Hello! I’m Cas, today I’m your personal Quest news reporter. v34 came out last week
and it again, adds some pretty cool features. I mean, these may seem small features, but
sometimes they add so much more value to our VR experience. I got it today, so I wanted
to give you a tour and share some latest news you may have missed, so… let’s get…
oh by the way, you may notice that our studio has changed. After 4 years we decided to remove
the green screen studio. It’s not finished yet as I plan to decorate it with new furniture,
so excuse the mess for now but I’m really looking forward to showing you the end result.
Anyways, leave me a like if you appreciate the content! And now, join me beyond reality.
First of all! The coolest feature of them all, especially those who have kids or a pet...
like us. Hey Milkyway! Milkywayyyy... I got some food for him for this purpose.
As you can see this is a new guardian feature that lets you see pets, objects or other humans
entering your VR space, and you see a pink outline of them, which is really funny looking.
Yea, I know, some of you said I shouldn’t be petting my cat while wearing the headset
as they’ll think I can always see them with it on my face. So I try not to do it too much,
just for the purpose of filming this video.
And I asked Chary to come into my play area last night too and this is how it looks like.
This is kinda futuristic looking! It’s like she just came into my VR game or something.
Pretty awesome to have this blend of real life with the VR world.
So to turn this on yourself, you go to Settings > Experimental Settings and then scroll down
until you see Space Sense. Here, you can toggle it on. Once you’ve set your guardian, it
should work immediately.
It’s not foolproof, since this uses the headset’s cameras in the front to sense
if there’s something in your play area. So someone can still sneak up on you from
the back if they wanted to. However, considering the many videos of people getting punched
by the controllers. I think this is a major update! It’s also going to be helpful when
showing off VR to newcomers. Now, this is something that you may have missed
but will make a massive difference for us gamers, so I have to mention it.
Quest headsets are getting a new rendering update called Application SpaceWarp this week,
which means it can increase the performance of Quest games and apps by 70%. That’s really
a lot!
Without going too technical, it basically lets apps run at a half framerate by generating
every other frame synthetically. So, for example, the app could run at 36 fps instead of 72
on Quest 1, 45 fps instead of 90, or maybe 60fps instead of 120 on Quest 2. It wouldn’t
matter because visually, it will still look as smooth as on a full framerate. This opens
up resources for developers to do other cool things, like noticeable higher fidelity graphics
or maybe even develop games that would otherwise not be possible on a standalone VR headset.
PC VR had something similar called Asynchronous Spacewarp. It’s a bit different, though,
and Meta says that Application Spacewarp will give us even better results. Having tested
it, they claim that this technology can provide apps with roughly 70% more power to work with,
even after Application Spacewarp finishes its work.
Now, this technology isn’t always perfect as it is possible you can experience latency
or see visual artifacts, but Meta claims they have solutions to these side effects. They
even go so far as to claim that there are “little to no” visible artifacts in most
cases and lower head latency than any app currently on the Quest today that doesn’t
use Spacewarp. This is with the help of additional technologies available to Quest developers
like Phase Sync, Late Latching, and Positional Timewarp.
Application Spacewarp will be an opt-in feature for developers so they can turn it on and
off themselves but some of these extra features will be enabled by default. We will have to
wait until devs use these technologies before we can see the differences ourselves, but
I am definitely excited about it! What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.
These technologies are included in an Oculus SDK release, which should have been released
on November 8th. This was presented during the ASW presentation during Facebook Connect
two weeks ago, so if you’re interested in the full tech explanation, I’ll link it
below. For now, we just have to wait and see. Next to this update, Android users also got
something that iOS users already had. Phone notifications in VR, so you can stay up to
date with whatever’s going on on your phone without removing your headset.
For this to work, you have to enable them via the Oculus App on your phone by going
to your headset’s Settings Menu. Once you’ve toggled that on, you can also toggle it on
in the Quest’s in-VR settings, and it should work. If you share your Quest, don’t worry,
as you can set up a Multi-User account so your notifications will be safe and secure
from any secondary accounts.
Unfortunately, when making this video, this feature hasn’t been rolled out to my phone
app yet, only on my Quest, so I haven’t been able to test it.
And then on to Passthrough API! This was enabled last year, and I’ve shown you apps that
make use of it already, like this Piano learning AR app and a couple of other lightweight AR
games. These were demos, though, and you had to sideload most of these to try them out.
Now, the time has come that these experiences can be shipped by the developers! This means,
we’ll be getting some AR games on the Oculus Store or App Lab soon for everyone to play.
Meta has also said they’re already working on the next generation of related technologies.
Including Spatial Anchors, Scene Understanding, and the rest of their Presence Platform capabilities
that will make good on their metaverse vision.
It sounds awesome! We’re still not there yet for true AR, but this will get us closer.
I think for AR to look and feel realistic is when we have virtual objects superimposed
on our real-world that can be touched and moved around. They should also support occlusion.
So, for example, if you have a real thing moving in front of the virtual object, it
should hide behind it. You don’t see this a lot yet in consumer AR, but I think Meta
is getting us there with this tech and that’s pretty exciting so I look forward to seeing
more. If you’re a developer by the way and have a mixed reality game coming, please do
reach out with the email down here. So what else do we have? VOICE COMMANDS that...
I still cannot use because I don’t live in the United States. If you’ve missed it
as well, you can activate this from the Universal Menu; if you’re in the usa… then, if you
double-press the Oculus button on your right controller, you can initiate a voice command.
You can also say “Hey Facebook”, funny enough, since they changed their name. But
in any case, some of these voice commands can be really handy. For example, you can
use it to hide the calorie tracker. This usually takes a few steps before you can turn it off,
but using the voice command, it’s super-fast and easy. Plus, you can ask stuff like ‘How
can I factory reset?’. Pretty helpful, so I’ll link a list of full voice commands
in the description for you to check. If only I could use it myself 😉
And here’s a feature no one asked for, at least I don’t like it, Quest apps can soon
send you notifications if you allow them. They will be delivered in VR and also appear
in the alerts tab of the Oculus mobile app. Meta says it can also push relevantion notifications
to your phone, and that devs can create two types of notifications. Campaign and triggered.
Campaign are manually sent to a targeted group of users, triggered notifications are personalized
and pushed automatically based on the user. So it is very possible, we’ll be getting
promotions or from games you like, a new update or DLC.
I don’t enjoy notifications as I get very distracted from them, so it’s good to know
that you can at least disable or customize these notifications on a per-app level on
your smartphone. One last piece of news. It’s been reported
by the New York Times that Meta is planning on opening physical stores for more than a
year. The goal is to introduce people to Meta’s hardware, like VR headsets, glasses, and their
video-calling Portal products. I think this is great as most people just don’t know
what VR is like or what they’re missing without trying it once. So this could help
bring more people into VR. It’s not sure yet when they are opening their stores, though
and whether this will happen at all but I’ll keep you updated.
Next to this, a bit of a sad outro. The Oculus branding is going away, as announced during
Facebook Connect. Social media platforms by Facebook will stay the same name, like Instagram
and Whatsapp, but their products that have something to do with the Metaverse, like Oculus
Quest, will be rebranded to Meta. And here is already the first time we’re seeing the
Oculus branding being renamed to Meta... This was the latest blog post on Oculus.com.
And it’s just happening so fast, even though Meta said it would take some time. I’m going
to delay it as long as I can, but I’ll probably have to start saying Meta Quest soon, too.
I guess when people start looking for Meta Quest instead of Oculus. Pretty pretty sad,
kinda an end of an era…
Still, I hope you enjoyed this quick news update. Let me know what you think about all
this and what your favorite or least favorite piece of news is.
I am still giving away a Peco Peco Quest game key to one winner who answers my question
of the day down below. Peco Peco is one of the chilliest puzzle games on the Quest platform
so be sure to check it out. I’ll pick a winner in 3 days. Thanks for watching, please
leave me a like to support us for free and a special thanks go to all our Champions.
VR on.