The Vision Pro announcement highlights a major problem with XR
I don’t need to tell you that Apple finally announced their AR headset on Monday. Every blogger and their mum has by now published their opinion. And we’ve all seen the viral video of the audience gasping at the price.
At The Round, we thought it was awesome. No, there wasn’t much in terms of functionality that hasn’t been done before, but, unsurprisingly, it’s all being done better, smoother, neater and sexier by Apple. What has for years been confined to the crania of the uber-commited is finally looking like something that the cool kids might actually be seen wearing. Soon.
However, did you notice the lack of actual immersive content in those slick videos? My heart started racing during the Disney segment, but everything else was 2D in 3D. My first ever VR experience was a dinosaur one back in 2016 and it changed my life. To see that Disney is plotting multiverses of immersive madness is super exciting. That tabletop basketball concept? I don’t even care that I don’t know the rules — sign me up!
But (and this is one big but), with what is essentially a mobile device, albeit with some nice Apple silicone inside, how on earth are immersive developers going to load their applications with all the rich, beautiful animations that are required to bring 3D stories to life on a headset like the Vision Pro?
Here’s some context — in 2022, Google created a three-minute Augmented Reality concert with the Gorillaz that users could place atop the towers of Time Square and Piccadilly Circus. It was awesome. But, in order to watch that experience, we had to download an 850mb packet of files to our phones (after having installed the 650 mb app). That 850 mb file is 1.3x the size of the downloaded copy of the entire Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets film I have waiting for me on my Netflix account (664 mb). For three minutes. Per minute, the Gorillaz AR experience (and most experiences for mobile XR) is 68x the size of film content. Because of this, all animations have to be downloaded to the device in advance of being used in an XR experience or game. This, obviously, uses huge amounts of data and storage space. Seeing as the main demographic for this kind of content skews younger, and younger people are more likely to have cheaper devices and data packages, developers avoid overloading apps with animated content and, as a result, create less engaging experiences that struggle to find an audience.
I probably need to provide context for that last statement, too. Remember Pokemon Go? Of course you do. The game is often credited with mainstreaming (inventing? certainly validating) mobile AR gaming. But frustratingly, Niantic has struggled to replicate that success. They’ve had access to some of the world’s most valuable IP and still struggled to have another hit. With Pokemon, the format perfectly fitted the IP, and simple gameplay made sense. But when they released ‘Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’, I wonder whether the hunt and catch format simply didn’t play to the strength of the Wizarding World IP: its characters. ‘Hogwarts Legacy’, on consoles, has been a massive success, despite boycott calls. It leans into the narrative storytelling and rich characterisation that fans love about the franchise so much. After retiring Wizards Unite, Niantic partnered with Marvel for their next release. Sadly, the trial release in New Zealand is reportedly tanking. Per a review in Forbes (albeit by the persistently pessimistic Paul Tassi):
“While it’s unfinished and clearly still being worked on, what’s being shown here is extremely rough. Ugly characters, repetitive and badly animated combat, a strange storyline. It continues the tradition of Niantic mostly failing to understand the original appeal of Pokémon GO was…Pokémon, a game about exploring the world and finding Pokemon. That really does not translate to many other genres” — Paul Tassi, Forbes
Ouch. As an industry, we really need some more huge AR games and experiences that capture audiences’ attention. But the sheer size of 3D animation files is causing a huge bottleneck in mobile XR gaming. It’s throttling storytelling and preventing developers from creating truly engaging, rich, narrative-driven experiences.
On Monday, Apple didn’t just launch a new product, they announced the era of spatial computing. However, spatial content is currently in its iPod era. Like with songs 20 years ago, each animation you want to use has to be downloaded to your device first and uses up precious storage space. Like listening to the same few albums on repeat in years gone by, we’re currently stuck with ‘repetitive and badly animated’ 3D content.
For spatial computing to deliver what audiences of today want (unlimited content) we need the spatial Spotify to step on to the scene. Three years ago, at The Round, we were working with leading arts institutions in the UK, who were asking — ‘how can we use AR and VR to reach more audiences with our work?’ The fact is, we couldn’t. 3D animation file sizes were too restricting for use on accessible devices. So we set out to develop a means of distributing broadcast quality animation content in real-time across the cloud to anywhere in the world.
Our proprietary spatial streaming protocol can now compress that same three minute Gorillaz AR concert to just 30 mb (a 96.5% reduction) and stream it in real-time at 60 frames per second (compared to the 25 fps industry standard) with perfect audio visual synchronisation, across an infinitely scalable cloud architecture that doesn’t require users to join servers or wait to download files. We can store limitless catalogues of animated content in the cloud for practically nothing, which developers can stream on demand to their games and experiences, requiring a 4G, 5G or WiFi connection of just 15mbps. A maximum of 6 mb of storage space is used on the device at any time. This is the Spotify of spatial computing, and having just completed work on our developer SDK, we will be demonstrating it at London Tech Week, streaming to AR, VR and PC simultaneously, from the 12th to the 15th of June 2023.
Welcome to the new era of spatial content. Come and say hi!
