Welcome to episode 47 of Lost in Immersion, your weekly 45-minute stream about innovation as we are NAR veterans who will discuss the latest news of the immersive industry. Hi guys! So, what are our topics today? Fabien, if you want to start please. Hello, thanks. So, I want to talk about this paper that went out a couple of weeks ago. Since the beginning of VR, there are a lot of studies about VR, like the benefits of VR and also the limitations. And I think it's interesting to see that as mixed reality devices are getting more and more popular, especially with the release of the BetaQuest 3 and the release of the Apple Vision Pro that is also getting a lot of popularity. It's interesting to see that other research is going out. And here, what they wanted to do is to research the issues and potential psychological implications of mixed reality. So, here in this specific case, what they are looking at is a pass-through video. So, it's what the Apple Vision Pro does, what the Quest 3 is doing, is using cameras to reproduce the reality into screens. So, let's see what they are discussing. Basically, what they did is they used the Quest 3 over a period of a couple of weeks and they just explained their findings of using this headset for a long period of time. So, the first one is they are very positive about mixed reality. They tried, as everybody, maybe the first encounter game that we showcased a couple of months ago at the release of the Quest 3, which is a very nice game. So, for most of them, they had a very strange feeling caused by the distortion and had issues with distance separation. You can see them trying to do a high-five or trying to touch an object and having issues at the first try to actually success at the first try. They also tried to go from a dark place to a very bright place, like you go from inside to outside. Obviously, the adaptation is even more difficult than with our eyes. Something that is interesting to see is that they all reported motion sickness, even in mixed reality. They also report an obvious reduction of the field of view. And the last point, which I think is maybe the one that I would like to discuss further, is the feeling of what they call a social absence. So, being disconnected from the people that you are seeing in the mixed reality view. So, that's the first part. So, I would like to bring a bit of nuance into this observation that they are doing. So, first, they used only the Quest 3 in their testing, it seems, from what I understood from the paper. And we all know that the pass-through of the Quest 3 is not perfect. And the one from the Apple Vision Pro seems to be much better. So, hopefully, with the technological improvements that this device will see over the next few years, we will see less distortion, lower latency. So, hopefully, less motion sickness, better field of view. So, hopefully, all of these negative issues will disappear. The only one that I'm also curious about is that social absence feeling. From the Apple Vision Pro reviews, we can see that the eyesight feature has kind of mixed, pun intended, reviews. So, some people find this very cool. Some other think it's not compelling enough. And, yeah, is this feature, sorry, would this feature be enough to kind of alter this sense of social absence? And finally, I want to show a quote that they put in the paper. So, they mention all of these issues and they say, okay, what can we do about it? And they say, maybe we should ask for better regulation and moderation of these devices. And it's funny to see they say, like, and I quote, given that these strategies have failed epically with smartphones, we are not optimistic. So, I thought it was kind of sarcastically funny in a way. So, yeah, that's the paper I had a look at it today. And I'm really curious to see your feedback. So, Seb, what do you think about all of this? I can talk about the social absence. I think I felt it during meetings while wearing the headset and explaining what it does, how to interact with it. Only that, even introducing what the person I will hand the headset to will have to look at. Even that, I felt like I was not there with them and they tend to talk to someone else while I was trying to explain something. So, even then, they were not taking me seriously when I was talking with the headset on. Maybe it's part of the fact that the Quest 3 looks weird when you wear it. It doesn't look nice compared to Vision Pro where it's more like a real Google and looks like a ski Google. So, and we are more used to look at someone wearing goggles like that than something weird with three cameras in the front, obviously positioned and obviously visible. So, my feeling is that it would be a bit better on that part for the Vision Pro because the person wearing the headset may believe it looks cool with it. And the other person can think the same when looking at them. So, I think it will help. And then for the other feeling of motion sickness, reduction of field of view, I think the reduction of field of view would be a bigger issue on the Vision Pro. It's really smaller than the Quest 3. But the motion sickness comes a lot from the distortion that you get when you put your hand in front of your headset and you start to see weird lines and weird changes in the environment. At least that's what really gave me some weird sensation. And also one issue with the Quest 3 is that there is not a processor to a specific one on the video and the pass-through. So, if your application tends to be heavier and heavier, it starts to get laggy and then your video pass-through starts to get laggy and that's where it's completely unusable. And that's where I get a lot of motion sickness myself. I'm quite sensible to this. And do you think that the eyesight feature can reduce this feeling of social absence or is it just a gimmick? Apparently, it's so weird. It has been built for this but apparently it's not working that well. So, it's more in the uncanny valley sensation than anything else. So, it doesn't help the social absence on this part, I think. Okay. Cool. Guillaume, I'm sure you have a lot of things to say about it. Well, I too have some things to say. It's that I'm quoting someone about the Apple Vision Pro that it could be the best experience you have with the pass-through. At the end of the day, you are still looking at screens with all the problems that it causes, especially that you have something in front of your eye blocking you from the real world. So, I understand the presence issue which is a bummer because presence is the key for immersion. So, could we be completely immersed in a video pass-through? That is a great question, I guess. And the other thing is about the stereoscopic effect. There are more and more reviews of people using the Apple Vision Pro daily that have some issue getting back their stereoscopic feeling after a long period of use of the Apple Vision Pro. They are talking about 15 to 20 minutes when they have some trouble getting objects or feeling weird, dizzy. Because, of course, the stereoscopic effect is just a brain trick for us to get the depth and, of course, it requires adaptation. We had this kind of issue with VR back in the day for people that were using VR for a long period of time as well. And we know that the brain can adapt once it gets used to this feeling of using screens. But, once again, a little disclaimer for young people using this kind of headsets. It is known that you shouldn't be using VR or AR or pass-through headsets until you are 12 or 13 because your stereoscopic vision is building. So, if you are using too much VR headsets or AR headsets, it can mess up your depth perception and vision for when you are an adult. So, be very careful with that. One thing I saw, which is quite funny, that on the one hand, it can be troubling for us to see depth and provoke some kind of discomfort. But, on the other hand, I saw someone, I don't know if it's fake or whatever because we have to be very cautious right now with the Apple Vision Pro. It was someone that said that they were blind or not seeing much. And, once they put on the Apple Vision Pro, they increased their sight by a lot because the screens are very close to their eyes. They were able to see depths and stuff that were very far from them that they shouldn't be able to see in the normal use case. So, very interesting to see that it could be used in a medical field as well. Maybe on a daily basis for people to have better daily lives on the spectrum of people that have issues with their vision. So, yeah, it can be good on one side and not on the other. It depends on the use case, as always. So, yeah, I'm not sure the more we are experiencing it and seeing what the technology can provide, I'm not very sure that the video pass-through is a solution for AR or mixed reality. It can be a great solution for adoption. But, yeah, we all know that the grail is having the simple glasses with the information inside of them. But, yeah, we'll see what can be done on this. Yeah, I saw someone arguing that for now Apple has chosen the pass-through solution because this is the best experience that they can deliver with today's technology. But that ultimately their vision is to go to the AR HoloLens type headsets. And I forgot who was saying that, but they were quoting Tim Cook and he was always speaking about AR, AR, AR, AR. So, I don't know if it's just like selecting information or if it's an actual correct prediction. But I think it's interesting to think that ultimately the goal is to have something that is better than the pass-through, but with like a transparent screen. Yeah, I saw a lot of people saying that they had an issue looking at their phone and trying to read it when wearing the headset. And they were not capable of focusing on it. It seems to really depend on the user, but we'll begin to know how much people are considering it's good and they don't have any issue when removing the headset. And the other one that has a lot of issue of looking at things and have issue when they remove the headset. Okay, so Fabien, do you have something more? No? Okay. So, Fabien, Seb, it's your turn. All right. And this week I wanted to talk about the Brilliant Lab frame that has been announced last week, I think. It's not completely in their eyeglasses, but it sees through with information displayed on the glass. And it's all about AI. So you have one camera, a small camera on the center of the frame. It's not for tracking the environment. It's more to detect and react to the environment. And also there is a microphone, of course, to ask questions and get some feedback in the glasses. So there is no video of actually showing how it looks like really inside the glasses, but that's the kind of information that seems to be displayed. I guess they are smaller than that because if you display that in front of your eyes, you won't be able to read anything. So it's completely fake in this video. But the idea is here to show the kind of information you can get and how you can interact with the glasses, not how it will look like. So that's a very small form factor. Not that expensive. They plan to ship it on the 15th of mid-April at $349. So not that expensive. But then do we need an AI glasses connecting all the time to our head? I don't know. Maybe it's a new usage. We'll see if it becomes trendy or not. But at least the glasses look cool. And from what they say in their presentation, the rendering on that glasses seems to be quite good quality see-through screen. So, yeah, Guillaume, I don't know if you saw the news and if you have any feedback. No, I didn't see that about the use of an AI assistant on a daily basis. I have more and more colleagues doing so. So they are talking to their phone in their pocket and the AI is answering back. So I guess the use case is becoming more and more present. So I guess it could be because we talked about it. There's a small assistant with a camera, which seems to be a scam. It made some kind of burst because some people were willing to use these kind of devices. So I guess the AI glasses-like assistant could be something in the near future, depending on the fact or what the glasses can bring to the table. The quality has to be here if you want these kind of devices to win some market share. So we'll see. Yeah, I'm very surprised by the form factor, especially if you have the two glasses are augmented, if I can say. The battery seems to be very small. So I don't know about the length of use. We know that the Apple Vision Pro with a battery pack is only less than one hour and a half or two hours max. So I guess regarding the size of the battery or maybe they are using a very low consumption display. So we'll see. Yeah, we don't have much information, but the fact that the form factor is very, very small is very impressive at this point. In terms of rendering, they are just rendering text and small images in the center of the screen. There is no tracking, nothing done with the camera except sending it to the phone and having the phone do the AI search and stuff like that. There is an app on your phone for this. There is a CPU, but they don't announce anything about that. But what it's doing, if there is any huge processor on that, it's doing anything except sharing the information and maybe tweaking the voice signal and the camera signal to send it in a proper way to the phone. Yeah, but you still have the Bluetooth connection, which is like battery consuming at some point as well. They announced a daily use for their glasses, so we'll see when it's available. And they announced also the fact that you can, of course, add your prescription lenses inside of it when you command it. Fab, any feedback? I think you discussed all the comments that I already had. One thing is a question I have is about the usage. Will it become natural for everyone, for a lot of people to discuss alone with an AI assistant? I know that it can look strange when you hear someone talking, but even if they are on the phone with headphones, it can be strange sometimes. I don't know if this kind of usage will become a norm and that we'll get used to this, or if it still will look strange to have someone talking to nothing. Yeah, I agree. I think it's maybe a new way of interacting that we are not used to, because we are used to keywords. But maybe it's for a new person starting to interact with a new device, maybe that's a new way of doing it. We'll see how trendy it becomes. I forgot to mention also one thing, that they are open source and you can enter your own OpenAI account. You have to have an OpenAI account to interact with it, actually. And when you start the app to interact with the glasses, you have to enter your own OpenAI login and password. So I think that's an interesting way of doing this. And just a funny thing is the way they did the power supply for the glasses. They did it differently. And that's it for that subject. Do you have anything else to say about it? Nope. And one of the news that I wanted to talk about is this one. A company working on trying to find a way to be able to charge and to give power supply to a lens that would be in the eyes of the user. Right now, there is a lot of things to do on the lenses part. But that was one thing that was blocking is to know how to give power supply to a lens that would be on your eyes. And this company is working on doing that by adding something on your eyelid. And when you blink, it's charging the device and providing power supply for the wireless communication with an external device that would be, of course, processing whatever needs to be displayed in the lens. So I wonder how fake this video is or if it's a real thing. But it's nice to see that something is moving on this part too. Now, is it the right direction to go? I don't know. What do you think, guys? Well, there were already a company. There was a company that was doing augmenting lenses. We know that they stopped their activity last year, I guess, because of technical challenges and the maturity of the technology as well. It could bring something to give another shot at this kind of technology. But I think we are far, far away from augmenting lenses at this point. It hurts me to see the poor guy wearing those because it should be very rigid lenses. And we are seeing his eye completely red at some point, so it's not very comfortable, I guess. But yeah, we are more and more looking forward to being like cyberpunk and adding some devices directly to our bodies. So very fun to see that at this point. We are getting close to the science fiction. But yeah, before getting real high value augmented lenses, I guess we are far away from this. Yeah, I think similar to the claimed goal of Neuralink, that is to help people with disease. Maybe this could be also a first adoption of these technologies. As we were saying before, with someone trying the Apple Vision Pro and seeing... I don't know if it's the right word, but knowing that they can have better vision with this kind of device. Maybe they will be ready to wear this kind of devices if that brings them back a better vision. So hopefully that's one way that this can work. All right. I think that's it. Do you want to move on? Yes. So we talked about it a few weeks back about Windows willing to decommission or stop the mixed reality support. With Windows 11. That is done. Because with the update of February 9th, it is official that the Windows mixed reality won't work anymore. It includes the mixed reality portal app and the mixed reality support for SteamVR, which is very surprising. Because when they announced this process, I thought that they were keeping the SteamVR for the headsets to be still working at some point. So very, very weird that they are just closing everything about mixed reality. So you still have a small support for Steam until November 2026. But from that date, your mixed reality headset is just a brick. So very, very weird strategy. Because I just checked out the latest. We know that the mixed reality initiative started in 2015. It drops to 2016. So yeah, you can say it's a long time ago. But I checked out and the latest mixed reality compatible VR headset is HP Reverb G2. There is version 1 and version 2. And it was released in 2020, 2021. You could still buy those headsets in 2022 on the HP store. So it's like two years ago. So very strange. It seems to be a new trend for a company like Meta did the same with the Quest. Transforming the product that you bought into bricks because they are not willing to support it anymore. So very, very weird way of you not being able to use your devices. So yeah. I don't really like this trend as a retro gamer. I don't think that I would be enjoying the fact that all my consoles are not working anymore at some point. Because we should be able to use all the devices. So my only hope is that some developer in the community would be able to provide new drivers for it to work back. Like we did with the Kinect, for example. We still have the ability to use the older versions of Kinect. Because some developers did their work and created the appropriate drivers. So I'm a bit sad because this is the headset I'm using the most for development. So I don't know what can be done with this. So what do you think about this? Especially this trend of big companies just deciding that they are not supporting devices anymore and making them useless. Yeah, that's an unfortunate trend. And I know Google, not really on the hardware but on the software side, were also very keen to just drop projects like this. I'm very curious about the reasons why they are doing that. Is it something that is difficult to maintain for them? Or are they just not seeing any future in this kind of usage for the headsets? It's really strange. I don't know if you have some hints at the reasons behind this. Or it's just too complex to maintain. Goodbye. Okay. Well, I'm not sure I can check this out. I announced it in a presentation. It won't work. Sorry. You can delay them for a second. I'm not aware of this. I'm not tracking this one. Yeah, I think it's important to maintain all these features. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. For now... Okay. Good luck with that. Are you doing...? Okay. Okay. Okay. Just to add to the weird situation is that they just released the Microsoft Mesh like a month ago for companies, which is a feature for you to have VR support in teams. They are selling the solution, you have a subscription for you to use this kind of features. And this is very weird because the Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets was the best way of doing this because you just had to plug your headset on, and it was recognized and you can launch the team's team mesh automatically. Now, I don't know what will be the process, but it won't be that easy with the Oculus because basically this is the main headset now, but because you will have to go to the... I don't know. I don't know how you can do this as efficiently as it would be done with the Microsoft Mixed Reality headset. So, I just made a quick research and it confirmed that it's basically part of the strategy of laying off people and letting the VR side just disappear. Okay, so anything more? There was one news about we start to see information that Unreal will be compatible soon with the Vision Pro, and we saw that Disney and Unreal start to get into business together. So, yeah, I think something is coming in that direction. Surprisingly, Unity is very silent about their partnership with the Apple Vision Pro. We could have thought that they would be showcasing a lot of features with the availability of the headsets, but yeah, there was no communication or whatever. No tutorials, reviews or so. So, I guess they are not using this great partnership as they should at this point. They could have got a lot of new users or, yeah, a lot of traction, but yeah. Once again, communication with Unity, not so good, I guess. I guess if Unreal comes to the battle, they will have a war between them in terms of communication around it. Yeah, sure. Who comes first? Très bien. Any last words? I know, yeah. I think we could maybe do a complete podcast on the alliance between Epic Games and Disney. That was a really amazing news, I think, for the future of entertainment, online entertainment and persistent world and metaverse. So, yeah. Really, I also think that Unreal Engine, which is already very, very popular, will just keep going up. Okay. So, I guess this is it for today. So, see you guys next week for another episode of Lost in Immersion. See you.
