What’s new?

Snapchat released their latest AR headset, I tried out the Meta Quest 3S, Immersed Visor is still skating in scam territory, the Godot Game Engine has been ported to the Meta Quest, and I made ramen noodles from scratch for the first time ever.

Ready to dive in?

VR may overthrow the game console in 2025

I did a private demo of the Meta Quest 3S. It’s an amazing device packing Quest 3 internals in a Quest 2 style plastic housing with inexpensive fresnel lenses and an IPD adjustment that slides between 3 presets. While Fresnel and preselected IPD settings are not ideal, we know that Meta has the supply chain ready to roll out millions of units.

The Quest 3S is going to be announced tomorrow at Meta Connect. If they actually price it at $299 or even $199 without controllers (you can use many apps with hand tracking), I believe this will be on every kid’s Christmas list and by Q4 2025 it could become the best selling VR headset in history.

The signs for growth are there:

• The combined sales estimates for the Meta Quest 1, 2, Pro, and 3 are around 22 million units. That means that Meta’s headsets have narrowly eclipsed Nintendo’s 21.7 million Gamecube sales.

• The VR game, Gorilla Tag, has over a million daily active users composed primarily of children age 8-14. It’s popularity is still growing and the game IS a system seller for its young users.

• For the past 4 Christmases, the top downloaded app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store is the Meta Horizon app (required to set up your new Meta Quest headset).

The Quest 3 is what the market needs to grow. We’ve plateaued following the depletion of Quest 2 stock and the Quest 3’s eye-watering $500 price tag.

Immersed keeps being sketchy

Immersed was among the first to market with a decent multi-screen sharing app for VR headsets. The app hasn’t changed since I started using it in 2019, but the company has. In an unusual switch from a software company to a hardware company, they announced they were building a VR headset that was thinner and lighter than anything Meta, HTC, Pico, or Apple could manufacture. I thought this sounded too good to be true. Many online commenters claimed it was a scam and advised prospective buyers not to pre-order.

Last week they held an event in Austin, Texas to put the scam rumors to bed and show off their product. They had a physical product to show, but there were no demonstrations due to a “firmware” issue.

Shoutout to Erik Liga who leads the Houston AR/VR chapter for attending the Austin event and writing up his experience.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this company do something fishy.

• 2020 - They tried selling shares to users in a crowd funded investing scheme

• 2023 - When I used the app on a company computer, IT Security reached out to me because the Immersed app had quietly shut off Windows Defender

It’s unclear if the team experienced an unfortunate technical mishap or if they are really scammers, but I’m hesitant to endorse them.

Godot and Meta cozy up

In March of this year, Meta paid W4 Games to port the Meta Quest SDK (Software Development Kit) to the Open Source Game engine, Godot.

Last month, Godot 4.3 released with support for all Meta Quest functionality. This is a shift in the industry. Developers can now build on an entirely open source toolset and avoid paying huge licensing fees to Unity or Epic Game’s Unreal Engine.

Developers using Godot will have a certain amount of technical ability. If a dev has a roadblock, googling won’t turn up much and Godot’s asset store is significantly smaller than Unity or Unreal.

Meta has done an amazing job of hosting robust sample projects to build on. I’ve done this and can’t speak highly enough of the samples. Meta hasn’t ported any of their examples to Godot and it isn’t clear if they are planning to ever port them.

All of this means that Godot devs have to build more core components from scratch, but this is your moment if you’re technical and identify as an early adopter.

BUT WAIT! There’s more.

Godot didn’t stop with supporting the Meta Quest SDK, they brought Godot to the Meta Quest. That’s right. The engine runs on Android in Meta Horizon OS. You can open Godot on your headset and make VR games in VR. Talk about “meta”.

Shoutout to my sister, Joanna May, for sharing these stories with me.

My latest culinary creation

See you next week!

I’m headed to the AAF D10 conference on the Texas/Mexico border. I’ll be speaking about “Augmented Reality for Advertisers”. It’s been almost a year since my last conference appearance and I’m a mix of excited and nervous. Wish me luck!

I’d love to hear what you thought about this issue. What did you like? What makes your blood boil? Hit reply and let me know!

- Nate

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