Playing VR games is a great way to stay active, both mentally and physically. But when all is said and done, you’re still only traversing around a pretty small footprint—even smaller if you’re stuck in an apartment. Greg Madison, a UX designer at Unity and fellow indoorsman, opened up his playspace a bit by turning his apartment into a VR game platform, something he hopes to share soon with others.
Madison is an interaction designer at Unity Labs’ Mixed Reality research team and an actual magician; when it comes to imaging the future of VR/AR interactions, he’s the guy working full time on making the world a little more magical.
And although AR headsets such as Magic Leap 1 are certainly in his development arsenal, with the help of an Oculus Quest and some imagination, Madison shows you can have a perfectly useful ‘virtual’ AR headset too. Enter his ‘Gamefied Real Estate’ project.
It’s unlikely to be a full-featured game—more of an experiment for other devs to poke around in, which is due to the purpose-built nature of the app itself.
The room was custom-built (very likely in Unity) and then imported and lined-up properly with the actual environment, i.e. there’s no technology in the Oculus Quest that can create a room like this on the fly, only the ‘basic’ room-scale tracking that allows Madison to move around the environment itself.
That said, it’s still an awesome peek into what a wide field of view AR experience can look like, and may very well be a fixture of the future when AR headsets not only become more pervasive, but drastically cheaper and more capable of delivering not only these sorts of room-centric experiences, but being truly able to map the world around us in real-time.
Last week Google released a beta of Chrome 81 for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, which means a stable version is just around the corner. One of the most important updates to arrive in Chrome 81 is the ability to use web-based AR apps.
Google first included WebVR, the VR-focused predecessor to the WebXR API, in Chrome 66 back in April 2018. Debuted in Chrome 79 at the end of 2019, WebXR Device API came to devices without AR support.
Now, the stable version of Chrome 81 is expected to release sometime next month, which will carry with it the ability to display web-based AR content.
According to Google’s Chromium blog, the upcoming stable version of Chrome will also include support for the WebXR Hit Test API, an API for placing digital objects in a physical world view. Google says the new API captures both the location of a ‘hit test’, or where the user taps on the screen, and the orientation of the point that was detected.
Image courtesy Google
Appealing to developers, Google says that if you’ve already used the new API to create virtual reality apps, there’s very little new to learn to use AR.
“This is because the spec was designed with the spectrum of immersive experiences in mind. Regardless of the degree of augmentation or virtualization, the application flow is the same. The differences are merely a matter of setting and requesting different properties during object creation, ” the company says.
Chrome 81 is also slated to include web-based NFC (Near Field Communications), which allows a web app to read and write to NFC tags.
If you want to try out the beta, simply download the Chrome Beta app on your preferred device. When you do, make sure to play around with a few examples first..
Magic Leap recently announced some new programs that aim to get developers creating for the its AR headset, Magic Leap 1. The company additionally released dates for its developer conference, LEAP Developer Days, which will be held in May at Magic Leap’s headquarters in Florida.
Magic Leap is starting another hardware initiative soon, dubbed ‘Access Hardware’, which aims to get its AR headset into the hands of developers who are “serious about publishing applications with Magic Leap,” the company writes in a recent blog post.
The program is targeting existing developers hoping to release a “quality app in 2020,” which may point to another effort by the company to fill out its library of games, apps, and experiences before an ostensible consumer-facing hardware launch.
The company has thus far delivered $10 million in grants to 33 developers worldwide, and has given away hundreds of its Magic Leap One Creator Edition headsets (now rebranded to ‘Magic Leap 1’).
Outside of the physical hardware, which has a base price of $2,300, the Access Hardware initiative is also offering support from Magic Leap’s developer relations team so qualifying apps can be published on the platform’s store, Magic Leap World. Developers can apply for Access Hardware here.
“During the application process, we’ll look for things like technical experience, project feasibility, and the overall quality of your submission. Hint: we’re particularly interested in ideas that solve problems and create opportunities for enterprise markets and customers,” the company says.
The company says it will announce more details about developer funding later this year in addition to other support programs for enterprise-focused developers and agencies.
If West Coasters were hoping for a return of LEAP to its inaugural location in Los Angeles this year, they’ll actually need to do a bit of globe-trotting. Slated to take place at the company’s Plantation, Florida headquarters, the company says developers should expect “behind-the-scenes access to help accelerate their development and the growth of their businesses.”
LEAP Developer Days will be divided into two groups, held respectively on May 19-20 and May 21-22. This, the company says, will allow for face-to-face time with its dev relations team, studios, marketing teams, engineers and designers building the core Magic Leap hardware and platform.
Nreal, the creators of the Nreal Light AR glasses, today announced that shipments of its developer kit will be affected by the recent developments in Asia surrounding the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).
The company, which is split between San Francisco and Hangzhou, China, says in a tweet that production of the Nreal Light developer kit has been halted. Delays are said to affect the most recent batch of backers. There’s no indication of when production will start back up; uncertainty in the region has so far become a unfortunate norm.
Hangzhou, along with many other major cities in China, is in the precarious situation where some factories have been provisionally cleared to return to work as the Spring Festival comes to a close, however stringent city-wide lockdowns still stymie the flow of workers and resources.
Nreal Light launched pre-orders for its $1,200 developer kit late last year. The AR headset, which is driven by a tethered compute unit running a Snapdragon 845 mobile chipset, is touted for its more slim-line appearance and large (for AR headsets) 52 degree field of view.
The Coronavirus, a novel respiratory virus, began in China with the first reported case on December 31st, 2019. Since then the virus has seen more than 28,000 confirmed cases and 565 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. While the Coronavirus has spread to 24 other countries to date, 99% of cases have been confined to China.
Meanwhile, Nreal is still planning on attending MWC 2020, which has recently been marred with controversy as large companies such as Amazon, Ericsson, LG, and Sony have pulled out citing the obvious public health risk of promoting the largest telecom trade fairs during the epidemic. Event organizers GSMA has added a number of health and safety measures to this year’s MWC, such as a ban on travelers from Hubei province, increased cleansing of public areas, and encouraging among attendees a ‘no-handshake’ policy.
Nreal isn’t the only company in the AR/VR sector to have felt the effects. Facebook has issued a similar statement regarding the availability of Oculus Quest, the standalone VR headset which has been notably in high demand since well before the holiday season.
According to regulatory filings uncovered by Tech Crunch, Facebook has acquired Scape Technologies, a London-based computer vision startup.
Facebook has yet to publicly acknowledge the acquisition. A company spokesperson told Tech Crunch that it “acquire[s] smaller tech companies from time to time. We don’t always discuss our plans.”
Details are still thin, however UK registrar Companies House filings reveals that Facebook now controls 75 percent or more of the company’s shares. Companies House filings also show that a number of the company’s directors have stepped down, and have been subsequently replaced with Facebook executives.
Founded in 2016, Scape Technolognies is building a computer vision-based positioning system called Vision Engine that it says “can be used to precisely determine the location of any camera device, with more accuracy than GPS, and are automatically updated to reflect changes in the environment.” The company says it can do this with what it calls “low-quality imagery.”
The company’s multi-platform SDK for augmented reality, ScapeKit, was publicly demonstrated at the AT&T Stadium in Dallas last year to show off the capabilities of 5G-enabled augmented reality.
Scape’s tech is targeting smartphone-based AR use cases currently, although robust computer vision is a fundamental technology for the ‘all-day’ AR headsets of the future.
Facebook has admitted in the past that its currently developing an AR headset and has plans to build out its digital copy of the physical world, or something it calls ‘LiveMaps’, a real-time-updated map created using crowdsource-driven data from connected devices.
Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, the company’s most recent smartglasses (or rather smartglass), was only available to partner companies when it launched in May 2019. Now Google is allowing its third-party hardware vendors to sell the headset direct to developers.
Glass had a rocky start in the world when it was first introduced in its 2013 Explorer Edition targeting early adopters and developers. Resultant ‘glasshole’ neologism notwithstanding, Google went on to revive Glass back in 2017 in its first Enterprise Edition headset, which targets a multitude of businesses including logistics, manufacturing, and field services. Now it seems the most recent version of Glass has fared well enough in the enterprise market that Google is now opening up sales to anyone with around $1,000.
Image courtesy Google
According to a Google blog post, the company has seen “strong demand from developers and businesses,” so it’s making Glass 2 available through their hardware resellers, which includes CDW, Mobile Advance or SHI.
Glass Project Lead Jay Kothari says that with the new availability of Glass 2, the company is also sharing new open source applications and code samples, which includes sample layouts and UI components so developers can independently start creating for Glass.
Unlike AR headsets such as Microsoft HoloLens, HoloLens 2, or Magic Leap 1, Glass can only track the users head movement via its 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope, making it useful for tasks that can comfortably fit in its single-eye display, putting the smart glasses in stark contrast to more immersive, stereoscopic AR headsets that can track positional movement.
Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 chipset running Android Oreo and 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Its single 8MP camera boasts an 80° field of view. Since its made for industry, its both water and dust resistant, and can clip onto a variety of frames, including an optional titanium band.
Japanese tech giant Canon today unveiled its next enterprise-focused AR headset which aims to replace its MREAL Display MD-10, which the company launched in Japan in mid-2016 for the astounding price tag of ¥9 million (~$82,300).
The PC-tethered AR headset, dubbed MREAL Display MD-20, doesn’t have a release date or price yet, although Canon is showing off the device at this year’s 3D & Virtual Reality Exhibition (IVR), which will be held at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan from February 26th to 28th. The news was first reported by Japanese publication MoguraVR (Japanese).
Like its predecessor, the MREAL Display MD-20 is going to be sold on the Japanese market, and is couched as a business support tool for the manufacturing industry such as automobile makers.
Image courtesy Canon
MD-20’s improvements over MD-10 include a new CMOS sensor with global shutter, something the company says will “accurately capture real-world images without distortion.”
The MD-20 is also said to have expanded the display panel’s color gamut, which boasts 2,560 × 1,600 per eye resolution, and widened the horizontal field of view by a just a few degrees, now 70° (horizontal) and 40° (vertical); MD-10 features a 60° horizontal and 40° vertical FOV.
The CMOS sensor is also used for positional tracking by generating a real-time spatial map, although businesses can purchase add-on extras such as visual markers and optical sensors (sold separately).
The MD-20 is admittedly still under development, with Canon still aiming at further miniaturization and weight reduction in addition to working on its room-scale positioning.
The headset itself doesn’t have an official price tag yet, with the company simply stating for interested businesses to contact a Canon dealer, but if its ¥9 million (~$82,300) predecessor tells us anything, it’s going to be pretty expensive.
Not only that, but the headset also has a ton of expensive accessories too. Keep in mind that ¥100,000 is around $915, which puts many of the bits seen below (let alone the headset itself) well out of the range of anyone but the most well-funded businesses.
Product Name
Price (excluding tax)
Overview
MREAL Attachable Handles
¥ 85,000
MREAL Display MD-20 dedicated accessory Enables hand-held use of MREAL Display
MREAL Optical Sensor Attachment
¥ 100,000
MREAL optical sensor compatible attachment
MREAL Magnetic Sensor
¥ 60,000
MREAL system common, magnetic sensor compatible attachment
MREAL marker board (A3 size)
¥ 40,000
Marker board, A3 size corresponding to the spatial feature function of MREAL Platform
MREAL marker carpet
¥ 150,000
MREAL system common Carpet with MREAL markers placed (printed). For portable use of MREAL system
Front Access Kit
¥ 200,000
MREAL display MD-20 / MD-10, interface cable connector is on the front side, simplifying cable removal and insertion
In comparison to Facebook, Magic Leap, and Microsoft, Canon has been in somewhat of a backseat position when it comes to AR/VR hardware development. The company has produced a few AR headsets, and even teased a massive hand-held VR headset too in 2015, although nothing that seems to have left Japanese shores in any appreciable quantities. As a leading manufacturer in camera sensors though, Canon is in a unique position now to enter AR/VR more seriously, as inside-out camera sensor-based tracking is becoming a standard across the industry.
With its older MD-10 platform, the company has worked with Japanese companies such as Toyota Motor Company, East Japan Railway Company, Japan’s National Science Museum, and the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum.
An analysis of U.S. patents done by Fairview Research reveals that Facebook has made a significant surge in its year-over-year ranking for patents granted in 2019, something partly owed to its increased number of patents surrounding augmented reality. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.
The social media giant is still only in 36th place for companies granted U.S. patents, which in 2019 tallied a total of 989. This represents a 64 percent increase over the number of patents granted to the company in 2018 however, which consequently bumped the company up the rankings by an astounding 22 places.
Here’s a quick look at the top ten in comparison to Facebook, courtesy of Fairview Research:
Organization
2019 Grants
2018 Grants
% Change
Rank Change
1
International Business Machines Corp
9,262
9,100
2
0
2
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd
6,469
5,850
11
0
3
Canon Inc
3,548
3,056
16
0
4
Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC
3,081
2,353
31
3
5
Intel Corp
3,020
2,735
10
-1
6
LG Electronics Inc
2,805
2,474
14
-1
7
Apple Inc
2,490
2,160
15
2
8
Ford Global Technologies LLC
2,468
2,123
16
2
9
Amazon Technologies Inc
2,427
2,035
19
3
10
Huawei Technologies Co Ltd
2,418
1,680
44
6
36
Facebook Inc
989
602
64
22
Bloomberg notes that Facebook’s ‘Optical Elements’ category showed a nearly six-fold jump year-over-year, tallying a total of 169 patents. A majority of that growth however is said to come from the ‘Heads-Up Displays’ sub-category, which can either serve augmented or virtual reality depending on its intended use.
Of the many granted, here’s a few of the most interesting AR/VR patents we’ve found:
Outside of optimal element-related patents, many of the patents granted to Facebook in 2019 dealt with things like eye-tracking, online content delivery, and machine learning, the latter of which carries with it broad implications across all computing mediums and AR alike thanks to its use in computer vision tasks.
And while patents alone don’t tell the whole story, it’s apparent Facebook is mounting up to release an AR headset at some point in the near future. A number of the company’s hardware and software-related job listings last year made a prescient mention of Facebook-built AR headset.
With a growing number of Facebook-employed AR/VR professionals and a mounting catalog of IP, it’s clear Facebook isn’t just flirting with the idea of entering into the AR space, but rather it has a definite intention of owning a significant slice of the market.
Magic Leap’s next-gen AR headset, Magic Leap 2, is officially slated to launch sometime in 2021. Company founder and CEO Rony Abovitz says in a Forbesinterview that ML2 will be targeting enterprise and early prosumers, calling it “a major new platform packed with sensors, and advanced optics.”
Speaking to Forbes, Abovitz says its next headset is now passing through its final build stages, although he didn’t delve into specifics regarding any of the device’s upcoming features, saying only that the company plans to work with customers to perfect the Magic Leap 2 throughout 2020—exactly how, he wouldn’t say.
In a bid to further position itself as a solution for businesses, Magic Leap has now done away with the Magic Leap One Creator Edition moniker, replacing it simply with ‘Magic Leap 1’.
The $2,300 base price tag is still the same, and it doesn’t appear to be physically different in any way from the Creator Edition, which was launched in August 2018. However now the company is ostensibly trying to attract enterprise users, as its newly updated website puts professional use cases front and center—a definite change in tone from the quasi-consumer approach the company has taken since launch, which has showcased games, music apps, and experiences as the platform’s biggest draws.
The company has also put together a Magic Leap 1 ‘Enterprise Suite’ package, priced at $3,000, which includes two years of access to the company’s newly released Device Manager software, enterprise support, limited warranty, and rapid replace plan.
Some of this likely comes as response to a damning report recently released by The Information that alleges the company only sold 6,000 Magic Leap One headsets in the first six months after launch.
That same report maintains that Magic Leap Two will include 5G connectivity, a wider field of view, a smaller and lighter form factor, and different color options. The report claims however this second iteration may be stymied by “fundamental technology constraints,” making a hardware refresh a possibility too. Critically, Magic Leap disavowed the report, calling it “littered with inaccuracies.”
Whatever form Magic Leap 2 takes, one thing is for certain: the company is taking a clear step back from its ambitions as a consumer device, and meanwhile locking down street cred as a business-friendly device provider, putting it in closer competition with Microsoft’s HoloLens platform. Its 2021 release date is also encroaching upon the same time frame Apple reportedly could release its first AR device too. Where those two dots connect, we can’t say just yet (especially since the Apple report is unsubstantiated), but it seems the roaring ’20s are going to be a very interesting decade for AR, to say the least.
Magic Leap is one of the most well-funded startups in history, boasting $2.6 billion in overall funding—and that’s before calculating its latest financing round, the amount and specifics of which are still unknown at this time. A new report from The Information however alleges that the company has seen sluggish sales of its Magic Leap One AR headset, something that reportedly only sold 6,000 units in the first six months following its August 2018 launch.
The Information maintains CEO Rony Abovitz internally claimed he wanted to initially sell one million units of the $2,300 headset in its first year of production. Abovitz reportedly later reduced that number to 100,000 units.
Even at the low side of 100,000 units, that’s in the neighborhood of how many Oculus Rift DK2s were shipped globally, which at the time of launch in 2015 cost nearly one-sixth of the price of ML One.
Image courtesy AT&T, Magic Leap
According to the report, Magic Leap is also now prototyping a second headset, which is said to include 5G connectivity, a wider field of view, and a smaller and lighter form factor. The report claims however this second iteration has been stymied by “fundamental technology constraints,” making a hardware refresh a greater likelihood.
Furthermore, The Information maintains both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and former Qualcomm exec Paul Jacobs stepped down in 2018 from the board at Magic Leap. Pichai is said to have left due to “the demands of his schedule,” replaced by Google Maps VP Jennifer Fitzpatrick, while Jacobs was ousted from Qualcomm for his attempt to take the company private.
When asked for comment, a Magic Leap spokesperson told Engadgetthat The Information report was “littered with inaccuracies and misleading statements, and erroneously portrays Magic Leap’s operations, internal plans and overall strategy.”
In apparent response to the report, Abovitz also took to Twitter, saying that he’s “very realistic about each step we (and all others) need to take each year [to make AR mainstream].”
I'm a left brain and right brain person (I'm part engineer, part artist) – I have deep conviction that spatial computing will be really big over time – and very realistic about each step we (and all others) need to take each year to get there.
Some of this talk of sales numbers undoubtedly comes down to how Magic Leap positions their technology. Although it’s labeled a ‘Creator Edition’ headset, which is ostensibly targeted at developers, the company has made some overt bids to appear consumer-facing, as the company makes exclusive deals with major telecoms such as AT&T and Japan’s NTT DOCOMO, and it releases polished (and likely expensive to fund) second-party apps on their burgeoning app store, Magic Leap World.
Image courtesy Magic Leap
The store isn’t just a collection of developer examples, but it’s rather a curated platform that has both a selection of free and paid apps from big names including Weta Workshop’s Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders, ILMxLABS’ Project Porg, Rovio’s Angry Birds First Person Slingshot, or Insomniac Games’ paid app Seedling. You can even now listen to Spotify on ML One.
In short, nobody would be focused on sales numbers if the company had followed a more conventional release cycle; i.e. launch a purposefully unsexy developer kit with little to no marketing, build hype at trade shows by teasing a better, more refined version of the product with better specs, release the new product as the true 1.0 once you’ve got a solid set of useful apps on your store. Meanwhile, you can either heavily subsidize the product to make it more appealing to indie developers, or provide alternate hardware available so devs don’t have to weather the full cost of a $2,300 device.
Irregardless of the report’s claims, Magic Leap has clearly decided to approach the problem of kickstarting the AR headset product segment in its own unique way, something their unprecedented amount of cash has allowed them to experiment with. However now with Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook heavily invested in AR, Magic Leap will need a real win here soon if it plans to compete with the established powers in tech for what looks to be an interesting next decade ahead of us to say the least.
