Quest Pro price crash and another Quest 3 leak
Our weekly recap: Meta is still leaking internal information. Good for us, bad for Meta.
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Meta Mega Leak
Didn't Meta say it caught the Quest 3 leaker? Oh well.
Another week, another leak from Meta: According to an internal roadmap, Quest 3, due later this year, will be much smaller, faster, and more expensive than Meta Quest 2, and like Quest Pro, will focus on mixed reality.
Speaking of the Quest Pro, Meta's official price for the current XR headset has taken a nosedive, dropping from $1500 to $1000 since its launch last fall.
Meta's leak also gave us semi-official Quest 2 sales figures for the first time: The company has sold about 20 million units of the VR headset, making it the most successful VR headset ever.
However, sales figures are not very meaningful without the number of active users. If the leak is anything to go by, Meta is struggling to keep people interested in using VR. One former VR evangelist even says that only about ten percent stick around. Even in Meta's social VR world, Horizon, only one or one in ten people reportedly come back.
Xiaomi unveils AR headset
At MWC 2023, Xiaomi unveiled a lightweight AR headset with an integrated micro-OLED color display, gesture control, and a VR mode. The full specifications of the Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition are not yet available, but Xiaomi has released some details in a blog post and video. The device is currently a prototype.
Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition was revealed at MWC 2023. | Image: Xiaomi
Pimax receives $30 million
Chinese manufacturer Pimax has been serving PC VR enthusiasts for a few years now with high-end VR headsets, most of which have a clear USP such as a wide field of view. Now the company has received a $30 million investment from a Chinese venture capitalist. The money will go toward its new portfolio of VR devices like the Pimax Crystal.
Vive XR Elite becomes an open-build AR video headset
At MWC 2023, HTC unveiled new comfort options for the Vive XR Elite, Viverse Business, a broadcast bundle for the Vive Mars CamTrack, and a new 5G streaming solution.
The "MR Face Gasket" replaces the wrap-around light shield of the thin VR headset with a small pad on the forehead. According to HTC, this merges the real world in your peripheral vision with what you see on the screen, making the XR Elite more akin to a Hololens-style AR headset. Of course, you are still looking at opaque displays and not directly into the environment like in open AR headsets.
An optional, small forehead pad turns the Vive XR Elite into an open headset in the style of the Quest Pro or Lynx R-1. | Image: HTC Vive
What is a NeRF and how does it help XR?
NeRFs (Neural Radiance Field) is a new AI-powered graphics technology that can quickly transform real-world objects and spaces into photo-realistic virtual objects and spaces. Thus, NeRF technology provides a solution to the problem of recreating real objects in a virtual digital environment that can even be used directly by end users.
ChatGPT haullucinates a product
Imagine you own a business and people buy a product you don't even offer - because they were misadvised by an AI. That's precisely what happened to OpenCage, a German company that, according to ChatGPT, sells an API that can turn a cell phone number into a phone's location. But it doesn't. The result: unhappy customers.
In other AI news at THE DECODER, check out our ChatGPT guide for some ideas on basic prompting strategies, and German Twitter users fall for an anti-government Jordan Peterson deepfake.
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