New World Notes

Janus VR Pivots from Startup to Open Source Community-Run Metaverse Project

Janus VR the web-based metaverse startup may be over, but that's not the end of Janus. James Baicoianu, the startup's former principal engineer, recently passed me this announcement, hosted not on JanusVR dot com, but on JanusXR dot org:

A core group of passionate fans have stuck with us from the beginning, and we're eternally grateful to them for accompanying us on this journey. Seeing their creations take shape is what motivated us to keep building all these years, and JanusXR.org will ensure that this content - which belongs to the community, not to us - can still live on.

Baicoianu tells me it's quite affordable for Janus to remain operational as a volunteer community operation:

"[O]ne of the benefits of how Janus' systems were built is that it costs us very little to keep the server infrastructure running - keeping the worlds up costs us less than $100 per month," as he puts it. "The expenses for Janus as a company were mainly payroll, our projects have been open source for some time -- as the lead developer of JanusWeb I plan to continue working on that as my open source project (as it was before I even joined Janus) I'm funding this out of my own pocket for now, I don't see it being a hardship unless suddenly we find new-found success that we never saw as a company, at which time we'll consider additional options."

But even if that doesn't happen, Baicoianu sees a future for the underlying technology he and his team created:

Janus VR, Startup That Aimed to Build the Metaverse, Closes

Another metaverse shoe was dropped yesterday, this time by James McCrae, the CEO and co-founder of Janus VR, a Toronto-based startup which raised over $1.5 million according to Crunchbase. McCrae's stated reason for the closing is regulatory: 

I write to inform the broader community of our intent to dissolve the corporation, Janus VR, Inc., at the end of Q4 2019. It is no longer feasible to maintain our corporation status in Canada and the US given the expenses this will incur each year (as it relates to legal, accounting, patent/IP filings, etc.)

It's likely the startup could have stayed afloat with additional funding, but apparently that funding never came. Sad to say, this is one of several startups attempting to build the metaverse, as detailed in a 2016 profile:

"Inspired in part by Snow Crash’s Metaverse, James McCrae and Karan Singh sought to build a network of VR portals within which users can collaborate, communicate, explore, and even create new 3D content."

This follows High Fidelity and also Sansar scaling back their own metaverse-minded efforts considerably, despite having much more funding. 

When companies close up shop, they often reveal some interesting insider details. And according to McCae's announcement, Janus VR attracted some decent user numbers:

Mark Zuckerberg Drops Huge Hint on Oculus Quest Install Base on Facebook Earnings Call

Many VR enthusiasts are skeptical about SuperData's VR sales reports, the most recent of which pinned the install base of Oculus Quest to now be 705,000+. But there's another, possibly more reliable source for estimating the Quest's install base: What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says about Quest earnings during a stock earnings call.

And here's what he just said:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a call with investors that “on Christmas Day, people bought almost $5 million worth of content in the Oculus Store.”

Now Facebook isn't exactly reputed for its honesty, but misstatements on a public company's financial reports are quite literally a criminal offense.  As a veteran game analyst once put it to me: "Earnings reports are reliable, because if they're wrong, someone can go to jail."

But what does $5 million worth of content in the Oculus Store purchased on Christmas Day tell us? A fair amount, thanks to the magic metric called ARPU:

Oculus Quest's Total 2019 Sales: 705K, According to SuperData, Far Short of Firm's Original Forecast -- Not Good News for Half-Life: Alyx

As promised last week, Nielsen game analytics firm SuperData just put out its summary of VR headset sales for 2019, starting with the most positive numbers:

Valve sold 149K Index headsets in 2019. Sales more than doubled from Q3 to Q4 (103K) thanks to anticipation for Half-Life: Alyx, which was announced in November and is slated to arrive in March. The Index sold more units than any other PC VR headset during the quarter despite a steep price of up to $1000. It would have sold even more if not for inventory issues (the device is currently sold out worldwide).

... The Oculus Quest sold 705K units during 2019, more than the Oculus Go and Oculus Rift S combined. 

Emphasis mine, as it bears emphasizing. Almost exactly a year ago (January 24, 2019), SuperData's Quest forecast was much sunnier than this ultimate count:

Market intelligence company SuperData released its latest extended reality (XR) findings on Thursday. It believes Oculus will sell 1.3 million units of its anticipated Quest headset this year, and annual XR revenue will reach $11.5 billion.

So the Quest came up roughly 600,000 units short of that forecast. If that's accurate, I'm surprised (and wrong) myself, because back last August, I said the Quest looked likely to break 1 million sales. I've asked SuperData for its own interpretation of this shortcoming, and will update this post if I get it. Ironically, this happens just as (see infographic above), the Quest is starting to sell almost as well as market leader PSVR. (At least over last Q4 holiday season.)

Speaking of Half-Life: Alyx, the widely-anticipated, VR-only Half-Life sequel that many in games see as virtual reality's likeliest killer app, these overall HMD sales sadly point to a bearish picture:

Immersive Power of Mouth Tracking in Social VR (Comment of the Week)

Many readers were seriously impressed by NeosVR's new mouth tracking feature, and longtime metaverse developer Max Graf expressed its value in a social VR context:

I have to say, out of all the things that that Linden Lab tried to accomplish with Sansar, one of the things they actually got exactly right (and even pushed the boundaries of the technology in general) was the VR voice and facial symmetry they developed, very similar to what Neos has done here.

I only got to experience it a few times in there with an actual VR rig on, but when I did this was one of the things I specifically wanted to check out, knowing how much they put into it. It was not just the mouth moving when sound was present, it adapted to variations in phonetics, volume and emphasis to change the facial mesh in a very accurate way.

This is definitely among the several features that Sansar really innovated on, and I hope something can be done to this technology, notwithstanding Sansar's current limbo state. Max says the overall effect was transformative:

Best SuperData AR/VR Datapoints for 2019: Pokémon GO is the AR Market, Standalone VR Games Earned $171 Million Last Year

Game/XR analyst firm SuperData* recently released its 2019 year in review report, and was nice enough to give me a preview. I love when a single datapoint can tell you quite a lot about the larger ecosystem, and in this case, the report has (for me) two. First up, a telling one for AR:

Pokémon GO is 81% of the augmented reality game market -- which effectively means Pokémon GO is basically the entire AR game market.  

And one for VR:

Watch: NEOS Social VR Adds Highly Detailed Mouth Tracking With Reported Latency Under 100 Milliseconds

Here's the latest update from NeosVR, an impressive indie social VR metaverse project backed by Patreon funders that we featured last year: Eye and lip tracking using the HTC Vive (along with HTC's Lip Tracking module). As demonstrated by lead developer "Frooxius", this is among the most detailed variation of mouth tracking I've seen in any VR app, not just tracking lip movement but tracking tongue, teeth, and inside the mouth.

In the video you definitely see an occasional delay between real life mouth movement and the avatar's mouth, but Frooxius tells me that's a feature of audio processing that wouldn't show up in the social VR world of NEOS:

Watch: Oculus Quest Demo Virtually Recreates Developer's Apartment at 1:1 Scale, Adds Interactive Surfaces

Unity Labs developer Greg Madison created this seriously impressive Oculus Quest demo in which he mapped out* his real life apartment with a virtual, 1:1 scale recreation of that apartment -- including the flat surfaces. That way, if you're wearing the Quest, any surface can instantly become an interface for games or other interactive apps:

Was VR Hype Largely Driven By the End of Moore's Law? (Spoiler: Probably)

I've written a lot over recent years about how the hype over VR has failed in the face of modest consumer interest, but one question has been flickering in the back of my mind since then: Why did the hype start up again in the first place, after waning in the 90s? The Oculus Kickstarter got the momentum going, but that crowdfunder didn't even raise $2.5 million -- hardly an indication of mass market interest. And to be sure, there are many powerful applications of VR for training, therapy, and prototyping, but that alone doesn't justify the billions of dollars companies like Google and Facebook have poured into the technology.

Cory Doctorow recently suggested a likely explanation that surprised me at first -- that the hype was impelled in part by the end of Moore's Law:

The period in which Moore's Law had declined also overlapped with the period in which computing came to be dominated by a handful of applications that are famously parallel -- applications that have seemed overhyped even by the standards of the tech industry: VR, cryptocurrency mining, and machine learning...

It's possible that this is all a coincidence, but it really does feel like we're living in a world spawned by a Sand Hill Road VC in 2005 who wrote "What should we invest in to take advantage of improvements in parallel computing?" on top of a white-board.

Specifically, Cory expanded to me, "GPUs! Any 3D rendering." And for that matter, offloading most VR rendering to a connected PC, or through the cloud. "And the cloud," as Cory notes, "is mostly low-cost parallel processors!"

My working theory has always been VR hype was powered by the desire to create a successor to smartphones and the Valley's attachment to Snow Crash and other cyberpunk classics depicting virtual reality as The Future. But now I think Cory's explanation is a big piece of the puzzle. After all, some VCs who've invested in virtual reality, not to mention executives involved in VR, have made a similar point about the end of Moore's Law. For instance:

Why Sony Needs to Discount PSVR to $99 (Comment of the Week)

Reader Tyler D., who clearly knows their stuff, has good suggestions for Sony in the face of slow sales of the PSVR:

There's just no way around it: $299 is a lot for a console peripheral (it's more than the cost of the base PS4). Until Sony slashes the MSRP to $99 impulse buy / bundle pack-in pricing, I don't think they'll move many more units.

For people willing to spend $300+ on mid-range VR, the Quest now offers more flexibility and functionality (in an arguably better ecosystem) for ~$100 more-- as a complete standalone package.

That said, it's worth remembering that the PS4 is the 2nd best-selling console of all-time so a 5% install base isn't shabby in terms of units sold.

That all strikes me as true, and frankly I'm surprised Sony isn't so far willing to take a loss up front by deeply discounting the PSVR. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if a price cut is announced this year.) I think Tyler's right that anyone in the market for VR per se are going to consider Oculus Quest, not PSVR -- while PS4 owners not in the market for VR might still consider buying a $99 PSVR, if only because it gives them more life to the PS4 that they spent so much money on.

Bonus suggestions from Tyler for Microsoft, which has been floundering with its own VR efforts: