Jay Peters
Trombone Champ, but in VR.
Trombone Champ: Unflattened, which is launching this fall, looks just as silly as the flatscreen game.
Virtual Reality
Andrew Liszewski
Wes Davis
I’m seeing red — and I couldn’t be happier.
That’s because the all-time greatest virtual reality gaming system, the Nintendo Virtual Boy, is now available (in emulator form) on the Vision Pro via the VirtualFriend app. I’ve been testing this emulator for some time — check back soon for my impressions.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some Red Alarm to play.
Sean Hollister
Sony’s PSVR 2 PC adapter is apparently just VirtualLink — I have good and bad news about that.
⭕ If you’ve got USB-C on a reference design GPU, you may not need the adapter at all. Some report you can plug the headset right into certain cards once you install the app.
❌ Sony’s dongle doesn’t have Bluetooth; I’ve spent hours trying to get PS VR2 controllers to work well on desktop, despite using a Sony-approved Bluetooth dongle.
Emma Roth
Watch SpongeBob... with SpongeBob.
A new environment in the Paramount Plus app for the Apple Vision Pro transforms your surroundings into Bikini Bottom, complete with SpongeBob, Patrick, and Squidward’s homes. If you decide to watch SpongeBob in the environment, SpongeBob himself will join you with a bowl of popcorn.
Image: Paramount Plus
Wes Davis
Disney Plus now takes you to Iceland.
In the Apple Vision Pro, that is. Disney Plus has rolled out a National Geographic edition virtual environment for its visionOS app that lets you watch movies in a snowy corridor in Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park.
The environment uses “3D models captured on-site using photogrammetry,” according to Disney’s announcement. When you watch a movie, it turns dark and shows you the Northern Lights!
Andrew Webster
Alien overload.
It’s a busy time for Alien fans, with Romulus hitting theaters soon and a TV series in the works. But don’t forget about Rogue Incursion, a promising VR game that got a new trailer at SDCC. It’s launching in holiday 2024.
Wes Davis
Foggy.
Apple has released Lake Vrangla, one of two Vision Pro Environments that have spent months marked “coming soon,” and boy is it moody.
So what is Lake Vrangla? Well, it’s a small lake roughly 25 miles west (as the crow flies) of Oslo, Norway. You can see it fog-free on YouTube. Seems pretty!
Wes Davis
Is HTC teasing a new Vive Focus headset?
Whatever this “Vision for you” is, the silhouette HTC shows at the end looks very pointedly Vision Pro-like, while also looking like it fits into the HTC Vive Focus 3 design mold.
The video hints at “a new kind of power.” Perhaps it involves that new Snapdragon XR2 Plus Gen 2 headset chip with 4.3K-per-eye resolution support, which Qualcomm said it’s working with HTC (among others) on.
Wes Davis
A look at Meta AI running on a Quest 3 headset.
Demos on this Meta blog show how the company will implement its promise to bring AI to its VR headsets. Like the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, you can ask it questions about things you see (in passthrough), and it will answer.
The experimental feature rolls out in English next month, in the US and Canadia (excluding the Quest 2).
Nilay Patel
Jacob Kastrenakes
The Vision Pro launches in five more countries today.
Customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK can now buy Apple’s VR headset. It’s the second wave of international expansion, following China, Japan, and Singapore last month. When the headset launched in February, it was exclusive to the US.
Apple is finally launching the Vision Pro outside the US
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Allison Johnson
Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm are, uh, still doing that XR thing.
Google’s Rick Osterloh mentioned the elusive XR collaboration briefly in his onstage appearance at Unpacked, without providing any new details. That’s the at least the third time we’ve heard about it without actually hearing anything at all about it. But I guess now we know it’s still a thing in the Osterloh Android era?
Jay Peters
Metaverse expert Matthew Ball published a long interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.
As summarized by Ball:
In the interview, we discuss the three “epochs” in Meta’s Metaverse strategy, what it will take for total VR / MR headset sales to cross 100 million annually, his the specs of his dream headset, Meta’s spending on Reality Labs, whether and when developers might get access to the Quest’s raw camera feed, the many inventions required to ship optical AR glasses, the role of AI, and more.
Wes Davis
The Vision Pro needs a macOS-style dock.
I’m now convinced of that after adding one using the free Dock Pro app. Now, some of the Vision Pro apps I use most (along with time and battery percentage) are just right there, waiting. Adding third-party apps is tricky and involves finding app URL schemes, though.
Don’t get me wrong; I like the hand flourish to open apps in the visionOS 2 beta. But sometimes, a dock is just better.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
David Pierce
Wes Davis
The Vision Pro follow-up may get lower-res displays.
In its quest to build a cheaper headset, Apple has asked manufacturers for technical details needed to develop 2-inch or 2.1-inch displays with a pixel density of 1,700ppi (or about half the Vision Pro’s 3,386ppi), according to an Elec report cited by UploadVR yesterday.
Assuming the same aspect ratio, the outlet pegs the resolution “somewhere around 2600 x 2300,” or just over two-thirds that of the current headset.
Jess Weatherbed
Apple Vision Pro launches in first countries outside the US.
The headset is now available to buy in China, Japan, and Singapore, with Apple documenting the international launch via a recent blog post.
The Apple Vision Pro will also roll out to Germany, France, Australia, the UK, and Canada on July 12th, with preorders for those regions available starting today at 5AM PT.
Jay Peters
Meta is “almost ready” to show off a prototype of its full holographic glasses.
“Every person who I’ve shown it to so far is just like... their reaction is giddy,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in an interview. Perhaps at Meta Connect in September?
You can read more about Meta’s AR / VR roadmap in a report from last year by my colleague Alex Heath.
Wes Davis
Who wants to take care of some space plants?
Game developer Creator just showed a new trailer for Starship Home, its augmented reality cosmic gardening sim for the Meta Quest 3, during the UploadVR Showcase. The game is up for preorder now at a discounted $17.99, with a “Summer 2024” release date, Meta announced.
Some jitteriness aside, I still think the game is promising in a casual Tamagotchi or Animal Crossing sort of way.
Jay Peters
Alex Cranz
Jay Peters
The future of PSVR 2 looks grim.
Sony is developing just two PSVR 2 games, Android Central reports. Two! That’s not a great sign.
If you already have a PSVR 2, you’ll be able to hook it up to your PC starting in August, so that might make it more useful. But mine has been in a closet for months, and still I don’t see a reason to take it out.
Sony no longer cares about the PSVR 2, and neither should you
[Android Central]
Adi Robertson
Palmer Luckey says his new headset is “driven by military requirements but it’s also going to be used for non-military stuff.”
Joking aside, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey made good on his promise to announce a new head-mounted display during a talk at Augmented World Expo. He said little about the new project, though, except the quote above — and he suggested it’s still in the early stages.
Luckey also mentioned “adult entertainment” could be the most promising VR hardware niche for a small company, since mainstream companies won’t touch it. He emphatically did not say that’s what he’s working on here.
