The YouTube app on Quest 3 now supports 8K videos, including immersive 360° & 180°.
At 8K, 2D 360° videos have enough pixels to almost match the Quest 3's display angular resolution, and 2D 180° videos will far exceed it. For 3D content, 8K 180° videos almost match Quest 3's display but 360° videos would still be far below.
Around 16K would be required for 3D 360° videos that match Quest 3's display, and around 48K for 3D 360° videos that match the human eye (assuming a capable headset such as Varjo XR-4).
The app on Quest 3 also now supports regular rectangular 8K videos, though this seems a tad pointless as the headset doesn't have sufficient resolution to do this justice at any reasonable size.
Strangely, I found when testing the update on my Quest 3 that most 360° videos labeled as 8K in the search results max out at 4K in the quality selector. It's unclear why exactly this is, and it wasn't a problem with any 180° videos I tried.
And even on the immersive YouTube videos that do play at 8K on Quest 3, the bitrate seems to be far below what Apple offers with its Apple Immersive Video, which is 8K 180° 3D. The compression artifacts resulting from low bitrate are much more apparent in an immersive video inside a headset than on a traditional screen, and Apple Immersive Video's high bitrate was a key feature I praised in my Vision Pro review. Apple Vision Pro doesn't have a YouTube app though. You can access it in the Safari web browser, or through the third-party app Juno, but neither option allows playing 360° or 180° content.
The Quest v64 update brought two undocumented major new features.
You'd generally think that a changelog for the system software of a consumer electronics device would include all major new functionality introduced, but with Meta that isn't always the case.
Version 64, released earlier this month, officially brought improved passthrough quality, external mic support, and lying down mode to Quest 3, and made casting no longer end when the headset is taken off.
But Quest power users have noticed v64 also brings two major features not mentioned in the changelog: furniture recognition on Quest 3 and simultaneous hand tracking and Touch Pro or Touch Plus controllers in the home space.
Furniture Recognition On Quest 3
Quest 3 generates a raw 3D mesh of your room during mixed reality setup, and could always infer the positions of your walls, floor, and ceiling from this 3D mesh. But until now the headset didn't know which shapes within this mesh represent more specific elements like doors, windows, furniture, and TVs. You could manually mark these out, but that manual requirement meant developers couldn't rely on users having done so.
With v64 though, at the end of mixed reality room scanning Quest 3 now creates a labeled rectangular cuboid bounding box around:
Doors
Windows
Beds
Tables
Sofas
Storage (cabinets, shelves, etc)
Screens (TVs and monitors)
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Quest 3 v64 furniture recognition footage from Squashi9.
Quest developers can access these bounding boxes using Meta's Scene API and use them to automatically place virtual content. For example, they could place a tabletop gameboard on the largest table in the room, replace your windows with portals, or depict your TV in a fully VR game so you don't punch it.
Apple Vision Pro already gives developers a series of crude 2D rectangles representing the surface of seats and tables, but doesn't yet provide a 3D bounding box. The RoomPlan API on iPhone Pro can do 3D bounds, but that API isn't available in visionOS.
The new Quest 3 functionality was first publicly noticed by X user Squashi9, as far as we can tell. UploadVR tested v64 on Quest 3 and found this feature works very well for most object categories, except for Storage which creates inaccurate bounds.
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Quest 3 v64 furniture recognition footage from VR enthusiast Luna.
You may think this sounds a lot like the SceneScript research Meta showed off last month. But the furniture recognition on Quest 3 in v64 is far more crude than SceneScript. For a sofa, for example, v64 creates a simple rectangular cuboid encapsulating it, while SceneScript generates separate rectangular cuboids for the seat area and arms, as well as a cylinder for the backrest. SceneScript likely requires far more computing power than Quest 3's current furniture recognition, and Meta presented it solely as research, not a near-term feature.
Simultaneous Hands & Controllers In Home
Since last year Quest developers have been able to experiment with using hand tracking and Quest 3 or Quest Pro controllers simultaneously, and since two months ago they've been able to publish apps using this feature to the Quest Store and App Lab. Meta calls this feature Multimodal.
With v64 Multimodal has been added to the Quest home space, both in passthrough and in VR mode. Again though keep in mind it only works with Quest 3 or Quest Pro controllers, so you won't see this feature on Quest 2 unless you buy the Pro controllers for $300.
Multimodal enables an instantaneous transition between controller tracking and hand tracking, no more delay. It also enables using one controller while still tracking the other hand. That means you can pick up a single controller to navigate the Quest home space, without jank, as you might a TV remote. This could be appealing for web browsing, media watching, and changing settings, giving the precision a tracked controller while keeping your other hand free.
Pimax just announced two new wired PC VR headsets, Crystal Light and Crystal Super, as well as a wireless adapter for the current Crystal.
Pimax is a China-based startup best known for its 2017 Kickstarter for an ultra-wide field of view PC-based VR headset, but in recent years it has shifted focus from field of view to resolution.
The current Pimax Crystal, which started shipping around a year ago priced at $1600, is a hybrid headset that can be used as a native wired PC VR headset or a standalone headset, though the number of supported standalone apps is very small.
The new $300 wireless adapter for the original Crystal, promised at the headset's reveal almost two years ago, will make Crystal Pimax's first wireless headset. It uses a 60GHz signal, so it should support higher bandwidth and thus less compression than regular Wi-Fi streaming on headsets like Meta Quest and Pico.
The new Crystal Light and Crystal Super will not support this adapter. Unlike the original Crystal, the new headsets forgo the onboard chipset and battery in favor of a 250 gram lighter wired-only PC-only design with a cheaper entry price.
Crystal Light has the same 2880×2880 resolution QD-LCD displays as Crystal but drops eye tracking. The $700 base model Crystal Light also lacks Mini-LED local dimming, but it's available in a $900 model.
Crystal Super will also come in two models, according to Pimax. Both have 4K displays, but on the $1800 model those displays will be QD-LCD while on the $2000 model they will be micro-OLED. Unlike Crystal Like, Crystal Super retains the eye tracking from the original Crystal which enables eye-tracked foveated rendering.
Crystal Light
Crystal
Crystal Super
Wired (DisplayPort)
✅
✅
✅
Wireless
❌
$300 Adapter
❌
Lens Adjustment
Manual
Automatic
Automatic
Display Type (Models)
QD-LCD ($700)
QD-LCD w/ Local Dimming ($900)
QD-LCD w/ Local Dimming ($1600)
QD-LCD w/ Local Dimming ($1800)
Micro-OLED ($2000)
Resolution (per eye)
2880×2880
2880×2880
4K
Eye Tracking
❌
✅
✅
All Pimax Crystal models support inside-out positional tracking and come with 6DoF Touch-like tracked controllers. This tracking is delivered via four greyscale fisheye cameras in similar positions as Meta Quest 2.
Crystal Light is set to make 3K resolution PC VR significantly more affordable than before, while Crystal Super promises to bring 4K Micro-OLED to PC VR for the first time.
Pimax claims Crystal Light will start shipping in May and Crystal Super will ship in late 2024. However, Pimax has a long history of repeatedly failing to meet its deadlines and of shipping products without promised features. We strongly recommend exercising caution by waiting for reviews of final hardware before placing an order.
OpenXR is the open industry standard API for native XR app development and runtimes. It's managed by Khronos, the same non-profit industry consortium that manages OpenGL, Vulkan, and WebGL. The OpenXR working group includes all the major companies in the industry, including Meta, Pico, HTC, Valve, Varjo, and Unity - but notably not Apple.
The OpenXR 1.0 specification was finalized in 2019. Various companies and groups have added extra features on top of the core spec through OpenXR Extensions, and OpenXR 1.1 brings five of these extensions into the core specification to be supported by all devices:
Stereo with Foveated Rendering (promoted from Varjo's XR_VARJO_quad_views) adds support for either eye-tracked or fixed foveated rendering "across multiple graphics rendering APIs".
Local Floor (promoted from XR_EXT_local_floor), adding a third LOCAL_FLOOR tracking coordinate space type in addition to the existing LOCAL and STAGE. LOCAL is also known as eye-level tracking, and means recentering affects all three axis. With STAGE, recentering does not apply because the center of the coordinate space is the center of the floor in your playspace. The new LOCAL_FLOOR is a middle ground, recentering the two horizontal axis while keeping the vertical aligned with your real floor.
Grip Surface (promoted from XR_EXT_palm_pose), a pose that "allows applications to reliably render a virtual object held in the user’s hand, whether it is tracked directly or by a motion controller".
xrLocateSpaces (and its corresponding extension equivalent XR_KHR_locate_spaces), a "function to locate an array of spaces".
XrUuid (promoted from XR_EXT_uuid), a data type to hold a universally unique identifier.
The three tracking coordinate space types in OpenXR as of version 1.1.
Khronos says OpenXR 1.1 also delivers "new features and clarifications", including 13 new interaction profiles, identifiers for thumb resting surfaces, styluses, trigger curl, and trigger slide, proximity detection for controller elements, and localized haptics in the index trigger and under the thumb.
Further, OpenXR 1.1 adds new error codes for insufficient permissions and dependencies not enabled, to help developers with app debugging.
Major companies including Meta, Pico, HTC, Valve, Varjo, and Unity have reiterated their support for OpenXR and expressed their intention to support OpenXR 1.1 - though again, notably not Apple. Apple Vision Pro does not support OpenXR, using its open proprietary ARKit and RealityKit APIs.
Meta explained the setting all Quest owners should enable to make the headset much better at remembering its safety boundary.
Each time you start using your Quest the headset tries to recognize your surroundings to load up the safety boundary you previously drew.
In the Quest v60 system software update, released back in December, Meta said that it had added "cloud computing capabilities" to the safety boundary system that it said lets the headset remember more boundaries.
To activate this on your headset you need to enable 'Share point cloud data' in Settings -> Privacy -> Device Permissions.
Now four months later, Meta is going into detail as to what this setting does and how effective it is, and is branding the feature visual positioning system (VPS).
Meta says VPS uses "cloud storage and computing power" to store and process "more accurate and more robust spatial maps, making it more resilient to changes like lighting variations between day and night, changing clutter, and more", as well as supporting more rooms.
These spatial maps are point clouds, ie. collections of 3D coordinates, and don't include actual images of your room.
Meta claims VPS has "already helped Quest users get into their apps faster more than 100 million times" and that with VPS and other tracking system improvements the company has reduced the frequency of "Boundary not found" prompts by 50%.
This same point cloud matching is used in recalling Quest 3's mixed reality 3D room mesh, reducing frustrating instances of needing to rescan the room.
"Share point cloud data" remains an optional Quest feature, but enabling it should significantly reduce the friction involved in needing to set up your space before jumping into the VR or MR content you want to use.
Niantic's 8th Wall WebXR AR engine now supports Apple Vision Pro.
8th Wall is a web-based AR engine, which has a fully in-browser editor and offers cloud hosting for built projects. Niantic is the company behind smartphone AR games like Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now.
Last month we reported on three 8th Wall demos that support crossplay between smartphones and Quest 3, but noted that none of the demos worked on Apple Vision Pro.
Niantic has now added support for Vision Pro in 8th Wall, but there's a major catch.
Apple Vision Pro supports WebXR yes, through enabling an advanced Safari flag, but it does not support the WebXR Augmented Reality module. That means web apps can show fully immersive VR content on Vision Pro, but can't display on top of passthrough for AR.
To work around this, 8th Wall makes it easy for developers to add a virtual environment as the background for their otherwise-AR apps. These apps will run in AR mode on mobile and Meta Quest, and in VR on Vision Pro.
This is of course somewhat ironic, given the primary focus of Vision Pro is AR and the primary focus of Quest has traditionally been VR.
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Vision Pro owners can try out Niantic's Basketball Arcade game for an example of an 8th Wall experience that supports the headset.
The Wolvic XR browser is switching its engine from Gecko to Chromium.
Wolvic is the open-source successor to Firefox Reality, which was a web browser for early standalone headsets like Oculus Go, the original Oculus Quest, Vive Focus, and HoloLens 2. In 2020 Mozilla laid off 250 employees including staff working on Firefox Reality, and in 2022 handed over the project to "open source software consultancy" Igalia, which relaunched it as Wolvic.
Today Wolvic is available on Meta Quest, Pico, Magic Leap 2, and Huawei VR Glasses.
The stable version of Wolvic on app stores currently uses Gecko, the browser engine developed by Mozilla that's used in Firefox. But Igalia has now made a new version of Wolvic available for sideloading that uses Google's Chromium browser engine, and it offers significantly better performance for WebGL content, the rendering API for WebXR experiences.
The Quest Browser and Pico Browser built into Meta and ByteDance's standalone headsets already use Chromium, so Wolvic's new version allows it to compete directly with them.
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The switch to Chromium has also enabled Wolvic to add support for controller-free hand tracking, the WebXR AR module, and WebXR layers.
Igalia says it's not "immediately abandoning" the Gecko version of Wolvic and will continue to release Gecko builds "for some time". The Chromium version is also not yet complete, missing extensions and sync so far. But over time the Gecko version's maintenance "will slowly give way to maintenance of the Chromium version", and will switch the app store builds to Chromium in the "near-to midterm future".
Igalia notes it's making this decision on technical grounds, not ideological, offering this explanation:
"Chromium is (currently) very advantaged, and doubly so in AOS-based devices. Gecko simply does not have the same level of maintenance or development of its WebXR implementation. It doesn’t integrate well with the engine’s GPU process, nor does it currently receive development priority from Mozilla, which means no new features."
You can download new Chromium-based Wolvic APK for sideloading here.
Google I/O 2024 takes place on May 14, and the company confirmed it will include "AR announcements".
The company is expected to reveal more details about the Android XR platform it's working on for Samsung's upcoming headset.
Early last year Samsung officially announced it was working on an XR headset, with Google handling the system software via a new variant of Android and Qualcomm providing the chipset. Three months ago Qualcomm confirmed that this chip will be Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2, a higher-end variant of the base XR2 Gen 2 used in Meta Quest 3.
At last year's I/O Google said it would "share more" about Android XR and Samsung partnership later that year, but that didn't end up happening.
This may be because Samsung reportedly delayed and redesigned the headset in response to the reveal of Apple Vision Pro just one month after, which seemingly exceeded its expectations. It's possible this also led Google to redesign or reconsider Android XR.
Google recently asked Meta to switch to Android XR for its Meta Quest headsets over its own Meta Quest OS, also based on Android, but Meta strongly declined.
Meta's response is likely at least partly because this won't be Google's first Android-based XR platform for standalone headsets. Back in 2018 Google's Daydream platform powered the $400 Lenovo Mirage Solo, but less than two years later Daydream was abandoned.
Late last year UploadVR reported that Samsung told developers it plans to launch in late 2024. Samsung's plans could change between then and late 2024, however, as this will be the company's first standalone headset. We reached out to Samsung at the time but did not receive a response.
While Samsung will be the first hardware maker to use Android XR, The Information reported that Google has also been pitching it to other hardware makers - though there have been no reports of other companies yet accepting. Meanwhile Meta too is courting hardware partners, recently netting LG.
We'll bring you the news of any XR announcements at Google I/O on May 14.
It's sometimes claimed that PC VR usage on Steam is shrinking, but here's why that isn't actually true.
The Steam Hardware & Software Survey reports the percentage of Steam users that use a VR headset on SteamVR each month. In March this figure was 1.82%, down from 1.97% in February.
This figure has been gradually trending down since March 2020, when Valve changed the survey's methodology to scan your SteamVR logs for the past month instead of only currently connected headsets.
Taken at face value, it's easy to conclude that PC VR has contracted over the past four years. But there are two major considerations at play here.
The first is that this figure is a percentage. That means that if the number of PC gamers grows faster than the number of PC VR users, this percentage will decrease, even if PC VR has actually grown in absolute terms. But this isn't much consolation. For PC VR to be considered succeeding, it should at least keep pace with PC gaming, right?
Well when the second consideration is taken into account, it not only keeps pace - it's actually growing. The biggest issue with the VR users figure in the Steam Hardware Survey is that it includes China. The most popular PC VR headsets and SteamVR games aren't officially sold in China, and the number of Chinese users on Steam has gradually increased each year.
Here's what that same chart looks like when factoring out Steam users with their language set to Chinese:
While Valve doesn't invest in bringing major new VR content to SteamVR like Meta and Sony do for Quest and PlayStation VR2, PC VR does seem to still have enough organic momentum for growth, albeit not at the pace of other leading VR platforms. And the cheaper version of Quest 3 almost certainly inbound could entice a new wave of PC gamers to jump into VR soon.
The Meta Quest v64 system software update is starting to roll out.
Version 64 is focused almost entirely on Quest 3, bringing improved passthrough quality, external mic support, and lying down mode. The update also makes casting continue when you take the headset off.
As always, keep in mind that Quest system software updates "roll out" gradually, so it may take a few days or even more than a week for your headset to get the Quest v64 update.
Improved Camera Passthrough Quality
The headline improvement of v64 is improved camera passthrough on Quest 3.
Shortly after Quest 3 launched Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said its passthrough would improve "modestly" over time with software updates, and v64 is the first update to do so.
Here's specifically what Meta claims has been improved in v64:
Improved resolution We have improved the perceived resolution for passthrough by optimizing the passthrough pipeline. This makes it easier for users to see finer details and read smaller text in the real world - such as notifications on a smartphone screen.
Improved image quality We have fine tuned the camera processing pipeline to improve color, exposure, contrast and dynamic range in passthrough. This makes color passthrough better match the real world. We have also reduced graininess (aka image noise) in lower light conditions making for an overall more comfortable passthrough experience in a range of lighting conditions.
UploadVR tried v64 on Quest 3 and can confirm the dynamic range and exposure control have been very noticeably improved, making it easier to view physical screens like monitors and phones. The graininess has also been slightly reduced. However, this all comes at the cost of a slightly darker and less vibrant image. Interestingly, this new passthrough tuning, including the darkness and vibrancy tradeoff, is closer to Apple Vision Pro's, as we noted in our review of it.
What hasn't visibly changed however is the harsh geometric warping distortion, our biggest criticism of Quest 3's passthrough in our review.
External Microphone Support
When Quest 3 launched I was initially excited to use it on our weekly VR Download podcast but found its microphone had the same annoying plosives popping issue as Quest Pro, so I still use Quest 2.
The v62 update brought some improvements to Quest 3's microphone quality, including specifically to the plosives issue. However, I tested and found it still isn't good enough for VR Download, and still sounds noticeably worse than Quest 2.
The new v64 update adds the ability to use an external microphone on Quest 3 via the USB-C port. This can include a mic with a USB-C connector or any mic via a USB-C adapter. We plan to test this for VR Download.
Lying Down Mode
The headline feature of the v63 update was the addition of lying down mode to Quest 2 and Quest Pro, a new experimental feature called 'Use apps while lying down'.
When it's enabled, recentering (holding the Oculus button on the right controller or your right index finger to your thumb) while looking up above you will also rotate the virtual coordinate space 90 degrees upwards, letting you comfortably use seated VR apps and games in bed.
However, it wasn't available on Quest 3 until now. The v64 update brings this same feature to Quest 3. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth previously said that the delay bringing this to Quest 3 was related to its automatic boundary setup option not present in older headsets.
Continous Casting
Finally, v64 makes casting your Quest's view to an external device continue even when the headset is taken off. Previously, the stream would go black. This should prevent issues with the stream cutting out when you put the headset back on.
