VR Is Here To Stay: Announcements from Oculus Connect & Google Daydream
Last year, I wrote about Oculus Connect 2 and how important it was for the budding VR industry. Nearly a year later, I am writing about the most important VR announcements from Google and Oculus... which occurred in the same week!
This week made it very clear that VR is here to stay. The energy from developers, gamers, and executives across media, entertainment, and more, was filled with confidence that the VR has graduated from its infancy to a fast growing developed industry. Its now just a matter of when the “next” computing platform is now.
On that note, I am writing this to shine a candid light on the good, the bad and the ugly of the announcements, which might come off a bit contrarian in comparison to much of the press, which has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel compelled to break down what I feel was done wrong to help the entire industry improve for the future.
For the sake of simplicity, the post is broken into 6 parts: Mobile, Social, WebVR, Tech Advancements, Content Announcements and The Road Ahead.
Mobile:
1. While no mobile VR hardware updates occurred at Connect (the new Gear VR came out in August), Oculus announced Gear VR sees 1M monthly actives and John Carmack reassured the audience during his keynote that he strongly believes that the future of VR is mobile.
2. Google announced their Daydream headset
The headset is only $79 ($20 less than the Gear VR) BUT it currently only works with 1 Daydream compatible phone (Google’s new Pixel & Pixel XL phone made by HTC). This was a bit disappointing because I believed that Google would launch with a series of Daydream compatible phones, widening the possibility of new users into mobile VR. I now realize, however, that it will take a few generations of phones to create and build the Daydream ecosystem. Short-term, this doesn’t give developers targeting Daydream much of a market, thus we won’t see the full platform’s potential for another year, however, long-term this allows Google to develop their ecosystem the right way and learn what works/doesn’t work along the way.
Here’s a quick overview of the differences between the two mobile VR headsets:
* The phone does not connect to the Daydream headset by USB, it simply clasps the phone in place and launches straight into VR, easily adjusting to the phone’s position and size. Fitting the Samsung phone into the gear VR’s USB slot can be quite frustrating, so it’s great to see Google tackling that.
** Daydream comes with a custom controller that offers 3 degrees of freedom (left/right, up/down, forward/backwards). The best thing about the controller is that it is small and fits fright into the headset, making it hard to lose or misplace, unlike Gear VR’s Game pad that was bulky or the touch pad that could get tiring.
Overall, it seems like the Daydream is quite an upgrade from Google Cardboard but until there are more Daydream compatible phones, Gear VR may remain the mobile VR market leader (unless recent recall of all Note 7 phones affect a large % of Samsung sales).
Social:
Mark Zuckerberg did an on-stage demonstration of the “Oculus Social VR platform” except the demonstration was just a demo and most of what he showed is not going to be released in the near future…
As I watched the demo, I was ooo-ing and ahh-ing, chatting with my team on Slack and those around me about how awesome the platform looked, how it made me want to use a Rift immediately… then came the bad news. None of the demo would be available to use for the foreseeable future.
So, to make it clear, let me breakdown what was demoed and what Oculus actually is planning on shipping.
What was demoed but has no plans of being released anytime soon:
- Facially tracked avatars that mimic human-like facial expressions
- Fully tracked bodies in VR
- Fully Customizable avatars (i.e. custom clothing, hair color, eye color, etc.)
- Ability to video chat a real-life person from a social VR platform
- Ability to visit multiple places over a video call with someone outside of VR from inside a VR headset.
What Oculus will actually release:
1. Single texture avatars
- Avatars come in single colors and facial expressions, bodies are not tracked
2. Oculus Parties
Allows you to chat via Voice Chat with friends on your friends list
3. Oculus Rooms
Allows those 8 friends to watch video together (provided by Facebook), listen to music, and play social mini-games
Vegter reports that both Parties and Rooms will be coming to Gear VR in a few weeks, and to Oculus Rift in early 2017.
While Zuckerberg’s demonstration offers a unique glimpse into the future, I believe showcasing it at such a public event depicts the VR industry in a light that is not realistic to where technology is at now. Many people who don’t work in VR, watch and/or read articles about the demo, and do not fully understand that this technology is not yet available. Therefore, it generates false impressions of where VR is, leading many to be disappointed/confused when they try their first social VR experience and it doesn’t meet that level of immersion.
Which leads me to the third batch of announcements…
Tech Advancements:
1. Oculus announced they are working on a standalone headset codenamed “Santa Cruz”
Kent Bye noted in this Voices of VR podcast, that this Oculus Connect felt less like a Developer Conference and more like a Marketing Conference. The announcement around the standalone headset that only press could try, communicated to the developers at the conference that it was more important to generate headlines than to give them a glimpse at what the next gen of hardware they will be developing for might feel like.
For in-depth info from press who actually got to see the headset, read here. There is currently no information about the release date or price of Santa Cruz.
2. Touch is finally available to pre-order and will ship on Dec 6! Alongside over 35 Oculus Touch launch titles, I am most eager to see all the wonderful creations made with Oculus Medium (Oculus’s 3D paint/sculpting app).
3. Oculus now supports room-scale
The catch? You need a 3rd tracker ($79/each). The Rift ships with 1 tracker, if you order Touch controllers, you receive a 2nd tracker, but to achieve room-scale, you must order a 3rd. This means of the people who do order Touch, there will be a smaller subset of those people who will order a 3rd tracker to enable “room-scale.” As a result, both consumers and developers are getting burned as consumers will be confused with what they can experience and developers are in the dark about how to best optimize their experience; building for room-scale is much different experience than building for 2 trackers with a front-facing experience or with one tracker to use with the XBOX controller. I’m afraid all these options won’t bode well for the Oculus ecosystem.
4. Oculus will be able to work with a cheaper gaming PC ($499)
Oculus will soon be compatible with much cheaper, less powerful PCs (running on Nvidia 960s) thanks to their newly released software updates called Timewarp and Spacewarp. Usually, VR has to run at 90 frames per second to avoid nausea, but with Spacewarp, it allows your PC to run at 45 frames per second and Timewarp corrects the display when the machine misses a frame. In theory, this should be huge for VR, but will have to see the tech functioning in the wild.
WebVR:
This was by far the most exciting announcement at Oculus Connect because it shows Oculus has begun to understand that walled gardens will not work for VR. Nate Mitchell, co-founder and VP of Product, said “the web is going to be one of the easiest ways to develop and share VR experiences.” I, too, am a believer that the web will expose more people to the potential of VR and convince many more to get inside a headset.
1. Oculus announced they are developing a VR Web browser called Carmel
Carmel will run on both Gear VR and Oculus Rift and is “fully optimized” for the headsets. I assume that Oculus decided to create their own browser to control the technical and design experience while inside a headset.
2. Teased ReactVR framework
ReactVR will power VR web experiences without requiring software installations or long downloads and will be easily viewable on any laptop or smartphone.
With Oculus now in the mix alongside Mozilla and Google, it means web VR will become more powerful, much more quickly.
Content:
Facebook committed an additional $250M to funding VR content, including entertainment, games, educational tools, $50M is to be allocated to mobile VR, $10M allocated to educational content, $10M toward supporting creators of diverse backgrounds.
Google announced a range of apps and experiences coming to the Daydream headset in November, most notably: a JK Rowling experience, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and HBO Now. While numbers were not announced, Google has been funding teams to build for Daydream apps and experiences.
The Road Ahead:
As part of Oculus Connect tradition, Michael Abrash, Oculus’ Chief Scientist, predicted the next 5 years of VR. Notably, he believes by 2021 VR displays will be 4K x 4K pixels per eye, headsets will reach a 140° FOV, and advancements in eye-tracking technology will be “so central to the future of VR”. Last but not least, he said that the lines between virtual and real realities will “blur”. Perhaps the merge of VR/AR will happen sooner than we think.
Virtual Reality is moving fast and is still in its earliest stages. It’s the community’s responsibility to stay on track and not sell false versions of VR technology to the mass consumer market. We need to be open and honest about how this technological platform is progressing, and showcase the experiences and technology that we can try NOW, not at an undetermined future date.
While it is important to inspire others about the future of VR, most are still just trying to grasp what VR really is, and it’s the community’s job to continue to build for the future, while educating consumers in the present. Because while these far-off demos are some of the things that get us excited about the potential for VR, we must not let consumers fall into the trough of disillusionment and instead, get them excited about what is happening now, so that they too can aspire for more in the future.
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