The Ghost Howls
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
The Meta Connect 2024 has just finished and there Mark Zuckerberg and some other Meta executives have announced very important news concerning XR and AI. Of all these announcements, I selected the 5 most important ones for me and I want to briefly describe them to you, explaining also why they could be relevant for the future of XR. Are you interested in that?
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
On stage at Meta Connect today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially unveiled Quest 3S, Meta’s next headset, which aims to appeal to first-timers as well as Quest and Quest 2 owners looking for their first mixed reality device. As previous leaks suggested, Meta is releasing two variants of Quest 3S, a 128GB model priced at $300 and a 256GB model for $400, launching on October 15th.
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AR Insider
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Apple recently stripped away some of the friction in visual search. The iPhone 16's new Camera Control button includes a function to launch visual searches on the fly. Could this one-touch approach accelerate visual search's adoption curve? This post appeared first on AR Insider.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Meta today revealed a prototype of its first pair of AR glasses, codenamed Orion. The glasses are impressively compact, have a class-leading field-of-view, but also relies on a wireless compute unit that goes in your pocket. Although Meta has been selling its Ray-Ban smartglasses for several years now, the company hasn’t actually shown any glasses-sized device with a display—until now.
Speaker: Chris Paxton McMillin, President of D3 Training Solutions
To avoid awkward and sometimes disastrous learning content, instructional designers must use authentic translation in the right context to get optimal results. For example, even a simple phrase like “got milk” translates to “are you lactating” in Mexico. Can you imagine what a straight translation might do to your course? With over 317 million people in the US and over 6.7 billion potential customers in the world, personalizing training seems logical.
XR Today - Virtual Reality
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
SparkVR is launching augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) edtech solutions in school and universities in India. Immersive STEM Education Solution Gains Industry-Wide Recognition How XR, AI, BCI, and Neural Interfaces are Changing Healthcare Education Avantis Education Reveals 300,000 VR/AR Educational Assets The technologies create ‘highly’ interactive and realistic training modules, according to the Indian technology news provider, Inc42, which shared the story.
Virtual Reality Pulse brings together the best content for VR professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
XR Today - Virtual Reality
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
This week, VR career training solution provider Transfr announced 14 new Spanish-language VR programmes, following success in school districts like New Jersey and Kannapolis. According to the firm, the new VR learning simulations cover various high-paying career paths, including sectors such as solar technician, nursing, semiconductor manufacturing, and network technician.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Meta revealed at Connect today that it’s working with Microsoft to bring its Quest platform better wireless pairing with Windows 11 PCs, aiming to make using a PC with Quest a more seamless experience. “Soon you’re going to be able to easily connect to any Windows 11 PC. You just look at keyboard and it will start pairing,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on stage.
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Meta is showing off integrated prototype AR glasses at Connect with a field of view that's remarkable given their form factor. The company claims these AR glasses, codenamed Orion, have a field of view of 70 degrees diagonal. For comparison, Xreal glasses and the new Snap Spectacles have a field of view of 46 degrees, and HoloLens 2 has a field of view of 52 degrees.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Nearly two years ago, Meta announced that Quest’s social space, Horizon Home, would allow users to watch YouTube videos together—something we’ve been wishing was easy to do in VR for a long time. Excitement waned, however, when the feature never actually made it out the door. Now the company says social viewing for YouTube is finally ready.
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With a rapidly changing economy, Avangrid Renewables looked to virtual reality to develop a standardized form of immersive training in order to onboard and upskill technicians faster than ever before.
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
The new Meta Avatars system will launch on Tuesday. Meta Avatars are used in Meta's own Horizon Home, Horizon Worlds, and Horizon Workrooms, as well as in third-party VR and mixed reality apps that use the Meta Avatars SDK such as GOLF+ and Eleven Table Tennis. A graphics overhaul was first announced with a pre-rendered mockup by Mark Zuckerberg at Meta Connect 2022 two years ago.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Ghosts of Tabor , the VR extraction shooter from Combat Waffle Studios and publisher Beyond Frames, has doubled its revenue to $20 million since the game’s debut on the main Horizon Store in February 2024. The game’s first major milestone came earlier this year, where the studio revealed it had reached $10 million in less than a year on App Lab and Steam Early Access.
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Quest 3 owners in the US can try photorealistic scenes via Meta's new Horizon Hyperscape demo app. The app was launched today at Meta Connect. It offers six photorealistic scenes, six studios and a Meta HQ conference room. The scenes are fully volumetric, meaning you can move around them with positional tracking. Meta describes these scenes as "digital replicas", and says they were scanned using mobile phones, plus postprocessing in the cloud.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Meta has finally revealed its latest headset, Quest 3S. Although it retains some of Quest 2’s flaws, it creates much needed parity in power and features, all at an unbeatable price. Quest 3S has not only just been formally announced, it’s also right around the corner. Launching on October 15th, this $300 headset is the best place for VR newcomers to start.
Speaker: Nik Gowing, Brenda Laurel, Sheridan Tatsuno, Archie Kasnet, and Bruce Armstrong Taylor
With 191 country signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement now hard at work in the race to zero carbon by 2050, much of the heavy lifting in ecosystem sustainability falls on the shoulders of the world's densely populated urban centers. This conversation considers how today's AI-enabled simulation media, such as AR/VR, can be effectively applied to accelerate learning, understanding, training, and solutions-modeling to sustainability planning and design.
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
"We have a camera passthrough API coming early next year." In a surprise announcement at Connect 2024 today, Meta revealed that it will give developers access to the passthrough cameras of Quest headsets via a new API next year. "This will enable all kinds of cutting-edge MR experiences. You've got tracked objects, AI applications, fancy overlays, scene understanding, and so much more.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Say goodbye to the 128GB version of Quest 3, as the company is slated to only offer the 512GB version moving forward, and at a new, more attractive price. With the entrance of Quest 3S, and the discontinuation of Quest 2 and Quest Pro , Meta’s lineup is shifting a bit to make way for its new entry level XR headset, Quest 3S. Released in late 2023 for $650, the 512GB version of Quest 3 is still the company’s best-in-class XR headset.
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Quest 2 and Quest Pro will no longer be available when stock runs out or at the end of the year, whichever comes first. Meta made the announcement today at Meta Connect 2024. It comes as the company officially revealed and opened preorders for Quest 3S, starting at $300, and announced that it's also discontinuing the 128GB Quest 3 after cutting the price of the 512GB Quest 3 model to $500.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Out with the old, in with the new. Meta announced that the cheap and cheerful Quest 2 and the company’s pricey mixed reality pioneer Quest Pro are officially getting the boot, marking Meta’s next big push to bring mixed reality to the masses. There aren’t any official figures going around, but it’s safe to say Quest 2 was Meta’s most popular VR headset to date, coming just one year after the launch of the original Quest, which was released in May 2019.
Speaker: Richard Goring, Director at BrightCarbon
Remote meetings are here to stay - and many are BORING. If you are trying to engage your learners (or any audience), compelling content is critical. But trying to create stimulating content with the same tools you’ve always had is hard, right? Thankfully, wrong! Terrific tools in PowerPoint along with visual assets help you create the kind of dynamic content you need to capture your remote audience’s attention, with functions that allow for interactive sequences and navigation.
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Official YouTube cowatching on Horizon OS will finally launch as a beta next week. There is already a YouTube app on Quest, but it currently only supports solo viewing. Meta first announced YouTube cowatching two years ago at Connect 2022. Now, two years later, the company says it will finally roll out as a beta next week. YouTube cowatching will take place in Horizon Home, meaning you'll see other people as their Meta Avatar alongside you.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Polyarc, the studio behind Moss and Moss: Book II, announced both pint-sized VR adventure platformers are getting visual overhauls and a 25% discount—just in time for the launch of Meta’s newly unveiled Quest 3S. The studio says both games are getting all-new visual and gameplay updates, coming for free to both Quest 3 and Quest 3S. “The update brings significant visual improvements to Moss , the ability to skip combat in both games, as well as a few quality-of-life updates players
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Meta is launching an official Open Facial Interface for Quest 3, priced at $40. With Quest Pro being discontinued soon , Meta will no longer offer a headset with an open periphery, meaning the ability to see the real world at the sides of your view. That may be why it's now offering an official option to achieve this with Quest 3. Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth has said that he was a big fan of the open design of Quest Pro, and seemed to tease this Open Facial Interface on multiple occasions.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Amazon today released a new version of its Prime Video app for Quest, which is letting you do one thing the 2019-era version never got around to: downloading and watching videos offline. That ought to put Travel Mode to good use. The original Prime Video VR app for Quest hasn’t seen much love since it was launched in 2019, although with the entrance of Quest 3S and overtures to mobile app developers to stock the Horizon Store with 2D and spatial apps alike, Amazon is launching a new versio
Speaker: Treion Muller, Chief Strategy Officer at ELB Learning
Since when has learning and development (L&D) become such a negative experience with its intended learners? Could it be because learners have been conditioned by very poor learning experiences over the past two decades, combined with the kinks of technological innovation? Or is it because learning has typically been designed as a one-size-fits-all solution, despite the fact that humans are not clones?
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Meta says Horizon Worlds creators will be able to add AI NPCs to their worlds next year. These AI NPCs will be able to "engage in conversations, help people out, and even compete in games", Meta claims, showing the following demo it claims is real: 0:00 / 0:24 1× Meta says AI NPCs are multiplayer by default, and creators will be able to customize both their appearance and voice.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Amid the official unveiling of the new $300 Quest 3S today, Meta dropped another bombshell at its Connect developer conference: all new Quest 3 and Quest 3S purchases are getting the much anticipated Batman: Arkham Shadow bundled if they order before early next year. From now until April 2025, all new Quest 3/S owners can nab Camouflaj’s upcoming Batman: Arkham Shadow for free, which is set to release on October 22nd —just a few days after the October 18th release of Quest 3S.
Upload VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
The critically acclaimed Moss duology will receive a free update, bringing visual and gameplay improvements on Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S headsets. Coinciding with the anticipated Meta Quest 3S reveal, developer Polyarc unveiled a host of Quest-specific upgrades coming to both Moss and its sequel, Moss: Book 2. The original game, which was released on the first Meta Quest, hasn't had an upgrade since it launched on the 2019 headset.
Road to VR
SEPTEMBER 25, 2024
Logitech today announced the launch of the MX Ink stylus. This officially supported Quest accessory aims to give users a more precise and natural input method for applications like design, drawing, and visualization. On Quest, hand-tracking is great as a low-barrier input for basic cursor-like input, while controllers are great as a flexible and high performance input for gaming and applications that need lots of distinct inputs like buttons and sticks.
Speaker: Micah Eppler, Account Executive for Rehearsal of eLearning Brothers
Did you know that companies such as Paychex, 3M, and Honeywell are getting better results by incorporating video-based practice and coaching within their L&D strategy? From sales pitches to soft skills, learners are becoming top performers by applying and validating knowledge transfer using the unique benefits of video. Whether used as a stand-alone application or integrated with a learning platform, video-based practice and coaching platforms give learners the ultimate opportunity to repeatedly
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