Category: VR Hardware

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ProTubeVR Confirms It’s Developing A PSVR 2 Gun Stock

French accessory developer ProTube VR confirms it’s developing a gun stock for the PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers.

Best known for developing gun-themed accessories that fit VR controllers across different platforms, ProTubeVR announced its upcoming plans earlier today through Twitter. “We officially confirm that we are working hard on the #PSVR2 cups design to make our gunstock compatible with this bad boy!” the company revealed, promising more information will come soon. This announcement follows previous hints from company founder and CEO Romain “Bourin” Armand, who was seen replying to requests for a new PSVR Aim Controller on PSVR 2.

So far, Sony hasn’t confirmed any official PSVR 2 accessories beyond the Sense controller charging station, but ProTubeVR isn’t the only company developing a third-party PSVR 2 gun stock. US-based company Virtual Rifle Systems recently announced similar plans, revealing concept art on Twitter last week. However, that particular accessory is currently in the design phase, so there’s no word on a potential release date.

We don’t have any pricing details or a release date at this time for ProTubeVR’s upcoming PSVR 2 accessory, but we’ll keep you updated once we learn more.

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Quest Pro Price Cut To $1000 Just 4 Months After Launch

Quest Pro’s price is officially being cut from $1500 to $1000.

Unlike the US & UK discount tested earlier this year, this is an actual price adjustment – not just a temporary offer – and it will apply to all countries where Quest Pro is sold.

The price of the 256GB Quest 2 is also being reduced, from $500 to $430. The 128GB Quest 2 is remaining at $400. Both Quest 2 models are still more expensive than before last August though, when they were raised from $300 and $400 respectively.

The Quest Pro price cut takes effect on Sunday in the US and Canada, then March 15 in the other countries. The 256GB Quest 2 price cut takes effect on Sunday in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US.

Quest Pro launched in October to mixed at-best reviews, with criticism falling on its underwhelming resolution, grainy passthrough, lack of automatic room sensing, and Meta’s cartoonish avatars not being detailed enough to do the impressive face tracking sensors justice.

What has likely made Quest Pro an even harder sell are the reports of a Quest 3 coming later this year with a twice as powerful processor for a much lower price. The announced reduction lowers the price gap somewhat, but it’s still a lot to ask for a headset that could soon be essentially outdated.

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Meta Reportedly Plans Cheap “Accessible” Headset For 2024

Meta plans a cheaper more “accessible” headset for 2024, according to a Meta roadmap leaked to The Verge.

Meta’s VP of VR Mark Rabkin reportedly told staff:

“The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market.”

Of course, the idea of a stripped-down budget headset from Facebook sounds familiar. In 2018 the company released Oculus Go, a $200 standalone headset for seated use with no positional tracking, fixed lenses, and a basic rotational laser pointer remote. Go was withdrawn from the market in 2020 and Facebook vowed never to ship a headset without positional tracking again.

2018’s Oculus Go, sold from $200

It’s unclear how exactly the 2024 headset would differ from the Quest 3 slated for later this year, which Rabkin reportedly said will cost more than $400. What would Meta remove this time, or reduce, to achieve the lower price point? The obvious answer would be to not include tracked controllers, instead focusing on hand tracking. But then why not just offer Quest 3 without controllers?

Developing a separate headset suggests it will have tradeoffs. If Quest 3 has adjustable lens separation, Meta could reduce costs in the 2024 headset by using fixed lenses. This would mean some people have a less visually comfortable experience, though pancake lenses are slightly more forgiving of eye alignment, so the blur wouldn’t be as bad as with Go. Another possibility could be to use fewer or lower quality mixed reality sensors, but this could impact Meta’s ability to deliver high-quality hand tracking and might limit the market for the mixed reality experiences it wants to push – two features that seem core to the broader market the headset would want to target.

The report also doesn’t say what Meta plans to call this 2024 headset. Will it be a Quest 3 Lite, a Quest Go, or something else entirely? For now, it’s reportedly just known by its codename: Ventura.

However, it’s important to note that hardware companies frequently cancel projects in development, so there’s no guarantee this headset will ever actually ship.

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Next Quest Pro Reportedly Pushed Far Out But Will Have Photorealistic Avatars

Meta reportedly canceled a near-term successor to Quest Pro, with the next model now “way out in the future”.

Quest Pro has received mixed at-best reviews, with criticism falling on its high price, underwhelming resolution, hefty weight, outdated processor, and lack of automatic room sensing for headline mixed reality features.

The Verge’s Alex Heath reports Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told staff a planned second generation of Quest Pro is canned. Instead, Meta’s VP of VR Mark Rabkin reportedly told staff the company plans an advanced headset “way out in the future” featuring Codec Avatars, the company’s long-running research project to achieve photoreal spatial telepresence via face tracking sensors on VR headsets.

The Codec Avatars project was first revealed in 2019. Last year it’s lead Yaser Sheikh said that when the project started it was “ten miracles away”, and he now believed it was “five miracles away”.

“We want to make it higher resolution for work use and really nail work, text and things like that,” Rabkin reportedly said of the “way out” headset.

In November, a South Korean news outlet reported Meta executives met with Samsung and LG’s display divisions about supplying OLED and MicroLED microdisplays for future VR and AR devices. Microdisplays have significantly higher pixel densities and thus can enable higher resolution in headsets more compact than today’s.

Last year The Information reported the near-term Quest Pro successor had been slated for 2024, suggesting this “way out in the future” headset won’t arrive until 2025 at the absolute earliest.

UPDATE March 2: Heath confirmed the cancelation of the near-term Quest Pro successor in his weekly Command Line newsletter. This article has been updated to reflect this.

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Quest 3 Reportedly Much Thinner And Twice As Powerful, But More Expensive

Details about Meta Quest 3 were leaked to The Verge.

Alex Heath reports Meta’s VP of VR Mark Rabkin told staff in an internal presentation that Quest 3, launching later this year, will be two times thinner and at least twice as powerful as Quest 2 – but cost “a bit more.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously said Quest 3 will be “in the price range of $300, $400, or $500, that zone”, suggesting $500 as the likely entry price.

“We have to prove to people that all this power, all these new features are worth it” Rabkin reportedly said.

Rabkin also reportedly said Quest 3 will have a “Smart Guardian”. The report doesn’t elaborate, but this could potentially involve automatically seeing a 3D outline of furniture, people, and pets when you get close to them. Currently, Quest 2 and Quest Pro let you arduously manually mark out furniture to see a basic rectangular bounding box when near, and you can enable a crude 2D outline feature that doesn’t distinguish between kinds of objects. Late last year, leadership at Meta said it was a goal to make room scanning an automated process for mixed reality.

Apparent schematics leaked to YouTuber SadleyItsBradley

In September, apparent schematics of Quest 3 were leaked to YouTuber SadlyItsBradley. Unlike Quest Pro, the headset depicted didn’t have either eye or face tracking. It did, however, include pancake lenses to achieve a slim design, and a depth sensor for advanced mixed reality.

Mixed reality will reportedly be a major selling point of Quest 3. “The main north star for the team was from the moment you put on this headset, the mixed reality has to make it feel better, easier, more natural,” Rabkin reportedly said. “You can walk effortlessly through your house knowing you can see perfectly well. You can put anchors and things on your desktop. You can take your coffee. You can stay in there much longer.”

Rabkin also reportedly said there will be 41 new apps and games shipping for Quest 3. Meta has acquired 8 game studios over the past 3 years but has only vaguely teased 1 new game from them. We’ve been speculating for a while now that Meta has been directing these studios to build content for Quest 3.

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Open-Source Project Bringing Hand Tracking To Valve Index And Reverb G2

An open-source project is bringing controller-free hand tracking to PC VR headsets.

The open-source Linux-based OpenXR platform Monado just added hand tracking. Hand tracking is a built-in feature on standalone headsets like Quest, Pico 4, and Vive XR Elite, but isn’t currently natively available on SteamVR except through 3rd party attachments such as Ultraleap.

The new feature fully supports Valve Index and has “degraded quality” support for Oculus Rift S and WMR headsets like HP Reverb G2 – though that should be fixed “soon”.

Collabora, the group developing Monado, claims the feature can track fast hand movements and is usable for drawing, typing, and UI interaction in specialized apps. It’s mainly intended to be used with your hands separated, with “limited” support for hand-over-hand interactions.

Monado also supports inside-out headset positional tracking on Linux, allowing Valve Index to be used without base stations.

Of course, almost all PC VR owners use their headsets through Windows, not Linux. Collabora says a Windows SteamVR driver for its hand tracking tech should arrive “in the coming weeks”, alongside improvements to stability and jitter. There are no announced plans for the headset positional tracking to come to Windows, though.

Whether the driver will become popular enough to encourage developers of games with support for hand tracking on standalone headsets to also support it on PC is a very different question, but for specialized applications this could still prove a very useful feature.

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Teardown Reveals PSVR 2 Panels Don’t Have Full Number Of Subpixels

iFixit’s PSVR 2 teardown brings a controversial revelation about its display panels.

Shahram Mokhtari took apart the new headset to assess its repairability and inspect its components in a fascinating video we recommend you watch. Mokhtari then took a magnifying glass to the OLED panels, revealing the subpixel arrangement.

 

Each “pixel” in a display is actually made up of primary color subpixels. That’s usually red, green, and blue (RGB) and all modern LCD panels have the full three subpixels for each pixel. Most OLED panels, however, use a different subpixel arrangement called PenTile. PenTile has the full number of green subpixels, 1 for each pixel, but only half the number of red and blue subpixels.

The original PlayStation VR featured a full RGB subpixel arrangement and it was one of the only non-PenTile OLED panels ever shipped in a consumer product. While on paper PSVR 2 has four times as many pixels PSVR, the difference is not so extreme when subpixels are considered.

PlayStation VR PlayStation VR2
Panel Type OLED HDR OLED
Pixels Per Eye 1 million 4 million
Subpixels Per Eye 3.1 million 8.1 million

Alongside the diffusion filter we predicted teardowns would find in our technical analysis, the PenTile subpixel arrangement likely contributes to the perceived “softness” of PSVR 2’s image compared to even lower resolution LCD headsets. The display driver chip uses a technique called subpixel rendering to translate regular RGB input into a PenTile output, but the result is a loss of visual detail compared to full RGB panels.

subpixel arrangement comparison

Image from MobCompany.info showing RGB and PenTile 1080p smartphone panels.

OLED panels provide vibrant colors and unrivaled contrast with true deep blacks, but those advantages come at a cost. Whether that cost is worth those benefits is a controversial question, one that each VR gamer will decide for themselves.

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Reports Suggest Meta Cancelled A 2024 Quest

The Verge’s Alex Heath reports Meta canceled hardware codenamed Cardiff.

In his Command Line weekly newsletter, Heath writes he “heard of at least two early-stage hardware prototypes, one codenamed Cardiff and the other Hermosa, that have been canned recently.”

In May last year, The Information said it viewed an internal Meta roadmap showing the next two mainline headsets after Quest 2 and the first two high-end headsets (the first being the Quest Pro released in October). The two mainline headsets were said to be codenamed Stinson and Cardiff and set to release in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

Stinson is almost certainly Quest 3, as Meta has effectively confirmed it’s launching this year. So what exactly would Cardiff have been? There are a few possibilities to consider.

Quest 4?

Qualcomm seems set to update its XR2 chipset after three years, but the VR market would probably need to get much bigger to accelerate this cycle. Quest 3 is set to release three years after Quest 2 alongside the next generation XR2, but it’s possible Cardiff could have been a move to a yearly release cycle with relatively minor improvements.

This seems unlikely though, and such a move would discourage some people from buying because they’d worry their headset would be quickly outdated.

Quest Lite?

Cardiff could have been a lower cost option aimed at bringing VR to many more people than even Quest 2 and 3. But what exactly would Meta cut or reduce? A weaker processor would limit the applications it could run, while a lower resolution display wouldn’t save much on cost. Savings could be achieved by removing mixed reality sensors, but this wouldn’t match Meta’s long-term strategy and limit the userbase for mixed reality content.

Quest 3 Plus?

The price and feature gulf between the $400 Quest 2 and the $1500 Quest Pro is vast. Quest 3 is set to get color passthrough for mixed reality but leaked schematics suggest it won’t have eye or face tracking.

The most likely possibility is that Cardiff would have sat between Quest 3 and Quest Pro 2, offering features like eye tracking while priced lower than the next-generation high-end device.

As for Hermosa, there hasn’t been any reporting suggesting what it could have been, and we haven’t heard anything either.

If you know anything about Cardiff or Hermosa, please email tips@uploadvr.com or contact me on Twitter.

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Meta Fixed Quest Automatic App Updates, Significantly Reducing Friction

Meta fixed automatic app updates on Quest.

Quest headsets had an option to update apps automatically in the smartphone app, but it didn’t work reliably. Even if you left your headset charging for hours you might put it on to find the app you wanted to use required a lengthy update. Waiting for an app to download is a terrible experience when you’re stuck in a headset. You could take the headset off, but then you’d have to guess when the update might finish or periodically put it on again to check. This could lead to shortened VR play sessions and turn some people away entirely until the next play session.

While not documented in the official changelog, I can confirm that the version 49 system update fixed this problem, as Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth had hinted. Quest system updates sometimes require your headset to reboot before fully applying and that’s what happened for me. Over the past month of testing when I’ve left my Quest Pro or Quest 2 charging they automatically downloaded app updates. So now VR is ready whenever I am. For Quest Pro owners, the update also means Meta delivers on the promise of its charging pad to keep VR ready anytime.

There are still other sources of friction to getting into a VR session but this one was arguably the most time-consuming and frustrating. With improvements like this and Direct Touch, Meta is smoothing out the experience of owning its headsets ahead of the planned launch of Quest 3 later this year.

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Meta Says It Reduced Quest Pro Controllers Startup Time

Meta claims update v50 reduces the time Touch Pro controllers take to synchronize their tracking with the headset.

The Touch Pro controllers track themselves via three cameras and a relatively powerful onboard chipset. This means tracking works at any angle regardless of where the headset is facing, but there is a major downside. Since their tracking is completely independent of the headset, when you pick them up it takes a few seconds for their coordinate space to be synchronized to the headset – as we noted in our Quest Pro review. The controllers do move in this time, but are misaligned from the correct position.

With the Quest v50 update, Meta says it “reduced the amount of time it takes for tracking to initialize on the Meta Quest Touch Pro controllers. In other words, your controllers will be quicker to respond when you first put on your headset”.

It’s not actually entirely clear whether this refers to the synchronization time or the actual start-up time. The controllers, like even the Quest 2 controllers, also have a time between pressing a button and actually turning on. We’ll be testing this ourselves when our headsets get version 50.

Touch Pro also works with Quest 2, so this change should also apply to it when v50 actually rolls out.