VR Industry

Apple is Approaching Social on Vision Pro the Way Meta Should Have All Along

Apple, apple vision pro, apple vision pro facetime, apple vision pro shareplay, apple vision pro social, Feature, News, Social VR, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / October 17, 2023

As a leading social media company, it seemed like Meta would be in the best position to create a rich social experience on its XR headsets. But after almost a decade of building XR platforms, interacting with friends on Meta’s headsets is still a highly fragmented affair. With Vision Pro, Apple is taking a different approach—making apps social right out of the box.

Meta’s Social Strategy in a Nutshell

Horizon Worlds is the manifestation of Meta’s social XR strategy. A space where you and your friends can go to build or play novel virtual games and experiences. It’s the very beginnings of the company’s ‘metaverse’ concept: an unlimited virtual space where people can share new experiences and maybe make some new virtual friends along the way.

But if you step out of Horizon, the rest of the social experience on the Quest platform quite fragmented.

The most basic form of ‘social’ is just hanging out with people you already know, doing things you already know you like to do—like watching a movie, playing a board game, or listening to music. But doing any of that on Meta’s headsets means jumping through a fragmented landscape of different apps and different ways to actually get into the same space with your friends.

On Quest, some apps use their own invite system and some use Meta’s invite system (when it works, anyway). Some apps use your Meta avatar and some use their own. As far as the interfaces and how you get in the same place with your friends, it’s different from app to app to app. Some even have separate accounts and friends lists.

And let’s not forget, many apps on Quest aren’t social in the first place. You might have made an awesome piece of 3D art but have no way to show your friends except to figure out how to take a screenshot and get it off of your headset to send to their phone. Or you might want to watch a movie release, but you can only do it by yourself. Or maybe you want to sit back and listen to a new album…maybe you can dig through the Quest store to find an app that allows a shared browser experience so you can listen through YouTube with someone else?

Apple’s Approach to Social on Vision Pro

Apple is taking a fundamentally different approach with Vision Pro by making social the expectation rather than the rule, and providing a common set of tools and guidelines for developers to build from in order to make social feel cohesive across the platform. Apple’s vision isn’t about creating a server full of a virtual strangers and user-generated experiences, but to make it easy to share the stuff you already like to do with the people you already know.

This obviously leans into the company’s rich ecosystem of existing apps—and the social technologies the company has already battle-tested on its platforms.

SharePlay is the feature that’s already present on iOS and MacOS devices that lets people watch, listen, and experience apps together through FaceTime. And on Vision Pro, Apple intends to use its SharePlay tech to make many of its own first-party apps—like Apple TV, Apple Music, and Photos—social right out of the box, and it expects developers to do so too. In the company’s developer documentation, the company says it expects “most visionOS apps to support SharePlay.”

At WWDC earlier this year, Apple talked about how it’s expanding SharePlay to take social to a whole new dimension on Vision Pro.

For one, SharePlay apps will support ‘Spatial Personas’ on Vision Pro (that’s what Apple calls its avatars which are generated from a scan of your face). That means SharePlay apps on the platform will share a common look for participants. Apple is also providing several pre-configured room layouts that are designed for specific content, so developers don’t need to think about where to place users and how to manage their movement (and to finally put an end to apps spawning people inside of each other).

For instance, if a developer is building a movie-watching app, one of the templates puts all users side-by-side in front of a screen. But for a more interactive app where everyone is expected to actively collaborate there’s a template that puts users in a circle around a central point. Another template is based on presenting content to others, with some users close to the screen and others further away in a viewing position.

With SharePlay, Apple also provides the behind-the-scenes piping to keep apps synchronized between users, and it says the data shared between participants is “low-latency” and end-to-end encrypted. That means you can have fun with your friends and not be worried about anyone listening in.

People You Already Know, Things You Already Do

Perhaps most importantly, Apple is leaning on every user’s existing personal friend graph (ie: the people you already text, call, or email), rather than trying to create a bespoke friends list that lives only inside Vision Pro.

Rather than launching an app and then figuring out how to get your friends into it, with SharePlay Apple is focused on getting together with your friends first, then letting the group seamlessly move from one app to the next as you decide what you want to do.

Starting a group is as easy as making a FaceTime call to a friend whose number you already know. Then you’re already chatting virtually face-to-face before deciding what you want to do. In the mood for a movie? Launch Apple TV and fire up whatever you want to watch—your friend is still right there next to you. Now the movie is over; want to listen to some music while you discuss the plot? Fire up Spotify and put on the movie’s soundtrack to set the scene.

Social by Default

Even apps that don’t explicitly have multi-user experience built-in can be ‘social’ by default, by allowing one user to screen-share the app with others. Only the host will be able to interact with the content, but everyone else will be able to see and talk about it in real-time.

It’s the emphasis on ‘social by default’, ‘things you already do’, and ‘people you already know’ that will make social on Vision Pro feel completely different than what Meta is building on Quest with Horizon Worlds and its ecosystem of fragmented social apps.

Familiar Ideas

Ironically, Meta experimented with this very style of social XR years ago, and it was actually pretty good. Facebook Spaces was an early social XR effort which leveraged your existing friends on Facebook, and was focused on bringing people together in a template-style layout around their own photo and video content. You could even do a Messenger Video Chat with people outside of VR to make them part of the experience.

Facebook Spaces was a eerily similar microcosm of what Apple is now doing across the Vision Pro platform. But as with many things on Quest, Meta didn’t have the follow-through to get Spaces from ‘good’ to ‘great’, nor the internal will to set a platform-wide expectation about how social should work on its headsets. The company shut down Spaces in 2019, but even at the time we thought there was much to learn from the effort.

Will Apple Succeed Where Meta Faltered?

Quest 3 (left) and Apple Vision Pro (right) | Based on images courtesy Meta, Apple

Making basic flat apps social out of the box on Vision Pro will definitely make it easier for people to connect on the headset and ensure they can already do familiar things with friends. But certainly on Meta’s headsets the vast majority of ‘social’ is in discrete multiplayer gaming experiences.

And for that, it has to be pointed out that there’s big limitations to SharePlay’s capabilities on Vision Pro. While it looks like it will be great for doing ‘things you already do’ with ‘people you already know’, as a framework it certainly doesn’t comport to many of the multiplayer gaming experiences that people are doing on headsets today.

For one, SharePlay experiences on Vision Pro only support up to five people (probably due to the performance implications of rendering too many Spatial Personas).

Second, SharePlay templates seem like they’ll only support limited person-to-person interaction. Apple’s documentation is a little bit vague, but the company notes: “although the system can place Spatial Personas shoulder to shoulder and it supports shared gestures like a handshake or ‘high five,’ Spatial Personas remain apart.” That makes it sound like users won’t be able to have free-form navigation or do things like pass objects directly between each other.

And when it comes to fully immersive social experiences (ie: Rec Room) SharePlay probably isn’t the right call anyway. Many social VR experiences (like games) will want to be able to render different avatars that fit the aesthetic of the experience, and certainly more than five at once. They’ll also want more control over networking and how users can move and interact with each other. At that point, building on SharePlay might not make much sense, but we hope it can still be used to help with initial group formation and joining other immersive apps together.

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The Biggest Announcements at Meta Connect and What it All Means for the Future of XR

Connect 2023, Feature, Meta, meta connect 2023, News, VR Industry / Mike M. / October 5, 2023

Meta Connect 2023 has wrapped up, bringing with it a deluge of info from one of the XR industry’s biggest players. Here’s a look at the biggest announcements from Connect 2023, but more importantly, what it all means for the future of XR.

Last week marked the 10th annual Connect conference, and the first Connect conference after the Covid pandemic to have an in-person component. The event originally began as Oculus Connect in 2014. Having been around for every Connect conference, it’s amazing when I look around at just how much has changed and how quickly it all flew by. For those of you who have been reading and following along for just as long—I’m glad you’re still on this journey with us!

So here we are after 10 Connects. What were the big announcements and what does it all mean?

Meta Quest 3

Obviously, the single biggest announcement is the reveal and rapid release of Meta’s latest headset, Quest 3. You can check out the full announcement details and specs here and my hands-on preview with the headset here. The short and skinny is that Quest 3 is a big hardware improvement over Quest 2 (but still being held back by its software) and it will launch on October 10th starting at $500.

Quest 3 marks the complete dissolution of Oculus—the VR startup that Facebook bought back in 2014 to jump-start its entrance into XR. It’s the company’s first headset to launch following Facebook’s big rebrand to Meta, leaving behind no trace of the original and very well-regarded Oculus brand.

Apples and Oranges

On stage at Connect, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Quest 3 the “first mainstream mixed reality headset.” By “mainstream” I take it he meant ‘accessible to the mainstream’, given its price point. This was clearly in purposeful contrast to Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro which, to his point, is significantly less accessible given its $3,500 price tag. Though he didn’t mention Apple by name, his comments about accessibility, ‘no battery pack’, and ‘no tether’ were clearly aimed at Vision Pro.

Mixed Marketing

Meta is working hard to market Quest 3’s mixed reality capabilities, but for all the potential the feature has, there is no killer app for the technology. And yes, having the tech out there is critical to creating more opportunity for such a killer app to be created, but Meta is substantially treating its developers and customers as beta testers of this technology. The ‘market it and they will come’ approach that didn’t seem to pan out too well for Quest Pro.

Personally I worry about the newfangled feature being pushed so heavily by Meta that it will distract the body of VR developers who would otherwise better serve an existing customer base that’s largely starving for high-quality VR content.

Regardless of whether or not there’s a killer app for Quest 3’s improved mixed reality capabilities, there’s no doubt that the tech could be a major boon to the headset’s overall UX, which is in substantial need of a radical overhaul. I truly hope the company has mixed reality passthrough turned on as the default mode, so when people put on the headset they don’t feel immediately blind and disconnected from reality—or need to feel around to find their controllers. A gentle transition in and out of fully immersive experiences is a good idea, and one that’s well served with a high quality passthrough view.

Apple, on the other hand, has already established passthrough mixed reality as the default when putting on the headset, and for now even imagines it’s the mode users will spend most of their time in. Apple has baked this in from the ground-up, but Meta still has a long way to go to perfect it in their headsets.

Augments vs. Volumes

Several Connect announcements also showed us how Meta is already responding to the threat of Apple’s XR headset, despite the vast price difference between the offerings.

For one, Meta announced ‘Augments’, which are applets developers will be able to build that users can place in permanently anchored positions in their home in mixed reality. For instance, you could place a virtual clock on your wall and always see it there, or a virtual chessboard on your coffee table.

This is of course very similar to Apple’s concept of ‘Volumes’, and while Apple certainly didn’t invent the idea of having MR applets that live indefinitely in the space around you (nor Meta), it’s clear that the looming Vision Pro is forcing Meta to tighten its focus on this capability.

Meta says developers will be able to begin building ‘Augments’ on the Quest platform sometime next year, but it isn’t clear if that will happen before or after Apple launches Vision Pro.

Microgrestures

Augments aren’t the only way that Meta showed at Connect that it’s responding to Apple. The company also announced that its working on a system for detecting ‘microgestures’ for hand-tracking input—planned for initial release to developers next year—which look awfully similar to the subtle pinching gestures that are primarily used to control Vision Pro:

Again, neither Apple nor Meta can take credit for inventing this ‘microgesture’ input modality. Just like Apple, Meta has been researching this stuff for years, but there’s no doubt the sudden urgency to get the tech into the hands of developers is related to what Apple is soon bringing to market.

A Leg Up for Developers

Meta’s legless avatars have been the butt of many-a-joke. The company had avoided the issue of showing anyone’s legs because they are very difficult to track with an inside-out headset like Quest, and doing a simple estimation can result in stilted and awkward leg movements.

But now the company is finally adding leg estimation to its avatar models, and giving developers access to the same tech to incorporate it into their games and apps.

And it looks like the company isn’t just succumbing to the pressure of the legless avatar memes by spitting out the same kind of third-party leg IK solutions that are being used in many existing VR titles. Meta is calling its solution ‘generative legs’, and says the system leans on tracking of the user’s upper body to estimate plausibly realistic leg movements. A demo at Connect shows things looking pretty good:

It remains to be seen how flexible the system is (for instance, how will it look if a player is bowling or skiing, etc?).

Meta says the system can replicate common leg movements like “standing, walking, jumping, and more,” but also notes that there are limitations. Because the legs aren’t actually being tracked (just estimated) the generative legs model won’t be able to replicate one-off movements, like raising your knee toward your chest or twisting your feet at different angles.

Virtually You

The addition of legs coincides with another coming improvement to Meta’s avatar modeling, which the company is calling inside-out body tracking (IOBT).

While Meta’s headsets have always tracked the player’s head and hands using the headset and controllers, the rest of the torso (arms, shoulders, neck) was entirely estimated using mathematical modeling to figure out what position they should be in.

For the first time on Meta’s headsets, IOBT will actually track parts of the player’s upper body, allowing the company’s avatar model to incorporate more of the player’s real movements, rather than making guesses.

Specifically Meta says its new system can use the headset’s cameras to track wrist, elbows, shoulders, and torso positions, leading to more natural and accurate avatar poses. The IOBT capability can work with both controller tracking and controller-free hand-tracking.

Both capabilities will be rolled into Meta’s ‘Movement SDK’. The company says ‘generative legs’ will be coming to Quest 2, 3, and Pro, but the IOBT capability might end up being exclusive to Quest 3 (and maybe Pro) given the different camera placements that seem aimed toward making IOBT possible.

Calm Before the Storm, or Calmer Waters in General?

At Connect, Meta also shared the latest revenue milestone for the Quest store: more than $2 billion has been spent on games an apps. That means Meta has pocketed some $600 million from its store, while the remaining $1.4 billion has gone to developers.

That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, and while many developers are finding success on the Quest store, the figure amounts to a slowdown in revenue momentum over the last 12 months, one which many developers have told me they’d been feeling.

The reason for the slowdown is likely a combination of Quest 2’s age (now three years old), the rather early announcement of Quest 3, a library of content that’s not quite meeting user’s expectations, and a still struggling retention rate driven by core UX issues.

Quest 3 is poised for a strong holiday season, but with its higher price point and missing killer app for the heavily marketed mixed reality feature, will it do as well as Quest 2’s breakout performance in 2021?

Continue on Page 2: What Wasn’t Announced »

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Leaked Xbox Documents Show XR Interest But No Immediate Plans

AR Industry, microsoft, News, VR Industry, xbox, xbox ar, Xbox VR, xbox xr / Ryan Harris / September 20, 2023

Leaked documents relating to Microsoft’s business strategy for Xbox show the company eyeing XR technology but continuing to keep it at arm’s length.

While Microsoft has previously taken considerable steps into XR with both HoloLens and the Windows Mixed Reality platform on PC, the company’s flagship gaming division, Xbox, has notably not joined the fray.

Over the years Xbox leadership has repeatedly pushed back on XR interest, saying the tech doesn’t yet have a large enough audience to warrant investment. And while it doesn’t look like we should expect anything relating to XR from Xbox in the near future, the company is at least continuing to eye the tech as a potential opportunity.

Road to VR reviewed the entirety of a trove of documents that leaked this week in connection with an ongoing Federal Trade Commission v. Microsoft court case. The documents, which reveal a significant portion of Microsoft’s long-term plans for the Xbox brand, show the company is still skeptical of XR but not discounting it in the long run.

In a mid-2022 ‘Gaming Strategy Review’ document, Xbox pointed to “AR / VR” as one of a handful of “opportunities” the company was mulling as part of its “early thoughts on [the] next generation of gaming.” In the same section the company pointed to tech like cloud gaming and ML & AI as potential areas of strategic focus.

In another section of the same document the company highlighted Windows Mixed Reality, OpenXR, WebVR, and HoloLens among many platforms and services that Xbox can leverage to build its “next gen platform for immersive apps and games.” Given the context of the document, however, it doesn’t seem that Xbox is specifically referring to XR when using the word “immersive.”

While Xbox has mentioned XR as a future opportunity, the company’s tone is still significantly skeptical that the tech has achieved a meaningful addressable audience.

In another section of the same document which overviewed Xbox’s competitors, the company pointed to Meta’s billions of dollars of investments into XR, but concluded by saying, “we view virtual reality as a niche gaming experience at this time.”

Another document from mid-2022, which overviewed the company’s long-term plans for Xbox all the way through 2030, noted that Microsoft wanted to expand its hardware portfolios to include new hardware categories, but nothing on that long-term roadmap pointed to any XR hardware.

While the leaked documents did focus on long timelines, business is always dynamic and priorities can shift quickly, so it’s important to remember that the documents are just a snapshot of Xbox’s view in mid-2022. With the more recent introduction of devices like Apple Vision Pro, it’s likely that Xbox is looking even more closely at how important XR may be to its future portfolio.

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Meta’s XR Revenue Down 39% “due to lower Quest 2 sales,” as Quest 3 & Vision Pro Loom

apple vision pro, Meta, Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest Pro, meta reality labs, meta revenue, meta xr revenue, News, Quest 2, quest 3, reality labs, reality labs q2 2023, reality labs revenue, VR Industry / Mike M. / July 28, 2023

Meta’s latest quarterly results show its Reality Labs XR division is again reporting an operating loss just south of $4 billion. Now, for its Q2 2023 results, the company says Reality Labs’ revenue was down by 39% due to lower Quest 2 sales, making for the worst quarterly performance in the past two years.

Meta has been clear about its plan to spend aggressively on XR over the next several years, so it’s again no surprise we’re seeing operating budgets in the billions with only a fraction of that coming back in via Quest 2 hardware and software sales.

In fact, Quest 2 sales play such an important role in Reality Labs’ quarterly performance that Meta has reported $276 million in revenue in Q2 2023, or 39% lower than last quarter.

Meta reported that Reality Labs expenses were $4 billion, which was up 23% since the same period last year. The company says this was due to lapping a reduction in Reality Labs loss reserves and growth in employee-related costs, bringing the XR division’s operating loss to $3.7 billion for Q2 2023.

Meta says it expects continued operating losses in the future, saying losses will likely “increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in AR/VR and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, the company is preparing to launch Quest 3 in late 2023, the $500 follow-up headset that integrates many of Quest Pro’s mixed reality capabilities. Meta’s $1,000 Quest Pro has also reportedly been discontinued, however (without substantiating that particular claim) Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth implied earlier this month that a Quest Pro 2 isn’t off the table.

Apple’s Vision Pro is also looming, set to launch sometime next year. As rising tides lift all boats, hype around Vision Pro could actually benefit Meta in the short term. Apple’s $3,500 XR headset has attracted new attention to the space, however Meta’s consumer-friendly pricing and extensive game catalogue for Quest 3 may be well positioned this holiday to capitalize on that Apple-adjacent cachet.

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Sales of Valve’s Index Headset Are Waning After Years of Surprising Longevity

News, valve, valve index, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / July 15, 2023

Valve’s Index VR headset is now more than four years old. Despite its age, the headset continued to sell at a surprising rate over the years—but as they say, nothing lasts forever.

Valve launched Index with the goal of setting the bar for PC VR headsets to beat. And by many measures it accomplished that goal. Despite the $1,000 price tag and the headset’s age, Index remains the second most-used headset on Steam at 18.38% of active headsets on the platform (though a distant second to Quest 2 at 42.05%) as of June 2023. Even with just one headset, that makes Valve the second largest headset vendor on the platform.

Despite PC VR headsets that have launched since with higher resolution or OLED displays or even a cheaper price, the headset’s balance of comfort, visuals, sound, tracking, and controllers have made it a popular choice long after its spec sheet would suggest.

While usage of Index remains strong, sales of the headset appear to be in decline after years of holding steady.

Although Valve doesn’t share how much revenue individual products make on its platform, Steam does rank the top selling products, by revenue, each week. Thanks to SteamDB’s archive of the data, we’ve been able to get a rough trend of the headset’s sales performance over the years.

The data is at times sparse; for most of the dataset we only know the top 10 products by weekly revenue (if Index fell under the top 10 we don’t know exactly how far it fell), but Steam recently began sharing the top 100, giving us a clearer insight into the downward trend of Index sales.

The exact reason for the somewhat sudden change in trend is unclear, but we have one hypothesis. The downturn began happening some six to eight months after Valve released Steam Deck—the company’s first hardware product since Index. The turn also came around the new year heading from 2022 into 2023.

Especially considering that actual usage of the headset remains strong, our best guess is that sales of Index have trended downward largely because Valve has shifted the spotlight to Steam Deck; possibly even more so after the company saw how well the device sold through the 2022 holiday season.

While Valve had once promoted Index in various places on the Steam storefront, now Steam Deck appears more often to be put in front of Steam’s huge audience of users:

Valve may even have reallocated some of its Index manufacturing capacity to meet demand for Steam Deck.

Its difficult to say what this means for Index and Valve’s future VR hardware ambitions. There’s no doubt that the introduction of standalone headsets has changed the VR landscape considerably compared to when Index first launched. There have been glimpses that Valve is still working on something behind the scenes, but the company’s limited attention may be largely focused on Steam Deck for the foreseeable future.

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Roblox is Coming to Quest, Casting a Shadow on Meta’s Own Social VR Platform

horizon worlds, Meta, News, quest, roblox, roblox quest, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / July 13, 2023

One of the biggest names social gaming is coming to Quest. Roblox is home to tens of millions of daily users and user-generated experiences. “In the coming weeks” Roblox will launch on Quest, casting a shadow on Meta’s own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds.

A Curious Proposition

Meta confirmed today that Roblox is coming to Quest “in the coming weeks” starting as an Open Beta on App Lab before eventually graduating to a full launch on the main Quest store.

On one hand, the move is a win for Meta. Roblox is one of the most popular social gaming and user-generated content platforms; playing in a similar ballpark with the likes of Minecraft and Fortnite. Getting Roblox onto Quest brings a valuable and recognizable IP to the platform, along with a huge new social graph of non-VR players.

On the other hand, Roblox is very nearly a direct competitor to Meta’s own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds. Both Horizon and Roblox are heavily focused on social experiences and user-generated content. But compared to Horizon, which caters only to the smaller demographic of VR players, Roblox has some 66 million daily active players across Xbox, iOS, Android, desktop—and soon, Quest.

For comparison, that means the number of people playing Roblox every day (66 million) is more than the total number of Quest headsets ever sold (believed to be around 20 million).

So ambitious creators looking to build content for the largest audience (and largest return-on-investment) will see the scale tipped vastly toward Roblox over Horizon.

Whether or not Roblox on Quest will stifle the fledgling Horizon remains to be seen, but needless to say this is an awkward situation. Not just for Meta though; Roblox also represents a looming threat to other social VR applications like VRChat and Rec Room.

Roblox Content Compatibility on Quest

Roblox currently has some 15 million playable experiences for users to choose from, but not all (probably not most) will be suitable to play on Quest.

Meta says the Roblox Open Beta on Quest is a “great opportunity for the Roblox developer community to optimize their existing games for Quest and build new ones for VR while gathering input and feedback from the Quest community.”

That said, Roblox Corp plans to automatically enable VR support for some portion of existing Roblox experiences, though exactly how many is unclear.

“[…] we have automatically updated the Access setting for some of the experiences that use default player scripts to include support for VR devices. We have found that experiences that use default player scripts typically run well in VR without modifications. Automatically publishing these experiences allows us to seed our library of experiences that support VR devices,” the company says in its announcement of Roblox on Quest.

Presently it isn’t clear if or how the company plans to ensure that user-generated Roblox experiences on meet minimum performance expectations on Quest.

Modernized PC VR Support for Roblox

Roblox has offered PC VR support for many years at this point and the company appears committed to continue supporting the platform in addition to Quest.

Less than a month ago Roblox Corp announced that it would adopt OpenXR to future-proof its VR support, including for PC VR headsets. The update also included improvements to correctly synchronizing the player’s VR playspace and scale to that of the current experience.

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Meta CTO Says Quest 3 Announcement Timing Had ‘Nothing to do with Vision Pro’

andrew bosworth, apple vision pro, boz, Meta, News, quest 3, VR Industry / Mike M. / July 13, 2023

Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said this week that the announcement of Quest 3, which came just days ahead of Vision Pro reveal, had nothing to do with the timing of Apple’s first public foray into XR.

“People won’t believe me, I don’t care—I’m telling the truth, you can believe me or not, that’s up to you […],” Bosworth began in a Q&A hosted on Instagram this week in response to a question about the curious timing of Quest 3’s announcement, which came just days ahead of the reveal of Apple Vision Pro. He continued:

What we found out… especially last year… is that when we announce a new headset in September/October, a lot of people—especially when you already have headsets out in market—a lot of people have already made buying decisions in the summertime, or they’re kind of committed to a path, so you’re not capturing the full holiday season.

So we sent a note to [Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg] long before we even knew about WWDC timing or substance, saying ‘hey for Quest 3 we want to announce it early, so that people know it’s coming, so they can plan well in advance of the holiday season what they want to do’.

So that was our plan from a long time ago, and the timing worked out unbelievably well [laughs]. I’m not mad about it… I’m not saying I’m mad about it, I’m just saying that was the plan that we developed in terms of go-to-market, and it had nothing to do with [Vision Pro].

The announcement of Quest 3—which came four days before Apple’s Vision Pro reveal—was certainly curious as far as the company’s prior patterns. Compared to the kind of formal announcement we’ve seen, the new headset was first teased and then revealed on social media through Mark Zuckerberg’s feeds. Even when more formal information was shared shortly thereafter, the company didn’t share the headset’s full specs, instead promising more details to come at the annual XR event, Meta Connect, which wouldn’t be held for nearly four more months.

Regardless, Bosworth maintains the Quest 3 announcement was decided well before the company knew what Apple would reveal or when.

Bosworth, who heads Meta’s XR division, Reality Labs, also answered some other questions about Apple Vision Pro during the Q&A.

Q: Thoughts on Apple’s decision to have attached battery pack rather than all-in-one headset?

A: At some point these headsets are a physics problem. You can spend your thermals and your weight one way, or another way, but at some point the equation has to square. [Apple’s] headset, I think, is roughly in the same ballpark of weight as our headsets, and they wanted to have this battery life, so they wanted to go external with [the battery]. It doesn’t matter who you are, what company you are, who you work for… physics is a uniform belligerent to this space. We’re making progress hand-over-fist as an industry; I think Apple’s entry is going to help with that a lot. But yeah, you have to square the circle somehow, and they had to do it with an external battery pack and a cord.

Q: How does the Vision Pro change Meta’s roadmap?

A: Andy Grove—famous Intel CEO and kind of godfather of Silicon Valley—always used to say “only the paranoid survive,” and we try to embody that. You try to approach your work with a lot of humility. Whenever a great competitor comes out, whether it be the Pico, whether it be Apple Vision Pro, certainly; you’re trying to look and see, what did they do differently, and why? What did we miss? Did we get it wrong, or did they figure something out? So you try to learn from it. And then be humble about it. At the same time, you can’t constantly be chasing every competitor because then you’re getting thrown off your own game. You’re getting thrown off what you can uniquely do and what you’ve done right, and that they need to learn from. In our case I think we’ve got a great ecosystem, we’ve got a great set of devices, we’ve got a great price point. So it’s a balance to try to learn from them and not over-rotate on that. Nothing that we hadn’t looked at before […] we were focusing on gaze and touch for AR as well—it’s a natural AR interaction—is that something that needs to get more priority in VR? Not sure yet. So we’re looking at it… we’re not sure yet.

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Cloudhead Games CEO: Apple Vision Pro is an AR Headset Wearing VR Clothes

apple vision pro, cloudhead games, denny unger, Guest Article, News, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / June 12, 2023

Cloudhead Games is one of the most successful and senior VR studios in the industry. In this Guest Article, studio head Denny Unger shares his thoughts on Apple’s entrance into the space.

Guest Article by Denny Unger

Denny Unger is CEO and CCO at Cloudhead Games. Based in British Columbia and founded in 2012 Cloudhead’s pioneering approach to VR gave rise to broadly adopted movement standards including Snap Turns and Teleportation. Working closely with Valve, Sony, and Meta, Cloudhead is best known for their title Pistol Whip and has shipped four popular VR titles (Pistol Whip, Valve’s Aperture Hand Labs, Call of the Starseed, and Heart of the Emberstone).

So let’s get the obvious over first; Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s first generation attempt at AR glasses using a Mixed Reality VR headset. AVP is a development platform also serving an enthusiast demographic. Make no mistake, this no compromise MR device appears to get many things right for AR at a premium cost. Will Cloudhead Games be buying one to better understand Apple’s approach? Heck yes. AVP will give developers a powerful foundation and ecosystem for which to develop AR apps for a future ‘glasses formfactor’ device in that mythical 5–10 year window. And to the victor, the spoils of a smartphone replacing device.

No doubt (and if rumors are true) there were many debates at Apple HQ about VR. Whether or not to open the device up to VR studios and successful titles. Whether or not to include controllers to support legacy VR titles. Whether to allow users to full-dive into Virtual Reality, freely move around, and be active in the medium. But in an effort to sharpen their messaging, and to command a dominating lead within the AR space, VR and its many benefits were expertly omitted on nearly every level. Do I understand the strategy to strike a different cord as an XR business owner? Absolutely. Does it frustrate me as a VR-centric studio owner? You bet it does.

I question why the AVP didn’t maximize its potential, leveraging almost a decade of know-how from the VR community working within this space. Why not set a vision for a future device that would accommodate both AR and VR as complimentary mediums? Apple could have embraced a dual launch strategy with a rich and proven catalog of best selling VR games, perfectly tuned to onboard a completely new audience to XR. Apple could have expanded into VR’s recent success, growth and competition within the current market. In their recent presentation VR is essentially reduced to a gimmick, the thing you lightly touch the edges of, instead of a complimentary and equally important medium. Unity engine support is promised but with no plans for motion control support, Apple has cut out any possibility of porting most of the existing or future VR catalog to its platform.

Hand-tracking is a logical affordance for AR based spatial computing and no doubt some experiences will work well with that design philosophy. However it is important to point out that most VR games built over the last 10 years (and many more in production) are not compatible with, nor will they ever be “portable” to hand-tracking only design. Inputs and Haptics are incredibly important to Virtual Reality as a major tenant in reinforcing immersion and tactile interaction with virtual objects. Buttons pushed, triggers pulled, vibrational feedback experienced, objects held, thrown or touched, alternative movement schemes supported. There is a comfort in understanding the topological landscape of a controller and a physical touchpoint within the virtual environments themselves. When introducing users to a radically different medium like VR, convention & feedback matters. And over the last 50 years in gaming, input has evolved to encourage a suite of highly refined game design standards, creating a particular kind of muscle memory in the gaming population. Say what you will about which genres remain popular in this 450 Billion dollar industry but it does strain belief to think we’ll all be playing with finger guns in the latest and greatest shooter.

I know what some are likely to say “ there will be new innovative standards and we’ll look back on controllers as a crutch”, but I would push back and say hand-tracked or not, moving away from future haptic devices and innovation is a backwards step in XR design. Even smartphone games utilize basic haptics, because touch is foundational to the human experience.

In the aftermath of the AVP launch some would argue that VR is not yet mainstream and that Apple did the right thing by ignoring it. I would argue that VR turned a significant mainstream corner when Quest 2 outsold Xbox, when Sony reentered the market with PSVR2, and when Google teamed up with Samsung to work on what’s next, and on it goes. Over its 10 year rebirth, the last 3 years of VR have experienced Hockey Stick levels of growth. OEM’s have increased investments, and significant indicators keep coming with more titles earning revenues north of $20 Million. Fully immersive VR is a legitimized medium not because I say it is but because people like it, and are willing to part with their hard earned money to experience it.

I hope Apple is more inclusive of VR over time but the Apple Vision Pro appears to be a VR headset pretending not to be a VR headset. Because of this strategy it represents a unique opportunity for Apple’s competitors to double-down on supporting Virtual Reality at a more affordable entry point. Sure, they can all wage the 5-10 year war for a smartphone replacement but why in the world would one ignore an equally compelling revenue stream within a blended MR ecosystem? Maybe, because it took too long to go mainstream? Sorry all, we had to learn a few things along the way but I’m happy to say that after 10 years, the trail ahead has never been this clear.

Cloudhead Games CEO: Apple Vision Pro is an AR Headset Wearing VR Clothes Read More »

The Best Thing About Apple Vision Pro? Meta Finally Has Big Competition

Apple, apple vision, Meta, meta quest, meta quest 3 vs apple vision pro, News, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / June 9, 2023

Meta has undeniably been the lone looming Goliath in a field of smaller Davids in the XR scene for years now. With Apple finally making its entrance into the market, Meta won’t be able to go at its own pace.

Apple’s new headset might be an absurd $3,500, putting it in a completely different class than Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 at $500, let alone the Quest 2 now at $300. But the pressure will still be on as comparisons are made between the experience Apple has crafted and what Meta offers.

After all, there’s no denying that while the Vision Pro is packed full of hardware, and has the benefit of Apple’s proprietary and powerful M2 chips, so much of what the headset is doing right is about the software experience rather than the fidelity that’s unlocked with the hardware.

Great Hardware, Struggling Software

The thing is, Meta’s headsets are plenty capable. Quest 2 is still a solid product that is in many ways still best in class and Quest 3 only promises to up the ante later this year with more power, higher resolution, improved lenses, and better passthrough AR. Meta’s hardware has always been quite impressive, even as far back as the original Oculus Rift CV1.

But on the software side the company has seriously struggled to make usability a priority. For all the lessons the company learned about the power of reducing friction in VR—by building a standalone headset that doesn’t need a computer or external tracking beacons—there has been seemingly little emphasis on making the same reduction in friction by creating a cohesive interface between Quest’s system interface, and Meta’s own first-party apps; let alone providing a set of clear and useful guidelines so that developers and users alike can benefit from a common user experience.

Lean on Me

Meta has leaned substantially on third-party developers to make using its headsets worthwhile to use. Game developers have done the painstaking work of refining how users should control their apps and interact with their worlds in entertaining ways. When you’re inside of a VR game, the developer is fully controlling the experience to make it cohesive and enjoyable, while sussing out the pitfalls that would turn off users—like bugs, convoluted menus, and inconsistent interactions.

If Meta’s headsets didn’t have games—but still did everything else they’re capable of—they would be dead in the water because of how painful it can be to use the headset outside of carefully crafted game experiences designed to entertain. On the other hand, Apple Vision Pro has a minimal emphasis on gaming (at least at the outset), but is spending significant effort to make everything else the headset does easy and consistent. By doing so, Apple is ensuring that the headset will be great for more than just gaming.

Despite the price difference between Vision Pro and Quest headsets, Meta is still going to have to stare this thing in the face and come to grips with what it could be doing better—for users, developers, and itself. The good news, at least, is that much of the room for improvement is in the software side of things.

The Vacuum

Until now, Meta has had no serious competition in this space. Its headsets—despite the criticisms I’ve laid out here—have consistently offered the best value in their class, with great hardware and a great game library, all at a very attractive price that others have largely been unable to match.

That’s made it hard for other headset makers to compete and left Meta little need to respond even if other companies do something better or innovative. It’s also meant that developers and users have very little leverage over what Meta decides to do—after all, where else are they going to go if they want an affordable standalone headset with the best library of content?

Meta has been able to create a vacuum in the consumer VR space which on the surface might look like success… but in reality, it has left Meta unfocused on what it needs to do to make its headsets appeal to a broader audience.

Better for Everyone

Now we have Apple in the game, ready to challenge Meta on hardware and the software experience. Price advantage is clearly in Meta’s favor, but it’s going to need to up its game, otherwise it risks losing not just customers, but more importantly developers, who might see greener grass on the other side—especially if they’re looking forward to a future where Apple’s headset comes down in price.

Apple’s entrance into the market might seem like a threat, but ultimately Meta now gets to sit back and examine all the hard work Apple has done over the years, then choose the best ideas to incorporate into its own offerings, while ignoring what it sees as missteps by Apple.

In the end, Apple’s headset is going to force Meta’s headsets to get better, faster. And that’s good for everyone, including Meta.

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70% of the 20 Best-rated Quest 2 Apps are Now Available on Pico 4

Data, News, pico 4, pico 4 apps, pico 4 games, pico 4 vr, Quest 2, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / May 24, 2023

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

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One of VR’s Most Veteran Studios Has Grown to 200 Employees While Continuing to Double-down on VR

Feature, ndreams, News, Patrick O'Luanaigh, vr headset sales figures, vr headset unit figures, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / March 23, 2023

Having been exclusively building VR games since 2013, nDreams stands as one of the most veteran VR-exclusive game studios to date. And with more than 200 people, one of the largest too. The studio’s CEO & founder, Patrick O’Luanaigh, continues to bet his company’s future on the success of VR.

Speaking exclusively to Road to VR ahead of a presentation at GDC 2023, Patrick O’Luanaigh talks about the growing success of nDreams and why he’s still doubling down on VR.

Starting in 2013, O’Luanaigh has navigated his company from the earliest days of the modern VR era to now, which he believes is VR’s biggest moment so far—and growing.

Between the company’s own internal data and some external sources, O’Luanaigh estimates that VR’s install base is around 40 million headsets across the major platforms, excluding the recently launched PSVR 2. At least half of that, he estimates, is made up by 20 million Quest headsets.

While it’s been a challenge to keep all those headsets in regular use, O’Luanaigh says the size of the addressable VR market today is bigger than ever.

That’s why he’s bulked up the company to some 200 employees, nearly doubling over the course of 2022 through hiring and studio acquisitions.

O’Luanaigh says, “this is the biggest we’ve ever been and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. […] In a decade of exclusively making VR games, we’ve never seen that growth before.”

O’Luanaigh knows well that content is key for getting players into their headsets, and to that end his efforts to scale the company are about building bigger and better VR content to keep up with the growth and expectations of the install base, he says.

“Setting up our fully-remote nDreams studios, Orbital and Elevation, was significant for us in establishing a powerful basis for developing multiple projects in parallel,” he says. “It gives us the specialism to develop the variety of VR titles, across multiple genres, that the growing market now demands.”

O’Luanaigh points to nDreams developed and published titles Phantom: Covert Ops (2020), Shooty Fruity (2020), Fracked (2021), and Little Cities (2022) as some of the most successful VR games the studio has launched thus far, with Phantom: Covert Ops specifically finding “important commercial success” on Quest 2.

With the release of those titles over the years and their ongoing sales, O’Luanaigh shares that nDreams doubled its year-over-year revenue over the last 12 months. And with multiple new projects in the works, including Synapse, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, and other (unannounced) projects, he believes the company is on track to more than double annual revenue again by 2024.

Phantom: Covert Ops | Image courtesy nDreams

Though he’s leading a company of 200 employees, O’Luanaigh calls himself a “massive VR enthusiast,” and is still very clearly in touch with makes VR such a unique and compelling medium.

He says his studio aims to build around five key pillars that make for compelling VR content:

Aspirational roleplay – first-person embodiment of appealing roles or characters
High-agency interaction – tactile 1:1 mechanics in a freely explorable world
Empowering wielding – Feel, hold, and use visceral weapons, tools, and abilities
Emotional amplification – Immersive situations that provoke strong, diverse feelings
Fictional teleportation – Presence within desirable locations, inaccessible in real life

And while O’Luanaigh could easily steer this studio away from VR—to chase a larger non-VR market—he continues to double down on VR as the studio’s unique advantage. Far from moving away from VR, his company is actively trying to bring others into the fold; O’Luanaigh says nDreams continues to expand its publishing operations.

“The success of Little Cities, which has just launched its free ‘Little Citizens’ update, has been a great validation of our investments into third-party publishing and we are actively on the lookout for more amazing indie developers to work with.”

With the scale that VR has now reached, O’Luanaigh believes the market is truly viable for indie developers. And that’s why he’s glad to see the rise of VR publishers (and not just his own company); having the benefit of longstanding expertise in the medium is crucial to shipping a shipping a quality VR title, and that’s why O’Luanaigh believes VR-specific publishers like nDreams will play an important role in bringing more developers and great content to VR.

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That expertise is increasingly building upon itself in the company’s VR games which have shown impressive mechanical exploration, giving the studio the chance to test lots of VR gameplay to find out what works.

Few in VR have had the gall to prove out something as seemingly wacky as a ‘VR kayak shooter’ and actually take it to market in a large scale production like Phantom: Covert Ops. And you can clearly see the lineage of a game like nDreams’ Fracked shining through in upcoming titles like Synapse. Though the game is an entirely new IP and visual direction, the unique Fracked cover system is making the leap to Synapse; a clear example of leveraging a now battle-tested mechanic to enhance future titles. But more than just a reskin of a prior shooter, nDreams continues to experiment with unique VR mechanics, this time promising to harness the power of PSVR 2’s eye-tracking to give players compelling telekinetic powers.

To that end, the studio’s lengthy experience in the medium is clearly an asset—and one that can only be earned rather than bought. Where exactly that experience will take them in the long run is unclear, but even after all the ups and downs the industry has seen, O’Luanaigh and nDreams remain all-in on VR.

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Meta Has Sold Nearly 20 Million Quest Headsets, But Retention Struggles Remain

Data, Meta, News, quest 2 sales, quest 2 sales figures, quest 2 unit sales, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / March 2, 2023

Meta has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets, but the company continues to struggle with keeping customer using VR.

According to a report by The Verge, citing an internal Meta presentation held today, the company has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets. This likely includes Quest 1, Quest 2, and Quest Pro, though by all accounts Quest 2 appears to be the vast majority. And while the figure wasn’t publicly announced, this would be the first official confirmation of Quest unit sales from the company.

This info was shared by Mark Rabkin, Meta’s VP of VR, during an internal presentation to “thousands” of employees, according to The Verge.

And while the 20 million unit Quest sales figure is impressive—and well beyond any other single VR headset maker—Rabkin went on to stress that the company has to do a better job at keeping customers using the headsets well after their purchase.

“We need to be better at growth and retention and resurrection,” he said. “We need to be better at social and actually make those things more reliable, more intuitive so people can count on it.”

Curiously, Meta’s latest wave of headset customers are less enthusiastic than those that bought in early.

“Right now, we’re on our third year of Quest 2,” Rabkin said, according to The Verge. “And sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in—the people who bought it this last Christmas—they’re just not as into it [or engaged as] the ones who bought it early.”

The report from The Verge includes more info about the company’s XR roadmap, which you can read in full here.

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