Welcome to the second episode of the series of articles that celebrate the craziest XR devices I’ve got to know about. They may be XR genius solutions completely ahead of their time, or just some things that will make you ask yourself “What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck?”. But in any case, they are devices that are worth a (funny) comment. In the first episode, we talked about some amazing things like the Ekto VR shoes, and now in this episode, we’ll see other crazy stuff, like an installation that made you fly in VR! Are you ready? (Remember that these articles are made for fun, I like to joke abo ..read more

A few days ago, I was reading an interesting article by (the always great) Scott Hayden on Road To VR. He claimed that the announcement of “Alien: Rogue Incursion”, the first big-budget VR game that is compatible only with Quest 3, marks the beginning of the end for Quest 2 and Quest Pro. I’ve found the statement correct, but the article let me also think about when and how this transition will happen. While the transition between Quest 1 and Quest 2 has been rather easy, I believe the one between Quest 2 and Quest 3 will be more tricky. I explain why in the remainder of this article, where I ..read more

This summary comes a bit later than usual because I’ve been busy writing a very long post to celebrate my ten years in XR! It’s incredible to have been here for such a long time… and to have written more than 350 of these roundups of news. I hope in these 10 years to have done at least something good for you of the XR communities. I hope we’ll do also the next 10 years together… Top news of the week (Image by Apple)VR is dead again because Apple Vision Pro sales have decreased A new report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims that the sales of the Vision Pro had a huge decrease after the initia ..read more

Se mi guardo nello specchio con il tempo che è passato Sono solo un po’ più ricco, più cattivo e più invecchiato (If I look at myself in the mirror with the time that has passed I’m just a little richer, meaner, and older) [M.Masini] April, 25th 2014. This is the day I usually say that I’ve officially started my career in AR/VR. Actually, my efforts in the field started even before, and I discovered the term “augmented reality” when I was reading tons of articles for my thesis in computer vision and I’ve found some interesting applications of the SIFT features. It’s hard so to establish an exa ..read more

You know that I’m a big fan of AR contact lenses: while making AR glasses is already incredibly complex, some amazing innovators are betting on the impossible battle to miniaturize all that is needed to do AR into small lenses. And the cool thing is that they are even managing to produce some prototypes. XPANCEO is one of these few companies betting on this futuristic technology. And I was pretty excited to have a video call with them a few weeks ago, where I met the cofounders Roman Axelrod and Valentyn Volkov. They’ve not only answered a few questions, but they have even led me to a remote v ..read more

I’ve played a good chunk of the VR game Max Mustard and I can confirm what the other reviewers are saying about it: it is a very entertaining VR platform game. Let me explain to you why. Gameplay Max Mustard is a platform game. As in all the platform games, your purpose is jumping on platforms (you don’t say), collecting coins, killing a few enemies here and there, and rescuing something at the end of the level. Rinse and repeat for all the levels. View post on imgur.com In Max Mustard your purpose is to rescue some cute creatures that have been made prisoners by some evil guy: there are 3 l ..read more

You may wonder why this newsletter episode is coming a bit later than usual. Well, it’s easy to say: Yesterday I was going to start writing this newsletter when Meta dropped the bomb about opening up its operating system and I was like “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT”. After a few minutes of shock, I thought “I HAVE ABSOLUTELY TO WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT!” and so I did, but of course, it took me some time to do. And then I thought again “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT”… it’s kinda crazy what happened! Next time, Boz, warn me a bit before making these decisions public, I need some time to prep ..read more

Today a (positive) earthquake hit the virtual reality ecosystem: Meta has just opened up its walled garden, as a strategic move to expand its business in the virtual reality market. It has just authorized other VR OEMs to use its Quest operating system and blurred the lines between the Meta Quest Store and App Lab. Let me tell you everything about this massive news and also analyze with you why this has been a very good idea. Meta Horizon OS on multiple headsets Meta has renamed the operating system of the Quest as Meta Horizon OS, its store as Meta Horizon Store, and the Quest companion app a ..read more

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