vr industry

70% of the 20 Best-rated Quest 2 Apps are Now Available on Pico 4

May 24, 2023 From roadtovr

The standalone VR market is continuing to grow, and with it, we’re increasingly seeing platform competition for quality content. Pico made its biggest push into consumer VR so far with the launch of the Pico 4 last year, and the company has been gaining ground on getting top VR content onto its store.

Top Quest Apps Showing up on Pico 4

Looking at the 20 best-rated apps on the Quest store (data as of April 2023), to date 70% of the list is available on Pico’s standalone headset:

Title	Pico 4	Quest 2
Moss: Book II	✔	✔
The Room VR: A Dark Matter	✔	✔
Puzzling Places	✔	✔
Walkabout Mini Golf	✔	✔
I Expect You To Die 2	✖	✔
Breachers	✔	✔
COMPOUND	✖	✔
Vermillion	✔	✔
Swarm	✔	✔
DYSCHRONIA: Chronos Alternate	✖	✔
PatchWorld – Make Music Worlds	✖	✔
I Expect You To Die	✖	✔
Moss	✔	✔
Red Matter 2	✔	✔
ARK and ADE	✔	✔
Ragnarock	✔	✔
Cubism	✔	✔
Ancient Dungeon	✔	✔
Into the Radius	✔	✔
The Last Clockwinder	✖	✔

Another way of looking at Pico’s content traction is by the 20 most-rated apps on the Quest store. Breaking it down that way (data as of April 2023), 50% of the list is now available on Pico.

Title	Pico 4	Quest 2
Beat Saber	✖	✔
Blade & Sorcery: Nomad	✔	✔
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners	✔	✔
SUPERHOT VR	✔	✔
GOLF+	✖	✔
BONELAB	✖	✔
Vader Immortal: Episode I	✖	✔
Onward	✖	✔
Job Simulator	✖	✔
The Room VR: A Dark Matter	✔	✔
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted	✖	✔
Resident Evil 4	✖	✔
The Thrill of the Fight	✖	✔
Walkabout Mini Golf	✔	✔
Pistol Whip	✔	✔
Eleven Table Tennis	✔	✔
GORN	✔	✔
Virtual Desktop	✔	✔
Vader Immortal: Episode III	✖	✔
A Township Tale	✔	✔

Building good VR hardware is really just half the battle when it comes to being a serious player in the industry. The other half is getting compelling content onto the headset.

While Quest 2 still has a considerably larger library of apps and several big standalone exclusives (like Beat Saber) Pico looks to be doing a pretty good job so far in its push to legitimize its platform by making sure that some of the top VR content is available for its customers.

And there’s likely more to come. The company has yet to launch its latest Pico 4 headset in the US, which is a major VR market of both customers and developers. Without the US market in play, there’s less incentive for VR developers to bring their apps to Pico. But if Pico finally launches its headset in the US, it could be the nudge needed for more top VR content to make the leap to the store.

Special thanks to @CkYLee for helping to title availability on the Pico store

Meta Has Sold Nearly 20 Million Quest Headsets, But Retention Struggles Remain

March 1, 2023 From roadtovr

Meta has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets, but the company continues to struggle with keeping customer using VR.

According to a report by The Verge, citing an internal Meta presentation held today, the company has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets. This likely includes Quest 1, Quest 2, and Quest Pro, though by all accounts Quest 2 appears to be the vast majority. And while the figure wasn’t publicly announced, this would be the first official confirmation of Quest unit sales from the company.

This info was shared by Mark Rabkin, Meta’s VP of VR, during an internal presentation to “thousands” of employees, according to The Verge.

And while the 20 million unit Quest sales figure is impressive—and well beyond any other single VR headset maker—Rabkin went on to stress that the company has to do a better job at keeping customers using the headsets well after their purchase.

“We need to be better at growth and retention and resurrection,” he said. “We need to be better at social and actually make those things more reliable, more intuitive so people can count on it.”

Curiously, Meta’s latest wave of headset customers are less enthusiastic than those that bought in early.

“Right now, we’re on our third year of Quest 2,” Rabkin said, according to The Verge. “And sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in—the people who bought it this last Christmas—they’re just not as into it [or engaged as] the ones who bought it early.”

The report from The Verge includes more info about the company’s XR roadmap, which you can read in full here.

Meta Reality Labs Earnings Reveal a Less Successful Holiday Season & Highest Operating Costs Yet

February 1, 2023 From roadtovr

Meta today revealed its latest quarterly earnings results, showing that Reality Labs, the company’s XR and metaverse arm, had a smaller holiday season than the last, while operating costs have reached their highest levels yet.

Today during the company’s Q4 earnings call, Meta revealed the latest revenue and operating cost figures for its XR and metaverse division, Reality Labs, providing one of the clearest indicators of the success the company is seeing in this space.

The fourth quarter has consistently been the best performer for Reality Labs, no doubt thanks to the holiday season driving sales of the company’s offerings.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, the company saw $727 million in revenue, which was 17% less compared to the fourth quarter of 2021 when the company pulled in $877 million in revenue.

The fourth quarter of 2021 was a good performer for Reality Labs revenue thanks to the success of Quest 2 which had launched earlier that year.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, the company’s latest headset to launch was Quest Pro, it’s high-end MR headset. Unsurprisingly, the more expensive device—which has yet to find a strong value proposition at $1,500—doesn’t seem to have performed as well as Quest 2 did in its launch year. Just days ago, Meta temporarily discounted the price of the headset to $1,100, appearing to test the waters at that lower price. Granted, XR headsets aren’t the only product Reality Labs offers, which means the division’s other product lines—video calling speakers and smart glasses—may have had a role to play.

In addition to a smaller holiday season than last year, the latest earnings for Reality Labs show the division’s expenses were greater than in any previous quarter, surpassing $4 billion for the first time.

This continues a trend of Meta’s ever-growing investments in Reality Labs which the company has warned investors may not flourish until the 2030s.

In the face of operating costs far outpacing revenue, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that his management theme for 2023 was “efficiency,” saying he wants to focus the company on streamlining its structure to move faster while being more aggressive about shutting down projects that aren’t performing.

Meta Reality Labs Latest Revenue & Operating Cost Figures Aren’t Going to Make Investors Happy

October 26, 2022 From roadtovr

In Meta’s most recent quarterly earnings call the company shared the latest revenue figures of Reality Labs, the company’s XR division. In the third quarter of the year the division hit new milestones… unfortunately not the kind investors like to see.

Meta has been clear about its plan to spend aggressively on its XR initiatives over the next several years. So while it isn’t a surprise to see the company’s latest operating costs for Reality Labs reaching an all-time high, seeing that record in the face of an all-time low revenue record for the quarter isn’t a great look.

Meta has only been sharing its Reality Labs revenue and operating cost figures since Q4 2020, so while it’s certain that prior periods had less revenue and potentially even more spending, these new milestones shared for the third quarter of 2022 are as far back as Meta has shared the data (roughly the last two years).

The likely reasons for the lower revenue and higher spending may have to do with timing more than anything. As of Q3 2022, Meta hasn’t launched a new headset in two years. That’s probably meant slowing sales of Quest 2, especially considering the company confirmed work on its next headset a year ago, which may also have slowed sales. Not to mention that the company raised the price of Quest 2 earlier this year. While on its face that should mean more revenue, it also may have reduced demand for the headset.

It won’t be until the Q4 earnings call that we see the impact Quest Pro will have on the Reality Labs bottom line.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has warned shareholders that the company’s XR investments may not flourish until 2030, but the company still needs to tread carefully to maintain faith among its investors.

Valve Corrects Steam Survey Data Revealing Latest VR Population Growth

September 9, 2022 From roadtovr

Valve this week updated its monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey to fix issues resulting in anomalous VR population data. The corrected figures return the survey to being one of the most useful pieces of public data about the trend of consumer PC VR usage.

If you’ve been following along closely you might have noticed we haven’t reported on the VR data in Valve’s Steam Hardware & Software Survey data in several months. While it has been a largely reliable indicator over the years, starting in May of 2022 the data began to swing wildly in ways that didn’t seem to comport with any trends in the real world.

After not hearing anything from Valve for several months on the issue, this week the company finally told us that it has now fixed “a few issues” with the data collection and reporting, and “expects to have more accurate results going forward.”

The company also provided us with corrected data for the months in question (May, June, July, & August); while we didn’t get the full set of corrected data (since the survey only shows the current month’s data), we got the most important data point for each month (the percent of all Steam users with connected headsets), allowing us to update our estimate of VR headsets in use on Steam.

Monthly-connected VR Headsets on Steam

Each month Valve collects info from Steam users to determine some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the platform’s population, and to see how things are changing over time, including the use of VR headsets.

The data shared in the survey represents the number of headsets connected to Steam over a given month, so we call the resulting figure ‘monthly-connected headsets’ for clarity; it’s the closest official figure there is to ‘monthly active VR users’ on Steam, with the caveat that it only tells us how many VR headsets were connected, not how many were actually used.

While Valve’s data is a useful way see which headsets are most popular on Steam, the trend of monthly-connected headsets is obfuscated because the data is given exclusively as percentages relative to Steam’s population—which itself is an unstated and constantly fluctuating figure.

To demystify the data Road to VR maintains a model, based on the historical survey data along with official data points directly from Valve and Steam, which aims to correct for Steam’s changing population and estimate the actual count—not the percent—of headsets being used on Steam.

The updated data shows that, on average, VR saw slight growth over the Summer with an estimated 3 million monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam in August.

While normally we’d have a further breakdown of specific changes in the share of indiviaul headsets and headset vendors on Steam, we haven’t (and don’t expect to) receive that corrected data at this point, so we’ll have to wait for next month for new figures.

Varjo Raises $40M Series D Funding to Expand Cloud-based XR Platform

September 7, 2022 From roadtovr

Varjo, maker of high-end enterprise XR headsets, this week announced it has raised a $40 million Series D investment to continue building its Varjo Reality Cloud software and deliver a “true-to-life industrial metaverse.”

Varjo makes some of the highest-end enterprise XR headsets on the market, along with unique software solutions, claiming recently that one quarter of Fortune 100 companies have used used its tech.

This week the company announced it has raised $40 million in a Series D investment. Participants in the round include returning investors EQT Ventures, Atomico, Volvo Car Tech Fund, and Lifeline Ventures, and new investors Mirabaud and Foxconn, the latter being one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers and a potential strategic partner for Varjo.

The leading investor in the round was not made clear. The raise brings Varjo’s total funding to $162.5 million since 2017, according to Crunchbase, and represents a down-round compared to the company’s Series C investment of $54 million in 2020.

“Our new funding is a testament to the incredible growth Varjo has seen over the past few years as interest for enterprise XR adoption grows,” said Timo Toikkanen, Varjo CEO. “The vision for a true-to-life metaverse for professionals is already here, and we are proud to be the first and only company in the world to continue to deliver human-eye resolution virtual and mixed reality technology to the largest and most iconic enterprises in the world.”

The so-called “metaverse for professionals” isn’t clearly defined by the company though it ostensibly refers to Varjo Reality Cloud, the company’s cloud-based XR streaming tech which aims to streamline the use of XR within large organizations. The company plans to expand the platform to a wider range of hardware and software, including headsets other than its own. Check out our exclusive preview of Varjo Reality Cloud earlier this year.

Alongside the funding announcement Varjo also named a new Chief Product Officer, Patrick Wyatt, who is said to be leading the company’s software and cloud projects.

Beyond its enterprise ambitions, Varjo also recently dipped a toe into the prosumer space with the release of its high-end Aero VR headset which, for the first time, could be bought by general consumers without any kind of monthly fee. The company’s Series D funding announcement didn’t offer any hints about the future of the Aero, but Varjo told us earlier this year that there’s a good chance of an eventual follow-up to the headset.

Meta & Qualcomm Join “Multi-year” XR Chip Partnership to Combat a Common Threat

September 3, 2022 From roadtovr

Two of the biggest names in XR—headset maker Meta and chip maker Qualcomm—today announced a “multi-year broad strategic agreement” to collaborate on “customized virtual reality chipsets” for future devices.

Qualcomm, a leading provider of smartphone processors, was an early mover in the XR space by pushing variants of its Snapdragon mobile processors as ideal for use in both AR and VR headsets—a play which now sees the company’s product in the vast majority of standalone headsets available on the market today.

Meta has used Qualcomm processors in all of its standalone headsets to date—Go, Quest, and Quest 2—and is expected to do the same in its forthcoming Project Cambria headset.

Today Meta and Qualcomm jointly announced they have entered into a “multi-year broad strategic agreement” to work together on XR platform development. The agreement was a big enough deal that the CEOs of both companies made the announcement together during the IFA 2022 conference.

“We’re working with Qualcomm Technologies on customized virtual reality chipsets— powered by Snapdragon XR platforms and technology—for our future roadmap of Quest products,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “As we continue to build more advanced capabilities and experiences for virtual and augmented reality, it has become more important to build specialized technologies to power our future VR headsets and other devices.”

With the companies having already worked together over the last several years, it’s a curious announcement—what gives?

On its face the announcement likely represents a commitment by Qualcomm to make Meta a top priority client over the next several years, devoting more time to the company and offering it more influence over future Snapdragon XR chips from Qualcomm. And with Meta believing that it’s going to take a complete rethinking of the typical computing architecture to make the sci-fi vision of XR a reality, the companies will probably be prototyping together on that front as well.

But there’s likely another major reason for this partnership—it brings two allies together against a common threat: Apple.

Though Apple hasn’t formally announced any XR products yet, all signs point to a long history of R&D and a desire for the company to dominate the space. For Meta, which itself wants to control the destiny of XR, that’s a problem. Mark Zuckerberg has been eyeing this potentiality since at least as far back as 2015, which drove him to buy Oculus in the first place—in an effort to get out ahead of companies like Apple and Google in the nascent XR space.

But Apple is a problem for Qualcomm too… Apple is sure to use its own custom processors (colloquially referred to as ‘Apple silicon’) in its XR products. By definition then, the greater marketshare that Apple has in the XR space, the fewer Snapdragon chips Qualcomm will sell.

Apple has long been building its own custom processors for its smartphones which has given the company and edge over competitors using commodity chips. In the last few years Apple has also begun phasing out third-party processors in favor of its own chips in its PC products, signaling a maturation of the company’s microprocessor design and fabrication capabilities.

For Meta, the partnership with Qualcomm buttresses a strategic vulnerability by giving the company a committed ally that can make chips that are highly specialized for XR devices.

For Qualcomm, the partnership with Meta is an effort to ensure that Apple doesn’t easily dominate the XR market and snuff out the company’s opportunity to sell chips to a wide variety of non-Apple XR device makers.

Ultimately the partnership is a maneuver in a fight for early ground in a market that the companies expect will one day be worth trillions of dollars.

Meta’s PC VR Dominance Continues as Quest 2 Passes New Milestone

August 8, 2022 From roadtovr

Quest 2 quickly rose to become the most-used VR headset on Steam, but last month it crossed a new milestone as the majority of headsets used on the platform.

Quest 2’s aggressive price point and ability to be used as both a standalone and PC VR headset propelled it to become the most-used VR headset on Steam back in February 2021, just four months after its launch.

From there it has only continued to grow, and now the latest data from Valve’s Steam Survey shows that Quest 2 now makes up the majority of headsets on the platform at 50.32% (+1.3%).

Of course Quest 2 isn’t the only Meta headset used on Steam. Quest 2, Quest 1, Rift S, and Rift collectively grew slightly in the last month to 67.16% (+0.48%), with the vendor’s overall gains otherwise reduced by the Rift S dropping to 9.88% (−0.72%). That sees Meta continuing to hold more than two thirds of the VR headsets on Steam.

Though Quest 2 has definitely grown quickly, the headset’s recent price increase will probably reduce its growth rate compared to what we’ve seen so far.

While the portion of individual headsets used on Steam appears to be correct in the latest round of data from Valve, the total portion of Steam users using VR headsets has been fluctuating wildly in the last few months, apparently erroneously. We’ve reached out to Valve on multiple occasions for comment on the issue but have yet to receive a response.