And we are on. So welcome to the episode number one of Lost in Immersion, your weekly 45-minute stream about innovation. As VR and AR veterans, we will discuss the latest news of the immersive industry. So let's do it, Fabien, if you want to start. Yeah, thanks. So sorry, I got a bit cut, so I didn't hear what you said. Can you repeat, please? Sorry. No, it was just the introduction, so you are free to speak now. OK. And talk about your subject, the topics you will choose this week. OK, cool. So this week, for the first episode, I thought it was nice to talk a bit about two VR headsets that are quite new on the market. And I choose these two because they have kind of interesting properties that I think we can discuss. The first one is the PlayStation VR 2, which was released, I think, last week or two weeks ago. And so there are a lot of features, and I want to keep it short, so I will not go through all the features. But I have two main that I think are worth noting. The first one is eye tracking. So it seems to be necessary now in all the modern VR headsets, both for adding some realism on the avatars. So the avatar in the virtual world could have the same eye movements as you have, which is nice. And also helping on what we call the Foveon rendering, like rendering only in high quality only the part that you look at, which improves quality and performances. And so that's the first one. And the other one, which I think is quite interesting and I'm really curious to try, is there is a headset feedback. So there is like a small motor in the headset, and that propagates onto the headset and gives some haptic feedback on the head, which I'm really curious to see what the game developers will do with that and how it will feel. I'm not really sure. Maybe they want to try to give some, you know, not only the things that happen on the body of the player, but maybe, you know, if like a headshot or maybe wind, you know, if some wind is passing or like a very strong sound to have some like bass as well. So yeah, I think it was the two nice features on this one. There are many more, but again, we don't have a lot of time on the kipshaw. To stay on focus, but maybe Seb, what would be your thoughts about this PSVR2 headset? It seems to be nice, mostly for the force feedback, for me that's something that differentiates the headset from the other. But the fact that it's still linked with the cable and from what I've heard, the OLED screen has some issue. It's like flickering a lot. And so it's visible inside the headset. It seems to be the first feedback I see online from users. So it seems like a nice device, but like the display seems to have an issue right now. I don't know if they can solve that issue with the current headset or if they will have to make a new one. But like I said, the feedback on the headset, I agree with you Fab, it's a new thing. I will talk about it also with another headset when it's my turn. But they added also some feedback on the controller, so on the trigger. So you can get the trigger stuck before if you handle something in your hand, you can have feedback in your hand. And I think that's something missing in most of the headsets, you don't have a lot of feedback. The controller is vibrating maybe a bit, but not that much. And increasing that feedback will make the experience much more interesting, I think. Great. So on my side, there are two things that really surprised me. The first one is that they announced it as the best VR headset ever for gaming, mainly. Not because of the hardware, but because of the games themselves. Because they are saying that the quality is as high as a normal game. So we are reaching this point where VR games are not just basic low-poly games. They are high-end AAA games now, and they will bring more players to the VR side. And the other thing that surprised me is that the day of the release of the headset, I don't know if it's the same in France, but in Canada, everyone was talking about it. I had an hockey game that night, and half the guys were buying this headset for them on the day of the release. So I was like, wow, 50% of the guys are playing VR now? Well, I hope this is what it is. And we have this big VR push forward by Sony. I guess this is a great thing, even if the headset itself is not perfect. But it could be a really interesting new path for VR, for mainstream VR. So I don't know if it's the same for you. Did you hear your colleagues or friends talking about it? Or in the street, I don't know. But it was something, even on the radio, people were talking about it. Yeah, I didn't have the same feedback here, but I don't know. Maybe it depends on our surroundings. Something that surprised me as well, and I forgot to mention, is that, well, it's not a surprise, but the headset doesn't seem to be PC compatible. So it's recognized by the computer, but not as a VR headset. There are already some initiatives to make it compatible. So there are some hackers and mods on the way already. So we can hope that it will be compatible. But compared to Quest 2, for example, which don't have any cable, and which is PC compatible, I guess it's not worth all the work to make it compatible with PC, I guess. I don't know what you think about it. No, it will be mostly to get access to these new controllers and the operation, because that's not an option available on the other headset. But apart from that, Oculus Quest Pro, for example, does the work nicely. Like you said, with streaming, with Wi-Fi, the content from a PC. That's what's great. I read another thing which is very interesting, is that the performances between the PC equivalent of the game and the PS5 one, the performances were better on the PS5. They seem to have optimized it through hardware, which is very interesting, because every time the consoles are better for most of the games, because they have this special hardware specification. It's always easier to develop one game for one platform than one game for all the platforms around the world. Fabien, your second headset? Yeah, the second headset was a bit of a surprise. I don't know if there was a lot of rumors of it before it was announced. It's the big screen VR headset. Two interesting items I want to highlight on this one. The first is that it's supposed to be the smallest VR headset. It's a tethered headset, but it's supposed to be the smallest. Hopefully, something that will ease the adoption of headsets, because it's less strain on the neck and easier to support for a long time. In that same direction, the second point is very interesting. I think they are the only ones to do that. You will have to download an app on your phone. It's iPhone, and you scan your face. They will create a form according to your face, so it will sit on your face really nicely. I'm curious to see the rendering inside, how the screens look like. I'm really curious to see as well, especially for at least the two of us who have glasses. I'm not sure how it will work. I'm really curious to see that as well. I'm curious, what do you think of this hyper-personalization, so it will be your headset and only yours? I had glasses before, so I've done the same for the Quest 2. I had my lenses only for me. Each time I wanted to show something to someone else, I had to remove them to give the nice experience to the other user. For them, it was all blurry if they used my prescription. It was already the case with some of the headsets. I guess that's mandatory to move this way if you want to have a great experience. The idea of being able to share it with someone else right now, because everyone doesn't have his own headset, makes it tough to use every day. Especially with the price tag of Canadian dollars for it. On my side, I'm quite happy that they are making the statement that VR headsets are for one person only. This is a theme that I'm fighting about for quite some years now because people are putting VR headsets all around and they are not experiencing the content as they should be because they are not configuring the interpupillar distance and the headset is not always very well adjusted. Sometimes they are thinking that it's due to the experience as it is linked to the way they are wearing the headset. I'm really happy with that, but as you say, it's not compatible with the way people are using it today as they are maybe one headset through a group of friends and for sure they won't buy this one to do that. So it's for experts with a bit of money for them to have this headset. The size of the headset itself is very impressive compared to the Quest 2. I don't know if you saw the side-by-side picture, but it's half the size for this new headset. Maybe not this one, but the next iteration will be very interesting. I'm just talking about that the Quest 4 has a nice feature of providing directly the IPD to the user so that you can readjust your current IPD and make it fit yours. They did that for the PSVR too. I don't know if you saw the calibration process, but with the eye-tracking they can automatically deduce your IPD which is great for mainstream users. And I was going to say the fact that the Quest 4 doesn't have the side part automatically when you want to share it to someone else and show quickly to five people around you what you have done. It's really easy to put it on someone else. There's nothing that goes on the face, it just rests in front of the eyes. It makes it nice to share experiences like that. It depends on your usage. If you want to have a headset for games and stuff like that, having it personalized makes sense. If you want to be in a work environment and share what you are doing quickly, I guess having something more flexible that doesn't rest completely on the face and that is easy to move and give to someone else is better. It's really more the use case than the headset itself that needs to be customizable. Do you have something else to add, Fabien? Just very quickly, I think it's interesting to hear you guys talking because on your side, Seb, it's more about sharing an experience quickly between users. On your side, it's more like having something for you and really tuned to your eyes. I was just noticing the two different perspectives, which is nice. And, yeah. I have also the two use cases. When I do VR games, I prefer to have it more perfect, like you said, because that's the most expanded, better experience. But when I go to a client meeting or at an event, we have the constraint of being able to share the headset quickly and the experience quickly. Great. So, Seb, what's your topic this week? So, same two headsets, two different headsets. I have the HoloKit right here. I don't know if you've heard about it. It's like the AR Capo version with plastic. Yeah, exactly. We just received the SDK to work on it, so that's our plan, to work on that and do some tests on it. What is amazing for me is that it reproduced the kind of experience we had with the HoloLens 1 in terms of field of view. But in terms of quality of the visual, it's even better. So, with a small device that costs half the price of the HoloLens, you still have to buy an iPhone Pro, so it's still expensive, but the cardboard itself is not. And it allows to detect the hand tracking. It really uses all the features that the iPhone has now with the AirKit, so that's quite impressive. Right now, the only issue we have is that, and I don't see anything about that on the forum, so maybe it's because I have an old iPhone Pro, like the first generation iPhone 12 Pro. But I have some kind of delay, everything that is in augmented reality is like floating a bit. And it seems for me, because when I switch the phone in spectator view to see the same experience, but with the phone and the camera directly on the phone, then everything sticks perfectly. So, I wonder if the time that AirKit is taking to handle the video, get the tracking, the SLAM information, etc., gives the position of the camera. Maybe they buffer the video and just display that afterwards, so when you look at it in spectator view, everything seems in sync. But because you are in the headset afterwards and you remove completely the video, this delay, this buffering of the video is not happening anymore. And therefore, you are always a bit, always before the real information that you get, so everything looks like having some delay and it bothers the experience. So, like I said, I must do some tests with the iPhone, like iPhone 14 Pro, the latest one, to make sure that this is not due to the iPhone, but maybe that's an issue that will remain. If we do experiments with that, we'll have to think about something that is not sticking to the environment, but can float in there. But still, that's quite impressive. They added the ability also to use the Apple Watch to trigger some stuff. So, when you move your hand, you use the accelerometer in the watch to show some magical space, for example. They did a kind of Hogwarts school, magic school teaching in the world. And yeah, the multiplayer experience seems to be nice too, so that's really something that I would have hoped to be the best use case, a simple one, much cheaper one for our clients. Right now, we still have to figure out how to solve that delay issue. Maybe with predictive algorithms that predict where the user head will be in the next couple of milliseconds. That's something that we'll have to test. It's strange that there are no trace of that on the forum, or maybe there are not enough users right now. Yeah, we received, like I said, the decay yesterday, so I would expect it to be pretty early. Fabien, what you're thinking about it? Yeah, I was really excited about this device as well, for two things. One is the iPhone Pro adoption is very large, so it can bring a lot of users to AR. And the other one is, I really liked the spectator view as well, because a lot of times the AR or VR experience, they are quite solo. Even if you are in a group of friends, if someone has something on their head, he's the only one enjoying the experience. And with the spectator view, everybody can enjoy the same experience. So I was really excited about this. Nice. Well, for my part, I thought these kind of devices were dead long ago. And the AR cat board thing was just a gimmick. I played with it. It's maybe 10 years now. And it was really, really bad, because there was not any kind of tracking or whatever. It was just playing with printed markers in front of your phone, so the views were very limited. But as you are explaining, using the latest feature of the iPhone Pro is really impressive. And I can't wait to try that on my side. Nice one. It starts to make sense. Like you, I did test it before the iHorizon, the white one that was using a tracker, a marker to detect the environment, and it was not usable at all. Here it's almost usable. Well, it could bring AR back, because as we were... I have another group of discussion, and we were making the reflection, but we are not talking about AR anymore. It's like on a silent mode. And it could bring AR back, and it could be a great thing. So, yeah. That's... Please show us your second headset, if you have one. Yeah, that's the one. It's blurry, but it's a Tilt 5. Yeah. One. Same. It seems nice on paper. The ability to have several people looking at the same content, multi-reality content, in front of them, and interact with each other on the same board. The issue there is the quality. It's a nice concept, but the... First, the board is quite large, so you have to have a huge table to put it on. It's folded, and because it's using reflective materials, and because it's folded, on some part of the board, there are lines. That doesn't cover completely the board. And the way the system works is using a projector in the glasses to project on the board, and the reflective materials show back the image to the eyes of the user. So, the definition and the color and the quality should have been the best experience available out there, but the projector is limited in terms of quality. So, when you are at a normal distance from the board, everything is blurry, and you have to get closer to get sharper images. Plus, because the board is folded, you have some lines, and that completely breaks the 3D effect. The line is completely in 2D on your table, because everything is underneath with the 3D information, 3D projection. The line is completely breaking the effect. I saw that at CES, or the different events that show the technology, they use another board, they have two versions. One that is not foldable, it's a square one, smaller one. So, I guess that they are trying to with that board to make the experience nicer, because the projection is smaller on the board, and because there is no fold at all. So, there is not this breaking issue that we cannot control with this one. They do not provide any way of making your own board. So, even if you buy some materials, you will have to make the same shape of marker. There is like a black marker on it with some circle that is used to track the board. And same with that, I had also an issue that everything was a bit jittery. So, after half an hour, I encountered motion sickness. So, yeah. I will not push for that solution, even though on paper, it seems to be awesome to use only one computer except on it, and be able to play board games, for example. It seems nice, but the quality is not there. Usually, I always show the technology I have to my family and friends to see their feedback. This one, I didn't even try. So, yeah. That's a sign. Fabien, what do you think? Yeah, I was again, for this one as well, very excited about because one thing is their target seems to be gaming, like board gaming, like around the table, being able to play with each other. But I was really curious to see what we could do. As a community of VR developers, XR developers, we could use this for other usage, like museum or even for industry. It would have been very easy to just put glasses that are very easy, back to the topic we were discussing before. Something that is very easy to put on and boom, you have an experience. So, I don't know. It's the first version. So, they can just do better, I think. So, yeah. On my side, I'm very glad that this product finally is finding the market and can be bought because if I remember correctly, it's from the CastAR team back in the day. It's like a 10-year initiative. And the thing that is not that exciting is, as you are saying, the product itself is not as good as we would like it to be as we are waiting for it for the past 10 years. We could have expected something better. But the use case is still interesting. I hope they will pursue this technology to provide something better on the second or third iteration. Yes, there are some things about the wide field of view, the fact that when you put your hand in front of the board, it's already on top of the 3D element. You don't have to do anything. It's missing, although, some interaction with fingers, but that can be added in the future. But, yeah, the fact that it's tethered also is quite annoying because the way they tether it is they put the cable just in the front of the asset, so you have the cable like this and it's quite rigid, so you are not moving completely freely around the board which makes the experience not that good right now. Well, thank you and I'll bring the last topic. I saw a conference like two weeks ago by Charlie Fink. I don't know if you know him. He's a VR veteran as he worked at Disney Research. He's a Forbes columnist and he wrote several books about metaverses. Somebody asked him a question and it was what do you think would be the biggest thing in 2023? And he answered that for him it would be AR but not augmented reality, it would be assisted reality. And by that he was targeting the smart glasses that we are seeing coming along for mainstream users as well with the Unreal Airglass, there's a Rokid Airglass as well and Xiaomi just announced two days ago they are on the smart glasses. So, well, first of all what do you think about that? Do you share his point of view? And the second thing is that what is about this AIR? Why are they all calling their product AIR? Is this a new way of calling AR something more sexy than AR and they are just adding the I in the middle to make it AIR? I don't know, so just for you to think about and please give me your insight on this. Très bien. Yeah, so what I think is interesting is and I think Meta and Apple are also looking at this kind of devices. And what I wonder if the end goal of this is to forget about the smartphone like the smartphone could stay in your pocket or in your bag and the information that you have with the smartphone would be on the glasses so email and messages kind of like directions GPS this kind of stuff. That's my first reaction is are we looking at the next smartphone which will be the smart glasses? And about the name I don't have any idea maybe because it's light it's lighter than the than the headset I don't know. For me it's the fact that it's in the air but it's not using augmented reality so it's not stuck to the real environment so it's a way to say it's augmented reality but in the air not locked to anything. Well the Xiaomi one the Xiaomi one has the AR feature that can be fixed and tracking as well and they are really pushing the AR features compared to the end-real glasses for example which it doesn't have. Yeah please continue. And maybe it's a trendy name. I guess that's the way they work on their naming of devices. One thing that I don't foresee as a usage is what also Google Glass was trying to do a couple of years back is to have like a small visual of information on the side of one eye. I did test that and I don't see it like something I will use every day. It's really bothering to have something that stays fixed even if you are moving. I think people prefer to have the information when they want it instead of having it popping it on one eye. So I don't see it as a use case very useful. I saw that it is however very useful in a storage company that needs to provide information on what they need to pick up, what they need to put in the box for the client and have like a list that is displayed because you need your hand to handle the package and handle the stuff you carry on and if you get that information directly on your eyes then that makes sense. But having that for everyday use I'm not sure. Can this be expanded to a lot of industrial use like professional use? Knowing that many of them are providing like completely blacked out lenses for the glasses to do this kind of mixed reality VR AR but with a very low quality. But yeah there seem to as you are both saying there seem to be a trend about this. People are liking it for a reason that I don't really understand but people find it light and easy to use. Well why not? It could be as you said maybe a first step into AR VR for a lot of us and in any way they are all thinking about the new iteration for TV or smartphones so everyone is thinking about something or to sell more because TV is dead to be clear and smartphones are now reaching a point of where the technology is not selling anymore despite the iPhone trend and people are still buying the new iPhone because it's a new iPhone but for other users once they have their phone it's working, they are happy with it and they don't have any argument to buy another one and this is what everybody is thinking right now and as you said Apple is on the AR side, some are on the VR side and I guess we'll see pretty quickly which way it is taking for everyone to have this new device to buy as a must-have. So I guess this is a wrap up for today, we are in the 45 minutes window as expected so I thank you both for your time and your great topics and we'll see you next week for another episode.
