New World Notes

Watch: How BONELAB Could Become the Garry's Mod for VR

Via VR scout Adeon, here's a very good case from YouTuber ThrillSeeker to keep an eye (and a haptic finger in the wind) out for BONELAB, from indie studio Stress Level Zero, creator of the unexpected VR hit BONEWORKS from 2019. Like that game, BONELAB has highly responsive physics and avatar customization, with this new version compatible with the Quest 2 and its install base of some 11-12 million consumers. Even more intriguing, BONELAB's teaser trailer strongly suggests that player modding will be a major feature to the game after it rolls out. Or to put it another way: BONELAB could become the Garry's Mod for VR.

Teaser trailer and feature description below from the Steam page:

Quest 2 Install Base Estimate: Now 11-12 million, Based on Q1 Meta Report

With Meta's Q1 2022 earnings report now out, it's once again time to engage in some Meta-ology. (You know, like Kremlinology, except with a publicly traded company.) The core question for us XR/metaverse obsessives being: What's the install base of the Quest 2, which is central to Meta's  metaverse strategy?

Short answer: From what we can tell based on this earnings report, about 11-12  million.

Why? If you want to walk with me in the weeds, read on:

Why Meta's Retail Stores Miss Where the Metaverse is Most Powerful

What's our evidence that Meta's Metaverse strategy is helplessly muddled? Well, there's Business Insider confirming what I reported, citing an insider last year. But even more evident is Meta trying to market its metaverse platform in the real world:

Meta said Monday that its first physical retail space will open on May 9 in Burlingame, California. The store will be at Meta’s Reality Labs complex, the office where its engineers work on technologies like virtual and augmented reality... Although Meta will sell its video chatting device Portal and Ray-Ban Stories glasses on site, most of the store’s real estate will be dedicated to showcasing the Oculus headset, a Meta spokesman said. That makes sense given Zuckerberg’s reportedly obsessive focus on the metaverse lately.    

The practical difficulties are many. As I discussed with Bloomberg's Parmy Olson:

Wagner James Au, author of “The Making of Second Life,” who blogs regularly about metaverse platforms, says Meta can’t underestimate the psychological barriers to introducing people to VR. “I’ve worked for metaverse platforms and you really have to wrap your arms around someone and manipulate their head and their face while you put this headset on them.” 

And that was a challenge requiring "VR condoms" even before there was, you know, a deadly global pandemic. But even beyond those issues, the fundamental problem is this:

XR Headset Controlling Giant Humanoid Robot to Construct a Railway is Peak Japan Moment of 2022

This is the mixed reality application of the month and is probably the Peak Japan moment of the year: A giant construction robot.. controlled through an XR headset. According to this Japanese news site (and Google's so-so translation), it is very much in production:

[Railway company] JR West announced on the 15th that it is developing a multifunctional railway heavy equipment that combines a humanoid heavy equipment robot and a railway construction vehicle in collaboration with the human-machine integrated and Nippon Signal. The company aims to improve productivity and safety by developing highly versatile heavy railway equipment that can be used for various equipment installed in high places and mechanizing work that previously required human intervention.

According to VR expert Adeon (who tipped me on this ), the HMD we see pictured here is an HP Reverb G2. ("Very good headset, better than Index.") New World Notes' Japanese translator Sanny found this video of the robot in action, watch below:

BREAKING: Rec Room Has Over 3 Million Monthly Active VR Users, Most on Meta's Quest 2; That's 10x More Users Than Meta's Horizon Worlds & Venues!

Just got this pretty amazing breaking news note from Shawn Whiting, Head of Influencers & Partners at Rec Room:

"Shortly after the holidays, Rec Room crested 3 million VR monthly active users... A majority of those VR monthly active users are Quest 2. [Emph mine - WJA]

"We're very happy with the VR growth but at this point VR is a pretty low percentage of our monthly players. Rec Room is seeing much more growth on iOS, Android, PlayStation, and Xbox due to there being billions of those devices out there collectively." 

So that's something! Last December I estimated Rec Room had 4-5 million monthly active users across all devices, but based on Shawn's wording, total Rec Room numbers is likely to be well over 10-12 million MAU.

This is quite an impressive milestone for metaverse platform growth -- and more key, for usage of the Quest 2 headset on metaverse platforms. Quest 2 has an install base over 10 million, so at least 15% of that (i.e. 1.5 million) are active on Rec Room.

This is also a sharp wake-up call for Meta:

EXCLUSIVE: Virtual World Vet Warned Meta About Avatar Harassment in the Metaverse Years Ago -- But Long-Known Best Practices Were Not Prioritized

If you've been following the news about Facebook/Meta's metaverse project lately, you'll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds, leading the company to hastily add an avatar "boundary" system.

And if you've been following virtual world/metaverse development for any substantial amount of time, you've probably been wondering why Meta allowed this to happen at all. Understanding and preparing for avatar-to-avatar harassment, especially directed at female avatars, is a fundamental challenge. How did a company spending billions of dollars on making a metaverse platform of its own somehow miss lesson #1 from Metaverse 101?

As it turns out, Meta was warned about this many times -- by a well-known virtual world veteran who was a senior member of the Oculus team. But somehow, his warnings, recommendations, and best practice summaries were not centered. And definitely not put into place.

"I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row," Jim Purbrick tells me, with evident frustration, even sending along the talk he gave on the subject at Facebook's own conference back in 2016. (Watch below.) "I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn't reach every part of the organization, sadly."

My Tiny Life, of course, is Julian Dibbell's classic account of virtual world sexual assault... from the 1990s. Yes, the problem has been well-known and documented for that long. 

Purbrick, as regular readers know, was an early developer at Linden Lab, going on to consult with CCP, the developers of Eve Online, before joining the Oculus team. He also documents virtual world/metaverse best practices on his blog here.

And when he joined Facebook's XR team, Purbrick took pains to carry over the wisdom learned from Second Life and from the knowledge base of virtual world development in general:

Apple XR Headset Not Likely to Come Out in 2022 (Like I Said In 2021)

Just posted my 2022 predictions just last week, and this news already dropped this week:

Apple was reportedly planning to put the headset on sale sometime after the [June 2022] WWDC announcement.

Now, however, Apple is said to be exploring the possibility of delaying the announcement by at least a few months, or potentially pushing it back to 2023. If the iPhone maker goes forward with the plan, the device would reportedly start shipping to customers later than planned as well.

According to today’s report, Apple’s hesitance to debut the headset at WWDC in June is the result of ongoing development challenges related to the device’s software and cameras. Additionally, there are reportedly overheating issues caused by the onboard processor.

I don't doubt the hardware issues are an issue, but as I said, "I still fail to see why Apple would risk its brand on a still-niche product as yet." (If Meta announces much greater Quest 2 sales than expected, I would expect Apple's hardware challenges to get solved right quick.)

But even beyond sales, there's the other virtual shoe that hasn't dropped. If Apple has an XR headset... who is making the content for it? Because like I wrote:

Fact Check: Neither Qualcomm or Facebook Claim the Quest 2 Has a 10M Unit Install Base (Yet)

If you're following VR news across various social media platforms, you probably saw this article on The Verge yesterday:

Meta has sold 10 million Oculus Quest 2 headsets, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon at the company’s 2021 investor day, giving the best benchmark yet for sales of Meta’s standalone VR platform since it launched last October... The news doesn’t come directly from Meta itself, but given that the Quest 2 relies on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset to power its standalone VR hardware, Qualcomm does seem like it would have an accurate number for how many headsets have been sold.

This is hard to believe, because at the end of July, the install base for the Quest 2 was 5-6 million, based on Facebook's latest earning report. (Not to mention July's infamous face rash incident which placed the US install base at 4 million.) Given that hardware sales mainly surge during the holiday shopping season, it's seriously unlikely 4-5 million more Quest 2 units were bought in the last 3 months alone. 

So I wasn't surprised, scrolling down further, to find this jaw-dropping update casually added to the bottom of the Verge article (but with no subsequent change to the clickbaitey headline):

Rec Room, Which Already Has a 3 Million+ User Headstart on Facebook Horizon, Is Hiring Like Crazy

In case you missed it (and I meant to blog this last week, sorry), Rec Room is hiring like crazy, with around 60 open positions.

"We're growing a lot," as Rec Room Influencer/Partner Head Shawn Whiting tells me. "Mobile (iOS and Android) is growing very quickly so almost every team is hiring to keep up," Here's the company career page.

Rec Room, which Facebook/Meta's Horizon roughly resembles in terms of graphics and avatars ((but launched first), has something that Facebook/Meta does not:

Metaverse Veteran Zuckerman Unleashes on Metaverse Wannabe Zuckerberg

In the Atlantic, longtime Internet activist and scholar Ethan Zuckerman takes textual fisticuffs to Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Metaverse ambitions, going through the long evolution of the technology like an avuncular Bane. ("Ah you think the Metaverse is your ally? You merely adopted the Metaverse. I was born in it, molded by it.") Because Ethan's hands-on history with the Metaverse started as a developer in the 90s, and features a long stop at Second Life:

When Linden Lab launched this metaverse in 2003, there was a brief burst of enthusiasm where otherwise serious entities, such as businesses and universities, bought and built out their own islands in Linden’s proprietary world. (Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, now the Berkman Klein Center, had its own island.) The learning curve to build objects in Second Life was steep, the universe was populated haphazardly, and the Second Life client demanded a very fast computer and a very patient user. But pioneers in the space saw beyond these limitations and envisioned a system that was so emotionally compelling that journalists and activists would be forced to engage with it to reach audiences.

I was invited to the Metaverse Roadmap Summit in 2006 to see some of these “serious” Second Life spaces. The one that finally caused me to lose my shit was Camp Darfur, an exhibit designed to help metaverse explorers understand what Sudanese refugees were experiencing when they were displaced from their homes. Of course, this was Sudan as understood through the eyes of well-meaning Bay Area techies, which meant it featured a roaring campfire surrounded by wooden tree stumps where you could sit and contemplate the horrors of genocide. Given that women routinely walked miles from barren, tree-free desert camps to collect firewood, risking assault and rape in the process, it seemed like the sort of detail you’d want to get right in simulating the refugee experience.

I vividly remember Ethan losing his aforementioned shit on the topic, because I was onstage at the Metaverse Summit when SL's Camp Darfur project was discussed. (I first blogged about it here  -- pic of the notorious campfire above.) I was more interested in the group of Green Lantern roleplayers who protected the camp from griefers, but Ethan's objections to the project itself were painfully on point, a lesson in how easy it is for us to lose sight of what actually matters amid our ebullience over new technology.

Ethan also gets into the challenge of Second Life's poor branding, a theme I also keep coming back to: