mark zuckerberg

Original Oculus Quest to Get Air Link Support

June 16, 2021 by GenVR

2021 has seen Facebook roll out some big updates for the Oculus Quest platform, with most focused on the newer, more powerful Quest 2. One of the major additions a couple of months ago was Air Link enabling wireless streaming from a PC. An Oculus Quest 2 feature, it was never clear if Air Link would be brought to the original Quest – or if it was even viable – but that’s now been confirmed by the boss man himself, Mark Zuckerberg.

In a recent Facebook post talking about the next v30 update, Zuckerberg reveals that “Air Link for Quest 1 is coming too…” which hints that it might not be far away. That’s not only an added bonus for Oculus Quest owners so they can maintain those wireless freedoms the platform was built around but also highlights Facebook’s continued interest in supporting the headset.

When it arrives is another matter. Currently, Facebook hasn’t given any indication of when that might be but going on the monthly trend the recent updates have adhered to it is most likely going to be in June. As mentioned, Zuckerberg has teased a bit more info on v30 which is going to further expand Oculus Quest’s Infinite Office functionality. There’s going to be better multitasking support for those that do want to work in VR, with a short clip showcasing three windows being opened in a triple curved monitor arrangement.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where Mark hangs out in VR and where you might jump into him, he says he’s still playing a lot of Onward and Population: One, two of Oculus Quest best shooters. They also just happen to be the titles by the two studios Facebook recently acquired, Downpour Interactive and BigBox VR respectively.

Expect plenty more features to be revealed soon as Facebook does fairly well at jam-packing content into each and every update rather than incremental improvements. As those details are revealed, VRFocus will let you know.

Zuckerberg Explains Why Facebook Is Building A ‘Reality Operating System’

June 3, 2021 by GenVR

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and VP AR/VR Andrew Bosworth hosted a live Ask-Me-Anything session on Instagram, in which they confirmed work on a new OS.

Back in 2019, The Information reported that Facebook was working on a new operating system for AR glasses. In yesterday’s AMA, one user-submitted question asked whether Facebook is really building a OS, and why. Zuckerberg responded, “We are building a reality operating system. That’s sort of how we think about it.”

“These new platforms are so different from everything that’s come before it – not just the input, but the app model, how you’re going to discover things, how tightly they need to be optimized. If you’re building a pair of glasses that need to look like normal glasses, you need to have the system be so tightly optimized so you can basically do all the computation that you would expect from a modern computer, but do it on someone’s face within a thermal envelope and a power envelope that can last all day long. So that’s a very big challenge.

The team is pretty far along in this, at this point. We’re building a microkernel-based operating system, which is the architecture that you want to segment the pieces to make it as secure as possible. That way you have a small [set] of pieces that you know are going to be fundamentally trustworthy that you can build on top of. But at the end of the day, we need to basically be able to design and customize every layer of the stack in order to build out the performance and efficiency that we need in order to deliver these systems.”

It’s unclear whether this OS will be only for AR glasses or also in future Facebook VR headsets. The Information’s report only mentioned AR, and Zuckerberg’s answer referenced “a pair of glasses that need to look like normal glasses”.

Bosworth jumped in to clarify that he and the team at Facebook Reality Labs ideally wanted to build as little as possible from scratch, but ended up needing to build quite a lot to tackle the large technical challenges:

“I want to build as little as possible. And Facebook really was built on top of open source. We’re big contributors to open source. When software is available for us to use, we love using it. Obviously, our Oculus and Portal systems are built on Android, which we’ve had great success with. I want to build as little as I can. What is amazing is how much you have to build to fit into these tight thermal envelopes.

And I do feel at times that mine was a generation of computer programmers who were a little bit lazy. We got to be lazy. We were at the absolute, just the fattest part of Moore’s law, delivering tremendous gains in silicon. So you can just write high-level inefficient code and who cares? We’re not up against Moore’s law — much tougher than that, we’re up against the first law of thermodynamics. The amount of heat that we can dissipate off of your face — not very much without burning you, which we strongly oppose.

So any piece of work you see me doing, any piece of work you see Facebook Reality Labs doing… I don’t want to do that work – I feel like I have to do it to deliver the vision. And building our own reality operating system is a part of that.”

Facebook’s operating system effort is led by Mark Lucovsky, a former Microsoft engineer who co-developed Windows NT. Lucovsky’s Twitter & LinkedIn profiles call the project ‘The Reality Platform’. Some job listings at Facebook have referenced this work but we haven’t seen the executives speak publicly about the efforts.

Interestingly, earlier this year Bloomberg reported Apple is on a new OS for AR and VR called rOS, with the r likely also standing for reality.

Staff writer David Heaney contributed to this report.

Mark Zuckerberg Seemingly Confirms Onward 2

May 25, 2021 by GenVR

It looks like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have accidentally confirmed Onward 2 is coming.

Responding to a question about which VR games he’s most looking forward to on a recent Facebook post, Zuckerberg said he was “pretty excited for Onward 2.” Here’s a screencap we took of the answer though, at the time of writing, it’s still there in the replies.

Onward 2 Confirmed?

This response might have gone unnoticed had Zuckerberg not been replying to Gene Park, a games reporter for the Washington Post. An official sequel to Downpour Interactive’s online shooter hasn’t yet been announced. That said Facebook announced it was acquiring the studio in late April and made mention of “future projects”. It makes sense that one of those would be a sequel to the incredibly popular VR multiplayer shooter. We’ve asked Facebook for comment. It’s worth mentioning Zuckerberg could be talking about a hypothetical sequel, too.

Onward itself remains in Early Access on both PC and Oculus Quest, with plenty of updates planned for the future. If Onward 2 is coming, we still wouldn’t expect to see it for some time. Downpour and Facebook have both confirmed support will continue for the existing game across both platforms, though it remains to be seen if any future titles will also come to PC or be exclusive to the Quest platform.

What would you want to see in Onward 2? Let us know in the comments below!

Zuckerberg Envisions Oculus Quest Pro With Multiple Sensors for Gaming, Fitness & More

May 10, 2021 by GenVR

Facebook may not have released any sales figures for Oculus Quest 2, but from company remarks including that of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the virtual reality (VR) headset is doing very well. And while the headset looks to be around for a while, previous AMA’s featuring Head of Facebook Reality Labs’ Andrew Bosworth have revealed that a Quest Pro is in the works. Zuckerberg recently confirmed that it’s “something that we’re working on,” going into further detail about where its capabilities may lay.

The Oculus Quest 2 packs a lot of tech into its diminutive frame and for a consumer-friendly £299. Yet there’s a lot more which could be fitted inside to increase that sense of presence, especially for those high-end consumers or companies willing to pay. In an interview with CNET, when asked about the Oculus Quest Pro Zuckerberg said: “there are other aspects that make virtual reality a higher-end experience as well, including putting more power in it in terms of different types of sensors and capabilities on the device. We do want to be able to support a wider range of use cases.”

So that could very well mean an Oculus Quest Pro with abilities such as eye-tracking or facial tracking sensors so that your gestures in VR are more expressive, a feature Facebook is already pushing with its new avatars. These kinds of features are already appearing in high-end, enterprise-focused headsets like the Pico Neo 3 Eye or as additional upgrades such as the Vive Facial Tracker. That would mean a more expensive headset but it would help to expand the Oculus platform.

One area Zuckerberg seems very keen on is fitness. He’s a big Beat Saber fans and apps like FitXR and Supernatural are pushing the subscription model. So a future Quest Pro could also have health sensors to monitor heart rate and other variables, useful for those at home as well as healthcare professionals using VR.

“From my perspective, it’s filling out the initial vision and hope that we had for VR about how there are going to be all these different use cases,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s amazing for gaming, but it’s not only for gaming. Part of the question is if you were focused on building a higher-end device that could really max out further on some of those other use cases, in addition to doing the gaming pieces, there are some interesting questions about how you design.”

With the demise of Oculus Rift S, the Oculus Quest 2 is the only VR product Facebook currently offers, in stark contrast to others in the industry who have a range of models. While you can enhance your Quest 2 experience by either cabling or using Air Link to connect to a PC, an Oculus Quest Pro could remove those requirements – especially handy if you don’t have a VR-capable PC – as well as moving beyond the entry-level, mainstream market Quest 2 is building.

As for when an Oculus Quest Pro might appear he notes: “Now it’s not coming out anytime soon, but that’s certainly something that we’re excited about.” As further details regarding the upgraded headset appear, VRFocus will let you know.

Facebook Acquires Onward Developer Downpour, Working On ‘Future Projects’

April 30, 2021 by GenVR

Downpour Interactive, the maker of multiplayer VR first-person shooter (FPS), Onward, is the latest developer to be acquired by Facebook.

The news was announced today on the Oculus Blog, which states that Facebook will “support Dante [Buckley, Downpour CEO] and Downpour Interactive in growing Onward as one of the foremost multiplayer VR games”. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, though Downpour did confirm that the entire team is joining Facebook.

Onward will continue to be supported on Steam, Facebook says, where it’s available in Early Access, following the acquisition. The blog post also confirms that Downpour has plans for “future projects” and that it hopes to release them to “as many people as possible”.

Since release on Steam in 2016 Onward has proved to be one of VR’s most popular multiplayer shooters. Its focus on military realism gave a lot of VR fans exactly what they were looking for in the early days of consumer VR and Downpour has offered consistent support for the game since, adding new maps, modes and fixes.

Onward came to Oculus Quest in 2020 with support from Coatsink. The standalone version of the game features full cross-play support with the PC VR versions, a fact that actually saw a drop in visual fidelity on PC at release. Downpour has slowly but surely continued to rebuild the PC version from a visual perspective, though.

There are plenty more plans for Onward, too. Anti-cheat measures were introduced into the game this week, and new maps are planned for future updates too.

Downpours joins Beat Games, Ready at Dawn and Sanzaru Games as Facebook-owned Oculus Studios developers.

Zuckerberg: Consumers Aren’t Going ‘To Go For’ Wired VR

April 28, 2021 by GenVR

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested in a earnings call with investors that consumers aren’t interested in VR headsets with wires.

“Some other folks might try to ship something that they claim is higher quality but has a wire, and I just don’t think that consumers are going to want to go for that,” Zuckerberg said during the call.

The call recapped Facebook’s earnings performance during the first quarter of 2021 which saw the non-ad revenue at Facebook hit $732 million. During a question and answer portion of the call Zuckerberg offered some of his thoughts about the VR market.

“Having wires wrapped around you just really breaks the sense of presence and immersion,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook’s sustained performance in non-ad revenue suggests the price and feature set of the wireless Oculus Quest 2 is seeing continued interest and sales beyond the holidays. Recently, Facebook’s VP in charge of AR/VR suggested the headset would be on sale “for a long while” as Facebook plans monthly software updates for the headset to improve the overall experience.

Facebook’s wired Rift S is at the end of its life and that leaves Facebook entirely focused on the Quest 2, which Zuckerberg suggested has “attributes” like price and the quality of its wireless experience that most other companies aren’t going to be able to deliver.

“I also just look at how the team is executing and the products that we have in the pipeline, and I want to make sure that we can really go all in and deliver this,” Zuckerberg said.

HP ships the wired Reverb G2 while Valve offers the wired Index, HTC is announcing new VR products in a couple weeks, and Sony’s next generation PSVR headset is confirmed to offer a wired experience.