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The Future of Reality is Mixed

Back in the 1980s I worked as a penny stockbroker in Denver Colorado. If you’ve ever seen The Wolf of Wall Street, I was one of those people “dialing for dollars” as we called it. When the market closed at 2 PM, we would often head to a bar to drink away our stress. A co-worker friend named Jim Barlow used to tell this horrible joke where he would write on a bar napkin something that went like:

Person 1: “M R ducks”

Person 2: “M R not ducks!”

Person 1: “M R 2 ducks. See dem wings?”

M R Headsets

The virtual reality market has been wrestling with various acronyms for years. Recently the vernacular has settled around:

  • Virtual Reality or VR, when users are fully immersed in a virtual world with no view of the physical world
  • Augmented Reality, or AR, when users are looking through lenses with a transparent display, such as a wave guide, that places digital objects in the physical world.
  • Mixed Reality, or MR, brings the experience of AR into a VR headset. Users see the real world through cameras, and the headset mixes virtual objects into the scene.

Meta’s Quest 3 and Apple’s Vision Pro were the first mainstream headsets to feature high resolution color stereo “pass through,” enabling users to experience a blending of the physical and virtual worlds. The MR feature really changes the user experience. No longer do you feel totally isolated from the rest of the world.

Mixed reality enables new kinds of experiences. I regularly use my Quest 3 when I need screen real estate than my 14” laptop provides. New games that integrate the physical environment have started to show up too. One to watch is Laser Limbo from one of the team members who helped create Tower Tag. Another is Spatial Ops from Resolution Games, one of the most successful consumer VR game developers in the world.

M R New Headsets

While Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest headsets are not ideally suited for location-based VR, some new MR headsets are on the near horizon. LBE leaders HTC VIVE and Pico are both preparing to launch new headsets incorporating full-color, stereo passthrough and other tech necessary to deliver high quality mixed reality experiences.

Pico 4 Ultra

Pico just launched their Pico 4 Ultra in China. Priced at US$600 it’s a worthy competitor to the Meta Quest 3. It offers the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip as the Quest 3. Both headsets offer roughly the same display resolution and field of view and are about the same weight.

Depth Sensors
The Pico 4 Ultra includes a depth sensor, something that the Quest Pro and 3 featured. It’s a critical part of being able to deliver mixed reality experiences. The depth sensors allow more accurate measurement of the environment so the system knows where to “place” virtual objects in the scene. If a monster is coming out of a wall, the system needs to know where the walls are. Or if a dinosaur is going to stomp across the floor, it needs to know where the obstacles might be so it can maneuver around them.

Connectivity
The Pico 4 Ultra is the first headset to support the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 standard, which operates on the same 6 GHz frequency as Wi-Fi 6e. After talking to several experts in the networking space, the advantages of 7 over 6e are unclear (vs the benefits of 6e of 6 which are substantial.)

New Focus from HTC Vive?

HTC Vive Focus 3 has been the premium headset for the LBE market since I offered a sneak preview during the VR Arcade Summit in 2021. But that makes it over 3 years old in a market that is moving rapidly. The fact that it’s still the go-to headset shows how far ahead of the market it was. But it’s starting to show its age, especially in the MR department. The Focus 3 offers only low resolution black and white pass through.

HTC has been teasing a new headset that tech blogger Brad Lynch suggests is a next generation Focus 3. It will have the same display optics, but will be upgraded with a slightly more robust processor, stereo color passthrough for mixed reality, and built-in eye tracking.

HTC Vive Focus 4 Leak:

📷 Dual Color Cameras w/ Depth Sensor
📺 Same Optics/Displays/Controllers as Focus 3
⏹️ Same XR2 Gen 1 as XR Elite (8GB to 12GB RAM)
🔌 USB-C DisplayPort Alt Mode
👁️ Built-In Eye Tracking
🥽 Same Design as Focus 3 (Works with Focus 3 Accessories) pic.twitter.com/a1WSSrb6Cl

— Brad Lynch (@SadlyItsBradley) July 24, 2024

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking has been around for years. HTC included it in a headset in 2017, and Quest made it a feature of the Quest Pro in 2022. But adoption of the tech has languished because developers can’t count on it being there for consumers.

Apple’s Vision Pro made eye tracking the centerpiece of the user interface. By looking at an object, the “cursor” jumps to highlight exactly what the eye is focused on. This makes navigating VR much more natural, and way faster, than hand tracking. A year ago I predicted that all headsets going forward had to have eye tracking. Hopefully HTC is following this advice.

Meta’s Quest for Volume

Despite its leadership position in the consumer VR space, Meta is still looking to increase sales volumes of its Quest headsets. It’s currently clearing out the channel inventory of the Quest 2, which doesn’t offer any MR capabilities, for a new lower prices model: the Quest 3S.

Rumor is the Quest 3S will ditch the pancake lenses that make the newest headset so slim and go back to the Fresnel lenses of the Quest 2. But it will offer full color stereo passthrough for mixed reality. It’s critical for Meta find ways to support different price points without fragmenting the market for developers. If the low cost models don’t support MR experiences, then developers have smaller markets of owners to which they can sell their apps.

All of this will be clearer by the time we wrap the IAAPA show in Amsterdam on Sept 26th. HTC is planning an event there, where I hope to get a hands-on with the new Focus model. And the Meta Connect conference is scheduled to be streamed live on Sept 25th. I am sure Pico will be roaming the halls showing off their latest as well.

Whatever the details, these new headsets show the industry is heading towards a future where mixed reality and virtual reality coexist on the same headsets. Until we see a breakthrough in see-through optics (Meta claims they will be showing their latest updates at their Connect conference), mixed reality is the closest we will get to AR glasses.

September is shaping up to be interesting. Stay tuned…

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