VR and AR

nDreams, a British developer and publisher of VR games, has joined Aonic, a gaming conglomerate that owns stakes in OtherSide Entertainment, BKOM Studios and Milky Tea.

On July 27, the Roblox open beta test for Meta* VR headsets began. According to Roblox CEO David Baszucki, in the first five days, the owners of Quest 2 and Quest Pro downloaded the VR version of the platform “much” more than a million times.

The losses of Reality Labs, the XR division of Meta*, continue to grow. In the first half of 2023, they amounted to $7.73 billion. This is $1.9 billion more than in 2022.

Apple has reduced the plan for the production of the Vision Pro AR headset due to the complex design of the device. This is reported by the Financial Times with reference to sources.

Apple has seriously revised its sales plan for the Vision Pro AR headset, analyst Ayesha Tariq reports, citing an industry insider. It has become 6.6 times smaller.

Bank of America predicts strong sales for Apple‘s AR headset. According to his estimates, the device will be bought 1.5 million times in the first year.

The AR startup Mira has joined Apple, The Verge reports. The deal took place the day after Apple unveiled the Vision Pro augmented reality headset.

During the newly opened WWDC 2023, the announcement of a new gadget from Apple took place. The device resembles ski goggles, is controlled by eye movement, gestures and voice commands.

On the eve of the WWDC 2023 conference, Apple‘s stock price rose to a historic high, Bloomberg reports. According to the publication, this is partly due to rumors about the upcoming announcement of the XR headset.

The Reality Labs division working on augmented reality technologies remains unprofitable for Meta*. In a recent financial report, the company said that the losses of Reality Labs for the first quarter of 2023 amounted to $3.99 billion – 34.8% more than last year.

The official announcement of Apple‘s XR headset may take place in the near future, according to Bloomberg sources. According to them, last week the company showed the device to 100 top managers, and also disclosed the price and sales forecast.

According to The Verge, this figure was named by the vice president of the VR direction Meta* Mark Rabkin during a presentation for employees.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) failed to block a deal between Meta* and Within Unlimited. The District Court of California allowed the company to buy the developers of the Supernatural VR game, Bloomberg reports, citing sources.

Ambitions to create a metaverse are expensive for Meta*. In the latest financial report, the company reported that the losses of the Reality Labs division for 2022 amounted to $13.717 billion, which is 34.5% more than a year ago.

Yesterday, Bloomberg, citing sources, reported that Sony is going to produce only one million copies of PS VR 2 in the first quarter of 2023 instead of the previously planned two million. However, Sony later issued a denial.

Innersloth studio announced that Among Us VR has crossed the millionth milestone in less than 10 weeks since its release.

Ghost Ship Games has bought a minority stake in the VR studio Bolverk Games from the investment firm Capnova. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

This year, Americans spent 2% less on VR headsets compared to 2021, CNBC reports, citing data from the NPD Group. Their expenses decreased to $1.1 billion.

On December 20, Mark Zuckerberg appeared in court in the case of the purchase of the VR developer Within Unlimited. The head of Meta* tried to prove that this deal would not make his company a monopolist in the nascent market of fitness games for virtual reality.

The British company nDreams, specializing in VR games, made its first purchase. She purchased the Near Light studio for an undisclosed sum.

Ryan Smith, tech art director of R&D at Gearbox, has opened up about how the studio is already using AI in its work. He encouraged other artists to learn these tools, because they can help in solving routine tasks.

ArtStation has finally responded to the backlash from artists calling on the platform to ban AI-generated art. The company, however, tried to find a compromise, which further angered many professionals.

The surge in popularity of ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other tools has people thinking that AI will soon replace artists and will help even smaller teams create games on the scale of Cyberpunk 2077 or RDR 2. However, many devs remain skeptical.

This is almost three times more than in 2022. According to Omdia estimates, only 26 million people currently have VR headsets.

The global VR market is on the rise. According to the forecast of Newzoo analysts, in two years its revenue will exceed $ 3 billion, despite the fact that in 2019 it was only $ 0.5 billion.

On behalf of five Chinese ministries, a plan was published according to which the country plans to put 25 million VR devices on the market by 2026.

The company claims that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the lawsuit is guided by assumptions and “ignores the facts with the law.”

The Meta company banned in Russia has announced the purchase of three game development studios at once. The amount and terms of the transactions were not disclosed.

SCMP journalists suggest that such a demand for a VR headset is largely due to the fact that it is impossible to officially buy Quest 2* in China.

The names were noticed in applications for registration of the corresponding trademarks in the USA, Canada, Great Britain and a number of other countries.

Owners of VR headsets from Meta* will soon be able to no longer use social media accounts to log in. Yesterday, the company officially announced that special Meta accounts will be available to users in the near future.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal. It should be noted that this purchase will allow Soedesco to gain a foothold in the Spanish market — in the spring, the Dutch publisher launched its first foreign publishing division in Madrid.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) intends to prevent Meta* from buying Within Unlimited, a developer of a fitness game for Supernatural virtual reality. The agency sued, saying that such a deal would lead to the creation of a monopoly.

Meta* has released a fresh financial report, in which, among other things, it told about the losses of Reality Labs. According to the corporation, the losses of the XR division for the first half of 2022 amounted to $5.76 billion — 35.4% more than a year ago.

Meta* became interested in the Canadian startup AdHawk Microsystems. According to Bloomberg, the corporation is thinking about what to officially offer him a deal in the coming weeks.

British indie studio XR Games has closed a new round of funding. Praetura Ventures, Maven Capital Partners and ACT Capital Partners have invested in it.

Due to government restrictions, Chinese companies are looking for new opportunities in Western markets. Today NetEase announced its first investment in developers from Poland.

While the mobile games market is sinking by an insignificant 6.6%, the mobile AR games market may lose significantly more by the end of 2022 – as much as 20%.

Perhaps Apple is still planning to release its own augmented reality headset. This was hinted at by the head of the corporation Tim Cook (Tim Cook) in an interview with China Daily.

Meta* is going to make VR headsets safer for children. She has released an update for Meta Quest with new parental control tools.

Meta* decided not to sell the first version of AR glasses. According to The Verge, instead, the company will send them to developers so that they can make applications for the next versions.

Meta Quest 2 continues to hold the title of the best-selling VR headset in the world. IDC has estimated that 14.8 million people have bought the device since its release in October 2020.

ResearchAndMarkets.com выпустила исследование об AR-играх. Согласно ее прогнозу, в 2022-2027 годах выручка рынка будет расти в среднем на 33,8%.

Таким прогнозом поделился аналитик гонконгской фирмы TF International Securities Минг-Чи Куо (Ming-Chi Kuo). Однако он отметил, что точная дата релиза VR-гарнитуры во многом будет зависеть от графика разработки игр.

В 2020 году немецкий суд постановил, что Meta* злоупотребляет доминирующим положением в стране. Спустя три месяца после этого компания перестала продавать в Германии все свои VR-гарнитуры. Такое решение больно сказалось на доходах местных разработчиков.

According to Niantic, the startup joined it back in February, but until that moment the deal was not officially announced. However, the terms and the amount for which SpotX Games was purchased are still not disclosed.

This is reported by Bloomberg with reference to sources close to the company. According to them, Apple has also accelerated work on the rOS operating system for the headset. According to sources, all together this means that the release of the device may take place in the next few months.

The developers of the free Godot engine have received a new grant for an undisclosed amount from Reality Labs. The funds will be used to develop additional features to support AR and VR games.At the same time, the authors of Godot Engine shared their plans for the development of the XR direction for 2022:

Rec Room is a social VR platform on which users can build their game worlds and communicate with each other. The company received $145 million from investors, as a result of which its valuation increased to $3.5 billion.

Last October, Meta (formerly Facebook) released a new VR headset – Oculus Quest 2. Since that time, 10 million people have bought the device.