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AWE 2025 Speakers Include Oculus Founder, Meta’s VP of Metaverse Experiences, & ILM Immersive VP

From roadtovr

AWE USA 2025 is set to include speakers from some of the biggest names in the XR industry, including Oculus & Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, along with Jason Rubin—one of the only remaining early Oculus executives—who is presently Meta’s Vice President of Metaverse Experiences. Also on the roster is Vicki Dobbs Beck, the vice president of ILM Immersive, the studio behind XR adaptations of Star Wars, Marvel, and more.

AWE USA is one of the largest and longest-running XR-focused conferences in the world, and has become our must-go XR event.

This year AWE USA will be held in Long Beach, California from June 10th to 12th, and it’s expected to be the biggest yet, with more than 6,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and a 150,000 Sqft expo floor. Early-bird tickets are still available, and Road to VR readers can get an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to the event.

Among the 400+ speakers giving presentations at the event are representatives of a wide range of XR industry companies, including Palmer Luckey, Jason Rubin, and Vicki Dobbs Beck.

Palmer Luckey | Image courtesy Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus, the startup acquired by Meta in 2014 to kickstart the company’s XR ambitions. After overseeing the launch of Meta’s first major XR headset, the Oculus Rift CV1, Luckey was ousted from Meta following political backlash for his actions pertaining to the 2016 US presidential race.

Years later, Meta made up with Luckey by inviting him to see a preview of its latest AR headset (Project Orion). This was followed by a public apology from Meta’s top XR executive, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, who said “I’m grateful for the impact you made [Meta] and in developing VR overall. Looking forward to showing you more of our work in the future.”

The ousting must have been heartwrenching for the Oculus founder who played no small part in making XR what it is today; but a tiny silver-lining did emerge… Luckey went on to found the military tech contractor Anduril, which has grown to its current valuation of around $18 billion—putting him in the very rare club of people who have founded more than one multi-billion dollar company.

Though his pivot to military tech appeared to take him far from his passion for XR, just last week Anduril announced it’s now spearheading the military AR headset project originally undertaken by Microsoft.

At the event we expect to hear Luckey talk more about this project and what it means for XR tech in America’s military forces.

Jason Rubin | Image courtesy GDC Showcase

AWE USA 2025 will also see a talk from Jason Rubin, one of the only remaining Oculus executives still at Meta, presently serving as the company’s Vice President of Metaverse Experiences.

Rubin joined Oculus in 2014 and was a key figure in guiding the early content investments and strategy following the company’s acquisition by Meta. Since then he has shuffled between quite a few roles within the company, with most pertaining to gaming content and partnerships.

At AWE we expect to hear Rubin talk more about Meta’s evolving vision for the metaverse.

Vicki Dobbs Beck | Image courtesy Lucasfilm

Rubin won’t be the only seasoned gaming executive present at the event. We’ll also hear from Vicki Dobbs Beck, the Vice President of Immersive Content at ILM Immersive, the interactive division of Lucasfilm.

As a co-founder of the division, Dobbs Beck has overseen the production of award-winning XR content that has brought huge IP into the immersive realm. That includes the likes of the Vader Immortal series and Marvel’s What If…? – An Immersive Experience, one of the first major productions to land on Apple Vision Pro.

During her talk we expect to hear more about what’s next for ILM Immersive and how the division expects story-driven immersive experiences to pan out with a growing number of standalone headsets in the market.

Road to VR is proud to be the Premier Media Partner of AWE USA 2025, allowing us to offer readers an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to the event.

PSVR 2 Holiday Sales Volume Grew Massively Year-over-year on Amazon

From roadtovr

A big sale on PSVR 2 pushed the headset’s holiday sales volume on Amazon US higher than might have been expected, selling nearly five times more than last year.

PSVR 2’s Black Friday and holiday sale brought a huge 42% discount on the Horizon bundle of the headset, dropping the US price from $550 to $350.

Predictably, the sale increased the sales volume of the headset, but by even more than one might have expected. PSVR 2 saw nearly five times the peak sales volume on Amazon US during the 2024 holiday season as it did in 2023.

Granted, it’s important to note that the headset didn’t get any particularly big sales in the 2023 holiday season. But still, one might be inclined to think that if you cut the price of something by 50%, then you would expect to sell 50% more than you would have otherwise. In this case, we can see that PSVR 2 has a far different relationship between price and sales.

In 2024, Sony started the sale ahead of Black Friday and kept it running well into the new year. The sale lasted so long that it seems the company may have been trying to sell off stock, perhaps because it has a new SKU on the way (like a new bundle or lower cost redesign). While some have suggested that Sony could be losing faith in the headset and trying to do a firesale before discontinuing it, we think it’s likely the company continues to offer the headset at least until its next console cycle, even if it doesn’t put much weight behind it in the meantime.

Meta CTO: 2025 is a ‘Make or Break’ Year for Meta’s XR Ambitions, Internal Memo Reveals

From roadtovr

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth released an internal memo to employees, stating 2025 is going to be “the most critical year” for the company’s XR efforts yet, Business Insider reports.

Titled “2025: The Year of Greatness”, the memo (seen below) largely takes an inspirational tone, urging Reality Labs employees to do “the best work of your career right now.”

Bosworth, who also leads the company’s Reality Labs XR division, offers hope and motivation for teams to succeed, stating the company needs to “drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR.”

Bosworth also puts emphasis on the success of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s cross-platform social XR platform, noting the mobile version of the app “absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”

Image courtesy Meta

While inspirational, the memo also offers an existential warning:

“This year likely determines whether this entire [XR] effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure,” Bosworth says.

“On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough,” he continues. “We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.”

This follows news of a leadership shakeup at Reality Labs, announced by Bosworth last week in a leaked internal forum post obtained by Business Insider.

The post included info that Meta CTO Reality Labs COO Dan Reed is being replaced by Meta COO Javier Olivan, and that Reality Labs will work more closely with the company’s core business, as Bosworth stated the division has become “a positive driver for Meta’s overall brand.”

Late last month, Meta’s quarterly financial report revealed that Reality Lab saw its best ever Q4 revenue but, like in quarters past, it coincides with equally growing costs, which amounted to a record $1.08 billion in quarterly revenue, but also quarterly costs of $6.05 billion, making for quarterly loss of $4.97 billion.

Reality Labs is responsible not only for its Quest platform, its related services and research and development, but also Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which are built in collaboration with EssilorLuxottica.

Now in its second generation, the device has proven successful it’s prompted Meta to not only extend its partnership with the French-Italian eyewear conglomerate into 2030, but also reportedly produce a premium pair of the smart glasses with a built-in display, tapped to launch sometime this year.

Here’s Bosworth’s full memo:

2025: The Year of Greatness

Next year is going to be the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs. We have the best portfolio of products we’ve ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don’t feel the weight of history on you then you aren’t paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.

I’ve been re-reading “Insanely Great,” Steven Levy’s history of the Macintosh computer. If you haven’t read it the book chronicles the incredible efforts of individuals working in teams of 1-3 to build a device that more than any other marked the consumer era of personal computing. What I find most fascinating about it is the way that even people who left the program on bad terms (it was not particularly well managed) speak about the work they did there with an immense sense of pride. There was a widespread cultural expectation, set by none other than a young Steve Jobs, that the work needed to be “insanely great.”

On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren’t sitting around celebrating because know it isn’t enough. We haven’t actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.

Greatness is our opportunity. We live in an incredible time of technological achievement and have placed ourselves at the center of it with our investments. There is a very good chance most of us will never get a chance like this again.

Greatness is a choice. Many people have ben at the precipice of opportunity and failed to achieve. For the most part they failed to even challenge themselves.
You should be doing the best work of your career right now. You should be pushing yourself to grow where needed and doubling down on your strengths. When you look back on this time I want you to feel like you did everything in your power to make the most of it.

You don’t need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I’ve observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee. You should be so focused on results that being in a bunch of docs or meetings is too frustrating to bear.

The path is clear. You don’t need to come up with a bunch of new ideas to do this great work. Most people in the organization just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed. It is about operational excellence. It is about master craftsmanship. It is about filling our products with “Give A Damn”. This is about having pride in our work.

I will close with an Arnold Glasow quote: “Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.” 2025 is the year. Let’s be on fire.

Meta’s VP of XR is Departing the Company Citing Family Health Concerns

From roadtovr

Meta’s VP of XR, Mark Rabkin, is departing the company after leading its XR efforts for more than four years. Rabkin cites family health issues as the primary driver for his departure.

Today Mark Rabkin announced his plan to leave the company in March. In his public announcement he said, “devs and fans [of XR]—I will leave you in good hands. More to come.” Which likely means we’ll soon learn who will take over the role in his place.

As Meta’s VP of XR for the last four years, Rabkin oversaw the launch of Quest 3, Quest 3S, and the latest platform developments, like Quest’s software rebranding to Horizon OS, the assimilation of App Lab into the Horizon OS store, and a significant push toward mixed reality and spatial computing on the company’s headsets.

Though Rabkin was VP of XR for some four years, he says he’s been at Meta for 18 in total, where he had started in 2007 as a “rowdy, slightly cocky, fresh-faced backend infrastructure C++ engineer in my twenties.”

According to his LinkedIn, Rabkin worked his way up to VP positions over the following decade. He joined the XR side of the company in 2019, first as the VP of XR Experiences before eventually becoming the VP of XR overall.

‘Star Wars’ Actor Daisy Ridley to Star in VR Experience ‘Trailblazer’ Coming to Quest in March

From roadtovr

Daisy Ridley, who played ‘Rey’ in the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy, has been tapped to star in an upcoming VR experience, which is slated to arrive on Quest in March.

As reported in a Hollywood Reporter exclusive, the experience is called Trailblazer: The Untold Story of Mrs. Benz, which recants the story of 19th century German automotive pioneer Bertha Benz—the first person to drive an internal combustion engine automobile over a long distance, and wife of Carl Benz, creator of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen from 1885.

Image courtesy Hiroyuki Tsutsumi, via Hollywood Reporter

The VR experience, which is slated to arrive on Quest 2 and above on March 7th, is being directed by Emmy-nominated Eloise Singer from UK-based Singer Studios, which also developed narrative VR experience The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend (2024), starring Lucy Liu.

Ridley, who plays the role of Bertha Benz, will join Singer and Lesley Paterson as executive producers when Trailblazer is made into a film and graphic novel series.

“Bertha’s determination and courage are incredibly inspiring,” Ridley tells Hollywood Reporter. “It’s been such a privilege to step into her world and help tell her story. I hope audiences are as moved by her journey as I was while working on this project.”

Trailblazer: The Untold Story of Mrs. Benz is said to “invite audiences to step into Bertha’s shoes, explore her workshop and assemble the engine that reshaped transportation forever.”

While the VR experience first premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022 and SXSW in 2023, that was before plans were revealed that Ridley would be attached to the project.

Mindshow Unveils Enterprise Virtual Production Suite for XR Animation, Former Hulu Executive Signs on as COO

From roadtovr

Mindshow, the real-time CG animation company, unveiled its virtual production platform for enterprise partners looking to use XR headsets to speed up the animating process. The company additionally announced the appointment of David Baron as Chief Operating Officer, a founding executive at Hulu, and industry veteran of Fox Digital Media, Paramount, and Microsoft.

You might have heard of Mindshow when it first launched on Steam in 2017, giving anyone with a PC VR headset the ability to animate and capture everything from short skits to entire shows thanks to its virtual production tools. The app was delisted from Steam in 2020, ostensibly pointing to the company’s ambition to turn its once consumer-oriented platform into a enterprise toolset.

Now, Mindshow has unveiled that enterprise production suite, which allows select industry partners to animate in virtual studio sets using XR headsets, including Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest, merging real-time rendering with “asset ingest and character animation tools accessible across the entire production pipeline—from storyboarding to final pass,” the company says in a press statement.

Before its platform unveiling, Mindshow worked with a number of brands to create promotional videos and narrative content for Barbie, Hot Wheels, Monster High, and Enchantimals, as well as a slew of Cameos from Cheetos mascot Chester Cheetah.

While the company says it will continue to offer its full-service production studio though its Los Angeles-based location, the Mindshow platform is now available for licensing to select entertainment companies, sports organizations, and consumer brands.

The studio says Mindshow features proprietary lip-sync technology which converts pre-recorded audio into stylized animated facial performances and character movements. It also includes virtual studio cameras for in-app capture, motion capture for real-time character expression, and asset integration, allowing companies to rig existing 3D models for quick animation.

“Every step of animation requires a specialized tool—from assets to previsualization to rendering and review. This technical fragmentation bottlenecks creativity costing production teams time and money,” said Sharon Bordas, CEO of Mindshow. “Mindshow is purpose-built to integrate a growing ecosystem of virtual production capabilities as rapidly as cutting-edge content tools and technology hit the market, making studio-quality animation immediate and intuitive through a single platform.”

The company says its recent addition of streaming veteran David Baron as COO “underscores Mindshow’s commitment to scaling its enterprise software platform.”

Baron notes that Mindshow helps bands “move from concept to delivery in one production cycle, turning characters into multi-platform properties across social, streaming, previsualization, and beyond.”

Meta Reportedly Working on a High-end Quest Pro Successor Alongside Quest 4

From roadtovr

Meta Quest Pro wasn’t really the prosumer hit it was chalked up to be, leading the company to discontinue its first mixed reality headset a little over two years after release. Now Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports Meta is not only working on an ostensible Quest 3 consumer follow-up, but also a “high-end” model that could succeed Quest Pro.

In Gurman’s weekly newsletter, he rounds up a wide range of recent XR news, from Meta possibly including a display in its next Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses to reports of Apple winding down Vision Pro production amid decreased demand for the $3,500 headset.

Citing insider sources, Gurman also reported that Meta is “working on Quest 4 VR goggles, as well as a new high-end model that could eventually become a successor to the Quest Pro mixed-reality headset.”

Released in late 2022, Quest Pro marked a significant departure from Meta’s line of consumer standalone headsets, which, at the time, ranged around the $300 mark.

Meta Quest Pro | Photo by Road to VR

Initially priced at $1,500, the ‘Pro’ level headset offered a host of features over its concurrent Quest 2, such as color-passthrough, pancake lenses, and both face and eye-tracking. Less than five months later though, Meta decreased the price of Quest Pro to $1,000 in an effort to attract more prosumers.

Then, in July 2023, The Information released a report claiming Meta was discontinuing the Quest Pro line entirely, which Meta CTO and Reality Labs chief Andrew Bosworth was quick to contest, stating “don’t believe everything you read.”

An additional report from The Information from July 2024 suggested Meta was switching its ‘Pro’ efforts to instead develop a lightweight mixed reality device resembling “a bulky pair of glasses,” codenamed ‘Puffin’—reportedly set to target a 2027 release date. This comes in addition to Meta’s claim it’s hoping to release a pair of AR glasses before 2030 which will be similar in functionality to its Orion AR glasses prototype.

A follow-up report from The Information released shortly afterwards further claimed a Quest Pro 2 prototype, codenamed ‘La Jolla’, had also been shelved. Bosworth later went on record to confirm that it indeed cancelled La Jolla, and is developing Puffin, although didn’t make mention of whether the company was abandoning its Quest Pro line for good.

– – — – –

Meta’s iterative approach to product development involves spinning up and shutting down prototypes, which Bosworth has outlined in the past as a way the company prioritizes exploration over immediate commercialization. Where projects, like Quest Pro 2 and others, currently are on that continuum is a mystery, making it difficult to tell whether reported stops and starts are actually stepping stones or dead ends, respectively.

Whilst refuting the earlier claim that the Quest Pro line was cancelled, Bosworth noted “there might be a Quest Pro 2, there might not be. I’m not really telling you, but I will say don’t believe everything you read about what’s been stopped or started.”

Meta is Experimenting with a Home Theater Environment for Quest’s Horizon OS

From roadtovr

Meta already has a way to watch your own content on Quest, although browsing through a file system and viewing on a windowed panel is decidedly less immersive than a proper home theater. Now the company says it’s experimenting with the idea.

Mark Rabkin, VP leading Horizon OS and Quest, says in a recent X post that Meta is currently working on a home theater environment for Horizon OS, which is not only Quest’s operating system, but the soon-be-the OS used on a host of third-party headsets.

In response to a post wondering why such a first-party effort doesn’t already exist, Rabkin says the team is “[w]orking on all that, experimenting with lighting and other effects to see what’s best. Also trying to figure out awesome sound.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Meta developed its own theater environment. In 2014, Meta (then Facebook/Oculus) launched Oculus Cinema for Samsung Gear VR, which would later morph into Oculus Video for Gear VR and Rift, presenting a more cohesive way to watch your own content in addition to renting movies for on-device viewing. Released in late 2015, Oculus Social was another early attempt, allowing up to five users to connect and watch Twitch and Vimeo streams in a variety of virtual theaters.

Now-defunct Oculus Video app | Image courtesy Meta

Without rehashing ancient history (the list of now-defunct home theater apps goes on), Meta’s most recent attempt was in Horizon Home on Quest, which was updated in 2021 to allow multiple users to join your home space and do things like watch videos and launch into VR apps together. This however didn’t include many of the features associated with a dedicated home theater app, such as custom environments or advanced playback controls.

And while the content on offer varied over time, all of those apps had one thing in common: they put enough friction in the way between users and traditional content that it essentially shunted users to support more open alternatives, like Bigscreen and Skybox, but also dedicated apps serving up Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc.

That said, Meta’s next attempt at a dedicated theater environment probably won’t unite those fractionalized apps into a monolithic theater environment, although having a built-in, easily accessible way to immersively watch your own content might just be enough.

Google Acquires Vive Engineering Talent for $250M, Raising Questions About HTC’s Next Move

From roadtovr

Google has acquired a number of HTC’s XR engineers for $250 million, something the company says will “accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”

Google’s announcement of Android XR last month represents a critical shift in the competitive landscape, as Samsung will ostensibly be the first to launch a headset running Android XR. Excitement for familiar faces offering up competition in the consumer XR space was tempered somewhat by the usual questions surrounding Google’s ability to commit to the project long-term.

While Google has addressed some of those underlying concerns in a Road to VR exclusive, which you can read more about here, that doesn’t reduce the laundry list of products and services killed by the company over the years, one of which includes Google Daydream, the company’s first real attempt at entering the XR space proper back in 2016.

Google Daydream View (2017) | Image courtesy Google

Now, Google announced it’s signed an agreement with HTC to acquire a number of HTC’s XR engineers for $250 million. The details of the agreement are still thin, although it’s possible Google is tapping HTC for its hardware talent in a bid to secure a more solid foundation in the modern XR segment.

“We’ve been investing in XR for more than a decade, and just last month introduced the Android XR platform with our strategic industry partners,” Google says in the announcement. “Today we signed an agreement to welcome some of the HTC VIVE engineering team to Google, which is subject to customary closing conditions. They are an incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space, and we are looking forward to working with them to accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time Google paid top dollar for HTC engineers. In 2017, the company shelled out a princely sum to gut HTC of its smartphone engineering talent, amounting to $1.1 billion. One year later, HTC merged its smartphone and VR divisions, which signaled HTC was putting increased emphasis on its XR ambitions.

Since the details of the deal aren’t public, where that leaves HTC for now is still a mystery. The Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company is principally involved in producing XR headsets for enterprise and prosumers, such as its latest headset Vive Focus Vision, a $1,000 standalone mixed reality headset that packs in a mishmash of specs from Vive Focus 3 (2021) and Vive Elite XR (2023).

That said, HTC has dabbled with non-XR devices in the recent past, although very little to hang its hat on. In 2018, the company released HTC Exodus 1, the crypto-phone that seemed encouraging enough for the company to release its follow-up one year later. In 2019, it released an at-home 5G hub, which capitalized on the first wave of buzz surrounding 5G. None of those devices are currently being sold by HTC, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Snap Makes Spectacles AR Glasses More Affordable for Students & Teachers

From roadtovr

Snap, the company behind Snapchat, is making its latest Spectacles AR Glasses more affordable to students and teachers with a new educational discount that cuts the $1,200 launch price in half.

Initially released in September 2024, the company’s fifth-gen Spectacles (called Spectacles ’24) are primarily targeted at developers, priced at $100 per month for a one-year commitment.

While Snap’s latest AR glasses made some key improvements over the fourth-gen device released in 2021, including a wider field-of-view, better resolution, the addition of hand-tracking, and an overhaul to its software stack, the price seems to have been a sticking point for students and teachers looking to build and learn about AR apps.

Snap Spectacles ’24 | Image courtesy Snap Inc

Now, the company is rolling out a new student discount that cuts the total price of Spectacles in half—just $49.50 a month for 12 months ($594), or a single payment of $594 and an additional $49.50 payment one month after ($643.50).

Those interested in nabbing the deal need a .edu email address, or other email address from an accredited educational institution. Students and teachers in all supported regions can take advantage of the discount too, which includes the US, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands.

You can learn more about about Snap’s latest Spectacles in our deep dive explainer from last year, including specs, capabilities, and software.