VR Power Maker To Launch Kickstarter Soon For ‘Ears’ Audio Solution For Quest And More

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Rebuff Reality is planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign this month for its off-ear audio solution that’s said to be compatible with a range of VR headsets.

Rebuff makes accessories for VR headsets including the impressive VR Power battery pack we reviewed recently that solves some of the biggest problems associated with Oculus Quest. Its upcoming VR Ears solution is said to provide a similar kind of audio experience to the Valve Index. Index features powerful off-ear speakers that sit right outside the ears, providing realistic and loud sound that focuses you on a virtual world while still allowing you to hear the occasional interruption from the real world.

Some VR headsets feature earbud solutions that fit inside the ear while others, like Oculus Quest, integrate audio into the strap of the device. Neither approach is ideal and it looks like VR Ears might extend the audio capabilities of many headsets.

The Rebuff Reality website suggests VR Ears will work with at least Oculus Quest, HTC Vive, Pimax 8K, Oculus Rift S, PSVR, and possibly other headsets. We went hands-on with an early version of the solution at CES in January and came away impressed.

According to Rebuff Reality, “To be able to reach the optimum Sound Pressure Level (SPL) at the ear, we made VR Ears active, adding an in a lithium polymer battery (lasts up to 8hrs), high efficiency Digital Amplifier and Digital Signal Processor (DSP).”

Rebuff Reality’s VR Power solution is currently backordered. According to the company, COVID-19 impacted its supply chain and logistics infrastructure. VR Power includes two USB-C output ports so it can charge an Oculus Quest and an accessory from its single battery pack. According to Rebuff Reality, VR Power can be used to charge up VR Ears during use.

We’ll provide updates on both VR Power and VR Ears in the coming weeks. Hardware-based Kickstarter projects are generally pretty risky as a lot can go wrong, and even products that do ship after crowdfunding are often delayed.

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Valve: VR Adoption ‘Has Gone Pretty Much The Way We Thought It Was Going To’

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The slow growth of the PC VR market since 2016 has led to a lot of discussion of whether the platform failed. But, for Valve, things have apparently gone pretty much as planned.

Valve’s Robin Walker suggested as much in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun surrounding the release of Half-Life: Alyx last week.

“I think there were always a lot of venture capitalists who really wanted VR to explode in some way that we’d never seen hardware do before, but VR adoption has gone pretty much the way we thought it was going to,” Walker explained. “We’ve always said we should be realistic about how this is going to go. I think that we leave [Alyx] now convinced that there’s a really interesting medium that can build experiences that we haven’t been able to build on our previous platforms. We would never have believed that VR was going to replace anything – that’s all silly talk.”

Early PC VR systems launched with big price tags and required expensive PCs to run, putting up huge barriers to entry. While those challenges still remain to an extent, cheaper, easier to use headsets, standalone hardware like Oculus Quest and big titles like Alyx have made getting into VR a more attractive proposition. But, while Facebook has driven costs down to accessible $399 headsets, Valve also doubled down on the enthusiast market, launching the $999, high-specification Valve Index last year. Neither company has revealed sales stats for their respective headset to date, though.

Crucially, though, Valve software like Alyx doesn’t require an Index to run; you can play it on practically any headset that works with a VR-ready PC.

Still, it’s interesting to hear that VR is progressing as Valve had predicted. It would be even more interesting to hear where the company thinks the industry will go from here. Ahead of Alyx’s launch Gabe Newell suggested we were “closer to the Matrix” than we thought, but does he mean months, years or more?

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Steam Hardware Survey Revamped, Will Be Reliable Estimate Of PC VR Headset Ownership

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Valve revamped the VR section of the Steam Hardware Survey to support all PC VR headsets. When the data for March is released later today, it will include any headset the user has connected in the past month.

The Steam Hardware Survey is offered randomly to a portion of Steam users each month. If they agree, it uploads their system specs. These specs are publicly collated each month, giving PC developers insight into the hardware capabilities of their market.

UploadVR has been collecting the VR headset data reported by this survey for years now. Because Facebook and HTC don’t release sales figures, the survey is actually the most reliable publicly available indicator of PC VR headset sales.

However, before these changes it had a major limitation: only reporting headsets currently connected to the PC. While many PC VR headset owners likely keep their headset plugged in, some may prefer to unplug and store it.

In an email sent to UploadVR and others, Valve explained that starting on March 1, Steam started to use the SteamVR records of any headset connected in the past month, instead of just scanning current USB devices (which will now be just a fallback).

Using SteamVR’s data also means the survey will be tracking wireless headsets, theoretically including Oculus Quest via Virtual Desktop. It also means it can keep track of less common headsets that weren’t in the Hardware Survey’s whitelist beforehand.

Drivers for the Pimax 5K Plus and the community drivers Sony’s PlayStation VR seem to have been retroactively added to the report for the February survey, which has now been updated. Those headsets have usage shares of 0.04% and 0.05% respectively.

How can you use a PlayStation VR on Steam you might ask? Third party drivers like Trinus or iVRy allow it to interface with SteamVR. But unless you’re just using it for cockpit games, you’ll also need a third party tracking service, such as
PSMoveService or Driver4VR. Keep in mind the quality of tracking often won’t be as good as on a PlayStation 4.

These changes should make the Steam Hardware Survey by far the most reliable estimate of PC VR headset ownership. Steam has roughly 100 million active users, so each percent should represent roughly one million users.

If a significant portion of users don’t keep their headsets connected to their PC, or are using wireless headsets, it could dramatically change our understanding of the size of the PC VR market.

Once the March data is released, we’ll bring you the figures, visualizations, and our analysis on UploadVR.com.

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VR chair startup raises funds, as pandemic boosts prospects for VR and gaming

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Roto VR, startup which markets an interactive, ‘360 degree’ chair, has raised £1.5 million in a funding round led by Pembroke VCT. Others in the round include TVB Growth Fund, managed by The FSE Group.

The chair is designed to make VR more accessible to a mass audience, many of whom have turned to VR and gaming to while away the hours as much of the world is locked-down during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Founded in 2015 by video games industry veterans, Elliott Myers and Gavin Waxkirsh, Roto VR is an interactive chair that addresses the physical problems of consuming VR whilst seated, such as motion sickness and tangling cables, whilst also enhancing the immersive experience with haptic / vibration feedback in the chair.

The Roto chair is motorized and can auto-rotate to wherever the user is looking, allowing for 360-degree viewing, and thus allows the user to stay in the VR simulation for longer periods of time.

The inbuilt desktop also supports input devices such as a keyboard and mouse which means it can be used in 360-degree desktop computing.

“Most people sit down to watch movies, work, play games and browse the internet whilst seated and we see no reason why the exciting new medium of VR will be any different,” said Myers.

The product is compatible with most VR Head Mounted Displays and is also compatible with all movies and games, as well as additional accessories such as racing wheels and joysticks.

The company is due to launch the consumer and office version of Roto imminently. In addition, it will be marketed to cinemas and arcades.

Andrew Wolfson, CEO Pembroke Investment Managers LLP, said: “In Elliott we have found an entrepreneur who has solved a problem for the VR market with a solution that addresses the physical issues encountered whilst consuming VR content, as well as significantly enhancing the experience. We see future customers coming from both the B2B and B2C markets, in fields such as experiential attractions, home, cinemas and shopping centres.”

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Strivr Secures $30M Series B Financing to Accelerate Adoption of VR Training

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Strivr, the immersive VR training company, announced the successful completion of a $30 million financing round, something the startup says will help it further expand adoption of enterprise-focused immersive learning.

The Series B financing round was led by Georgian Partners, with participation by venture capital firms including Franklin Templeton, Prologis Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures and Alumni Ventures Group. The latest round brings the company’s overall investment to $51 million.

Strivr is focused on building immersive learning software using VR headsets. It’s created VR training programs for the likes of Verizon, jetBlue, Fidelity, GE’s FieldCore, and Walmart, the latter of which was apparently so successful that the big box store expanded the VR learning program to all of its 4,700 nationwide, bringing with it over 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to US-based Walmart stores back in 2018.

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Although it now puts a major focus on retail and industrial training, Strivr actually first catered to professional and collegiate sports teams when it was founded in 2015 by former Stanford Cardinal kicker Derek Belch and Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human interaction Lab.

“With more than 1.5 million training sessions conducted in VR and over 22,000 headsets deployed across our customer base, Strivr has developed the world’s only end-to-end software platform for the delivery of immersive solutions to elevate workforce learning and performance,” said Belch.

As a part of the latest financing round, Strivr takes on its board of directors Tyson Baber, partner at Georgian Partners.

The post Strivr Secures $30M Series B Financing to Accelerate Adoption of VR Training appeared first on Road to VR.

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Valve Revamps Steam Survey to More Accurately Count VR Headsets

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Valve’s long running Steam Survey has been one of the most transparent data sources for gauging which VR headsets are the most used. Now the company says it’s revamping the way it collects data to more accurately count VR headsets in use on Steam.

Although Steam represents just one of several major VR platforms, it’s the only one of the bunch that transparently presents data about which VR headsets users are using via the Steam Survey which collects data about hardware used by the Steam population. The data helps developers and the rest of the VR industry understand important trends which can inform development, marketing, support, and more. Our last major analysis of the Survey data is here.

Valve tells Road to VR that it’s revamping the way it collects data about VR headsets used on Steam, which should increase the accuracy of the figures in the Survey. The company says that both wireless and less common headsets will now be represented in the data.

Previously, the company explained, VR headsets were counted by the Survey only if they were plugged in via USB at the time the data was collected. The new method will allow SteamVR to report to the Survey any headsets that have been used by the system in the last month, regardless of whether they are plugged in at the time of data collection.

SEE ALSO

SteamVR Gets a New Dashboard, Finally Ditching Steam Big Picture

Valve expects the change will result in a bump in the number of headsets counted in the survey. While the change in data collection hasn’t happened yet, Valve has already tweaked the Survey in a way that shows headsets being used on Steam which never previously appeared in the data, including Pimax headsets and PlayStation VR (which can be used with Steam via some third-party workarounds).

We’ll see the biggest changes when the Survey rolls over to the next month; at last count, it shows that 1.01% of Steam users used a VR headset in February.

The post Valve Revamps Steam Survey to More Accurately Count VR Headsets appeared first on Road to VR.

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Facebook Ends Samsung Gear VR Software Updates, 360 Video Downloads & Films

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Facebook is ending software updates for the Samsung Gear VR. Further, users will no longer be able to access films or download the Oculus Video app.

The Samsung Gear VR is a smartphone-based VR headset. Like Google Cardboard and its plastic derivatives, users slot in their smartphone which acts as the display and computer. Unlike cardboard, however, it features a dedicated gyroscope and accelerometer, and runs the same Oculus mobile platform and store as the Oculus Go.

The first Gear VR was released in late 2014 for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4. While labeled an ‘Innovator Edition’, the product was essentially the first modern consumer VR headset.

Over the years, new versions were released to support the latest Samsung phones. The headset did not change significantly, other than the inclusion of a 3DoF controller from 2017 onward.

No Updates, No Films, No New 360 Video Users

Samsung phones will no longer receive new Gear VR features via Oculus OS updates.

From today, the Oculus Video and Oculus 360 Photos apps will no longer be able to be downloaded on Gear VR. If you already have those apps installed on your phone you can continue to use them, but rented and purchased films will no longer be available. Existing users with purchased films should receive Oculus Store credit “equivalent to the cost you paid for any titles you bought,” according to Facebook. Users should be able to continue to use other film services like Netflix, Prime Video, and Fandango Now, but we should note that some developers who supported Gear VR stopped once it became clear Facebook wasn’t going to update the platform anymore.

The included Oculus Browser will no longer be updated. In Facebook’s own words, this may introduce “an increased security risk, as with using any out-of-date web browser”. At Oculus Connect conferences, the browser has been said to be one of the top used apps on mobile VR.

Samsung’s own Samsung Internet is available on Gear VR, but hasn’t been updated since April 2019. Other third party browsers exist on the store, but with low user ratings.

From September 15, developers will no longer be able to support Gear VR on new apps released to the Oculus Store.

Gear VR Was Already Dead

The announcement won’t be a surprise to those following the Gear VR in months.

At Oculus Connect 6 back in September 2019, Oculus’ then-CTO John Carmack essentially declared the Gear VR dead.

This was prompted by the news that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 would not support VR. The Galaxy S20 followed suit this year, ending Samsung’s support of the platform.

Google’s competing Daydream smartphone VR platform is also essentially dead, with neither the Pixel 3a nor Pixel 4 supporting it and sales of the headset itself ending.

In December the Oculus SDK dropped support for Gear VR, and in January the Unity engine, used to make most VR apps, deprecated support.

Smartphone-based VR created a lot of problems. The time it takes to slot in and out the phone, and the fact the user’s phone is unusable while docked into the headset, makes people less likely to want to use VR on a regular basis. A Gear VR session could also end after a matter of minutes, depending on the device and conditions in which it is used, due to the phone’s processor reaching its thermal limits. Smartphones pack all of their components into an incredibly small space. While Samsung improves its passive cooling design almost every year, there are physical limitations which can’t be overcome packing VR into a device designed first as a phone.

Standalone VR headsets, though, incorporate the screens and computing hardware and are designed for better cooling. Despite standalones having roughly the same graphical limitations as smartphone VR, Carmack claimed that the Oculus Go saw Rift-like retention levels, whereas Gear VR’s was much lower.

Facebook previously stopped production of cables for the original Oculus Rift, leaving many owners with no repair option when it breaks. Oculus Go’s social features were dropped late last year. Facebook said Quest will be supported “for years to come”, but Go looks like it may be on the way out.

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