New World Notes

VR/AR Aren't Essential to the Metaverse -- But Are Still Important Options (Free Book Excerpt on My Patreon)

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HoloBike: New VR-Free Virtual World For Exercise Bikes Launches On Kickstarter

I often say the market for metaverse platforms is about 1 in 4 people on the Internet, since 1 in 4 is roughly how many people enjoy heavily immersive 3D game worlds on their devices. But we are seeing new technology that enables immersion beyond a traditional game/VR device, as with Disney's HoloTile that I blogged last week. 

Now comes HoloBike, a new indie project which just launched its Kickstarter*.

The brainchild of engineer/product designer Samuel Matson, who last worked in Google's VR division, the HoloBike basically puts a virtual world on an exercise bike -- without needing a VR headset. (Watch above.)

I recently got a hands-on (feet-on?) demo of the HoloBike, and came away pretty impressed. While focused on the screen, you feel the 3D environment wrapping around your vision, even on the periphery, peacefully enveloping you in the virtual trail ahead of you. While it doesn't provide a full VR effect, it's more than enough for immersion -- and unlike VR, Samuel tells me none of the 100 or so people who've tested it (including some 20 women) have experienced motion sickness using it.

While I'm more of a treadmill/stairs cardio guy, I definitely prefer the HoloBike to the standard boring gym bike experience. And because nearly 200 million people worldwide have a gym membership (counting the 6.5 million people who subscribe to Peleton) it opens up virtual world experiences to a massive new audience -- many or most of whom wouldn't be caught dead playing a AAA videogame.

After the demo, I chatted with Samuel about the technology and its potential -- starting with how the "hologram" effect works:

WATCH: Disney's HoloTile Points to Solutions Around VR's Motion Sickness / Headset-Centric Challenge

In case you missed it, watch king tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee being the first person to get a hands-on (feet on?) demo Disney's HoloTile, created by Imagineer inventor Lanny Smoot. Basically, it's a grid of little motion-detecting treadmills on the floor, that enable you to walk in any direction, and have that motion integrated with a virtual space.

Brownlee does a deeper dive technically into how it works, and as he explains, it offers a pretty powerful solution to VR's ongoing motion sickness challenge, where a mismatch of what your eyes see (virtual movement) contradicts what your inner ear experiences (not actually moving). That's one key source of nausea reactions from VR, and as I've reported often, females have a stronger reported propensity to experience it. Tech like HoloTile may be a partial solution to this.

I'm really excited to see solutions like these emerge, opening up new possibilities of expanding virtual world-type experiences to larger audiences. While HoloTile can definitely work with VR (Brownlee demos it with a Vision Pro), we also see it demoed as a headset-free experience, where the user(s) interact in a virtual world displayed on large screens around them. I actually think the HMD-free version is the more scalable use case, especially for use in theme parks by a large line of guests. (Anyone who's done VR headset demos to groups knows how time-consuming and frankly unsanitary they quickly get.)

HoloTile isn't the only headset-free VR tech I've seen lately, by the way: 

Meta Horizon OS Seems More a Move Against AndroidXR, Than Encouraging an Open XR Ecosystem

Meta just announced Meta Horizon OS, which despite the name is not specifically about its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds, but actually its mixed reality operating system for Quest devices which is now running on other upcoming XR headsets:

Developers and creators can take advantage of all these technologies using the custom frameworks and tooling we’ve built for creating mixed reality experiences, and they can reach their communities and grow their businesses through the content discovery and monetization platforms built into the OS... 

Leading global technology companies are already working on new devices built on Meta Horizon OS:

ASUS’s Republic of Gamers will use its expertise as a leader in gaming solutions to develop an all-new performance gaming headset.

Lenovo will draw on its experience co-designing Oculus Rift S, as well as deep expertise in engineering leading devices like the ThinkPad laptop series, to develop mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment.

Xbox and Meta teamed up last year to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) to Meta Quest, letting people play Xbox games on a large 2D virtual screen in mixed reality. Now, we’re working together again to create a limited-edition Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox.

The announcement seems like a good deal for Xbox, Lenovo, and ASUS, but it seemed rather nothingburger for everyone else. So I checked with XR expert Avi Bar-Zeev. Unsurprisingly, he'd already posted an apropos rant on LinkedIn:

 

Why a Statistically "Moderate" Gender Difference in VR Cybersickness is Still a Very Important Consideration for VR Developers

Some readers have pointed out an apparent discrepancy in my post about the NSF-funded Iowa State University study on VR and gender that I covered last week: The University's summary characterizes the gender difference in stark terms: The study found that the women test subjects ended a VR game early twice as often as men, and "reported a sickness intensity that was 40% higher".

However, the abstract of the peer-reviewed study is not as stark, saying: "We summarize the literature and conclude that women experience more cybersickness than do men, but that the size of the gender effect is modest."

How can a 40% sickness intensity be described as "modest"?

I checked back with Dr. Jon Kelly, who led the research. Asking him, is it fair to say that the gender difference is "modest" in terms of statistical analyses -- but is still a very important consideration for VR developers and companies when attempting to launch a mass market VR consumer product:

US Government-Funded Researchers Found That Women Using Quest Devices Much More Likely to Experience VR Nausea. No One in Meta/the VR Industry Has Contacted Them About It.

As I recently noted, an Iowa State University study funded in part by the National Science Foundation seems to confirm danah boyd’s early research that virtual reality tends to make women nauseous:

As part of a larger study on adaptation to cybersickness, the ISU researchers recruited 150 participants to play up to 20 minutes of a VR game with a headset. The participants were new to VR and could stop if they felt too sick to continue. The researchers found women ended the game early twice as often as men and reported a sickness intensity that was 40% higher.

Emphasis mine. Notably, as study lead Dr. Jonathan Kelly tells me, most of these tests were conducted via Quest and Quest 2 headsets. (“We are now transitioning to the Quest 3 but have not collected much data with this one yet.”)

Also notable (to me at least): 

Dr. Kelly tells me no one at Meta, let alone the VR industry at large, has contacted him about these findings.

“I'm not sure why they haven't reached out,” he tells me by e-mail. “My guess is they have their own ideas of how to solve the problem of cybersickness, but I don't think the industry track record on that is very good.”  

He adds that they may just be unaware of this research (from a NSF-backed, well-ranked science and technology-focused university), but I tend to agree about the unimpressive track record. Then again, no one at Meta contacted boyd about her findings, even though she’s a senior researcher at Microsoft.

So I remain even more mind-boggled that Meta is still spending billions marketing its Quest devices as a mass market product without evidently worrying that they tend to make half the population sick.

For VR developers who are interested in minimizing VR nausea/cybersickness, Dr. Kelly has some advice:

10 Years Ago, After Facebook Bought Oculus, a Top Academic Warned About VR Causing Females Nausea. No One at Facebook/Meta Followed Up.

This week we're seeing many stories marking the 10th anniversary of Facebook/Meta's acquisition of Oculus, with some wondering why the VR device (later rebranded as the Quest), hasn't changed the world as expected.

Maybe I missed it, but none of these articles have mentioned nor even asked Meta about the vomitous elephant in the room: There is substantial research that VR tends to make females nauseous.

As I write in Making a Metaverse That Matters, no one at Meta, and hardly anyone across the VR industry, followed up with the top technology academic who raised this point the very same month Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014:

Shortly after the Oculus purchase was announced, esteemed academic danah boyd, a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, published a much-discussed opinion piece in the online business site Quartz, proactively entitled: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?”. 

In it, danah brought up an earlier study she had published which strongly suggested VR tended to make women nauseous. It began as a grad student given a chance to try out an early VR demo:

"Ecstatic at seeing a real-life instantiation of the Metaverse, the virtual world imagined in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, I donned a set of goggles and jumped inside. And then I promptly vomited."

Hardly an obscure researcher, danah is a widely and frequently cited expert in tech and mainstream media, especially around her work on teens and social networks. 

That VR can cause nausea has been fairly well known for decades — it was reported by military researchers as far back as the 1960s, who noticed it among some volunteers testing early flight simulators. However, it’s often attributed to poor graphics or how the sensation of motion is displayed. Any variation in VR nausea based on gender is usually explained away by pointing out that males tend to play 3D video games more than females, and are therefore better acclimated to immersive virtual reality.

But what danah discovered went deeper than that. She noted, for instance, that a difference around experiencing 3D was even observable in trans people at a gender clinic in the Netherlands — and that it also influenced thinking about 3D:

"[Researchers] found that people taking androgens (a steroid hormone similar to testosterone) improved at tasks that required them to rotate Tetris-like shapes in their mind to determine if one shape was simply a rotation of another shape. Meanwhile, male-to-female transsexuals saw a decline in performance during their hormone replacement therapy.

"Although there was variability across the board, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on…. …. I’d posit that the problems of nausea and simulator sickness that many people report when using VR headsets go deeper than pixel persistence and latency rates."

Emphasis mine, because it bears repeating: As I read it, danah’s research suggests that the different responses to VR based on gender happen at the hormonal level, and therefore, may not be addressable by technical improvements.

danah ended her essay with a call for researchers to follow up on her findings around biology and VR: “In other words, are systems like Oculus fundamentally (if inadvertently) sexist in their design?” It was not a condemnation of VR per se, but a call for researchers working in the technology to explore her findings.

“I want folks to take what I did and push it further,” as danah told me at the time. “If researchers start to investigate this issue, I’ll be ecstatic.”

On this point, she has not been made very ecstatic:

Watch: Philip Rosedale Demos New Rig-Based VR Experience Without Headset, Nausea

Watch this cool new VR prototype from Philip Rosedale and his son August, the latest project from his new studio, dubbed IRL (for In Reality Lab). As you can see in the video above, this is virtual reality without a head-mounted display, powered by massive high definition display screens, and an apparatus that keeps the user's head in place -- and tracks their motion.

As he explains on his blog, one goal with this new Rig is to create a new way of experiencing and interacting in VR that doesn't cause motion sickness:

Watch This Weekend: WebXR Awards (The Polys) Celebrating the Best of the Immersive Web

We’re thrilled to share that our original #WebXR game, The Escape Artist, has picked up some @webxrawards noms: Experience of the Year, Game of the Year, Entertainment Experience of the Year, and Developer of the Year! pic.twitter.com/0ZN7nG4Y7x

— Paradowski Creative (@paracreative) January 26, 2024

Update, 3/3: Event is over but awards are announced on social media.  The Escape Artist from Pardowski Entertainment took Game and Entertainment Experience of the Year.

Streaming on YouTube this Sunday (March 3), starting at 2pm PT, the Polys are announcing the best of the immersive web -- Best Game, Best Education Experience, and so on.  

You'll probably recognize many of the nominees and announcers like Evo Heyning (previously), and it's being co-judged by Julian Reyes of the Virtual Worlds Museum (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog), who's also a Polys co-sponsor through his studio Keyframe Entertainment.

Top Apple Analyst Forecasts Vision Pro to Sell 250K Units This Year -- In Line With My Prediction in January

Tantalizing new tidbit from the largely reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and MacRumors:

While there was speculation about how many people only bought Vision Pro to experience it before sending it back it at the end of the 14-day return window, he estimates that the current return rate has dropped to just 1%… 

Kuo said that current estimates of 2024 sales are considerably higher than Apple originally expected, though the ranges he cites are large: "U.S. shipments are expected to be 200,000–250,000 units this year, better than Apple’s original estimate of 150,000–200,000 units, but this is still a niche market."

Emphasis mine. Speaking of which, at the risk of a totally annoying flex, here's what I wrote in January:

The basic fact that an augmented/mixed reality headset device costing some $3500, even from Apple, will only attract the hardest of hardcore consumers/developers. My prediction from [December 2023], that the Vision Pro will sell under 250,000 units in the first year, still sounds right -- and is actually on the optimistic side. 

I can't claim the inside sources and expertise of Kuo and Mac Rumors, but I have been burned by 10+ years of multiple HMD launches which were forecast to Transform the Industry Forever and Replace the Smartphone. To wit: