Speaking of Microsoft hedging bets, it’s been doing that with VR since day one. The original Oculus Rift shipped with an Xbox One gamepad and could stream games from Xbox, while Microsoft simultaneously pursued its HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality initiatives.
Microsoft recently brought Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Xbox Cloud Gaming to Meta Quest, too, perhaps in preparation for today’s announce.
It’s only been dead and buried for three months, and yet Microsoft has already glommed onto a new “we don’t have to make this ourselves, OEMs will do it for us” VR headset initiative. Last time, it was Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung with tethered headsets; this time, it’s Meta, Asus, and Lenovo with Qualcomm-powered wireless ones.
Microsoft sure knows how to hedge its bets!
One of the odder things about the Vision Pro is that it doesn’t support a lot of standard VR and 3D video formats, like the side-by-side videos you can find in lots of places. Mike Swanson has a deep dive into Apple’s proprietary immersive video format, which uses a square frame and layered videos for each eye.
The second episode of Prehistoric Planet Immersive will be available on April 19th, according to the Apple TV Plus page for the series.
The first episode was a pretty demonstration of the Vision Pro, rather than the David Attenborough-narrated, pretend nature documentary that Prehistoric Planet is. But the younger version of me that saw Jurassic Park and Prehysteria in theaters welcomes it, anyway.
The Meta Quest game, which is $19.99 and available to preorder, puts you in charge of stuff like scrubbing toilets and plucking chewed gum in a 1993 laundromat. Yum!
The goal is to transform it into a fully-fledged arcade. Based on my childhood obsession with games and how awful I was at them, this laundromat would have been a very expensive three hours of my mom’s Saturday.
That’s what I kept asking myself when testing out spatial Personas with Wes. The short of it is your ghostly Personas are now free to interact in any SharePlay enabled app, so you can watch movies, play games, and collaborate on projects. It’s neat — and you can interact more with other people. But seeing Wes’ head just float in my office also reminded me he really wasn’t there.
This video is a fun speedrun through all the VR headsets and AR glasses that Meta’s been tinkering with over the last decade. There’s a mention of Project Aria, and you even get a glimpse of some experimental smartwatch like controls. It’s a neat highlight reel, but I did chortle at how fast the video glosses over Ray-Ban Stories.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon is now available in 3D on the Vision Pro Apple TV Plus app, joining free-for-subscribers films that Apple added to its streaming service in March.
New, but not in 3D, are several other movies that probably should be — including the first three John Wick films, Armageddon, Taken, and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. The new crop of movies is available for between four and eight weeks, reports MacRumors.
You can see that in this Slow Mo Guys YouTube Short showing the flashing of the invisible-to-the-human-eye IR illuminators of Apple’s face computer, both on the front and around the lenses’ edges.
At 1,000fps, the Guys show the Vision Pro’s very fancy micro-OLED displays alternating between images and black frames, with a ring of IR lights popping on during the dark moments to help track where your eyes are looking.
Jason Snell of Six Colors details his experience with the MLB’s visionOS app now that the season is underway. Of the Gameday feature that puts a 3D-animated baseball field in your space during a game, he writes:
I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available—from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.
Ah, the early days of the Vision Pro’s app ecosystem.
[Six Colors]
Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and Spire Blast will each get Vision Pro “spatial” apps tomorrow, Apple shared in a release emailed to The Verge.
Also, rhythm game Synth Riders — aka the only game I’ve been coming back to besides bullet hell shooter Void-X — has been updated with Game Center leaderboards and a pass-the-headset Party Mode.
First adopters are ambassadors for the future. Glassholes need not apply.
I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs now uses video passthrough on Meta Quest headsets (and the Pico) to project your target for destruction onto a real-life table or whatever.
If you don’t have a VR headset with passthrough though, there’s been standalone version of the game on smartphones for years.
A source tells MacRumors that Apple is working on just that, potentially allowing Vision Pro wearers to use the Pencil with drawing apps like Freeform and Pixelmator. Rumors suggest that Apple is planning to take the wraps off of a new Pencil next month, but there’s no word on whether it will come with visionOS support just yet.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told press at the China Development Forum in Beijing that China will get it this year, according to Reuters this morning, citing a Chinese state media Weibo post.
MacRumors notes that this is the first time an Apple executive has confirmed where the Vision Pro will launch outside the US this year. Rumors have also suggested Apple will prioritize UK and Canadian launches.
It’s essentially the same thing you’d see if you were browsing the store in the Vision Pro itself — a few curated lists of native apps here, some recommended iPad apps there.
But at least there’s a way to casually cruise those sweet spatial apps without popping the headset on now.
[AppStore]
I’m not the one making this very big claim. That’d be Hugo Barra, former VP of Android and head of Oculus. Go check out his in-depth blog about his Vision Pro experience. It’s a great read overall, but this bit stood out:
Intentionally making the Vision Pro optics blurry is a clever move by Apple because it results in way smoother graphics across the board by hiding the screen door effect (which in practice means that you won’t see pixelation artifacts).
I’ve been hopping between both headsets and... I see what he’s saying!
An alternate game feed on ESPN Plus, Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Plus will present today’s Bruins vs. Penguins matchup as the NHL Big City Greens Classic 2. It goes beyond Nickelodeon’s slime-filled Super Bowl feed by using NHL EDGE positional data and Hawk-Eye optical tracking to turn real action into an animated version.
Sportico explains that to control their animated avatars, commentators have replaced the motion-capture suits they wore for the first game with Meta Quest Pro headsets.
Once Apple released the Vision Pro, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with a video saying his company’s Quest 3 headset is “the better product, period.”
Now he’s back with more takes, posting this on Threads in response to a post that said, “Apple is selling pretty much the device Meta wants to reach in 3-5 years.”
I don’t think we’re saying the devices are the same. We’re saying Quest is better. If our devices weigh as much as theirs in 3-5 years, or have the motion blur theirs has, or the lack of precision inputs, etc, then that means we’ll have regressed significantly.
Yes, their resolution is higher, but they paid for that with many other product tradeoffs that make their device worse in most ways. That’s not what we aspire to.
[Threads]
Here’s the story behind that photo of a bride giving her new Vision Pro-wearing husband the stink eye. Speaking to Futurism, the now notorious groom says:
“My wife was like, ‘We’re not taking photos in the Vision Pro,’ but I told her it was just for the meme.”
The bride says she wasn’t actually mad and gave the okay after everyone else left. That said, the Vision Pro “was the last thing [she] wanted pictures of.”
At least it wasn’t during the ceremony.
There’s a new Vision Pro update out, and visionOS 1.1 supposedly improves everybody’s favorite feature, Personas. But I think it’s still the stuff of nightmares. I FaceTimed my friend, and according to her: I still look too sleepy, my mouth moves more, and my eyes are better but not quite right.
“It looks more like you, but it’s still not you.” What do y’all think?
The premiere episode of “Faceless Lady” will debut on April 4th at 5 pm PT on Meta’s social VR platform, with the remaining five episodes dropping every Thursday, Variety reports. This is the third scripted VR original that Roth and Crypt TV have made for Meta, following 2022’s “Haunted House: Trick-VR-Treat” and “Be Mine.”
Those without a Meta Quest headset can catch the first two episodes on Crypt TV’s Facebook page.
It wasn’t just Meta’s social networks that went down yesterday — internet-connected Quest headsets, which should be able to work offline, showed an error message that prevented their main interface from loading, making them useless, as UploadVR detailed today.
Mark Rabkin, Meta’s VP of VR, blamed a login server bug yesterday, adding that Meta will try to make sure Quest devices are “more resilient.”
