vr industry

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.

Reality Labs Chief Scientist Outlines a New Compute Architecture for True AR Glasses

May 2, 2022 From roadtovr

Speaking at the IEDM conference late last year, Meta Reality Labs’ Chief Scientist Michael Abrash laid out the company’s analysis of how contemporary compute architectures will need to evolve to make possible the AR glasses of our sci-fi conceptualizations.

While there’s some AR ‘glasses’ on the market today, none of them are truly the size of a normal pair of glasses (even a bulky pair). The best AR headsets available today—the likes of HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2—are still closer to goggles than glasses and are too heavy to be worn all day (not to mention the looks you’d get from the crowd).

If we’re going to build AR glasses that are truly glasses-sized, with all-day battery life and the features needed for compelling AR experiences, it’s going to take require a “range of radical improvements—and in some cases paradigm shifts—in both hardware […] and software,” says Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Reality Labs, Meta’s XR organization.

That is to say: Meta doesn’t believe that its current technology—or anyone’s for that matter—is capable of delivering those sci-fi glasses that every AR concept video envisions.

But, the company thinks it knows where things need to head in order for that to happen.

Abrash, speaking at the IEDM 2021 conference late last year, laid out the case for a new compute architecture that could meet the needs of truly glasses-sized AR devices.

Follow the Power

The core reason to rethink how computing should be handled on these devices comes from a need to drastically reduce power consumption to meet battery life and heat requirements.

“How can we improve the power efficiency [of mobile computing devices] radically by a factor of 100 or even 1,000?” he asks. “That will require a deep system-level rethinking of the full stack, with end-to-end co-design of hardware and software. And the place to start that rethinking is by looking at where power is going today.”

To that end, Abrash laid out a graph comparing the power consumption of low-level computing operations.

As the chart highlights, the most energy intensive computing operations are in data transfer. And that doesn’t mean just wireless data transfer, but even transferring data from one chip inside the device to another. What’s more, the chart uses a logarithmic scale; according to the chart, transferring data to RAM uses 12,000 times the power of the base unit (which in this case is adding two numbers together).

Bringing it all together, the circular graphs on the right show that techniques essential to AR—SLAM and hand-tracking—use most of their power simply moving data to and from RAM.

“Clearly, for low power applications [such as in lightweight AR glasses], it is critical to reduce the amount of data transfer as much as possible,” says Abrash.

To make that happen, he says a new compute architecture will be required which—rather than shuffling large quantities of data between centralized computing hubs—more broadly distributes the computing operations across the system in order to minimize wasteful data transfer.

Compute Where You Least Expect It

A starting point for a distributed computing architecture, Abrash says, could begin with the many cameras that AR glasses need for sensing the world around the user. This would involve doing some preliminary computation on the camera sensor itself before sending only the most vital data across power hungry data transfer lanes.

To make that possible Abrash says it’ll take co-designed hardware and software, such that the hardware is designed with a specific algorithm in mind that is essentially hardwired into the camera sensor itself—allowing some operations to be taken care of before any data even leaves the sensor.

“The combination of requirements for lowest power, best requirements, and smallest possible form-factor, make XR sensors the new frontier in the image sensor industry,” Abrash says.

Continue on Page 2: Domain Specific Sensors »

Zuckerberg Warns Shareholders: Metaverse Investments May Not Flourish Until 2030s

April 28, 2022 From roadtovr

Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders that they should buckle up for the long haul because the company’s steep investments in XR and metaverse technologies aren’t expected to flourish until the next decade.

Today Meta gave its shareholders a quarterly update, in which the company overviewed its latest earnings and expenses.

For Reality Labs, the company’s XR and metaverse division, revenue was up 30% year-over-year, from $534 million in Q1 2021 to $695 million in Q1 2022.

However, costs associated with running the Reality Labs division rose even more, up by 62% year-over-year, from $1.83 billion in Q1 2021 to $2.96 billion in Q2 2022.

This growth in costs wasn’t unexpected. Meta told investors last year they should expect the company’s XR investments in 2021 to total $10 billion… and to grow even more from there.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been asking for investor patience in his vision for XR and metaverse technologies for years. Back in 2017 he was already prepping investors for a long haul, saying that in order to reach mainstream tracition, XR would need a 10 year trajectory from the year the company acquired Oculus—a timeline that pushed out to 2024.

But in Zuckerberg’s eyes that timeline may have slipped considerably.

Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call, during a lengthy, unscripted response to a shareholder question, Zuckerberg said that he didn’t expect the company’s metaverse and XR investments to really flourish until the 2030s.

So we have multiple teams in parallel that we’ve sort of now spun up [to build XR and metaverse tech]. This goes for VR as well as augmented reality and the other work that we’re doing and is sort of driven by the success that we feel like we’re seeing in the markets and the technology is starting to be ready to really ramp up.

So those [operating losses for Reality Labs], we’re experiencing today. I mean, having those teams operating is something that you see weigh on the results and is one of the reasons why I think the growth rates and expenses have been so high, and I think we’ll continue investing more over some period. But at some point, we will have all those product teams fully staffed for a few versions into the future and then the growth rates there will come down.

But it’s not going to be until those products really hit the market and scale in a meaningful way and this market ends up being big that this will be a big revenue or profit contributor to the business. So that’s why I’ve given the color on past calls that I expect [substantial revenue from Reality Labs] to be later this decade, right?

Maybe primarily, this is laying the groundwork for what I expect to be a very exciting 2030s when this is like—when this is sort of more established as the primary computing platform at that point. I think that there will be results along the way for that, too. But I do think that this is going to be a longer cycle.

To be fair, the company’s initial ’10 year trajectory’ included only a vague idea of the metaverse—something that, despite still being somewhat nebulous—has come into clearer focus in the eight years since Meta acquired Oculus and set out to build ‘the next computing platform’.

Meta arguably didn’t take its first stab at trying to figure out what the metaverse might look like until 2016 when it began seriously experimenting with social VR in what would ultimately become Facebook Spaces, the company’s first social VR app which launched in 2017.

Even so, progress has been slow. Facebook Spaces was shut down in 2019, to be superseded by Horizon. But Horizon—which was first announced in 2019—didn’t launch until the far end 2021… and it’s still only available to a limited audience.

For shareholders seeing Meta spend $2–$3 billion on Reality Labs per quarter… it makes sense why the company is being regularly questioned about its steep spending. Zuckerberg’s suggestion that the investments won’t really flourish until the 2030s surely isn’t going to help matters.

To that end, Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that the company’s plan is to use revenue from its non-XR businesses (Facebook, Instagram, and the like) to fund its aggressive and forward-looking spending. For investors to stick around for the long haul, Zuckerberg is going to need to continue to emphatically sell his belief that XR is the next computing platform and explain why shareholders should stick around for the ride.

One of the Last Bastions of the Oculus Brand is No More

April 25, 2022 From roadtovr

Alongside the announcement of the company’s first retail store, Meta has begun redirecting visitors of the longstanding Oculus.com website to its new Meta Store.

Facebook announced back in late 2021 that it would rebrand itself to Meta and eventually dissolve the Oculus brand. In 2022 the company has steadily taken steps to make this a reality, including rebranding its flagship VR headset, Oculus Quest 2, as Meta Quest 2. The company has also pushed the Meta Quest brand elsewhere by replacing the Oculus logo in various places.

The Oculus logo and type under Facebook

But one steadfast holdout was Oculus.com, the URL of company’s front-facing VR division for many years, which housed the storefront for the company to sell headsets along with its VR app catalogue. Even after the site’s content had fully moved to Meta Quest branding, the URL still read Oculus.com.

Today Meta continued its move to erase the Oculus brand; if you visit Oculus.com you’ll now be redirected to store.facebook.com/quest. The new site is a unified storefront for all of Meta’s hardware products, which right now is just Quest, Portal, and Ray-Ban Stories.

The move came at the same time the company announced it will be opening its first retail store which will also feature all of its hardware products.

Meta must have been in a rush to make the switch, as it oddly dropped Oculus.com URL in favor of a Facebook.com URL (instead of a Meta.com, which the company appears to control).

A large portion of the VR community were blindsided by Meta’s decision to dissolve the Oculus brand which has held very positive sentiment despite the growing unpopularity of the Facebook brand which owned it (prior to the change to Meta). The brand was so iconic that it’s still common to see people refer to any of the company’s headsets as ‘the Oculus’.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who was booted from the company back in 2017, suggested that Meta should have embraced the Oculus name even more deeply, rather than dissolve it.

“If anything, they should have renamed the whole company Oculus [instead of Meta]. It isn’t just the best brand in their stable, it is one of the most positively associated brands in existence,” Luckey said recently on Twitter. “Not even Quest branding will survive in the long run. It will all be replaced by Meta.”

For execs at Meta, however, the move makes sense. The company has made a big pivot toward focusing on the metaverse and wanted to point its hardware and software in that direction in a unified way. Instead of Oculus Quest, Facebook Horizon, and Facebook Portal, now it’s Meta Quest, Meta Horizon, and Meta Portal.

Only time will tell if the branding move was the right choice—or even if it really matters at all—but the general sentiment among XR industry & enthusiast folks is that the Oculus brand was liked and will be missed.

But Oculus.com isn’t completely dead. Not yet, anyway. Although Oculus.com now redirects to a Facebook.com URL, the Oculus.com domain still houses the company’s entire VR app catalogue and its VR developer resources; meanwhile, the Quest companion smartphone app, which is required to use the headset, is still called ‘Oculus’. Though it seems likely these too will be retired in favor of Meta branding before the year is out.

Apple Says Steep ‘Horizon Worlds’ Creator Fees Show Meta’s “Hypocrisy”

April 14, 2022 From roadtovr

Earlier this week Meta announced that it would begin testing tools to let creators sell things for real money in Horizon Worlds and would charge a fee of 47.5% of their earnings. The fee structure seemed at odds with prior comments from Meta which have criticized app store fees from the likes of Apple and Google. Now Apple is accusing the company of hypocrisy.

Following the news this week that Meta planned to take nearly half of a creator’s earnings in Horizon Worlds, Apple didn’t miss the chance to point out that this was coming from a company which has on multiple occasions criticized Apple’s app store fee of 30% (after 15% for the first $1 million in annual revenue).

Speaking to MarketWatch, Apple spokesman Fred Sainz had this to say:

Meta has repeatedly taken aim at Apple for charging developers a 30% commission for in-app purchases in the App Store—and have used small businesses and creators as a scapegoat at every turn. Now, Meta seeks to charge those same creators significantly more than any other platform. [Meta’s] announcement lays bare Meta’s hypocrisy. It goes to show that while they seek to use Apple’s platform for free, they happily take from the creators and small businesses that use their own.

And, well… he isn’t wrong. Just last year Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg not-so-subtly said in a very widely viewed keynote that being subject to the app store fees of Apple and Google had changed the way he viewed the industry, going on to say that he wants his company to take “a different approach” when it comes to its creator platforms.

The last few years have been humbling for me and our company in a lot of ways. One of the main lessons that I’ve learned is that building products isn’t enough. We also need to help build ecosystems so that millions of people can have a stake in the future, can be rewarded for their work, and benefit as the tide rises, not just as consumers but as creators and developers.

But this period has also been humbling because as big of a company as we are, we’ve also learned what it is like to build for other platforms. And living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. Most of all, I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things, and holding back the entire internet economy.

We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want to serve as many people as possible, which means working to make our services cost less, not more. Our mobile apps are free. Our ads business model is an auction, which guarantees every business the most competitive price possible. We offer our creator and commerce tools either at cost or with modest fees to enable as much creation and commerce as possible.

Indeed, those words seemed to fly in the face of Meta’s announcement that it would change creators a fee of 47.5% of their earnings for anything sold through Horizon Worlds. Not to mention that the company has also levied a 30% fee (the same that Apple and others charge) against developers since the very beginning of its VR app store.

Meta’s strongest defense, perhaps, is that Horizon World creator fees aren’t entirely out of line with similar platforms available today, but one must ask why the company wouldn’t want to set a better precedent given its public statements criticizing others for similar behavior.

Monthly-connected VR Headsets on Steam Blast Through 3 Million Milestone

February 7, 2022 From roadtovr

According to the latest data from Valve, VR headsets on Steam reached 2.14% of the Steam audience in January 2022. While this proportion falls short of the 2.31% record reached in May 2021, the estimated count of actual VR headsets has reached a significant new milestone of 3.4 million in January 2022 (compared to 2.98 million in May 2021).

The count of VR headsets on Steam had flirted with the 3 million milestone on several occasions but hadn’t quite surpassed it last month when it saw a significant jump from 1.93% (2.95 million) in December 2021 to 2.14% (3.4 million) in January 2022.

Year-over-year, the count of monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam is up 29.46%.

It’s impressive to see the number of VR headsets on Steam reaching this new milestone, though perhaps even more interesting will be to watch and see how many players stick around for the long haul. Will this be a temporary spike or a lasting impact?

Share of VR Headsets on Steam

Quest 2 was far and away the most significant driver in the growth of monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam in January. Clearly spurred by the 2021 holiday season, Quest 2 reached a record high of 46.02% (+6.40%), its largest single month of growth ever.

Given Quest 2’s significant growth, most other headsets gave up some share of the pie. The Oculus Rift S and Valve’s Index headset saw the most significant losses in share, with falling to 13.10% (−1.67%) and 14.36% (−1.43%), respectively.

Less popular headsets like the original HTC Vive at 7.31% (−0.95%) and Windows VR headsets at 4.99% (−0.70%) lost less share. This suggests that the 2021 holiday season saw many Rift S and Valve Index owners trading up to a Quest 2 while other headsets were less likely to jump on board with the newer headset.

However, despite Rift S, Index, HTC Vive, and Windows VR losing share, all of these headsets actually gained in count. That’s because the size of the pie itself grew enough to more than cover the losses in share.

From a vendor standpoint, Meta’s steady gains accelerated in January thanks to Quest 2 (and despite losses in share from Quest 1 and Rift S), with the company’s headsets now making up 67.25% (+3.67%) of monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam.

Aero Likely the First in a Series of Enthusiast Headsets from Varjo

January 21, 2022 From roadtovr

Varjo’s Aero headset is the first from the company that’s meant to appeal to individual customers rather than large organizations… and it probably won’t be the last.

Since the company’s inception, Varjo has sold high-end enterprise headsets to the likes of Fortune 500 companies. That is until just last month when the company started shipping its new Aero headset which was not only substantially cheaper but was, for the first time, sold without any kind of annual upkeep fee which made the company’s other headsets a non-starter for individual buyers.

And while it’s possible the company had formulated Aero as a sort of one-off experiment, it seems Varjo has been satisfied enough with the reception that it intends for Aero to become an ongoing series of headsets for the high-end enthusiast segment.

Speaking to Road to VR this week, Varjo Chief Technical Officer Urho Konttori touched on Aero’s recent launch, saying that the headset is still backordered but he expects things to start catching up in February. As of now the company’s website advises “3–4 months” from purchase to delivery.

As for what happens in the future, Konttori said that Aero would “probably” become an ongoing series of headsets from the company, rather than a one-off. Although the company still seems primarily dead set on serving the high-end enterprise space, the move means the company also expects to target high-end enthusiasts with more headsets in the future.

That could dovetail in an interesting way with some of the software the company has been building internally, especially its XR cloud streaming tech; though initially targeted toward enterprise customers, the company confirmed that the tech supports any OpenVR/SteamVR applications without modification, and plans to expand the feature to other headsets in the future. While the company says that multi-headset support is primarily aimed at making XR more scalable within large organizations, it’s not so far fetched to think that the company could offer it to individuals at some point in the future.