It’s not the best moment for the tech and gaming industry: many startups have failed and many people even from big companies have been laid off. In the VR industry, we are not immune to this trend and probably we have even bigger problems, since after the metaverse hype we entered again in an “autumn phase” for the whole ecosystem. For example, last week, one of the most known startups for enterprise VR meetings declared bankruptcy. Many people have lost their jobs these months and I have also seen a cool project I was working on being put “on hold”. As every entrepreneur, I’ve gone through a ..read more

These days I’ll start organizing my trip to the US to be a speaker at AWE in June… in case you want to meet me there, feel free to reach out. The sooner I know how many people would like to meet me, the better I’ll organize my trip…    After this personal announcement, let’s have a look at the most important pieces of XR news of the week! Top news of the week (Image by Google)Google promises “AR Announcements” for its I/O event It’s a period of important announcements for Google. It recently had its Google Cloud Next event, where it unveiled a bunch of new AI products, like ..read more

Social VR is one of the big trends of virtual reality: people are meeting inside virtual spaces in Rec Room, VRChat, and other similar applications to have fun together or just talk. But now the hype is on mixed reality so, we should also start thinking about how it is meeting people in augmented spaces. We had a taste of it thanks to the recent release of Spatial Personas by Apple, with all the XR influencers sharing videos of them meeting friends in AR in their homes. But is meeting in AR similar to meeting in VR? Does it follow the same rules? And if not, how can we design a gathering in mi ..read more

These days I’m experimenting with the development of mixed reality applications, and on Quest I’ve so been playing around with environment understanding, seeing the good and the bad of Meta’s approach on this topic. In this article, I will explain to you where we are at, and what we have to change to make mixed reality truly useful. Mixed reality and environment understanding Mixed reality is one of the trends of the moment and it will surely be one of the dominant technologies of our future: in “5 to 10 years” (Vitillo’s law of technology), many people will probably wear AR/MR glasses, and li ..read more

It’s not been an exciting week for the XR industry, but still, the release of Spatial Personas has created a new little hype around the Apple Vision Pro, putting even more pressure on Meta, which soon will make its move with the new Quest 3 S/Lite. Prepare some popcorn, because the one between Meta and Apple is going to be a very interesting battle…    (Hey, keep reading that this newsletter contains a giveaway of keys for the cool VR platform game Max Mustard!) Top news of the week (Image by Apple)Apple releases Spatial Personas The Apple Vision Pro keeps being the headset ..read more

A few days ago I posted this video on my social media channels where I poured some biscuits from a real-world biscuit box into my VR kitchen to have some breakfast: So tasty… The video got some interest from the community and some people asked me how I did it. Since I’m always favorable about sharing knowledge, let me tell you the secrets behind this application, so that you can do your augmented virtuality application for your Quest, too! Before we start, let me tell you just a few caveats about this article: What I did was a prototype, so the solutions I’ve found are not optimized. I wante ..read more

Easter has just gone by, and I hope that whether you celebrate it or not, you had a wonderful Sunday together with the people you love. I’ve personally enjoyed some time together with my relatives and also had a lot of good food (including a pistachio-flavored Easter cake).    Talking about things I enjoy doing, I’ve also written an April Fools joke on my blog about the upcoming Valve Deckard, gifting a smile to a few people in the community. If you want to read it, you can find it at this link, while at this other link, you can find a list of the best pranks announced today in the t ..read more

This has been the week of GDC and of the NVIDIA GTC, so we have a bit more pieces of news than the usual because there have been some interesting things announced there. Oh yes, also IEEE VR had its show. Actually, a lot of things happened for tech people in the US, which is good!    Regarding my personal life, I’m traveling these days, so I will mix a bit of fun and a bit of work. I’m also experimenting a bit more with technology, and especially the interactions between the real and the virtual worlds, as I did in this Quest app about cookies. Let me know if you are curious to know ..read more

These days I’m carrying on some experiments with XR and other technologies. I had some wonderful ideas of Mixed Reality applications I would like to prototype, but most of them are impossible to do in this moment because of a decision that almost all VR/MR headset manufacturers have taken: preventing developers from accessing camera data. My early start with MR As you may know, I got started with passthrough mixed reality in 2019, far before Quest enabled the use of passthrough. I was using the Vive Focus Plus, and I hacked one of its SDK samples to transform it into a mixed-reality device. Th ..read more

Today is Father’s Day in Italy, so I want to send a big hug to all the fathers out there, wherever they may be.    Life is busy these days, but in April I will have more time to collaborate with you all. For this reason, I’ve given a refresh to the pages where I talk about the paid services I offer, may they be advertising on this blog, strategic consultancies about the XR market, or development of immersive experiences. If you need my help, I’m available, just get in touch  And now, after this little personal commercial, let’s start talking about the most interesting XR news of ..read more