A metaverse high school is opening in Japan, as reported by Automaton. Students will get the same qualifications they would at a real-world high school, but they’ll attend in VR and show up as an avatar. You can learn more about in a press release and on the official website.
If you’re spending $3,499 to be one of the first 70,000 or so people with Apple’s Vision Pro, we can probably assume you own a recent iPhone. But just in case, 9to5Mac points out details from an Apple email explaining the online ordering process.
Despite rumors of required in-store appointments for face scanning, it looks like Apple will let you use FaceID on another device to judge the fit requirements and provide a current prescription if you need the $149 vision-correcting lenses.
Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo closely follows Apple’s production plans and is saying that for the February 2nd launch day, “Apple will produce 60,000 to 80,000 units of Vision Pro,” with around 500k shipping in 2024.
We had our first Vision Pro experiences last year at WWDC, and in just a couple of weeks, everyone can decide if they’re ready to spend $3,499 for an early entry to the world of spatial computing.
Glasses-free 3D, anyone? Samsung is previewing a 37-inch 4K gaming monitor at CES 2024 that can automatically switch between 2D and 3D. It includes eye and head tracking tech to analyze your position and gaze to create the 3D experience without destroying the colors and brightness.
You can use it to watch 3D movies or play VR games since it’s also compatible with SteamVR. Samsung says more details are to come later this year.
“Refer to your app as a spatial computing app,” Apple says in visionOS developer guidelines reported on by 9to5Mac. “Don’t describe your app experience as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), extended reality (XR), or mixed reality (MR).”
Yes, visionOS may be used to power not-VR apps in the future, and I get why Apple may want to distance itself from terms like VR or MR. But the Vision Pro device that comes out on February 2nd is a VR headset, even if Apple won’t admit it.
You’ll be able to watch shorter movies, though; Apple has updated its Vision Pro website to say the headset will let you watch “up to 2.5 hours” of video. When Apple first announced the device, the company had only said that the Vision Pro’s battery would offer up to two hours of use.
In addition to running iPhone and iPad apps or mirroring your Mac, Apple says the Vision Pro can stream movies or TV shows from Disney Plus and Max on an HDR screen that feels 100 feet wide, while the Apple TV app will have “more than 150 3D titles” plus there are Apple Immersive Video experiences with “180-degree, three-dimensional 8K recordings captured with Spatial Audio.”
Game Room, What the Golf?, and Super Fruit Ninja will be some of the spatial games rolling out when the Vision Pro launches February 2nd.
That’s according to Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter in Bloomberg.
Apple doesn’t participate in CES, of course, but Gurman writes that he still expects an announcement about Apple’s fancy AR / VR headset to come “in the next week or so” ahead of a February release.
It’s been on sale for $250 for the last two months, and now Meta is making that sale price permanent — that means you can get two of them for the price of a single (albeit much better) Quest 3. Accessories are seeing a price cut, too.
In the video embedded below, developer Korejan shows how the Quest Pro can now track their tongue with version 60 of Meta’s OpenXR face tracking extension, as spotted by UploadVR. The feature hasn’t been widely adopted yet, but Korejan has added support in their third-party VRFCT face-tracking module and ALXR PC VR streaming app.
It looks kind of like Rocket League mixed with guns, based on a brief glimpse in a trailer of upcoming additions to Horizon Worlds. Meta says the game will launch on January 1st.
The trailer also shows off Horizon Central, a kind of virtual town square where you can “browse” other Horizon Worlds experiences. And Super Rumble, is getting more quests and rewards on December 20th.
Apple’s upcoming mixed reality headset can play back stereoscopic 3D video shot on iPhone 15 Pro, and CNET’s Scott Stein got to load up some of his own spatial videos on a Vision Pro and watch them:
[My mom] sort of raised her eyebrows a bit, and the way she looked at me in 3D — at a scale close to normal size, with her seeming to make eye contact — made me feel like I was almost there. It made me want to climb through that fuzzy-bordered window and join my family again on the other side.
ByteDance reportedly scrapped it after sales of last year’s Pico 4 “fell far short of ByteDance’s expectations,” according to a report by The Information. The last headset still hasn’t launched in the US, as political heat has stayed on ByteDance and its other well-known project, TikTok.
However, the report also claims Pico engineers are working on a long-term “Swan” concept to develop a high-end headset inspired by Apple’s Vision Pro.
Update v140 allows you to stay “present in the moment” and record yourself in the third person (rolling out now). You can also follow new people by high-fiving them for two seconds, like an iPhone NameDrop in the not real world.
Even with the new high-five, there are new personal boundaries that keep people from feeling like they’re too close to you (adjust in Settings > Safety).
The composer of the intense music game Thumper is now making Thrasher, which like a similarly jaw-dropping musical experience. The game’s Steam listing describes it as “a mind-melting cosmic racer and an essential audiovisual experience,” and I can’t wait to try it out when it launches in 2024.
It’s coming to Quest and SteamVR first, but it will come to flatscreen platforms “sometime after,” according to a press email.
Sony just published an interview on the PlayStation Blog with two of the game’s developers, and it’s packed with details about what you can expect and some ways the development team adapted the game to VR. This was one of my favorite tidbits:
This is also a small detail, but the camera for the first-person perspective is set a little lower than Leon’s actual eye level. If the camera is at the same eye level as Leon – who is quite tall himself – the Ganados (enemy villagers) will appear smaller. The Ganados approach and attack Leon from a low, forward posture, so if you get too close to them, you end up looking down at them which strips away the intensity.
Resident Evil 4’s VR mode launches for PSVR 2 on December 8th.
There’s a reason why the $130 Quest 3 Elite Strap with Battery is listed as out of stock on Meta’s store — the company has temporarily paused sales of the accessory after widespread reports of buggy charging behavior. RoadtoVR reports that it’s having to manufacture new straps to fix the issues.
If your device is affected, try reaching out to Meta Support for a replacement.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with taking your phone to the ceramic throne so you can relax, read, and relieve... but a virtual reality headset? That’s next level.
OK, there are clear benefits to taking the new Meta Quest 3 to the bathroom, though. As Redditor Tall_Whole_5777 describes: You don’t need to touch screens or buttons to watch and control a YouTube video.
Microsoft Teams is about to go 3D thanks to a new VR meetings experience in January 2024. While that’s a new way to chat with coworkers, Microsoft is already teasing how its generative AI Copilot system will be able to handle requests for creating meeting spaces and objects in VR. We’re not sure when this will arrive, but generative AI in VR is certainly on the way.
Check out the process in an onboarding video that 9to5Mac found in the latest visionOS beta.
