Updates to the beta version of Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR, the official integration which allows Windows VR headsets to be used with SteamVR, hint at “upcoming hardware releases.”
Recent beta updates to the ‘Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR’ integration on August 24th and September 1st include “additional fixes & improvements for upcoming hardware releases.”
There hasn’t been a new WMR headset released since the HP Reverb headset back in 2019. And while the “upcoming hardware releases” likely refers to the impending launch of the new Reverb G2 (due out this Fall) it’s interesting that the headset is not simply named outright, considering that another line in the patch notes clearly names the “HP Motion Controllers,” the new controllers which will ship with the G2.
There’s at least a chance that the G2 is not the only headset among the “upcoming hardware releases” for WMR. Samsung hasn’t done much in the VR space since their Odyssey+ headset launched back in 2018, but earlier this year a handful of unseen Samsung headset designs were spotted in patents, lending some evidence to the idea that the company is still actively developing VR hardware.
Especially considering the manufacturing impact that the Coronavirus pandemic has had, it’s hard to guess how upcoming product timelines may or may not have shifted. For now, only time will tell if HP will continue to be the lone champion of WMR or if others will show renewed interest.
Facebook has halted sales of all Oculus VR headsets in Germany, something the company says will be temporary during its ongoing talks with German regulators.
“We’ve temporarily paused the sale of Oculus hardware to consumers in Germany due to pending discussions with the regulator [sic]. We hope to resume sales again in the future,” Facebook says in an FAQ provided to German publication MIXED.
“We know this is an inconvenience and we are actively working with German authorities to educate regulators on our practices and to ensure our products comply with local laws,” the FAQ states.
This comes on the heels of the company’s controversial move to both require valid Facebook accounts for all new Oculus users, as well as the beginning of a two-year grace period for all Oculus account users to connect to a valid Facebook account.
Germany tends to lead the way in antitrust legislation, and it seems Facebook is again finding themselves in the crosshairs there. Just last year, German antitrust regulators attempted to ban Facebook from combining data on users without their consent across its social media properties Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and although Facebook hasn’t confirmed this, it appears it’s in a similar situation with Oculus-to-Facebook account migration.
Facebook says Germany-based users already in possession of an Oculus device can continue to use it normally. The company says since it’s not actively selling Oculus headsets in Germany, that newly imported devices may not work as intended.
“As a result of this temporary pause, we will not be replenishing stock with our retail partners in Germany. Headsets may be still be available with certain retailers. We hope to resume selling Oculus hardware to consumers in Germany soon,” the statement reads.
Germany-based users are still able to refund headsets, however no further warranty is being provided outside of the company’s standard 30-day money back guarantee.
Thanks also goes out to Sebastian Ang of MRTV for pointing us to the story.
We’ve been waiting almost exactly four years now to see what would become of the enchanting, but decidedly short Gnomes and Goblins Preview, which was published on Steam back in September 2016. Now, XR developers Wevr says PC VR users will finally get the full experience later this month.
The project has attracted some serious talent, which includes Jon Favreau, the filmmaker behind films such as Iron Man (2008), The Lion King (2019), and The Jungle Book (2016). VR director Jake Rowell, known for his work on Call of Duty, Superman Returns (2006), and theBlu, is also lending his talent to the project.
Produced in partnership with MWM and Golem Creations, the studio says players will embark on “a dream-like journey and explore an enchanted forest world where interactions with the realm’s denizens shape the story’s evolution.” They’re calling it a hybrid form of worldbuilding that aims to combine agency with narrative elements.
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Image courtesy Wevr
Image courtesy Wevr
Image courtesy Wevr
Image courtesy Wevr
“I’m incredibly happy to see how Wevr has brought my original vision to life in virtual reality,” says Favreau. “From the earliest days of rough sketches and abstract concepts, Wevr’s entire team committed to fostering the kind of emotional connections that I believe will allow Gnomes & Goblins to occupy a special place in the hearts of players around the world. We worked hard to create the mood and feeling that Gnomes & Goblins is like a virtual theme-park ride, where magic and meaning are waiting around every corner.”
Gnomes and Goblins promises to take PC VR users through a multi-hour fantasy adventure experience, and will be available starting September 23rd on Steam, the Oculus Store for Rift and Viveport.
If you haven’t played it yet, definitely check out the Preview version first. As one of the early room-scale games, it’s surprising how well it holds up, and definitely creates that smurfy, magical forest vibe that rewards exploration of both the environment the personalities of the little gnomes themselves.
NVIDIA announced its latest GPUs, the GeForce RTX 30-series, based on its ‘Ampere’ architecture. The company revealed the price and release date for the RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090, with the first of the cards launching in just two weeks.
In a pre-recorded presentation streamed today, Nvidia revealed the GeForce RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 GPUs based on its latest ‘Ampere’ architecture. Before we dive into details, here’s the release date, price, and basic specs for the ‘Founder’s Edition’ of each card:
RTX 3090
RTX 3080
RTX 3070
Price
$1,500
$700
$500
Release Date
September 24th
September 17th
October
CUDA Cores
10,496
8,704
5,888
Boost Clock (GHz)
1.7
1.71
1.73
Memory
24GB (GDDR6X)
10GB (GDDR6X)
8GB (GDDR6)
Connectors
1x HDMI 2.1, 3x DisplayPort 1.4a
Succeeding the ‘Turing’ architecture of the prior generation, ‘Ampere’ aims to deliver more performance across three pillars: shading, ray tracing (RTX), and AI (DLSS). The company claims the new graphics cards represent the “greatest generational leap” in performance from one series of Nvidia GPUs to the next.
Image courtesy NVIDIA
For games that make use of those features, Nvidia claims up to 2x performance and 1.9x power efficiency between 20-series and 30-series cards. For games that don’t use features like raytracing, the gains don’t quite reach 2x performance, but still offer a nice jump, according to the company.
Nvidia also announced ‘RTX IO’ a new accelerated storage pipeline designed to offload game asset data decompression from the CPU to the GPU, accelerating performance by “up to 100x compared with hard drives and traditional storage APIs.”
“When used with Microsoft’s new DirectStorage for Windows API, RTX IO offloads dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to your GeForce RTX GPU, improving frame rates, enabling near-instantaneous game loading, and opening the door to a new era of large, incredibly detailed open world games,” the company says.
Image courtesy NVIDIA
RTX IO will require an NVMe SSD and an RTX GPU (as far as we understand, this includes existing 20-series cards as well as the upcoming 30-series).
Image courtesy NVIDIA
While the first wave of the prior RTX 20-series GPUs included USB-C ports with support for the VirtualLink standard, so far it looks like the first wave of RTX 30-series will eschew a USB-C port. Whether the piping is there for third-party manufacturers to add USB-C ports (and therefore VirtualLink support), isn’t clear at this time but we’ve reached out to Nvidia for clarification.
The company also introduced a new technology called Nvidia Reflex which aims to reduce game latency. The feature needs to be specifically built into applications, but Nvidia says “by integrating directly with the game, Reflex Low Latency Mode aligns game engine work to complete just-in-time for rendering, eliminating the GPU render queue and reducing CPU back pressure in GPU intensive scenes. This delivers latency reductions above and beyond existing driver-only techniques, such as NVIDIA Ultra Low Latency Mode.”
While the company is highlighting Reflex’s ability to reduce latency for competitive non-VR esports games, it said in a comment on its site that “in theory, it could improve latency in VR games, however we have not tested it.” We’ve reached out for more details.
Echo VR, the zero-G multiplayer game from Ready at Dawn, is now out of beta for Oculus Quest. Although it only includes Echo Arena, the zero-g team sport and not the team shooter Echo Combat, the free game seems to have struck a chord with Quest users since it launched into open beta back in March.
Update (September 1st, 2020): Ready at Dawn says in a developer blog post that the Echo Arena half of Echo VR is now out of beta.
During its stint in open beta, the game has managed to garner nearly 4,000 user reviews, rating it a near [5/5], putting it higher than Echo VR on Rift, which sits at around [4.4/5] at the time of this writing.
There’s still no word on whether Echo Combat, the paid team shooter half of the Echo VR equation, will also see a similar Quest-native port, however considering the team has put a fine polish on Echo Arena for Quest, it’s possible the studio is just waiting for the right timing.
Update (April 30th, 2020): Developer Ready at Dawn today announced a shift in its approach to the Echo VR Quest beta strategy. Starting May 5th, the company will open the Echo VR beta to all Quest users, and keep it open until the game’s full launch later this year.
The studio said the decision was prompted by realizing how important VR has been for the studio itself to stay connected while working remotely.
With our work from home situation forcing us to be disconnected physically, VR has allowed us to reconnect in a new way, not only with our teammates, but also with the community at large. We are therefore making our upcoming Open Beta for Echo VR on Oculus Quest available to everyone until the official launch later this year. Starting Tuesday, May 5th, we invite you to join us and collaborate with everyone at RAD, in continuing to build Echo VR on Quest.
The original article, which highlight the studio’s prior plans for staggered beta windows, continues below.
Original Article (April 8th, 2020): In the game’s next closed alpha, the studio will be including select players ranging from levels of 5 – 49, as the first wave of participants admitted to the initial closed alpha stage were picked from a pool of Level 50 players.
At the conclusion of the closed alphas, a closed beta will begin. The studio says that all players who signed up for testing will join existing community testers from the previous phases, and that testers will be able to access Tutorials, VS. AI, the Lobby, and the ‘Echo Arena’ game itself.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Unlike the Rift version, it appears Echo VR for Quest will only include ‘Echo Arena’, the VR sports game, and not ‘Echo Combat’, the team-based shooter. Both are accessible on Rift under the Echo VR umbrella launcher, with ‘Echo Arena’ provided as a free game whilst ‘Echo Combat’ requires an in-app purchase of $10 to play. ‘Echo Arena’ is said to provide cross-play between Quest and Rift.
After the final invite-only phase concludes, a general open beta will begin which anyone can take part in.
Exactly when all of this will take place still isn’t certain; the studio says more info will be shared in subsequent blog posts and that dates have been omitted “to more easily flow between phases and pivot when necessary.”
If you’re interested in taking part of any part of testing Echo VR on Quest, head over to the registration form here.
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In a presentation showing the latest developments on Neuralink’s brain-computer interface, Elon Musk revealed that the company has implanted prototype devices in live pigs, and was able to achieve rudimentary limb-tracking by monitoring activity in the brain.
Neuralink is a brain-computer interface startup founded by Elon Musk. The company hopes to build an implantable device that can read electrical signals from the brain and also “write” to the brain by stimulating it with electrical signals of its own. The initial focus is on medical applications, but the company expects similar devices to be used much more widely in the long run, including for gaming.
Neuralink recently shared an update on its latest brain-interface device and the surgical robot which is being design to make implantations precise and cost effective.
In a live presentation, Elon Musk revealed Neuralink’s latest prototype brain-interface device which it calls the Link 0.9. While a prior version of the Link was mostly external to the brain, except for tiny wires that were inserted, the Link 0.9 is a fully internal device that is implanted in a coin-sized slot cut into the skull, with the skin healed back over top of it. The device is inductively charged through the skin.
Image courtesy Neuralink
Neuralink revealed that it has already been implating the device into live pigs to demonstrate that the procedure is safe and that Link can be removed if necessary without causing any lasting brain damage, according to the company.
The pig implants are functional Link devices which read activity from a shallow portion of the brain by detecting electrical activity across 1,024 locations. In the demonstration the company showed a visualization of the brain activity data being read by the device.
Musk showed that Neuralink had rigged up an algorithm for rudimentary limb-tracking using input only from the Link. The company used the data to predict the position of each limb which was matched with visual measurement of the limbs to show how closely the prediction matched reality.
Image courtesy Neuralink
Though there was a significant amount of error in the predicted positions, it was still close enough to appear impressive considering the source of the data. While Musk said the predictions were based on the “neural activity” of the pig, he had also said previously in the presentation that the Link would include other sensors like an IMU; we’ll be interested to see more detailed research published on this particular experiment, as the addition of IMU data would make it a much less impressive demonstration of rudimentary limb-tracking. A pig’s gait is also not a particularly dynamic pattern, so it isn’t clear how well this method could translate to something like human arm motions.
In the long run the company is “100%” certain that brain-interface devices like Link will be used in gaming.
“I think that a good benchmark of ‘does it work well on humans’ is ‘does it work well enough for a quadriplegic play Starcraft’,” Neuralink’s Max Hodak said during a Q&A session following the presentation. “That’s a good functional target.”
In the presentation Musk announced that Neuralink has been granted a “breakthrough” designation by the US Food and Drug Administration (which approves medical treatments and devices). Such a designation is made to accelerate the regulatory process for promising treatments.
The company also believes that its brain-interface tech will be able to solve a laundry list of brain-related medical conditions in the long run; the presentation specifically listed: memory loss, hearing loss, blindness, paralysis, depression, insomnia, extreme pain, seizures, anxiety, addition, strokes, and brain damage.
