Vision Pro doesn’t have controllers, although that’s not stopping third-party hardware creators from trying to bypass Apple. Enter Surreal Touch, a newly announced motion controller that aims to leverage Vision Pro’s ability to play PC VR games, but not only.
Surreal Interactive, the startup behind Surreal Touch, is hoping to bring the controllers to market some point next month, with its price revealed at the time of launch.
Similar to Meta’s Touch Pro controllers, Surreal Touch contains optical sensors with fisheye lenses that allow the device to track independently from the headset.
Image courtesy Surreal Interactive
Also very similar to Meta’s Touch Pro, you’ll find a ring-less design thanks to its inside-out optical sensors, onboard SLAM tracking allowing for 6DOF input, and a standard button configuration that anyone with a modern VR headset will instantly recognize.
Speaking to CEO and founder Zhenfei Yang, Road to VR learned that Surreal Touch will ship with a SteamVR compatibility mode, which supports all existing PC VR games. That means you’ll need a VR-ready PC to play games like Half-Life: Alyx (2020), which the company shows working below:
And just how will that work? Surreal Interactive says it’s currently developing a Vision Pro-native streaming app, which promises to let you play SteamVR games from your computer at “4K, 120 Hz.”
While PC VR gameplay is undoubtedly a big focus, the company says it’s also working on its own native SDK, which will allow Vision Pro app developers the ability to support Surreal Touch.
“We’re currently collaborating with several studios to port their games to the AVP platform. Additionally, we have plans to reach out to and partner with more developers in the near future,” Yang told Road to VR.
Surreal Interactive also teased it’s working on a ‘Tool Mode’, which presumably could also allow for basic UI selection when in Vision Pro, however the company hasn’t revealed its exact function, stating only that the additional mode is “still undergoing in-house development. Stay tuned for more details.”
There’s still plenty to learn about, including battery life, real-world tracking accuracy, compatibility with other headsets, price, and more. We’re hoping to learn more closer to launch, so check back soon. In the meantime, check out the spec sheet below:
Specs
Tracking
Positioning Accuracy: Less than 10mm, Less than 1 degree
Refresh Rate: 100Hz
Computer Vision and SLAM Technology, dual fisheye camera
Design
Length: 125mm
Width: 71mm
Height: 77mm
Weight: 148g
Compact, ring-free design
Streaming App
Vision Pro Native
Graphics: 4K resolution at 120Hz
Software Optimization: Stream 4K 120Hz SteamVR Graphics to Your Headset, unmatched by others
There’s at least six really good reasons why getting Half-Life: Alyx onto PSVR 2 is a good idea, and it would be a net positive for everyone involved. So what do we gotta do to make it happen?
Despite launching in 2020, Half-Life: Alyx continues to be one of VR’s absolute best games. It’s production value and incredible attention to detail have allowed it to hold up extremely well, even four years later. But in PC VR land, pretty much everyone who has wanted to play the game probably already has. And hey, if you haven’t, you have no excuse not to buy it at a 66% discount right now!
But there’s another group of people out there with VR headsets who would love to play the game if given the chance.
Sorry Quest friends, I see you. Unfortunately Half-Life: Alyx would need a complete rework just to get it to run smoothly on standalone headsets, which would not only require a ton of work, but also decimate the look and feel of the game to the point of losing its essence. Instead, I’m talking about PSVR 2 owners.
Getting Half-Life: Alyx onto PSVR 2 would be a win all around. Here’s why.
PS5 Has the Power to Handle Half-Life: Alyx
Photo by Road to VR
Taking a made-for-PC VR game and getting it running on Quest just about always requires decimating the game to the point of garish graphics. That’s the unfortunate reality of trying to run PC VR games on a standalone headset. And that’s why so many developers build games that are made with Quest’s performance limitations in mind from the get-go.
Half-Life: Alyx is a visual spectacle, with details unmatched by almost any other VR game you can play. Aside from PC VR, there’s really only one other VR platform that has the power to handle the game the way the creators intended: that’s PS5 and PSVR 2.
Half-Life: Alyx’s minimum VR specs are as follows:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Memory: 12 GB RAM
Graphics: GTX 1060
PS5 has a rather custom architecture, but here are the roughly equivalent components if it were a PC:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
Memory: 16GB RAM (unified memory)
Graphics: RTX 3060 Ti
So not only does PS5 exceed the minimum specs of Half-Life: Alyx, but unlike most games, Alyx actually looks and runs impressively well at its minimum settings. And because PS5 is a singular hardware spec, Valve could spend its time dialing in optimizations for this hardware specifically, making sure it looks and runs great on all PS5 consoles.
Those of you who really know your stuff might point out that the minimum specs for Alyx don’t take into account the higher resolution of modern headsets. Valve’s Index has a resolution of 2.3MP per-eye, while PSVR 2 nearly doubles that at 4MP per-eye.
But, PSVR 2 also has eye-tracking which Index does not. That means it’s possible to implement eye-tracked foveated rendering to reduce the number of pixels drawn for each eye without reducing visual quality. Valve might need to build eye-tracked foveated rendering into its Source 2 engine to make this happen—though it’s unclear how much work it would take.
The only major performance conflict between Half-Life: Alyx and PSVR 2 that I can think of would be PSVR 2’s poor reprojection tech. Many PSVR 2 games target a 60Hz refresh rate and then PS5 projects those frames to reach the 120Hz refresh rate of the headset. Unfortunately PSVR 2 has always had worst-in-class reprojection that shows lots of ghosting.
I just don’t see Valve accepting their game running on PSVR 2 with 60Hz to 120Hz reprojection. Sony would either need to agree to finally come up with a better solution, or Valve would have to target a native 90Hz or 120Hz refresh rate for Half-Life: Alyx on PSVR 2.
PSVR 2 Players Are Hungry for AAA Content
PSVR 2 is one of the best VR headsets on the market today, but it’s in an unfortunate predicament. Despite PS5 having so much more processing power available than Quest headsets, the bulk of new games coming to PSVR 2 were designed first and foremost with Quest in mind. Which means most PSVR 2 games hardly scratch the surface of what kind of visuals PSVR 2 is really capable of, even if they get superficial enhancements like improved resolution and textures over the Quest version.
Sony has done little to remedy this issue. While the headset launched with a decent lineup of good-looking VR games, there’s been very little followup on AAA content from Sony. Compared to the original PSVR, Sony just doesn’t seem to be investing in high-quality first-party VR content to attract people to the headset.
And while PS5 might not have a huge userbase right now, you can bet that 90% of current owners would likely buy Half-Life: Alyx, and plenty of existing PS5 owners would consider buying the headset just to play this legendary VR game.
Valve’s Own Headset is Out of Date
Image courtesy Valve
Valve’s first (and so far only) VR headset is even older than Half-Life: Alyx itself, having launched in mid-2019 (compared to Alyx in early-2020). It held up for a good many years—longer than most VR headsets—but it’s officially past its prime.
So while one argument for not putting Half-Life: Alyx on PSVR 2 would be ‘why would Valve do that when they want to keep the game exclusive to PC so they can sell more of their headsets’… there’s really not much of a market left for the five year old device.
There’s Precedent
To some, the idea of Valve putting one of its games on a game console might sound insane. But it’s happened before.
In 2007 Valve released The Orange Box, a collection of Valve’s top games of the era: Half-Life: 2 (with Episode 1 & Episode 2), Portal, and Team Fortress 2.
People were thrilled to be able to play this collection of games that were once mostly exclusive to PC. And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to do the same with Half-Life: Alyx.
The Orange Box was considered not only an excellent value in gaming, but was also a commercial success for Valve by all accounts and a plus for its brand as a top-notch game studio.
Sony Has Embraced Steam… How About a Little Quid Pro Quo?
The forthcoming PSVR 2 to PC adapter | Image courtesy Sony
In the last few years, Sony has upended the long-held tradition of keeping its first-party blockbuster games exclusive to its own consoles. You can now play games like Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, Returnal, and God of War through Steam. And, if you’ve got the PC for it, you can make them look and run even better than they do on a PS5. And given the viral success of Helldivers 2 (Sony’s first simultaneous launch on both PS5 and PC) it’s likely this trend will only continue.
This is undoubtedly a big win for consumers.
Considering the significance of Sony bringing first-party content to Steam, I’m sure the company has been given the white glove treatment from Valve internally; these companies are already talking and working together.
And let’s not forget that Sony is already preparing to release a PSVR 2 adapter for PC, which means PSVR 2 owners who happen to have a gaming PC will be able to play Alyx through Steam. Wouldn’t it be nice for Valve to extend the same the same opportunity to PSVR 2 owners who don’t also have a gaming PC?
Valve is Different
Image courtesy Valve
In almost no other case would any of this have even a remote chance of happening… if Valve wasn’t… well, Valve.
Valve is an incredibly unique gaming company by pretty much every metric. Not just its unique flat management structure and ‘work on what you want to’ culture. It’s also the only major gaming platform that’s privately owned.
That means Valve can make decisions that aren’t predicated merely on what’s the absolutely best thing for their shareholders or bottom line. They can make decisions to do things because it’s what they want to do, not because it’s going to make someone the most money.
Both the Index headset and Half-Life: Alyx almost surely wouldn’t even exist if Valve was a publicly-traded company. Valve invested massive resources into building a top-notch headset and a game for the barely-proven medium. It was a huge gamble that it would be worth it. Surely just making Half-Life: 3 for PC would have made them more money.
But near as we can tell, Index and Half-Life: Alyx exist because people at Valve wanted to make them. They wanted to make an amazing VR game for people to enjoy and a great headset for people to play it with.
Given the numbers, it seems like Valve probably made a return on their investment with Half-Life: Alyx, but almost certainly not as much as they could have made if they opted to follow the most profitable option in front of them compared to the most rewarding one.
That is to say: if Valve was a typical publicly-traded gaming company, there wouldn’t be even a glimmer of hope that Half-Life: Alyx could make it to PSVR 2. But with Valve being Valve, I think there’s at least a chance.
– – — – –
Valve has said over the years that its VR business decisions have been guided by wanting to grow the medium as a whole—hence its hardware-agnostic support for VR headsets on SteamVR. If Half-Life: Alyx would help PSVR 2 thrive as its own VR platform… that’s surely good for VR players, developers, and the medium as a whole.
Japanese studio UNIVRS announced Attack on Titan VR:Unbreakable in late 2022, making for the hit anime’s first official VR game. Now the studio says it’s releasing the game in early access on Quest next month, giving us our first look at gameplay. And it looks pretty rough.
The studio today announced that Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable is releasing on Quest in early access on July 23rd, priced at just $5.
While it’s difficult to argue with such an honest price tag, the new gameplay video is a pretty stark departure from the concept trailer released in June 2023, which admittedly features pre-rendered animations.
Of course, we’ll be reserving judgement until we actually get a chance to go hands-on with the game, although it’s undoubtedly not the strongest start.
As the first official Attack on Titan VR game, Unbreakable lets players enter the world of the hit anime to become a member of the Scout Regiment and fight against the Titans for the survival of mankind. That means plenty of swinging through the city with your omni-directional mobility gear, and bringing down hulking Titans with your trusty blades.
The early access version is set to include the first two chapters of the game, each offering 2-3 hours of action, the studio says. It’s also set offer both single and two-player co-op, however the studio notes co-op mode will be under development until the full 1.0 release, which is slated to arrive in Late 2024.
A previous report maintained that Meta is getting ready to show off prototype AR hardware at the company’s upcoming Connect developer conference in September, which up until now has been tightly under wraps. Now Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’s “almost ready” to reveal a pair of “unmistakably [AR] glasses.”
Update (July 2nd, 2024): Zuckerberg sat down with Kane ‘Kallaway’ Sutter in a recent video interview where he revealed that the company’s prototype AR glasses are nearly ready to be shown off to the public.
“The glasses are, I think, going to be a big deal,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re almost ready to start showing the prototype version of the full holographic glasses. We’re not going to be selling it broadly; we’re focused on building the full consumer version rather than selling the prototype.”
Zuckerberg noted early testers were left with “a giddy reaction” when demoing the device, which are indeed set be glasses and not a headset like HoloLens 2 or Quest 3:
The prototype version is “not the most stylish thing, but […] it’s unmistakably glasses, not a headset,” Zuckerberg confirmed.
The original article detailing the previous report follows below:
Original (March 5th, 2024): A report from Business Insider maintains Meta’s AR team has been tapped to get its ‘Orion’ AR glasses ready to unveil at Connect 2024, which typically happens in October. The report cites two people familiar with the matter, whose identities were confirmed by Business Insider.
Orion has been under development for the past nine years, however there is allegedly now “internal pressure to ensure a high level of performance” at Connect, which the company regularly uses to not only unveil new products, such as Quest 3, but also research projects and prototypes such as Project Aria, which when unveiled in 2020 showed off a bevy of sensors the company was using to train its AR perception systems and assess public perception of the technology.
Project Aria | Image courtesy Meta
It’s uncertain if Orion and Project Nazare, are one in the same, which Meta teased back in 2021, saying it would be the company’s “first full augmented reality glasses.” Back then, Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg outlined just how difficult it would be:
“There’s a lot of technical work to get this form-factor and experience right. We have to fit hologram displays, projectors, batteries, radios, custom silicon chips, cameras, speakers, sensors to map the world around you and more into glasses that are about 5mm thick. So we still have a ways to go with Nazare, but we’re making good progress,” Zuckerberg said.
Speaking to The Verge late last year, Meta CTO and Reality Labs Chief Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth described the company’s AR glasses as having been built on a “prohibitively expensive technology path.”
According to Business Insider, it’s expected that a consumer version of the AR glasses won’t be ready for a number of years, as previous reports maintain it could come as soon as 2027.
Sony’s new headset, officially dubbed the SRH-S1 “content creation system” combines a compact form-factor with novel controllers. I got to check out the headset first-hand at AWE 2024 and came away impressed with the headset itself, even if the input and tracking still need some work.
The yet-to-be-priced Sony SRH-S1 is being designed as an enterprise headset. It’s built with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor for standalone usage. Sony also tells us it can be driven by a PC through a compressed video stream (like Quest Link).
Sony confirmed to Road to VR the headset’s actual resolution is 13.6MP (3,552 × 3840) per-eye, using Sony’s own ECX344A OLED microdisplay. The display is capable of 90 FPS and 1,000 nits (at 20% duty cycle), with 96% DCI-P3 color coverage. That means the Sony SRH-S1 with has higher resolution and better color accuracy than Vision Pro:
Sony SRH-S1:
13.6MP per-eye
96% DCI-P3
Apple Vision Pro
11.7MP per-eye
92% DCI-P3
The Sony MR headset also has compact lenses with a flip-up visor, and two utterly unique controllers: one is a star-shaped pointer, and the other is a ring that goes on your finger.
Photo by Road to VR
The SRH-S1’s ergonomic design is hits all the right notes. The headset has hardware-adjustable IPD, flip-up visor, rear-mounted battery for balance, and eye-relief adjustment. The eye-relief adjustment allows you to bring the lenses as close as possible to your eyes for the maximum field-of-view.
Photo by Road to VR
And though it’s all plastic, the headset and controllers feel well built, including the flip-up visor mechanism. Sony pitches the flip-up visor primarily so a user sitting at a connected computer can see the full resolution of their display, then flip down the visor when they’re ready to view virtual content.
Photo by Road to VR
Granted, even with the eye-relief dialed all the way in, the field-of-view wasn’t expansive. It felt smaller than something like Quest 3, but not too small to be useful. A smaller field-of-view also means the headset’s pixels are even more densely packed, which—if the optics are up to the task—would mean notably sharper imagery than Quest 3 or Vision Pro.
Photo by Road to VR
In my short time with the headset the display looked impressively sharp with absolutely no individual visible pixels. However, the content I saw wasn’t great for clearly comparing how the sharpness stacks up to contemporary headsets. I can say though that the optics appeared to have great edge-to-edge clarity, rivaling what I’m used to seeing with Quest 3’s excellent lenses.
I noticed some reflections in the lenses, though I’m fairly certain most of this was due to external light reaching the lenses from the headset’s open periphery. I didn’t get to try it but Sony has shown the headset with a soft peripheral blocker add-on for when you’d rather have less reflections and more immersion.
The demo seen I saw was a virtual filming setup where I was able to move and adjust a virtual camera that was shooting a virtual scene. I could also control the lighting by moving lights around and charging their colors.
While everything looked very sharp, the content being shown didn’t look well optimized for running on a standalone headset. That made the experience quite choppy—probably not running at a steady 90 FPS as it should—which made the head-tracking feel sub-par.
This probably impacted the feeling of the controller-tracking too, though I think the controllers had their own issues with latency and precision. The ring controller in particular had tons of jitter, making it quite bad for any kind of precision input—even just grabbing and moving things. The star-shaped controller felt much more precise, not just because the tracking was more steady, but also because you naturally hold it with an outstretched index finger, making it a natural ‘pointing device’. Even so it didn’t feel as precise as what you’d expect from a Quest 2 or Quest 3 controller.
Photo by Road to VR
I quite like the concept of the SRH-S1 controllers, but they need some work still on more than just tracking. Both controllers actually have physical buttons on them which are elegantly hidden under the skin… which also makes it very unintuitive to know they even exist.
The rep showing me the headset was trying to describe the location of one of the buttons for me to press by saying something like “it’s on your index finger,” but they weren’t talking about the button under the tip of my finger. Instead, there’s another hidden button that you press with the inside of the first segment of your index finger (before you reach the first knuckle).
The SRH-S1 controller has three buttons on it… but you probably wouldn’t notice unless someone told you about them | Photo by Road to VR
I literally don’t know if I’ve ever pressed a button using that part of my finger. So beyond being invisible, the fact that it’s in a weird place made it even more of an odd choice. It’s not necessarily a bad choice; this might be a great way to get two distinct inputs from one finger, given the unique controller design, but it needs to be much more intuitive.
And, indeed, it’s likely user experience details which will make or break the Sony’s SRH-S1 MR headset as a viable competitor to other headsets on the market. I feel fairly confident the company can get the device’s head and controller-tracking tightened up without any breakthroughs or major redesigns. But does Sony expect enterprise developers to figure out all the small details about how to teach users to use these unique controllers, and how to use them best in their applications?
Sony says the SRH-S1 is specifically made to work with Siemens NX, a comprehensive suite of CAD tools used by Sony itself. Presumably it will work with a wider range of software too, but presently it’s unclear what software platform or software standard the headset will support. Presumably OpenXR compatibility would be a good choice as an open standard, but even beyond that it’s not clear if Sony plans to maintain a software distribution platform for the headset or leave it up to companies to figure out how to deploy and manage the software.
Despite this being an MR headset, Sony unfortunately wasn’t ready to show the passthrough view, saying it was still being worked on.
Sony plans to launch the SRH-S1 headset later this year. But pricing, regional availability, and software compatibility haven’t been announced yet.
Meta announced in 2021 its was working with Rockstar Games to bring Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to Quest. While a recent comment made by the company over the weekend sparked renewed hope the iconic open world game is still in development, Meta was quick to delete the comment with no further explanation, which isn’t exactly confidence inspiring.
In the comment section of a recent YouTube video for Racket Club (2023), Meta responded to user ‘internetpebble4731’ asking if there was a release date for GTA: San Andreas or whether the project had been officially cancelled.
What seemed like a longshot actually garnered a response from Meta itself, stating “we don’t have a release date yet, but we’re working on it!”
Image captured by Road to VR
We reached out to Meta while the comment was still live, and have yet to receive confirmation back whether they’re indeed “working on it” or it’s been officially cancelled. In the meantime, the company has deleted the comment, which feels more than just a bit like being ghosted.
Granted, Meta’s response seems fairly boilerplate as far as a social media management goes. A vote of confidence though, even a fairly miniscule one like a YouTube comment, wouldn’t need to be deleted if it were actually true.
At the time of its announcement in 2021, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Rockstar Games has been working with the company “for years” to bring the game to VR, which was supposed to target Quest 2.
“This new version of what I think is one of the greatest games ever made will offer players an entirely new way to experience this iconic open world in virtual reality,” Zuckerberg said at the time.
So, is it cancelled, or is Meta just playing it tight-lipped? As bad as it looks, there’s really no telling for now. The company’s Connect 2024 developer conference may be the next logical opportunity for any sort of update, which takes place September 25th-26th.
Meta announced that security patches for Quest 1 are officially coming to an end next month, marking the final phase-out of the now five-year-old headset.
Meta sent an email to Quest 1 owners on Friday stating the 2019-era Quest will no longer receive any security updates or bug fixes starting August 31st, 2024.
While users will still be able to download and play supported apps, the company notes that “if any security vulnerabilities are discovered in the future, private data that is directly stored on the device or accessible from it would be at risk of compromise.”
Quest [left] and Quest 2 [right] | Photo by Road to VR
The first indication that Quest 1 was headed for the chopping block came in early 2023 when Meta announced that first-party social apps Parties and Meta Horizon Home would no longer support Quest 1.
It’s unclear whether Quest 2 will meet a similar fate so quickly. While Meta hasn’t released official sales figures, the company’s 2020-gen standalone is widely considered the best-selling VR headset to date. To boot, it still holding the top spot as a the most popular VR headset on Steam, with 38.10% of surveyed users using Quest 2 to play SteamVR games.
Meanwhile, Meta appears to making room for a new headset to supplant Quest 2 in its lineup, as Quest is now out of stock in nearly all regions when purchased direct from Meta.
You can see the full email from Meta to Quest 1 owners below:
Hi [User],
We’d like to let you know that starting August 31, 2024, we will no longer provide bug fixes or security updates for Meta Quest 1 headsets. You will still be able to download new apps and continue using your existing apps as long as they are supported by the developer. However, if any security vulnerabilities are discovered in the future, private data that is directly stored on the device or accessible from it would be at risk of compromise.
This update follows our announcement in January 2023, when we stopped releasing new features and new Meta Quest apps for Quest 1 on the Quest Store.
We’re excited about the future of Meta Quest and look forward to providing you with more groundbreaking MR experiences.
In the meantime, Meta Store Support is available to assist you with general inquiries.
