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Meta's Messy Divorce

Meta's Messy Divorce

How Meta’s toxic breakup is ruining VR media and making it impossible for new creators to make content. We look at some numbers for adult VR users and I visit the VR capitol of the Midwest. Keep reading to find out...

Nate Essin
October 31, 2024 • Reading Time: 11 minutes

Meta can’t let Quill go

Most rebranding projects exist to divert your attention away from the real story.

Meta is hiding something.

Why else would you change the name of your immersive animation player 3 times? It started as Quill Theater, then they called it VR Animation Player, and now it’s called Theater Everywhere.

The new app brings improvements to the interface - including a new onboarding tutorial featuring a talking snail who walks you through the new interface.

Immersive animation is an incredible format. Stories take place all around you with real depth. You can walk around and even look around corners to get a better look at something.

Total immersion can captivate your imagination in a way that the cinema can’t. Stepping into an animated film feels psychedelic - as if you stepped foot into someone else’s imagination.

When demoing immersive animation, I love to show people The Golden Record. It’s an unforgettable, heart warming tale that will bring a tear to your eye.

There’s just one catch. Quill is the the only immersive animation tool out there. It was created in 2017 at Facebook (now Meta) by Inigo Quilez, a former Pixar Artist and Developer. Inigo was working on Dear Angelica in the Oculus Story Studio and Quill was born out of necessity.

Quill is a fascinating program. You draw with brush strokes and animate your drawings using a blend of traditional 2D animation techniques with modern 3D tools.

The program only runs on a high end PC and no attempts have been made to port it to standalone mobile VR hardware like the Meta Quest.

Credit - Goro Fujita

Inigo Quilez left Meta in 2021. There are few details, but somehow he retained ownership of Quill. Meta relinquishes their claims to the Quill intellectual property in this mysterious blog post, but didn’t give everything away in the divorce. Quill’s save file format was open sourced to allow any program to export animations for a Quill Animation player like Meta’s Theater Everywhere.

After leaving Meta, Inigo renamed Quill to Quill by Smoothstep and stopped updating it. It has been 3 years now and creators are losing faith they will ever receive an update. Inigo writes on Twitter that Quill is a personal project and he has little time for those.

A desperate creator in the Meta Quest App store.

Why would Meta put all their firepower behind a dying medium? Could it be a desperate attempt to leverage some aging content in the fight against Apple and their Immersive Video strategy?

Perhaps there is a method to the madness. Meta could surprise us with a new animation tool. This app could easily be built on the Quill open source file format and advances in mobile VR headset processing power could make it possible to run on your Quest 3.

I doubt it.

Apple vs. Meta

Apple is staking a claim in VR movies with their Immersive Video format. Last week, they released a short film for the Apple Vision Pro directed by an Academy Award winning Director.

The market for 3D movies has floundered for years. Can Apple succeed where others have failed? Read more in last week’s issue.

VR by the Numbers

AR Insider is an XR research firm selling $999 reports. They breadcrumb their results to lure in prospective buyers and recently shared some numbers on U.S. Adult VR users in a blog post.

We’re seeing some dramatic shifts in the VR market with headsets in every Walmart. Check out the numbers I charted below.

I highly recommend following AR Insider to keep tabs on our industry.

Reader Submitted

My good friend Josh Stephens texted me following my recent story covering Renji Bijoy and the cursed Immersed Visor.

Shared with Josh’s permission

Minneapolis is the VR capital of the Midwest

I spent last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota to spend time with my sister, Joanna, for her birthday.

She attends her local VR meetup there and persuaded me to tag along.

Matt Foreman, a self taught developer who worked on Neolithic Dawn, is nearing the launch of his first title, Velociblaster, a multiplayer shooter set in space.

Matt presented his strategy for getting an invite to Meta Connect for the past 3 years.

Paul Christian, a developer for the Meta Quest app, Wooorld, presented unreleased updates to the app and shared insights for building one of the largest geospatial experiences on Quest.

Zach Wendt, the MN VR & HCI event organizer presented on the Quest 3’s spatial sensing mixed reality tech stack, compiling an Oculus developer sample and demonstrating room scanning, object recognition, and navigating between scanned spaces with their own local coordinate systems.

Zach Wendt holds the mic for Paul Christian

In addition to the 3 speakers, I met Scott Gaff, a technical director who worked for Bill Kovacs at Wavefront. Mr. Gaff attended Siggraph in 1984 when Pixar premiered their first short film, “The Adventures of André & Wally B“.

Also in attendance was Scott Lembcke, creator of Chipmunk2D and Scott Steffes, creator of the hit web game, Different Strokes. (Great Scott! That’s a lot of Scotts.)

Procrastination Station

Gunman Contracts has graduated from a Half-Life: Alyx mod to an independent title set to release on Steam with concepts of a plan to port the game to Meta Quest.

The sophisticated mod turns the popular PCVR game, Half-Life: Alyx into a high-action title where you accept contracts and try to stay alive while shooting everyone who gets in your way.

I captured this footage in my Quest 3 wirelessly connected to my gaming laptop running Gunman Contracts in Half Life: Alyx. Sorry/not sorry for the blood.

ANB_Seth started converting his mod to a full title in early 2022 and this month he partnered with 2080 Games (a studio with experience shipping mobile VR titles on Quest) to bring the project to the finish line.

Like most VR heads, I’m a fan of HLA. It was created by Valve, the same game studio that owns Steam. HLA may be the highest budget VR game ever created. For better or worse, it is still one of the most polished experiences for VR.

I couldn’t get enough of Half Life Alyx so I started installing mods and playing through a half-broken Better Call Saul sim, Gunman Contracts, and new Alyx stories such as Levitation and Overcharge which are every bit as good as the original campaign.

Gunman Contracts stands out as a mod. Unlike the fan-built alternate campaigns that have a foundation of artwork and interactions to build on, this mod treats Alyx more like a game engine. GC changes the fundamental gameplay and does so with a high degree of polish.

Looking for your next play? Try a Half-Life: Alyx mod. You won’t regret it.

Keep an eye on your inbox.

Next week we’ll dive into the technology behind head mounted displays. This is an issue you won’t want to miss.

Hit reply and let me know what you think. Next time you’re reading something and think of me, hit Forward! Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a shoutout in a future issue!

- Nate

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