New World Notes

Apple Sure Doesn't Seem Like Virtual Reality's Savior

If this new Bloomberg story is right, Apple will not be a mass market player in the VR industry for at least the next five years, and that's by Apple's own design:

Apple’s typical playbook involves taking emerging consumer technology, such as music players, smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, and making it reliable and easy to use for everyone. This time, though, Apple isn’t looking to create an iPhone-like hit for its first headset. Instead, the company is building a high-end, niche product that will prepare outside developers and consumers for its eventual, more mainstream AR glasses.

The plans suggest that Apple’s first headset will be far more expensive than those from rivals, which cost about $300 to $900. Some Apple insiders believe the company may sell only one headset per day per retail store... 

The headset, codenamed N301, is in a late prototype stage, but is not yet finalized so the company’s plans could change or be scrapped entirely before launch. The AR glasses, codenamed N421, are in an early stage known as “architecture,” meaning Apple is still working on underlying technologies. This product is several years away, according to the people, though Apple has previously targeted as early as 2023 to unveil it. 

Emphasis mine, because wow. One headset per day per retail store roughly translates to 500 headsets a day, i.e., less than 200,000 a year, i.e. less than 1 million in 5 years. And even that seems like a generous forecast.

I often hear people in the VR industry talk about Apple like the coming messiah that will catapult virtual reality into the mainstream. That may eventually be the case, but every indication I've seen suggests Apple remains seriously hesitant about entering the space at all, and has built numerous exit ramps, just in case. If overall VR headset sales remain slow, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's plans never even see the light of day.

Rec Room Reports 1 Million Monthly Active Oculus Quest 1 & 2 Users -- And Higher Peak Concurrency Than VRChat

Impressive figures for Rec Room via Road to VR:

Rec Room has seen a significant uptick in users recently, as it now reports over one million monthly active VR users on the platform... Rec Room Designer Shawn Whiting told Road to VR that given today’s news, virtual reality users are actually a relatively small percentage of overall users. “That’s the number for VR monthly active usership, but we’re much higher than that once you look across all platforms,” he says.

Although a minority, VR users have been remarkably dedicated, Whiting tells us, and they’re still growing past that one million per-month active rate.

“Our VR daily active users spend an average of 2.7 hours in Rec Room when they visit,” Whiting tells Road to VR. “Quest 2 is about half of our VR users [and] VR growth has been amazing the past few months.”

... Besides bumping past one million monthly active VR users, over the weekend the platform reports it’s hosted 45,000 concurrent players...

On Twitter, Whiting clarified to me what is meant by "active user" and the breakdown of HMD ownership: "Active would mean you logged into your account and loaded into the game. We mention 'Quest 2 is about half of our VR users' in the article, so add Quest 1 numbers to that and you have your answer."

Much to process from this post! Assuming these figures are accurate, it suggests several things:

VRChat Peak User Concurrency Passes 40,000 -- Up From 24K Last November

VRChat had some technical troubles during the world's New Year celebrations last week, but it was one of those catastrophic success sort of things:

If you’re unaware, we had a bit of an issue at probably one of the most popular times to hang out in VRChat and traditionally where we set concurrent user records — New Years Eve, around the time that EST hits midnight. VRChat went down. Great timing, yeah? Let’s talk about what happened.

First off, before the issues started, we were chugging along with no problem. In fact, shattered our previous concurrent player record with over a mind-boggling 40,000 players online at the same time.

Notably VRChat's reported peak concurrency just last November was only 24,000. A lot of the user growth since then is likely attributable to new Oculus Quest 2 owners plugging into the virtual world over the holidays for the first time.

Also notable for longtime readers, 40,000 is roughly on par with median concurrency for Second Life. A veteran SLer who's recently transitioned over to VRChat tells me the new world reminds them of SL during its highly sociable glory years:

Study: Virtual Reality Seems to Help Prime People to Have Lucid Dreams

Fascinating study from researchers with the Donders Sleep & Memory Lab  in the the Netherlands suggests that VR helps prime the user to have more lucid dreams -- you know, the sensation of being conscious while in a dream, and even having some control over what happens in the dream itself. VR inherently cues a user to keep questioning whether the things they are experiencing while wearing a HUD and motion capture rig are real or not. And that constant Cartesian awareness, the researchers theorized, might bleed over into the VR user's dreams.

To test this, they put volunteers into a VR rig and had them play a number of dream-like VR games. Then, they put the users in a realistic "normal" cafeteria setting in VR (pictured above)... but then made that simulation become increasingly strange and dreamlike:

Every early session (first two weeks) included the custom-made ‘Spinoza Café' scenario which involved performing the role of a waiter or waitress—delivering food to customers in the university canteen—which became progressively bizarre (clocks running backwards; customers suddenly staring at the participant or changing into mannequins; gravity failing) under control of the researcher. To increase the dream-like character, changes occurred outside of the field of the participants, i.e. they did not directly witness any changes, but only the result of the change when moving their gaze/attention to a different field of view. This produced an aesthetic which closely resembles dreaming, since alterations to working memory (among other cognitive changes) render otherwise intrusive, non-sequitur inconsistencies frequent and unremarkable from within the dreaming state. 

Overall results were pretty promising:

Rec Room Passes 10,000 in Peak Daily Concurrency Across All Platforms, Leapfrogs Fortnite on Xbox's Free Games Leaderboard,

Based on Steam user stats, I've assumed Rec Room trailed far behind VRChat. but that's reportedly wrong.  While Rec Room is currently peaking at 1,428 concurrent users on Steam, the world's design lead, Shawn Whiting, tells me via Twitter that Valve's platform is just a small piece of Rec Room's usage pie:  "Steam is our smallest platform by far. iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, and Oculus all higher," as he puts it. When I note this would suggest Rec Room now has over 10,000 total peak daily concurrent users across all platforms, he confirms that that is indeed the case.

This came out after Rec Room hit another milestone: In the Free Games category on Xbox, it's now ranking over Fortnite itself:

As EU & US Regulators Investigate Facebook, VR Evangelist Robert Scoble Warns That Oculus May Not Survive

Hitting Facebook at the worst possible time for the company (but they should have expected it),  regulators in Germany, the European Union's most powerful member state, are now going after Oculus’ now-mandatory Facebook log-in:

“In the future, the use of the new Oculus glasses requires the user to also have a Facebook account. Linking virtual reality products and the group’s social network in this way could constitute a prohibited abuse of dominance by Facebook,” federal cartel office President Andreas Mundt said in a statement on Thursday.

This is happening, of course, just as the United States government files a monopoly suit against Facebook, basically tossing Zuckerberg alone in the ring in a tag team deathmatch.

“I think that it is a good example of the different and sometimes complimentary antitrust approaches in the EU and the USA,” the EFF’s Cory Doctorow tells me. “The EU has historically gone big on conduct remedies, that is telling companies what they can and can't do but allowing them to create these big monopolistic silos. The US is now coming around to structural remedies, that is, breaking companies up so that they have no reason to self-preference.”

Doctorow suggests that the US simply requiring Facebook to sell off Oculus would be more effective, rather than prohibiting mandatory log-in:

“If Facebook didn't own Oculus,” as he puts it, “there would be no reason for Oculus to require a Facebook login, so breaking Facebook up would produce a more durable remedy than banning it from self-preferencing with Oculus accounts.”

One way or another, it seems like the end of mandatory Facebook log-in is coming soon. But VR evangelist Robert Scoble tells me that would also be the end of both Facebook and Oculus:

“Doing that would kill Oculus,” as he puts it to me, later adding, “If Facebook is forced to divest Oculus, then Oculus won't survive.”

Here’s why he thinks that:

Carmen King Explores Sansar as Only Carmen Can -- And Has Tips for Making It Better

After basically becoming the queen of Second Life YouTubers, Ms. Carmen King reluctantly donned her dusty Vive headset --"I get insane motion sickness... [and] "normally can't last 10 minutes in VR", she says -- to re-visit the social VR world of Sansar.

"First time I tried,"  she casually notes, while getting strapped in, "I saw people trying to fuck in the middle of the ocean."

No such luck this time, but she does narrowly avoid an alien probing and inevitably wields some dildo-shaped hand controls. Further Carmen-esque NSFW hilarity ensues, so just watch.

"Sansar seems really fun and I love how smooth the game runs," she tells me now.  "Virtual Reality makes it a lot more exciting as you feel like you’re actually in the game!"

Sansar was originally developed by Linden Lab before its acquisition by Wookey; but does she prefer it to Linden's original world, Second Life?

VRChat User Survey: Will You Buy the New Plus Subscription?

NOTE: If you're viewing this on a mobile device you might need to tap-slide-scroll on the survey below to view and take it:

After many years in free-to-play Beta and seeing impressive growth, VRChat is finally offering a paid subscription option (details here and summarized below). But are VRChat players actually interested in paying? Please take this survey, even if you're a very casual VRChatter -results shared next week!

Acclaimed VR Game Developer Locked Out of Oculus Platform Due to Facebook's Mandatory ID Policy -- Warns of Its Dangers to Developers in LGBT & Other Vulnerable Communities

Guess if @Facebook disabled my account for no reason and there's no way to have it reviewed I won't be developing VR anymore? Good thing I haven't opened the shrink wrap on my Quest2. #VR

— Nicole Lazzaro #RBG #BLM #Harris2024 💪🏾🗳🌈 🥞 (@NicoleLazzaro) November 16, 2020

Nicole Lazzaro is an acclaimed game developer, named by Fast Company as among the top 100 women in tech and by Gamasutra as among the top 20 women working in games. But now there's one kind of game platform she currently can't develop on: The Oculus Quest. Which is a shame, because she was developing her quite impressive VR game "Find the White Rabbit" for Oculus, but it looks like there's going to be a delay (if not a permanent pause).

This is due, as you probably guessed already, to Oculus' recently imposed mandatory Facebook log-in policy:

NeosVR Makes User-to-User File Sharing an Immersive Social VR Experience

 NeosVR, an impressive indie social VR metaverse project backed by Patreon funders  (featured previously here) continues to impress. In the latest update, lead developer Frooxius shows off its latest feature: the ability to import files and share them with other users. And rather than accomplish this with a 2D pop-up menu (the obvious solution), Frooxius makes it truly immersive: The files are 3D objects that can be manipulated, moved around, and given to other users in VR. You know, the same way file sharing has been depicted in fiction about the metaverse forever.