier last year, XRA also conducted a separate survey that sought teens’ views on current use cases for XR and their expectations for this technology. The results released in May 2022 revealed that 40% of teens have used either AR or VR in school and 50% describe their experience with these technologies as positive. Thirty-eight percent would like to own a headset in the future.
Even though there are potential concerns around immersive technologies, which teens are aware of, they are still excited about using XR in education, in a responsible way. Almost 4 in 5 teens think extended reality can impact lives positively. They believe that XR can improve their lives in the areas of fun (67%), creativity (61%), and learning (48%). Moreover, 52% of respondents expressed interest in taking a college course with extended reality integrated into its curriculum.
Read the Latest Addition to the XRA Developers’ Guide
XRA is proactively advancing XR application in classroom learning. It recently launched a new chapter in its Developers Guide on designing immersive lessons for high schoolers. The fresh chapter discusses current classroom needs, successful use cases, and industry-backed best practices for promoting safe and inclusive classroom learning through extended reality that addresses parent, teacher, and student concerns.
HTC officially unveiled its next consumer-focused headset at CES 2023 today. Called Vive XR Elite, the standalone mixed reality device boasts a feature set that positions HTC to go toe-to-toe with Meta’s Quest Pro, but at a notably cheaper price of $1,100.
The moniker ‘Flowcus’, a portmanteau coined by VR analyst and YouTuber Brad Lynch when the headset’s design was initially leaked in November, seems to ring true with Vive XR Elite. The design seems very much like a mashup of Vive Flow, a casual VR content viewer using pancake lenses, and Vive Focus 3, the company’s enterprise-focused standalone.
Vive XR Elite is starting pre-orders today, with shipping slated for sometime in late February. There’s no exact launch date on the books, so in the meantime let’s talk about some of the features HTC announced today, some key specs still in need of clarification, and the headset’s slew of gaming-focused content.
But first, the trailer:
Features
Unlike HTC products in recent memory, Vive XR Elite is specifically targeting gaming, fitness, productivity and on-the-go content consumption, the latter of which is thanks to a convertible battery headstrap that can be unplugged in favor of a glasses-like temple pieces.
It’s an interesting feature that’s a first for any major VR headset, which would hypothetically allow you to lean back in a seat without having a bulky back-mounted battery to contend with.
Of course, you’ll need some other power source to run the Vive XR Elite if you opt to remove the battery, be it a separate powerbank or a USB cable connected to the mains.
What’s more, Vive XR Elite is a mixed reality device, meaning it can switch between standard VR games and those that use color passthrough AR, putting it in the same category as its chief competitor Meta Quest Pro. And like Quest Pro, Vive XR Elite can be connected to a PC via USB-C for PC VR content, as well as wirelessly over WiFi, with support up to WiFi 6E. We’ll talk a little more about content in a bit.
Below, you’ll see the headset has four room-tracking camera sensors, one on each side and one hidden respectively under each faceplate. In the center is a single RGB camera for color passthrough as well as a depth sensor, which in theory would increase accuracy of room-scale tracking and object recognition.
Image courtesy HTC
Vive XR Elite also boasts Android app streaming, letting you interact with Android apps and games on a virtual cinema screen of “300 inches,” the company says. Users can also link Bluetooth gamepads to their phones for a fuller mobile gaming experience. That’s probably the only way you’d catch us playing Fortnite on a VR headset like this, since manipulating controls on the phone’s touch surface probably wouldn’t be effective.
Here’s a top-down look at the headset, which gives you a good view of how the back-mounted battery attaches, a look at the tightening twist knob, a clear look at the battery’s USB-C charging port. It’s also impressively slim, owing to the inclusion of pancake lenses.
Image courtesy HTC
In addition to supporting the same controllers that come with Vive Focus 3, the headset also supports Vive Wrist Tracker, a hand-tracking device that can be attached to the user’s wrist, or to objects like gun controllers, Ping-Pong paddles, or tools.
Here’s a view that shows headset’s diopter settings for its pancake lenses, which ostensibly allows near-sighted users to go without glasses, going up to -6D independently for both eyes. That little slider below the right lens is a mechanical IPD adjuster going from 54-73mm; nope, no eye-tracking here, at least not without the optional eye-tracking module that’s arriving at some point this year.
Image courtesy HTC
Audio is served up via two open-ear speakers integrated into the arms of the headset. We’ve poured over all product images and have yet to see space for a 3.5mm audio jack for external audio. That hole near the bridge of the headset appears to be an attach point for the forthcoming facial-tracking module, which is also slate to arrive sometime this year. We’re currently at CES, so we’re adding that to our list of features in need of clarification.
With a consumer target clearly in its sights, HTC is offering up a slew of gaming-focused content for Vive XR Elite (full list below) that includes what the company says is “100 new pieces of MR and VR content” including Demeo, Hubris, Yuki, Maestro, Les Mills Body Combat, FigminXR, Unplugged, Finger Gun, and more.
Post-launch content will include Everslaught: Invasion, and later in the year full MR games like Eggscape. As you know, a consumer VR headset is nothing without games, so it’s good to see HTC do its due diligence to attract some of the top games to the headset. No Beat Saber, but we wouldn’t expect Meta to prioritize porting the popular block-slashing rhythm game to such a direct competitor.
Image courtesy HTC
The company says Vive XR Elite will also be available for enterprise users at some point, with more information coming later this year.
Vive XR Elite also has connectors for both face and eye-tracking modules, which are set to launch separately sometime in 2023. We’ll be going hands-on at CES 2023, so make sure to check back for our full impressions of HTC’s next big leap into consumer VR. We won’t be able to say just how good a proposition Vive XR Elite truly is until we get our hands on it, and see if it really stacks up to the competition. As it is, it lacks eye-tracking for out of the box social presence and foveated rendering, and we still don’t know how it goes mano a mano with Quest Pro in the passthrough department with its single RGB passthrough camera.
Key Specs
Here’s an abridged spec breakdown. We’re working to get a more detailed list once we go hands-on here at CES 2023. We’ve included question marks (?) where we’ll probe for more detail in-person:
External Battery – removable and hot-swappable, 30W fast charge, 26.6Wh, mAh(?), typical playtime(?)
Price
One of the biggest selling points is HTC Vive XR Elite’s price, which although clearly not near the sub-$500 console price that typically gets us excited, it’s coming in a fair bit cheaper than the $1,500 Meta Quest Pro.
Note: many regions include taxes calculated in the final price above (UK, EU, AUS, etc) but a notable exception is the US. Sales tax varies widely through the US based on each state, so the final price in USD could range from exactly $1,099 in a minority of states with little to no sales tax to around $1,240 in states on the higher end of the range. Here’s the regional price breakdown:
US $1,099 exc. VAT
UK £1,299 inc. VAT
DE/FR €1,399 inc. VAT
NO 15,499 NOK
SWE 16,299 SEK
DK 11,099 DKK
A$ 2,099 inc. GST
NZ$ 2,299 inc. GST
Content
HTC provided a full content lineup, although the company hasn’t made it entirely clear which games are considered launch-day titles and which will come post-launch. HTC is calling the list below “launch window content,” so we’re checking with them now and will update once we know.
In any case, you’ll see a lot of overlap between the latest games on Quest 2 here. Highlights include Demeo, Green Hell VR, Les Mills Bodycombat, Unplugged, Hubris, Ancient Dungeon, The Last Clockwinder, and Ultrawings 2 to name a few.
We have boots on the ground at CES 2023, so check back soon for our impressions of Vive XR Elite and all things AR/VR for this year’s biggest consumer electronics show.
Wave, the virtual entertainment company known for putting on a ton of VR concerts a few years back, actually deprecated VR support for its app back in early 2021 to focus on streaming its brand of digital concerts to traditional platforms. Now, through a new partnership with VR headset creator Pico, Wave is set to jump back into VR with more concerts, available exclusively on Pico devices.
Through the partnership, Wave says it’s developing “a series of immersive 3D concert experiences with massively world-renowned artists” for Pico’s line of consumer headsets. Those include Pico Neo 3 and the new Pico 4 headset.
Its debut concert is set to feature The Calvin Harris Experience, taking place on January 13th at 8: 00PM GMT (local time here). The experience is said to last approximately 1 hour, which includes a five-minute preshow and 25 min exclusive extended set.
Only fans in Europe and Asia will have access, the company says, the only markets where Pico’s consumer headsets are currently available. The VR-accessible concert is said to be an “extended version,” of which only a portion will be broadcasted on TikTok LIVE.
The concert is slated to take fans on what Wave calls “a musical journey through Calvin’s virtual universe, a metaverse party filled with audio reactive visuals in a nature inspired luminous world.”
Calvin Harris is set to perform live as a virtual avatar in an immersive environment that Pico users can join and explore for themselves. Users will also have the opportunity to influence the live experience by “interacting with others, creating dazzling effects throughout the show by clapping, writing personalized messages in the air, and even join Calvin on stage.”
To take part in the concert, users must download the Pico Video app from the Pico App Store, then select The Calvin Harris Experience in your Pico Video feed on the day of the show.
You can RSVP to Wave’s premier Calvin Harris concert here. Rebroadcasts for Pico users will re-air daily on weekends starting Jan 14-26 at 8pm GMT.
Sony has announced that the latest title in its longstanding racing franchise, Gran Turismo 7, will support PSVR 2 at launch.
This week during Sony’s CES 2023 conference, the company announced that Gran Turismo 7 will support PSVR 2 at the headset’s launch via a free upgrade for existing owners.
Not much was shared about exactly how the game’s VR compatibility will work, including whether it would support the headset’s new motion controllers or rely on the standard PS5 gamepad.
This won’t be the first Gran Turismo game with VR capabilities. GT Sport (2017) offered support for the original PSVR headset, though only partially, with players being limited to a subset of the game’s modes, with the PS4 gamepad as the only form of input.
We’re hoping that this latest iteration of the game and headset will offer more comprehensive compatibility.
On stage during the event, SIE President Jim Ryan also shared that the company has sold more than 30 million PS5 units, and also said that customers should expect to have a much easier time finding the console available for purchase “from this point forward.” That’s of course important for impending launch of PSVR 2 next month, as anyone who has been waiting to upgrade to the new headset will also need the company’s latest console.
