Some of the most common questions asked by people interested in the VR industry are: What headset is selling the most? What content gets downloaded? And is it worth it for me to buy now?
Very rarely do we get a completely candid look into the exact sale and download numbers, typically having to collect scatterings of information to create an educated estimate. There are companies that are dedicated to these types of estimates, but even they should be taken with a grain of salt. Understanding that, the data they accumulate can paint an interesting picture and Superdata Research‘s newly released information paints a telling picture: the PlayStation VR (PSVR) and Samsung Gear outsold the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive by a large margin in Q1 of 2017.
Reported on Venturebeat, the new info from Superdata gave estimates for Q1 2017 sale numbers of five VR headsets and the numbers went as follows:
Gear VR: 782,000
PlayStation VR: 375,000
Google Daydream: 170,000
HTC Vive: 95,000
Oculus Rift: 64,000
With a little bit of math, we can tell that the PSVR actually sold almost 4x as many units in the first quarter of 2017 as the HTC Vive. Moreover, the Vive is outpacing the Rift and Gear VR is outpacing them all by quite a large margin.
Gear VR leading the charge is no surprise considering the ease of adoption with a significantly lower price than Vive and Rift and the dependence on the largely available smartphone. PSVR coming in second place highlights another aspect of accessibility since that headset piggybacks on the PS4, which already has a massive install base estimated to be nearly 60 million worldwide. Purchasing or upgrading a capable gaming PC is an expensive endeavor for the average consumer and, in the eyes of that consumer, the value of the higher-end tethered units isn’t enough for them to dig into their piggy banks.
Ultimately, not much of this is surprising. The Vive and Rift will continue to charge forward with ways to improve their definitive VR experiences while finding ways to lower the price and mobile VR will attempt to find ways to counteract their limited power and resolution to provide a stout virtual experience that’s widely accessible. It’s only a matter of time before a headset lands right in the sweet spot.
USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies works across graphics, learning sciences, medical VR, mixed reality, and much more, and the institute has played a major part in the development of many new technologies that move from research labs into widespread use.
“This is where Palmer Luckey cut his teeth in our mixed-reality labs before he did his Kickstarter,” says current ICT Research Assistant Professor Ari Shapiro. Luckey went on to co-found one of the breakthrough companies in the VR industry with Oculus and its Rift headset, so it is no surprise that ICT could end up serving as the origins for other pioneering pieces of technology.
Easy 3D Avatars
The graphics lab at ICT captures high-quality digital faces for film with special (and expensive) scanning equipment. Shapiro runs a research group there called the Character Animation Simulation Research Group and one of its goals is to create a digital person that can behave like a real one. There are certainly means to do this, but not in a financially accessible way that produces a high-quality final product.
“Can we generate something high-quality with off the shelf scanners and an automatic process,” ask Shapiro. “When you do that, do you essentially democratize this type of data? What if everyone could have their own avatar?”
Shapiro’s team has done studies to determine the objective value of such a tool, learning that there’s an interest in running a simulation with a version of yourself. Then they determined what elements of a person needed to be reflected in these digital creations.
“What other elements of us need to be embedded? Our personality, our style, our posture, and that sort of thing,” he adds.
The research group started testing with Microsoft’s Kinect four years ago, doing some body scanning and facial scanning. It resulted in ways to scan the face/body, attach hands and fingers, etc, but the major key was that it was obtained with off the shelf components. Not only does the removal of specialized equipment drop cost, you also don’t need artists or technicians in the loop. Years later, the video above shows a functional prototype that shows off realistic avatars with realistic expressions to boot.
Where Are We Now?
Shapiro says the plan is to commercialize this tool as much as possible and he sees opportunities for social VR and augmented shopping applications where users can try on different things using a replica of themselves. The software is up and running and they’ve done a few hundred demos so they’re moving rapidly along the path to making this available, but Shapiro says there’s still more to figure out when it comes to the face.
“We’re making a choice that a lot of people don’t make when they do these facial generation systems,” he says. “Most of the time, they have a working facial rig and they try to adapt it to a scan or a photograph.”
With that style, you end up with something that works and is able to “emote your speech” well but it doesn’t resemble the person as closely as desired. You’re basically trying to “fill in data” where you don’t have it.
“We’re doing the opposite. We’re basically saying that whatever you give us, we’re going to use that to reproduce the person. Ours look real with the limitation that, if you don’t give it particular emotional expressions, your character can’t do it,” he explains.
The attempt to stretch and pull these reproductions in order to exhibit emotions is how you fall into the uncanny valley — where an avatar looks almost human but is off just enough to make people seeing it uncomfortable. This is something Shapiro and his team hopes to avoid. They also want to reach a high level of quality for facial scanning that can allow for teeth and tongue modeling too.
Ultimate Goal
“If you have to use specialized equipment that can only be used in specific places, you might as well go down the traditional pipeline,” Shapiro said. He explains that well-equipped visual effects teams can produce content that looks and possibly functions better than what this rapid-scan technology puts out, but accessibility is the end goal.
“We’re trying to work it into a consumer platform,” Shapiro says. “The overall goal of this project is to create a set of technology that anybody can use to produce their avatar for any means.”
Ari Shapiro also serves as CEO for Embody Digital, a company specializing in technology for the “digital you”, and they’re already working on ways to commercialize the technology and make it available to consumers. Seems like it is only a matter of time before you’re scanning yourself into the virtual experience of your choosing.
Back at the start of March, we reported on a new analytics tool called Ghostline. Developed by Aldin Dynamics, this tool was crafted to be a window into different statistics related to VR usage — how people interact, for how long, and more. Aldin Dynamics shared their program with the developers of SUPERHOT and Gallery: Call of the Starseed, but gave those interested a peek at the stats for Waltz of the Wizard. Now they’re sharing a bit more info curated by the Ghostline tool, this time focused on the room-scale VR battle between Steam vs Oculus Home.
The report opens with a collection of interesting findings and one of the first things that jumps out is the fact that the NVIDIA GTX 1070 is the most popular graphics card for both Steam and Oculus users. As more begin to invest in VR-ready gear, statistics like this will stand out more and more. Another big thing to note is that Oculus tracking is improved almost two-fold when using 3 sensors instead of 2.
The CEO of Aldin Dynamics, Hrafn Thorisson, says that three sensors improve tracking with Rift so much so that it performs very similarly with Vive. He also cautions that “To be very clear, the report presents data from Waltz of the Wizard specifically, and tracking loss for that specific product — how content is designed can have an impact on tracking loss.” The design is crucial, of course, but this is definitely something to keep in mind. That small amount of players using 3 sensors (14.9%) will likely increase drastically if performance improvements like this are consistently recorded elsewhere.
The audiences across different countries are somewhat similar, except for SteamVR’s representation in China, and the play times aren’t very far off from each other either. An average playtime of around 28 minutes is notable as well.
When it comes to room-scale play, the difference in play space is pretty large. Steam has a sweet spot between 3-6 square meters but has few players using over 8 square meters of space. Only 6% of Oculus users go over 6 square meters and typically stick to 1-3.
These stats show only a small snapshot of the VR gaming community but, as Ghostline is used by more entities, creators will be able to shape their experiences to take advantage of player trends and build better content overall. You can read up more on Ghostline on their website and, if you’re a developer, submit for Early Access updates.
I always thought I’d be more prepared for “the talk” than my parents were. It would be a priority of mine to have historic references on hand, pull from life experiences, maybe even pick out an educational video from the library – you know, make things easier on myself. I made sure to learn as much as I could about this topic so that, by the time it was my turn to have that serious sit down with my kids, I would be ready for their questions. Being a writer, at the very least, I figured I’d be more able to articulate what to expect when it happens to them. What I’ve discovered though, after actually becoming a parent, was that no amount of preparation will make this talk any less stressful.
I mean, just how do you tell a young child that some people might not like them because of the color of their skin?
What I do find solace in is the fact that I won’t have to first try to convince my daughters that racism exists; being our children, they’ll listen to what my wife and I have to say. I’d also foresee the girls being naturally empathetic to our shared experiences. This in turn takes some of the edge off as it promotes uninhibited dialogue. As a family, we’ll never yearn to discuss such things at the dinner table. But we’d at least be comfortable enough to openly deal with whatever comes our way. That truth is very important given the nature of this topic. Not everyone is going to be willing to listen to my children’s concerns like my wife and I will when life becomes more challenging for them.
As I continued to mull this over, I wondered how I could surround my children with people who’d be willing to listen to their concerns. As of right now, a decent amount of my white friends would rather shy away from the conversation. It’s just too uncomfortable a topic. Although to a lesser extent, some feel as though our struggles are fabricated. That we either unnecessarily lump race into every dispute or that most of our difficulties in life, regardless of how we’re treated, are solely attributed to our own actions. They’re basically closed off to what a lot of people like me face on a daily basis. Still, I wondered what could be done outside of being careful of who we trust.
As the virtual reality industry continues to evolve though, it can be used to help people see things from the perspective of a minority in America. You know, wear someone else’s shoes and all that. This sort of thing has helped people see past their own experiences in the past (it’s a popular idiom for a reason).
I found the work of Dr. Jeremy Bailenson, Ph.D., a Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Among his numerous accolades, which included being the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, his doctorate in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University piqued my interest.
Dr. Bailenson’s main area of research deals with digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality, as per his bio. For years, he’s researched how VR can help to facilitate change in a person’s perceptions of others. For instance, in an academic paper he co-published, “Walk a Mile in Digital Shoes”, Dr. Bailenson describes an intervention method developed by Galinsky, A.D. and G. B. Moskowitz called Perspective Taking. It deals with how people see themselves vs. others during social interactions – when judging ourselves, we tend to rely on outside forces to justify our actions. That’s not the case when judging others. That said, extensive research has shown that when we’re asked to take on the perspective of the person we’re judging, in a virtual setting, we tend to give them the same benefit of doubt we’d give ourselves.
Then there’s also Courtney D. Cogburn, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. Dr. Cogburn has partnered with Dr. Bailenson on a project called “Examining Racism with VR”. The idea was to use an immersive VR experience that allows participants to embody a person of color (seemingly, more Perspective Taking).
Dr. Cogburn explained how she was building on research that challenged the way people talked about or measured racism. “We tend to talk about racism as things we do to each other on the basis of race,” Dr. Cogburn explained. “You know, being called a name, someone being followed in a store, or being directly harassed by a police officer. [Dr. Bailenson and I] are trying to build on work that indicates that racism is actually much more complex and nuanced than those types of experiences…[Like] being praised for being articulate or someone being surprised that you didn’t come from a single parent home or whatever stereotypes that might sneak their way into discourse in interactions.”
Dr. Cogburn and Bailenson were also interested in how they could expose people to understanding the structural nature of racism. “[It’s important to] understand the patterns of discrimination, policy and legislation that systematically disadvantages groups of people…if we hope to do anything about the effects that racism has on people’s lives,” Dr. Cogburn said. Unfortunately, something like that seems borderline impossible. It can be difficult to get people to listen when dealing with a single incident, let alone something more systemic.
She then detailed how they would be using qualitative data to help design content for the project. Everything is rooted and documented in reality, being careful not to take artistic license while constructing these scenarios. This is to help combat some of the resistance people will have towards the experiment; discounting its relevance as the scenarios “could never happen” in real life.
“Our team is comprised of about a dozen scholars, a majority of whom face issues of racial bias every day,” Dr. Bailenson explained. “Part of the reason the design process is taking months is that we continually discuss the experiences of the team members, and spend time deliberating which types of experiences will actually be uniquely suited to VR.”
Though their project is still in the design phase, using virtual reality as a means of evoking empathy is supported by sound research. Dr. Bailenson has worked multiple VR experiments dealing with a person’s negative stereotypes. None of his studies found “the answer” to today’s ills, given their complexity. Still, he was able to encourage a decrease in prejudiced thinking using different virtual programs. I particularly made note of the body transfer effect – where a person’s brain helps them to believe they are the person seen in a mirror through their headset – created through diversity training software called the Minority Mirror. Used for businesses looking to improve social awareness, the software places people in the bodies of different minorities and in some cases, genders. All of a sudden, a white female is transformed into a black male. Once that happens, another avatar comes up to the person and starts saying negative things about the participant’s race (that of which he or she sees in the mirror).
Interestingly, years of research revealed that the persons wearing the headset showed more empathy after coming in contact with the hateful avatar. When I asked if these feelings of empathy were short lived, Dr. Bailenson pointed out how his lab had “completed collecting data from an immersive empathy study that examines the effect of the treatment directly after the experience, two weeks out, four weeks out…we plan on analyzing the date in the next few months to examine how immersive VR compares to traditional role playing over time.” In other words, the impact of the study doesn’t end when the headset is removed.
The information I got from Dr. Bailenson and Dr. Cogburn was invaluable, in a sense that it gave me hope. Maybe people can have a change of heart and become more open to hearing what minorities have to say about racism. As uncomfortable as it may be, there’s a real need for honest conversation among peers. I’m sure that their Examining Racism project, based on the progress made from similar software, will help to facilitate these difficult discussions given time.
While this is all true, I do fear that there are some unique challenges hindering the effectiveness of this sort of approach. Some of which, I noticed after talking with Nonny de la Peña.
Nonny de la Peña is an award winning journalist, having written for reputable news organizations like Newsweek and The New York Times, and has helped pioneer VR empathy projects. It could even be argued that she is more readily known for her work in immersive journalism, a genre she is credited in creating. As CEO of Emblematic Group – a digital reality media company that produces immersive VR content – she recreates events that people can experience in virtual reality. One of her major pieces, Project Syria, was the topic of our discussion. Not because of how powerful it was for those who experienced it in her studio, but because of the blow back she got after releasing it on Steam.
“We put Project Syria on Steam and the response was horrible,” de la Peña exclaimed. “Racist, vitriolic responses. I would expect that our game [wouldn’t be liked] as a game. We’ve [only] put up $35,000 to make it. So I would understand that kind of criticism. But no, it’s all racist.”
While she spoke, I headed over to Steam to check out the comments for myself. If you take away the comments about Project Syria not being an actual game, a valid point for another discussion and perhaps more a result of Steam’s user base consisting of almost entirely gamers, and people complaining about the visuals, a lot of what’s left is appealing. With people claiming it to be “ISIS propaganda” and others asking “how to sink refugee boats”, it’s honestly disheartening.
For those that don’t know, Project Syria (PS) is a piece that provides an immersive look at the effects of the Syrian civil war on the country’s children using virtual reality. This is done by recreating a tragic event on the streets of Aleppo – a bomb goes off in refugee camp, wounding and killing many people living there – using found footage, photographs, and tons of documentation. Outside of improving the graphic fidelity of the piece (this was produced back in 2013), PS is probably the best chance anyone has of “experiencing” this sort of event other than actually visiting the country.
De la Peña didn’t expect to receive so much push back from the Steam community. It’s understandable really. Those of us who frequent the platform are more accustomed to the toxic behavior that the community can produce. I’d imagine it was even more shocking considering the opposite happened whenever she premiered her piece at conferences. For the most part, people seemed genuinely moved by what they saw. Some were brought to tears. Others came away asking how they could help in the relief efforts. I asked her if the experience was somehow more believable at these conferences. That maybe the gamers on Steam felt that she was exaggerating to push some sort of agenda.
“I could show you some of the art bible [from Project Syria] which shows how very carefully our reconstructed streets were created,” De la Peña explained. “And I had people from Aleppo come in through it and just bawl because we even got the color of the bricks right – because they were a very special color from Aleppo. So it’s always easy for me to counter those accusations with the unbelievable in-depth documentation that we do. And that documentation and the ability to find those pieces and what’s true is based on my many years of being a careful, considerate, thoughtful, and to the best of my ability, a truthful journalist.”
The truth of the matter is, there are always going to be those persons who are reluctant to hearing or even acknowledging a person of color’s side of the story. Some people don’t want to deal with anything that might disrupt their view on what life is like here in the United States (or any part of the world really).
“I think timing is always a factor,” Dr. Cogburn remarks. “Socially and culturally we’re in this unique space where a lot of people are alert and awake and paying attention, especially white people who might not have otherwise been paying attention…there are people who believe in the idea of justice and fairness but they don’t understand racism. We’re in a window of time where there’s a lot of people [who] are very aware that something is going on with race, even if they don’t fully understand what it is and what is happening, specifically linked to police violence because of all of the media coverage that have people more aware and willing to talk and listen.”
It’s important to be able to share in the troubles of our fellow man. Shining a virtual light on certain issues can both educate people, potentially bringing about change, as well as more immediately provide vocal aid to those of us who may be suffering. During my interview with De la Peña, she informed me of a story she did about a Muslim family that was unfairly targeted by the FBI after 9-11. Because she needed a shot of their Mosque to go along with the piece, she contacted a representative to come and view the rough cut of the video.
“He came in, and he watched the piece and he started crying,” De la Peña said. “He kept saying, ‘Why would you do this? Why would [someone like me] be willing to help?’ I didn’t know how to answer that question.”
He wasn’t sad, but was instead overcome with emotion. Someone who didn’t look like him, who wasn’t Muslim, and who hadn’t been negatively affected by the treatment of his people, was willing to help tell this story. It was a powerful moment for both of them, but even more so for the representative of the Mosque. The world is changing. Despite the current political climate, things are slowly progressing. People are starting to listen.
I personally hope, for my children’s sake, that eventually they’ll do more than just listen.
There’s steady growth across the VR industry, but the market is under a microscope nevertheless. Mass consumer adoption is the goal and many eyes are looking out for what will ultimately inspire the transition in the average consumer’s household. Considering the average consumer’s desire for entertainment, it makes sense that some expect gaming to be the spark and it looks like the PlayStation VR (PSVR) is leading that charge in Japan as reported on eMarketer.
2016 marked the birth of the modern virtual reality era with the launch of HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PSVR. Sony’s headset was a bit late to the party but stepped into the fray with an established device already in homes (the PS4) that could power the headset which made for easier adoption. eMarketer’s reporter compiled statistics from the International Data Corporation (IDC), finding that PSVR accounted for more than 90% of VR headset shipments in Japan by the end of Q4 2016. Recently back in late February, Sony also confirmed it was nearing 1M headsets sold already.
No matter how it all shakes out, it looks like PSVR will be the face of the immersive movement in Japan. This doesn’t set anything in stone when it comes to massive adoption for average consumer households around the world, but can other VR hardware creators learn from it? Is there something to this seemingly insurmountable lead Sony has established beyond Sony being a Japanese company? Time will tell.
During GDC 2017, Khronos Group unveiled OpenXR as the name for their VR/AR API standard that’s currently being developed. We reported on the announcement and broke down a bit of why this standard was something for the VR industry and community to get excited about, but we also got the chance to speak with Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to get some questions answered.
OpenXR’s First Task
OpenXR’s immediate task is combating the fragmentation of the VR industry, something that can continue to get out of hand in the industry’s youth as many different developers and manufacturers create in incredibly different ways. Now that the name is out in the wild, the next step is to work with current working group members over the next 12-18 months on the specifications of the standard. The approach is to create an API standard where devs make their app and that app will be able to work on different VR SDKs with minimal changes as opposed to having to create detailed, custom code for each device.
“Less cost, less porting, and a larger available market is the bottom line for developers,” Trevett says. The Khronos Group is hoping to be able to ship the API around GDC of next year.
If it is not evident by the “XR” in the title, this standard isn’t going to be limited to VR experiences though that is the immediate focus.
“The fragmentation issue is most urgent to solve in the VR community over the next 12 months or so,” Trevett explains when asked about the consideration of augmented reality solutions.
He says he “absolutely believes” augmented reality will be addressed, but the major push for it will likely come in the 2nd wave after the API starts to ship out.
“We’re going to take care that we don’t paint ourselves into any VR-only corners,” he said. “We want things to be applicable as far as possible to different mixed reality devices in the future.”
Will Microsoft Join The Effort?
The standard Khronos is working toward has sparked excitement across the tech industry, to the point that those involved have specifically asked to have their logos added to OpenXR’s partner image. The current collection of partners is dominated by those more involved in VR, including names like Sony, Oculus, Google, and more. When asked if there were any specific entities missing that Khronos Group would welcome, Trevett immediately mentioned one of the biggest faces of AR: Microsoft. He noted the company’s input now would be around the emerging Windows Mixed Reality platform, which we recently did a hands-on with, but they’d obviously be able to bring AR expertise to that 2nd round of the API’s development as well.
While this initiative’s purpose is to simplify things across the mixed reality industry, one would wonder if having so many entities involved in the development of a single standard could get noisy despite the obvious benefits down the line. Trevett details a democratic decision-making process that includes voting mechanisms to resolve disagreements when they occur, but he says that’s a rare occurrence.
“The weird thing is we actually don’t need the formal voting mechanisms very often,” he says. “The working groups tend to, quite successfully, work to unanimous consensus. It’s actually quite normal for a whole specification to be created and no formal voting is needed. The whole process is surprisingly non-political.”
While content, toolkits and software are always a big focus for the Game Developers Conference, there was an abundance of hardware and tech shown off at this year’s show, as well. At UploadVR, we’re confident that both virtual reality and augmented reality will be ubiquitous in the not-too-distant future, and the most prominent devices will likely be integrated AR/VR units that can easily switch back and forth between each. We haven’t seen too many models that come close to that kind of dual-functionality as of yet, but we got a chance to don IMMY’s NEO (Natural Eye Optic) iC 60 at GDC this week, and even though it was an early engineering build, we can already envision what the future holds.
IMMY consists of a 15-person team out of Michigan. While small, they were the team behind the James Webb Space Telescope, and have been working on this particular optics system for the past 13 years. The IMMY NEO uses direct retinal projection technology, using an OLED projector that bounces light off of mirrors and right into your eyes. Because of this, IMMY’s projection technology doesn’t suffer from as much distortion as other AR displays, thereby alleviating eye strain.
While just an engineering build at this point, the test unit I tried was very light. I was impressed by how bright the colors were and the sharpness of the picture. The 60-degree field of view was also noticeably wider than both the Hololens and Meta 2, and gave a more natural visual feel to the experience.
It was all just proof-of-concept at this point with no specific application software, but a brief demo of a vibrant green sea turtle swimming back and forth through the crowds at GDC did show off the fidelity that can be achieved with the optics. VP of Development Salvatore Vilardi also said the next revision will shoot 40% more photons in your eyeballs resulting in greater brightness, and should be ready in a month or so.
There are no definitive consumer release plans yet, but the IMMY should be out to developers by the end of 2017. A consumer version is planned for the future, but IMMY sees their solution more for industrial enterprise uses in the near term with consumer applications coming shortly after that.
2016 was the year of VR hardware and it’s looking like 2017 is the year of software and accessories, but there are still many skeptics about the potential of the industry. Because of those, supporters and detractors clamor for whatever data is made available from sales to time spent playing on VR platforms and more. As development charges forward, developers are interested in statistics deeper embedded within their games as well, especially those that could help them create better VR experiences. Aldin Dynamics, a studio founded in 2013 that works exclusively on VR content, has a powerful analytic tool called Ghostline and they’ve started fostering partnerships with other dev studios to use the tool with their games.
Aldin Dynamics is starting things off by sharing their Ghostline program with Cloudhead Games and the SUPERHOT team, who both have created top experiences in the VR ecosystem. SUPERHOT and The Gallery – Call of the Starseed both received 9s out of 10 from our team at Upload and both are maintaining “Very Positive” ratings on Steam at the time of this writing. Even though the high reviews allude to these developers having a solid grasp on what they’re doing, the VR ecosystem is incredibly young and developers will want to take special note of what they’re doing wrong as well as right for future projects. The immersive nature of VR presents a lot of data about players that wouldn’t be considered in traditional game development, so tools like Ghostline will be crucial going forward.
Content from Ghostline Data Insights PDF For Waltz of the Wizard
To offer up an idea of what Ghostline offers, Aldine Dynamics shared the information gathered from Waltz of the Wizard which is another one of the best performing VR titles on Steam. The document has the expected information like the amount of people playing with more in-depth info like the average duration of a play session and what days of the week people play. It goes beyond that into unique VR territory with tracking of player height and how regularly they utilized room-scale, both important things to note for future games. A notable takeaway is that players using room-scale would play for longer periods than those just standing in one spot. The full PDF shows the potential of Ghostline and will hopefully inspire devs to use the tool and apply what they learn going forward.
Developers that are interested in partnering with Aldine Dynamics for Ghostline can reach out to the team via info@aldindynamics.com or sign up for their newsletter to stay informed on early access for the tool.
Back in August of last year, Valve started to roll out of its innovative and royalty-free tracking technology. The company made a development kit available to licensees, but only if they attended a $3,000 training session that would teach the ins and outs of the tech. The introductory course was likely a bit of quality control, but the price of the session was also a daunting obstacle to some. This is no longer a concern, as Valve is removing the requirement of the course, thus making the highly regarded tracking technology more readily available.
Valve has over 500 companies signed up currently, though that number is sure to change a great deal in response to this new development. The original in-person training course will still be available, but the coursework (in English or Chinese) will be available for free.
On top of all this, the SteamVR base stations that emit lasers to track sensors throughout the room will be available directly from Valve later this year.
The tech itself opens up a plethora of opportunities for enhancing the immersion of VR. SteamVR Tracking is a system that works with low-weight sensors that can be placed on various objects so they can be brought into virtual spaces. For example, players could be handed realistic props for baseball, ping pong, or even shooters and they’d be tracked accurately in whatever experiences were built around them.
At the beginning of the year, we addressed the idea of SteamVR Tracking potentially being 2017’s most important VR technology, and it is very encouraging to see it made available in such a way. As it makes its way into the hands of more creatives and engineers, we’ll hopefully be able to find out if a more immersive hardware and accessory ecosystem will bring VR into more homes.
