Shooting With Our Fingers Using Quest Hand Tracking in Tea For God (Void Room) – Sidequest

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Tea For God’s Hand-Tracking Update Is A Buggy Marvel

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I’m very, very fond of hand-tracking on Oculus Quest, even if it’s often utterly broken. Between the empty grasps of thin air and pinches of fingers you can feel something; the beginnings of the future. Tea For God’s new hand-tracking update demonstrates that perfectly, even if it is a bit of a buggy mess.

We knew this side-loaded room scale gem would be getting support for Facebook’s experimental new feature. We just didn’t realize it would be this soon; developer Void Zone released an initial build earlier this week. Tea For God seems like the ideal candidate for hand-tracking as it doesn’t require any artificial locomotion; every step and skip you make must first be made in real life.

Sure enough, moments of Tea For God with hand-tracking are pure magic. Traipsing through the game’s procedural labyrinths, which mystically morph every time you round a corner to ensure you never run out of walking room, is thrillingly immersive. Gone is the familiar curl of fingers around a controller, replaced with hands that intuitively twitch and fidget to mirror your every motion. It’s quite a thing to behold.

It’s when you need to do, well, anything other than walk or push buttons, that things fall apart a bit. The game’s list of gestures, for example, take some memorization and this early version can have trouble picking up specific inputs. Though the absence of controllers is often a delight, you’d kill for one when you need to summon a menu.

Not to mention that firefights are rendered practically impossible. It’s far too easy to obscure the tips of your fingers from the Quest’s cameras, making it a real battle to aim and then squeeze your index finger to fire a gun. I simply couldn’t get the angle I needed to fight far off enemies and, if I did, there was a good chance I then couldn’t get the gun to fire. Fortunately Void Zone did put melee combat in a few weeks ago, making close-encounters much more enjoyable.

There’s much more work to be done, then, but that goes for Quest’s hand-tracking in general, not just Tea For God. This is a jittery, stubborn mess of an experiment. Equally, though, it’s a bit of a marvellous miracle.

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Spatial raises $14M more for a holographic 3D workspace app, a VR/AR version of Zoom or Hangouts

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The worlds of virtual and augmented reality have yet to land on the applications and hardware to truly spark mass-market, consumer interest in the space, but meanwhile a startup building mixed reality services for business users has raised a round of funding, underscoring the opportunity in enterprise.

Spatial, which has developed a “holographic” collaboration platform that people use to speak and work together in virtual rooms through the use of strikingly effective avatars — think: a supercharged, virtual reality version of Zoom or a Google Hangout — is today announcing that it has raised $14 million, a Series A that it will be using to continue building out the functionality of its application and its interoperability with a wider range of hardware, as well as to start looking at how it can turn its tech into a platform that could be used by others, for example by way of an SDK.

The funding is being led by WhiteStar Capital, iNovia and Kakao Ventures, with participation from Baidu and individual investors, Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger and Zynga’s Mark Pincus, also participating. Together with Spatial’s last round, $8 million in October 2018, the company has now raised $22 million. It’s not disclosing valuation at this stage, Anand Agarawala, the CEO who co-founded the company with Jinha Lee (CPO), said in an interview.

Other investors include Expa, Lerer Hippeau, Leaders Fund, Samsung NEXT and Andy Hertzfeld (of Macintosh fame).

Spatial’s funding comes at a time when VR and AR startups have certainly seen their share of funding (Magic Leap alone has raised over $3 billion), high valuations, some extremely notable exits, and definitely the release of a number of head sets and apps — but at the end of the day, it’s estimated that there were only 6 million VR headsets sold last year, speaking to how the space has remained niche at best.

Niche in consumer, however, can speak to major opportunity in enterprise, and that is where Spatial is operating, with technology that it has built to be interoperable with any headset or AR glasses — currently including Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Quest, Magic Leap One, Qualcomm XR2 or an Android/iPhone mobile device — or even a basic PC, if that’s all a person has to use, to let companies build out what might best be described as videoconferencing on steroids: placing people into virtual rooms where they can speak to each other, or look at and manipulate holographic models together, and more.

Spatial itself has seen its business take off in the last year, Agarawala said, with inbound interest from 25% of the Fortune 1,000 bracket of businesses, and its first publicly-named customers, which include very non-tech names like Mattel, Purina/Nestle and BNP Paribas. That in itself is also a sign of how immersive, three-dimensional media is possibly, finally approaching a breakout moment.

That will also be buffered by a raft of new hardware, Agarawala said. He declined to say which companies are likely to roll out new devices but as a developer of key services that spur purchasing, Spatial gets a heads-up (no pun intended) on what is coming around the corner, and Agarawala said the picture is bright and that we might finally be exiting what he described as a “VR winter”.

“It feels like the industry is accelerating this year,” he said. “The industry is firing up 5G and that will also be a big push.” He also pointed out the development over at Amazon, where last month the company announced AWS Wavelength for ultra-low latency 5G computing at the edge, something that will have a direct impact on using and building the next generation of AR and VR headgear.

Given its position with developers, if Amazon is getting into the mix, you know something is up, he added.

The idea of taking what Spatial has built to produce its own applications for customers, and turning that into a platform that others could use, too, is something that the company had always planned to do — platforms are front and centre in Agarawala’s mind, given his pedigree of years working at Google, which acquired his previous startup, BumpTop, in 2010. But that too appears to be getting bumped up, so to speak, because of the positive outlook. 

“We have always wanted to open up our platform to let others build applications on our framework, using our avatars, leveraging our cross-platform nature, finding new applications for our hand gestures,” Agarawala said. “We wanted to open that up, but we thought that it would be years out before we did, since it doesn’t make sense for an AR/VR platform to do something like that until there is actual market demand. But there has been so much heat that we might consider doing it this year.”

Krieger’s interest in Spatial comes in the context of him investing in a number of other work-focused collaboration platforms, including Loom, Figma, and Pitch, and that’s key to what makes Spatial interesting: it’s not just tapping the VR/AR space but another very interesting area that has seen a lot of growth with the rapid rise of products like Slack, and will continue to evolve.

“Spatial’s mixed-reality solution will be a key part of the future of work,” said Krieger in a statement. “They’re taking us beyond everyday tools like Zoom and Slack and pointing the way towards what conferencing & collaboration can be like if they were invented today and I’m excited to support the journey.”

Here’s a little video I did with Spatial earlier this month during CES.

 

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AR/VR Startup Spatial Raises $14M In Series A Funding

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AR/VR startup Spatial announced that it raised $14 million in Series A funding, bringing the total amount raised to date up to $22 million.

This latest round of Series A funding was led by WhiteStar Capital, iNovia and Kakao Ventures, along with continued participation from Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger and Zynga Founder Mark Pincus.

Spatial is a cross-device, multi-user VR and AR communication platform. The software allows for collaboration in 3D workspaces using AR and VR devices, regardless of whether users are in the same room or in completely different locations, allowing them to collaborate in the same virtual workspace.

This year at CES 2020 we tried out Spatial’s software for ourselves. You can watch the video embedded above for our thoughts on the technology, as well as some mixed reality footage of what the collaboration software looks like in action.

Spatial supports AR devices such as the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap One, but also VR devices such as the Oculus Quest, and mobile and desktop devices as well. Spatial aims to support as many devices as possible across all platforms, allowing anyone to collaborate and participate without the requirement of a specific device. Users who are not physically present in the same space are represented to others as 3D avatars which can be generated from 2D photos.

The eventual aim for Spatial is to eliminate the need for physical travel for team collaboration and provide a solution that goes farther than existing remote collaboration tools like Zoom and Slack, allowing users to collaborate in the same physical space no matter where they are in the world.

More information can be found on Spatial’s website. 

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GTA V VR Mod Fixes Cutscenes, Aiming And More

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Three months ago we wrote about a new GTA V VR mod that didn’t require you to buy Vorpx to play the game with a headset. The initial release was a little crusty, but it gave you a glimpse of Los Santos in VR. Three months on, though, and the mod just got a significant new update.

Developer Luke Ross launched the update yesterday. It addresses one of my original biggest problems with the mod: cutscenes. In the original version of the mod, they’d appear as blurry, zoomed in scenes stuck to your face, which was incredibly disorientating.

With this update, though, Ross implements a universal field of view (FOV) fix that gives you a much more natural perspective during cutscenes. Not only that but the developer has removed the game’s clip planes, meaning you’ll see the entire environment when watching scenes in VR, not just the window that Rockstar originally framed.

This might still come with its issues, Ross warns, like incomplete animations and teleporting NPCs (remember Rockstar didn’t originally plan for you to see any of this). We haven’t tried it for ourselves but we’re hoping it leads to a much more comfortable experience that allows you to tackle the full campaign in VR. Originally we said the mod was better suited for just sandbox gameplay.

Not only that but the FOV fix also helps when aiming down your weapon’s sights and entering cars. The installation process for the mod has also been streamlined even further.

Other fixes in this version of the mod include smoother camera rotation when on foot and improved camera reset logic. A pretty healthy list of fixes, then. Now, if someone would just get to that Red Dead Redemption 2 VR mod.

Will you be jumping back into the GTA V VR mod with this update in place? Let us know in the comments below!

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Borderlands 2 Index Support Finally Released In Free New Update

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Since its launch on PC VR headsets last year, Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 2 VR has strangely lacked support for the Valve Index headset. That changes this week.

Borderlands 2 Index support finally arrived in a free patch issued yesterday. That includes support for the Index controllers, with a new ‘2K Knuckles Config’ binding on SteamVR. Plus you can also move based on the direction in which your hands are pointing now, instead of just your head.

Finally, there’s an option to choose between 30, 60, 90, and 120 FPS for the scope window. Index support arrives after Gearbox accidentally listed support for the headset at its launch on Steam last year.

Fans have been clamoring for Borderlands 2 Index support since last year, so today’s news will be welcomed by many. Borderlands 2 VR in general has come a long way since its launch on PSVR back in 2018. Along with coming to PC VR headsets, it’s also added all of its original story-based DLC for free and the PSVR version of the game got support for the rifle-shaped Aim controller. There’s still no co-operative multiplayer support, though.

We think the game is a very decent translation of the original to VR, even if the lack of multiplayer stings.

We’re unlikely to see many other big updates for the game at this point, and we doubt we’ll be lucky enough to get a version for Oculus Quest. Still, that doesn’t have to mean the end of Borderlands and VR. We could perhaps still see the original game get support for headsets, but we’ve also got our fingers crossed that Gearbox is working on a VR version of last year’s Borderlands 3.

Will you be digging into Borderlands 2 now it supports Index? Let us know in the comments below!

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Facebook’s Revenue Rises Again, but More Slowly Than Ever

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