At one of the panels at last week’s Oculus Connect 6 conference, Facebook gave an update on its Spark AR platform, including some new applications for retail and shopping environments.
The panel, titled “Bridge Virtual and Real Worlds with AR”, started off with an introduction to Facebook’s perspective on AR now and in the future, centered around its Spark AR platform, and the ways in which the technology is being adopted.
“We’ve been looking to see if augmented reality can provide the experiences that resonate in actual reality,” said Matt Hanson, Spark AR Project Design Manager. “And we’re seeing pretty strong indications that it can.” Over 1 billion people have used AR experiences across a variety of Facebook platforms in the last year, including on Facebook itself, Instagram, Messenger and Portal.
“I love VR, but it’s difficult to get your content to a huge audience in an immersive way. But because AR and VR are so complimentary, we can exchange assets with relative ease, and by leveraging spark, you can now reach the eyeballs that you couldn’t without headsets.”
Although Hanson didn’t give extensive details, he announced that Spark AR will soon support “other exciting applications”, one of which is AR shopping. Hanson said that the service would facilitate being able to virtually try products through AR on a phone camera, without having to go to a physical shop to do so. The three examples he gave, pictured below, were being able to try sunglasses on, being able to try on makeup such as lipstick, and testing out what a piece of furniture would look like when placed in a room.
He also spoke about using Spark AR to create, implement and present AR experiences in places and spaces, such as a recent experience available to visitors at the Tate Britain museum in London.
How do you feel about trying on products through an AR camera service? Do you think it could replace the real thing? Let us know in the comments below.
This week at the Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) conference in San Jose, CA I got the chance to try out a brief demo of The Room VR: A Dark Matter from Fireproof Games, a newly announced entry in the long-running puzzle series.
The Room VR was announced during OC6 and they had two demo pods with Oculus Quest headsets set up for attendees to try out. During my demo Tatjana did a short interview with Barry Meade, Co-Founder and Director of Fireproof Games, with me playing in the background.
You can watch the interview here:
My demo took place mostly inside the London police station you can see in the gameplay footage sprinkled throughout the interview as well as in the trailer (embedded below) as I was tasked with trying to figure out what’s going on with some new evidence at the station.
If you’ve ever played an interaction-heavy puzzle-based game in VR before, the flow of The Room VR will be very familiar. I basically spent my time teleporting between various nodes in the police station that each had a bunch of objects and items for me to tinker with. For example, near the front was a project that I could use to flip through slides that had evidence and historical details, or I could go to the evidence locker and retrieve items.
Similar to the mobile line of The Room games, or even just physical Escape Rooms and VR-themed Escape games you might have played, it’s just as much about interpreting the objects you’re given as it is filling in the blanks. One of the key puzzles in the demo was figuring out which evidence locker had the item I needed to break into a safe. The safe I was trying to open was overrun by the titular “dark matter” and made it impossible to open normally.
Over at the evidence locker I can see that someone was arrested for safe cracking but their storage number is erased — naturally. So if I look down the list I could tell that each number was listed sequentially and the letter associated was (spoilers) assigned to the criminal’s last name. After realizing that I grabbed the item, opened the safe, and then used that item to solve another puzzle later on.
What stood out to me most though is that this demo was running on an Oculus Quest and it looked absolutely great. Visually all of the environments were sharp, I could go out on the balcony outside and look over the city at nighttime, and all of the physical interactions felt really, really good.
I didn’t get a sense too much of what the narrative is about exactly, but it certainly has a strong mysterious flavor that should hook existing fans of the genre.
We’ll be keeping an eye on Fireproof Games and The Room VR for more details as the months move on. The Room VR is slated to release within the first few months of 2020 and is coming to every major VR device included SteamVR headsets, Oculus Rift via Home, Oculus Quest, and PSVR. Check out the official website for Fireproof Games for more details.
Announced at Oculus Connect 6 this week was a new title from Stress Level Zero, the studio behind Hover Junkers (2016) and Duck Season (2017). The game, which is said to arrive on Oculus Quest sometime next year, is slated to take place in the same universe as the studio’s upcoming physics-based adventure Boneworks.
Teased during the opening keynote, the game is basically a complete mystery at this point, although the same can be said for Boneworks, which is slated to launch sometime in Q4 of 2019.
The title ‘Project 4′ was flashed on the screen, but it’s not clear at this time whether that’s the actual name of the game, or if it’s simply a placeholder.
Image courtesy Facebook
Stress Level Zero describes Boneworks as an “Experimental Physics VR Adventure” where you scavenge physics-based weapons, tools, and objects to fight across dangerous playscapes and mysterious architecture.
Physics-based interactions tend to be pretty CPU-intensive, so slimming down the experience to fit into Quest’s modest Snapdragon 835 will certainly be something to see. We’re hoping to learn more about Project 4 in the coming months. As always, we’ll keep you updated, so check back soon.
This week at Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) Facebook announced that later this year the Oculus Quest will receive the ability to connect directly to a PC to run Rift games via a new feature called Oculus Linkcoming this November.
You read that correctly. With a single USB 3 cable you can turn your Quest into a Rift S, with one less tracking camera, or unplug it to have it function normally like a Quest. It’s the best of both worlds — in theory.
The premium USB 3 cable from Oculus is expected to cost $79, but theoretically others should work if they are of the correct specification. I wasn’t able to speak with anyone about those specs or options.
Earlier today we got the chance to try out the feature for ourselves across a handful of games. Ian and Tatjana both tried Asgard’s Wrath, as did I. In Ian’s demo he noticed a burst of visual artifacts for a fraction of a second just once when glancing backwards quickly, but didn’t spot any latency issues and couldn’t replicate the artifacts. Tatjana noted that if she moved quickly or turned her head quickly there were “definitely noticeable” framerate drops specifically with one of the in-game menus.
For me, I did notice some artifacts but only when shaking my head very quickly and you can spot some very minor compression if you’re used to a standard PC VR headset or are a videophile. Controller tracking worked just as well as I expected, only dropping when my controllers were obstructed behind my back. I could also shake and move my hands very rapidly without issues. I did not notice any fixed foveated rendering like you often see on normal Quest games.
To be perfectly honest though? It felt extremely close to using an actual PC VR headset. Like, I’m being totally honest here. The best compliment I could pay this feature is that it made me feel like I was using a Rift and that’s almost entirely the case.
But let’s not be dishonest: this is not identical to using a Rift or Rift S, but generally it felt basically about the same and I think most people won’t notice much difference.
Specifically, the Rift S does have a different fit. It uses a halo-style headstrap that many people find more comfortable. However, it also doesn’t include mechanical IPD adjustment so there’s still a trade off. But then on the flip-side the refresh rate is 80Hz instead of 72Hz like Quest.
In terms of resolution, the Quest actually has the Rift S beat out of the gate with 1440 x 1600 pixels per eye on its OLED display compared to 1280 x 1440 pixels per eye on fast-switching LCDs for Rift S. Plus, the OLED on Quest offers deeper blacks and more color contrast, so it edges out Rift S a bit overall — especially if it’s got a PC powering the visuals instead of just the Quest itself.
Once Oculus Link launches, personally, I probably won’t be recommending anyone buy a Rift S anymore. For the same price ($400, plus the cable if you don’t have a capable one already) you can get a Quest with the capability to function as a separate standalone device. When you factor in how many games already have cross-buy functionality on Rift Home and Quest Home, it’s a no-brainer.
From what we’ve seen a Quest via Link is not going to entirely replace the Rift. If you’re used a PC VR headset much you can absolutely spot the difference. But for most users that just want to play games and don’t need the best tracking and the best performance, it is certainly far above the “good enough” bar in my book. And if we’re being totally honest here anyway: If you want the best performance and tracking you should probably get an externally tracked headset like the Valve Index anyway.
For more on OC6 check out our recap of what’s happened so far so you don’t miss out at all. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Today at Oculus Connect 6, CTO John Carmack dove into the work the company has done on Oculus Link, the Quest feature which will soon allow the headset to tether to PC to play Rift games. Today this requires a USB3 cable, but the natural next step, Carmack said, is that this will eventually be wireless.
Although Oculus Link requires a tether, it’s effectively a ‘remote’ rendering solution, Carmack explained today during his keynote presentation, which means the type of link between the headset and the PC doesn’t really matter so long as it has the necessary bandwidth, latency, and consistency.
While Oculus chose to go with a tether for Oculus Link as a “first step” (thanks to consistent bandwidth and latency), Carmack was up front that the work is headed toward a wireless solution.
“Clearly we’d like this to work on Wi-Fi eventually,” he said, as he went on to speak about some of the tweaks they’d likely undertake to make the Oculus Link rendering solution work best over a wirelessly.
While rotational tracking on Quest with the current Oculus Link solution is nearly identical in latency to Rift S, positional tracking and controller tracking does have some added latency, Carmack said.
Some of that could be further improved, he said, especially if Oculus can get lower level access to the headset’s underlying hardware. Doing so would allow them to build alternate video architectures which could be more suited to remote rendering, further reducing the latency. From Carmack’s discussion, it seemed this is something the company will continue to pursue.
Though Oculus is clearly happy enough with the performance of this solution when rendered by a PC in your home, cloud rendering is another matter. Carmack said that he doesn’t currently see a clear path on making VR cloud rendering viable, owed to both increased latency and more inconsistency.
Announced yesterday, Oculus Link will allow Quest to play Rift games by connecting to any VR-capable PC. In our hands-on at Oculus Connect, the feature really does seem to deliver an experience that feels like a native PC VR headset.
At launch, Oculus Quest only worked with its own separate library of content powered by the headset’s on-board mobile hardware. That meant that even if you had a VR-ready PC (as many PC gamers these days do), you couldn’t play any games from the Oculus PC library, which includes some of VR’s best games.
That’s going to change in November with Oculus Link, a feature which opens up the Oculus PC library to the headset by plugging Quest into a PC via a USB 3 cable. Oculus has said that any USB 3 cable that meets spec will work, but as it’s hard to find one that meets bandwidth and power requirements at a length that would be suitable for room-scale PC usage; they’re planning to release their own “premium” USB 3 cable which they can be certain checks all the right boxes. The cable will reportedly cost $79.
Photo by Road to VR
I got to try Oculus Link with the premium cable at Connect this week, and though I didn’t get to pick my own content (which means I didn’t get to look at stress-test scenarios), my initial impressions are really quite positive.
With Quest plugged into a VR-ready PC and running Asgard’s Wrath, it really felt like a native PC VR headset. There was no noticeable increase in head tracking latency during my time playing, nor could I detect any on the controllers (though I’ll withhold final judgement until I get to test the system with something that’s more latency sensitive, like Beat Saber).
Visually, the image felt smooth with no stuttering or obvious compression artifacts, nor significant muddying of dense textures (something you often seen with attempts at wireless VR over Wi-Fi). The edges of geometry felt sharp and maintained strong stereoscopy.
At the conference this week, Oculus explained that they’re doing a sort of peripheral compression where the edges of the frame are compressed while the center remains high fidelity—had I not heard that direct from them, I certainly wouldn’t have noticed from my demo alone, as any compression artifacts that might have been in the periphery were hidden under the peripheral blur of the lenses anyway.
Photo by Road to VR
The only thing that caught my eye visually was the moving ocean water in Asgard’s Wrath looking granier than I would have expected. Unfortunately, without a Rift S on hand to test with, I couldn’t discern if this was simply a janky water shader (ie: just part of the pre-released game) or a consequence of the compression needed to make Oculus Link work. Indeed, small, high detail, low contrast visuals (like waves at a distance) are often worse-case scenarios for compression.
I’ll be patiently waiting to get Oculus Link into my own hands so I can specifically test against those challenging compression scenarios; so far, however, the visual experience with Oculus Link was head-and-shoulders above any Wi-Fi-based streaming solution that I’ve seen to date.
Unfortunately Oculus didn’t want to answer too many questions about Oculus Link, but did tell us that users can expect that it will enable Quest to act effectively identical to a Rift headset, including access to Dash, Home, etc.
However, we were also told that Oculus Link will allow Quest to play “most” Rift content, but not “all.” They didn’t explain why all apps wouldn’t work, though my gut tells me that there could be some apps that use novel rendering that won’t work with Oculus Link’s unique compression pipeline, or perhaps they’re covering their bases on some other technical edge-cases. They also added that developers could opt out of having their Rift apps work with Quest via Oculus Link if they so choose.
While I didn’t get a direct answer on whether or not Quest could potentially work with SteamVR, signs point to ‘probably’, as Oculus said the PC sees Quest pretty much like any other Rift headset. Rift apps won’t need to be modified in order to work with Oculus Link, which further suggests that SteamVR compatibility should be possible as long as Oculus doesn’t actively try to block it.
Photo by Road to VR
The company confirmed that the Oculus Link connection is not VirtualLink, which means it can plug into any USB 3 port, whether that be with a USB-A or USB-C connector on the PC side.
Additionally, plugging into a USB 3 port directly on the GPU versus one on the motherboard makes no difference, we were told, the rendering tech is the same either way. In fact, in my demo at the show, Quest was plugged into the PC’s motherboard. Further, using Oculus’ premium cable doesn’t change anything about rendering or quality; any other USB 3 cable will work just as well, so long as it’s up to spec.
There was a massive haul of announcements yesterday (believe us, just look at our front page), and while today’s keynote may not have any specific product reveals, where else can you watch legendary programmer and Oculus CTO John Carmack talk about VR until they pull his mic?
Starting today, September 26th at 10 AM PT (local time here), John Carmack will take the stage to hold another installment of his insights and off-the-cuff thoughts about his work at Oculus/Facebook.
If you’ve never seen a Carmack talk, then you’re in for a treat, as he has a special gift for explaining complex topics without need for cue cards or slides.
You’ll be able to watch it live via the Oculus page, which requires a name and email signup. If you’re wary of giving out your info and being contacted for advertising purposes, you can always catch the keynote when its done on YouTube, although it won’t be livestreamed there.
The keynote will also be available via the Oculus Facebook page and via the embedded video below. Just refresh this page at the scheduled time.
If you missed day one’s keynote and you’re looking for two hours to fill, you can watch the complete presentation here.
Back at E3 2019 earlier this year we learned that Ready at Dawn was working on an Oculus Quest port of its zero-gravity VR disc sport, Echo Arena, and would be bringing it over to the standalone VR headset in “all its glory.”
Yesterday, at Oculus Connect 6 (OC6), I got the chance to try it out for myself on Quest for the first time and I can confirm that it’s certainly a capable port of the popular game, but certainly not a perfect translation.
Generally speaking, the game runs great on Quest. The developers describe it as still being in “alpha” but for all intents and purposes it seems far more feature complete than most alphas I’ve tried. Everything works already. All the controls are the same allowing me to reach out with my hands and use wrist thrusters to glide around the arena, I can push off of objects, boost with the left stick, brake with the right, use the grip buttons to grab the disc or environment, and use the triggers to punch and block.
Like I said, this is definitely Echo Arena. It’s all here. But it’s just not quite as good, which shouldn’t be a big surprise.
This screenshot is captured from the PC version.
For starters, you can tell it’s downgraded visually pretty clearly. I haven’t played Echo Arena in months but I could still spot some differences. The lightning system seemed less remarkable specifically and I am pretty sure I could spot a tad of fixed foveated rendering around the edges of my display. Character models were lower quality as well, even in terms of the differences between my avatar and the avatars of other players. For example, my hands were articulated with individually animated fingers, but other players appeared to have a smudged glove for hands, basically.
Those are pretty minor differences when you’re in the heat of a match though and don’t actually matter. But since the Quest only has four front-facing inside-out cameras in the corners of the headset face plate, the tracking volume is much smaller than the original Rift and smaller than the Rift S. Specifically, when reaching above my head, down around the back of my waist, or behind my back.
In most VR games you usually keep your hands out in front of you, but in Echo Arena that isn’t really the case. You’ll often grab a piece of the environment without looking at it directly or hold onto the wall, then turn to look towards the disc before pushing off and launching yourself. That action was sort of hit or miss on Quest. The same goes for reaching behind my hand to wind up a throw/pass or flicking it backwards to toss. The action usually worked okay, but it often forced my arms and hands to get all distorted, which was a bit jarring.
This screenshot is captured from the PC version.
To be clear though: Echo Arena on Quest, from what I’ve seen so far, is absolutely capable, playable, and quite good. I would definitely play this version and would personally recommend it to Quest owners from what I’ve played. Not having to worry about wires is reason enough to make Echo Arena on Quest one worth keeping on your radar because it feels great to spin around without issues. That being said, it just isn’t as good as on PC VR, but that should have been expected anyway.
There is still no release date for Echo Arena on Quest, so stay tuned for more once we know!
At Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) Facebook finally revealed what Respawn Entertainment has been working on alongside Oculus and it’s called Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. This is the first new game in the series in over seven years.
During the event we learned a lot about the game even though it’s not coming out until sometime in 2020. The demo was split across three levels, spanned about 45-minutes, and showed off lots of different guns and various mission types. We still have a lot of unanswered questions, but we did at least get to spend a good chunk of time with it ahead of the announcement.
At the event we got the chance to also attended a presentation and spoke with Peter Hirschmann, Game Director on Medal of Honor VR.
“We’re trying to make an authentic game, not necessarily a realistic one,” says Hirschmann. “If it’s fun, it goes in. Fun always wins. For us authenticity is defined by if it feels real, but we always try to be pro-player entertainment. For example, when switching weapons you just let go and it flies back to its slot.”
Other than the reloading example, you can see that sentiment carried through in the art style as well. It doesn’t feature photo-realistic character models or overly dark environments and it’s not very gory either. But at the same time it certainly has the mechanics, sound design, and general production values to feel more polished than most VR games.
“What defines Medal of Honor for us, going back to World War II, is that it’s all about analog warfare,” says Hirschmann. “It’s about the tactical relationship between you as the player and that bad guy. I really like Sid Meier’s definition of a game, in its purest form, is a series of interesting decisions. Medal of Honor is at its best when it’s you versus one, or two, or maybe three or four, bad guys with tactical decisions in real time about who to take out, analyze what weapons they have, taking an easier shot to wound them or trying to take them out and eliminate them completely. It’s about being up close and personal. Bullets matter, health matters.”
A lot of the intricate aspects of the gameplay and the intensity of hunkering down in an intense firefight I just didn’t see in my demo at all. All of the combat encounters I had were very straight forward and sometimes highlighted sub-par AI, but there is still a lot of time to work on that before release. If they can nail a smart, tactical feel without sacrificing the accessible pick-up-and-play design, that would be fantastic.
Most VR shooters right now are heavily focused on multiplayer. While it does require a healthy player-base, it means not having to design missions, creating a narrative, building AI, recording voice over, and all of the other things needed for a high-quality campaign story. But a developer of Respawn’s pedigree is of course tackling that challenge head on.
“We are contractually obligated to deliver a 10-12 hour long experience to our friends at Oculus, but we are well over that,” says Hirschmann. “When we kicked this off a couple of years ago we weren’t sure of what we’d be able to achieve…We realized what the platform was capable of, we loved to work with Oculus, so we decided to expand the scope and make it a bigger game. Usually you’re scoping down but we decided to scope up.”
According to Hirschmann Medal of Honor VR will include over 50 mission segments across three acts. Basically the way it was described to me is that each Act has a series of missions in it and each mission is split into segments, or levels. There are over 50 of those individual segments in total.
“We tried not to repeat ourselves,” says Hirschmann. “In those 50+ segments there are only a few times where we repeat a piece of geography and it’s usually only after battle damage.”
Obviously the most iconic moment from World War II, a moment that has been replicated in films, TV, and video games multiple times, is the landing on Omaha Beach at Normandy, often referred to as D-Day. I had to know if that would be included at all.
“We are doing Omaha Beach, but it’s different,” says Hirschmann. “Playing Allied Assault but in VR would have been cool on its own, but we have a rule for ourselves that we never revisit a Medal of Honor location just to do it in VR, we want to do something different. So in Above and Beyond you’re playing a Combat Engineer who is recruited into the OSS. The Combat Engineers were the first ones on the beach. They have a job, it wasn’t just to get to the top, it was to clear all those obstacles along the way…So you are planting explosives and clearing the way for the armor on the shore which was crucial to getting a foothold. It’s very scary because you’re blowing up the things that are providing you cover…Some of that actually comes from one of the veterans we interviewed. He said that getting to port before he left was some of the loneliest, quietest times he has ever had as a human being, so we wanted to capture that, not just immediately starting on the beach but building up to it.”
All things considered Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond certainly has the ingredients to be something truly special and impactful for VR, but now it’s just whether or not they can execute on that recipe. A big factor will be the quality of the actual narrative (which we haven’t experienced yet) and how deep the multiplayer components will be. All we know is that they’re included, but the team isn’t willing to share details just yet.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond releases exclusively for Oculus Rift platforms via Oculus Home for PC in 2020. Stay tuned to learn more in the coming weeks and months!
You should be able to play SteamVR games like Skyrim and No Man’s Sky on your Oculus Quest when Oculus Link arrives in November.
Facebook revealed this new feature at Oculus Connect 6 yesterday. The free update to Quest will allow you to play Rift games when you plug the headset into a PC with a USB-C cable. During the keynote speech, Mark Zuckerberg said “any” Rift game could run on the headset this way. There was still some confusion, though, as to if this simply meant games on Oculus’ own store, or titles on Valve’s competing Steam store too.
We followed up with Facebook, directly asking if this meant Quest can run Steam content through Link.
“Yes,” a Facebook representative told us over email. “When you tether your Quest to your PC with Oculus Link, you will be able to operate the headset the same way you do Rift.”
If that’s the case, then this opens up Quest to not only the hundreds of apps on the Oculus Store, but also all of the Rift-compatible experiences available through SteamVR too. That includes high-profile releases like Bethesda’s Skyrim VR and Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky Beyond. We didn’t get to try this option for ourselves when we tried Link at Connect yesterday, though.
Unofficially, Quest owners can already boot up a sideloaded version of VR productivity app, Virtual Desktop, and then use its PC streaming feature to access SteamVR content. Link, however, could present a more stable way to do this; it’ll just need to be tethered to the PC.
We can’t help but wonder if that might mean we’ll soon see Quest show up on SteamVR’s monthly hardware survey.
We’ll be keeping an eye on Fireproof Games and The Room VR for more details as the months move on. The Room VR is slated to release 
