Tag: Augmented Reality

The Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s Gamble on High-End Virtual Reality (and Why I Want One)

Brian Tong wearing the Apple Vision Pro (a still capture from his Apple Vision Pro unboxing video)

As I mentioned in passing in my last blogpost, I am eager to get my hot little hands on the latest Holy Grail in the world of virtual reality/augmented reality/mixed reality/extended reality (VR/AR/MR/XR): the Apple Vision Pro wireless headset, which began shipping to American consumers on February 2nd, 2024.

Alas, there is no word yet on when we non-Americans will be able to order this device, although at least one VR YouTuber, Brian Tong, has heard (via his unofficial, internal sources) that Apple is planning to expand access to the U.K. and Canada next, perhaps shortly before or during the 2024 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which is usually held the first or second week of June.

Brian’s YouTube channel has been full of many helpful videos about the Apple Vision Pro, including this unboxing video of a pre-release version, where he unpacked the various components in the Apple Vision Pro package like a giddy schoolkid on Christmas morning:

In an interesting move, Apple refers to this device as spatial computing, avoiding any mention of virtual reality, mixed reality, or any of the other terms which have usually been tossed around while talking about other headsets. Also, I find it quite telling that nowhere will you find mention of the now-often-maligned concept of the metaverse, especially after being embraced by numerous crypto/NFT projects which went nowhere, plus Facebook’s much-ballyhooed rebrand into Meta landing with a bit of a dull thud and a shrug among consumers. As fellow metaverse blogger Wagner James Au wrote on his blog last week:

With Meta’s latest earnings report published this week, we find out the company has now burned invested $42 billion on building the Metaverse, with little to show for that: Its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds has less than an estimated 500,000 monthly active users, while sales of its Quest VR headset line (a metaverse peripheral) remain steadfastly small.

While Wagner is certainly more pessimistic about virtual reality than I am, it’s clear that VR headsets are not exactly flying off shelves, especially when compared to the blockbuster sales of cellphones, tablets, and gaming consoles. Andrew Williams of Forbes reported last October:

Meta has sold more than 20 million headsets to date, 18 million of which were the Meta Quest 2.

The Quest 3’s predecessor was highly successful, considering VR isn’t really a mainstream proposition in the way standard game consoles are. But the market has not expanded in the way Meta clearly hoped.

Back in May, the Washington Post reported a significant proportion of Quest users were letting the headset gather dust after just a few weeks.

The somewhat tepid success of most VR/AR/MR/XR/metaverse ventures to date are clearly reasons why Apple has focused, in its usual savvy marketing campaign, on the fact that the Apple Vision Pro is intended to be a wearable personal computer (essentially, an iPad for your face). Apple has announced in a Feb. 1st news release that over 600 new apps built specifically for the Vision Pro were available to American consumers at launch, plus “more than 1 million compatible apps available on the App Store to deliver a wide array of breakthrough experiences.”

The Vision Pro the first completely new category of device launched by Apple since the Apple Watch in 2015, and many people (myself included) have been keen to see what Apple, with its history of launching well-designed products, would come up with. As I often say on my blog, A rising tide lifts all boats, and Apple’s entry into this market has the potential to shake things up quite a bit, especially since they have taken pretty much the opposite tack from Meta, by focusing on an expensive, ultra-high-end device as their first product.

And yes, I do mean expensive. On the U.S. Apple Vision Pro website, the three main models of the Vision Pro are for sale:

  • 256 GB of storage (starting at US$3,499);
  • 512 GB (starting at US$3,699); and
  • 1 TB (terabyte, or 1,024 GB; starting at US$3,899).

So the one-terabyte Apple Vision Pro of my fondest dreams and darkest desires comes out to $5,259.17 in Canadian dollars—and that’s before sales taxes!

Many mainstream media and tech news reviewers prepared print and video reviews of the Apple Vision Pro, using pre-release review units provided by the company. These reviews were embargoed until the official release of the headset in early February, when they landed in a big media splash (Apple has deep pockets to spend on advertising, and has always done excellent marketing for their products).

Brian Tong, the YouTuber whom I mentioned earlier, has put out a very user-friendly, comprehensive one-hour review video:

Nilay Patel of The Verge put out the following half-hour video as part of its extensive print review of the Apple Vision Pro, which did not shy away from talking about what he saw as some problems with the device, describing it succinctly as “magic…until it’s not.”

Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal (archived version) took a slightly more unusual, whimsical approach to her review of the Apple Vision Pro. Joanna wore the review unit for a full day, even taking it to out to a ski chalet and wearing it out on skis, on a closed-off bunny hill! (Something definitely not recommended, by the way; DO NOT DO THIS.) Here’s her ten-minute video, which also shows her wearing the Vision Pro while preparing a recipe, and even setting up multiple timers hovering over the different pots on her stovetop:

And yes, one of the many features of the Apple Vision Pro is that you can set up displays anywhere, as demonstrated by in this mind-bending one-minute YouTube video by Himels Tech, as he walks around his house showing off his set-up:

There are many other reviews out there, but these four video reviews between them cover pretty much all the bases, so if you watch all of them, you’re up to speed!

The eye-watering price is not the only hurdle to be overcome by whoever wants to possess one of these Holy Grail devices! Unlike every other VR headset I have purchased, I will not be able to wear my glasses underneath the face-fitting, ski-goggle-like design. So I have two options: to get soft contact lenses (which I have not worn for a couple of decades), or to buy magnetically-attached prescription lens inserts from Apple’s partner, Zeiss. According to an Apple Support article:

To purchase ZEISS Optical Inserts for Apple Vision Pro, you need a legible comprehensive prescription. Here’s the information your comprehensive prescription should contain:

Your distance correction and near correction needs, indicated separately but on the same prescription sheet. This is known as the full manifest refraction. 

An expiration date, which should not be expired.

Your date of birth, your full name, and your prescriber’s license number and signature.

Intermediate distance, task distance, or computer distance should not be part of that prescription, and contact lens prescriptions are not accepted. If you’re not sure if your prescription is comprehensive, consult an eye care provider and reference the description in this article.

ZEISS Optical Inserts are available for the vast majority of corrections, including for customers who normally use progressive or bifocal lenses. A very small percentage of people have a prism value added to their glasses prescription. At this time, ZEISS cannot manufacture ZEISS Optical Inserts based on a prescription containing prism value. If you have a prism value, it is labeled on your prescription and noted separately from sphere, cylinder, axis, and ADD values. If you’re not sure if your prescription includes prism, consult with an eye care provider.

Depending on your prescription, your vision needs might not be met through ZEISS Optical Inserts.

Annoyingly, there doesn’t seem to be any publicly-available chart to give the ranges of presecription lenses which they will support, instead asking you to fill out a form with your prescription details, and promising that they’ll get back to you as quickly as possible:

So it looks as though I am going to have to go see my eye doctor first, then submit my prescription, then cross my fingers that they will support my combination of nearsightedness and astigmatism (not to mention my need for progressive lenses!). Honestly, it all sounds rather discouraging and disheartening.

But perhaps my apprehension about the Vision Pro not working for my elderly eyes is misplaced, because even blind people are finding the device to be useful! Check out this mind-blowing YouTube Shorts video by James Rath, who tests out some of the accessibility features and settings, James says that he can actually see more clearly with the Vision Pro, than without! This device could open up a whole new use case for the visually impaired.

So, yes, I am very eager to get my hands on an Apple Vision Pro sometime this year! I don’t want to wait; I want to experience this envelope-pushing product as soon as possible. I haven’t been this excited about a headset since the Oculus Rift back in 2016. So please stay tuned as I report on my odyssey to acquire the new Holy Grail of spatial computing!

Meta Connect 2023 and the Meta Quest 3 Mixed-Reality Headset, with Updates from the Virtual Event Livestream: Do *YOU* Want Snoop Dogg as Your Dungeon Master, or Paris Hilton as Your Detective?

UPDATE Sept. 28th, 2023: If you’re looking for a good, concise summary of the Meta Connect 2023 event, TechCrunch has you covered.

The Meta Connect 2023 virtual event will start on September 27th, 2023 (today) at 10:00 a.m. PST / noon CST / 1:00 p.m. EST / 5:00 p.m. BST. Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) will stream the event live on its website. You can also watch the stream on YouTube, Twitch, and via the official Meta page on Facebook. The event will start with a keynote by Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who is expected to officially launch the Meta Quest 3 headset, talk about its features, and give an update on where the company is planning to go with its virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and extended reality (VR/AR/MR/XR) initiatives over the next few years.

As the BBC reported yesterday, Meta is facing growing skepticism about its metaverse plans and their impact on the company’s bottom line:

Remember the metaverse?

For a while it dominated tech news. A virtual reality world that would be so immersive, so engaging, that we would want to spend part of our lives in it.

Driving the metaverse narrative was Mark Zuckerberg.

The tech billionaire was so committed that in October 2021 he changed Facebook’s name to Meta…

No one could accuse him of a lack of ambition.

But almost two years on, Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse is in trouble.

In April, he was forced to deny that he is now jettisoning the idea.

“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse,” he told investors in April. “So I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate.”

On Wednesday, the company holds its annual VR event called Meta Connect.

It’s a chance, perhaps, for Zuckerberg to again explain his reasoning for taking an extremely profitable social media company and diverting its focus to an extremely unprofitable VR venture.

How unprofitable? Well, the most recent figures from Meta are eye-watering.

Reality Labs – which as the name suggests is Meta’s virtual and augmented reality branch – has lost a staggering $21 billion since last year.

Part of the losses reflect long-term investment. Meta wasn’t expecting short-term returns. But the worrying fact for the company is that, so far, there is very little evidence that this enormous punt will work.

I fully expect an announcement that Horizon Worlds, Meta’s social VR platform, will be rolling out to non-VR/flatscreen web and mobile users. Using a Meta Quest 2 test unit purchased for the virtual reality lab project I am involved with at the University of Manitoba, I have paid several short visits to Horizon Worlds, and I am, to put it politely, not a fan. Horizon Worlds is something even worse than boring—it’s soulless. It looks and feels like it was put together by a bureaucratic committee of engineers that was given a task to do, in order to report back to the executives that they did something, but the builders had no real understanding, appreciation, or love of what social VR is and can be. To be frank, I don’t believe that expanding Horizon Worlds access to web and mobile users is gonna bring a hell of a lot more users to the platform. In my opinion, it’s a dog that needs to be taken out back and shot, to be put out of its misery. 🐕

I also briefly tried out Horizon Worlds’ corporate cousin, Horizon Workrooms, and as I have said before on this blog, I find it very hard to believe that any company would actually use this product for a real-world business purpose. In fact, Meta has commanded its employees to “fall in love with Horizon Worlds,” a sign that even their own staff don’t want to use it. (Ironically, Meta is among the many tech firms now requiring its employees to actually show up in their offices 3 days a week, or face termination. I’m quite sure that that strict little edict from HR is really, really gonna encourage more Meta employee uptake of Horizon Workrooms!) I expect some more announcements of integrations with products like Microsoft Office and Zoom, but I’m not expecting anything that is going to make corporate bean-counters sit up and say, “hey, we gotta buy a fleet of headsets, immediately!”

Like many of you, I will be watching the Meta Connect 2023 event live, and I will be updating this blogpost with news as it happens. Stay tuned!

UPDATE 9:28 p.m.: I forgot to mention that somebody—probably Mark himself—is going to proudly announce that the avatars in Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms now have legs. Yawn.

Mark Zuckerberg: Hey, look! Our avatars have legs!

Second Life: Isn’t that just adorable. Meanwhile, our avatars can look like this…:

MX123

Second Life: …and your avatars look like this:

(And yes, I know, comparing a social VR platform like Horizon Worlds to a flatscreen virtual world like Second Life, which also has a 20-year head start, is not fair. But honestly, Meta’s avatars have a long, long way to go, in my opinion. Obligatory editorial.)

UPDATE 11:28 a.m.: I’m signed in to a livestream from one of the virtual reality YouTubers I follow, Virtual Reality Oasis, which apparently is starting half an hour before the actual Meta Connect event with a bit of a pre-show, perhaps. I will probably stay on this channel, for the additional commentary by this YouTuber (there’s also a very active comment stream to follow), but I might switch to another source later on. I will be making full use of two monitors here at work on my desktop PC—one for watching the livestream, and the second for blogging on the fly!

UPDATE 11:40 a.m.: Mike’s Virtual Reality Oasis livestream has started; apparently, he is located in a “side office” near backstage or behind the scenes at the Menlo Park auditorium, where the Meta Connect event is taking place (I think I got that part right!). He and another VR expert (whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch) will be providing some colour commentary and even taking questions from the over 3,700 livestream viewers. (Unfortunately, this livestream video was marked private after the event, so I cannot link to it.)

UPDATE noon: Meta has just announced a 30-minute delay to the start of the event, which is rather disappointing. Apparently, instead of an indoor stage, this event will be taking place on an outdoor stage in Menlo Park. I will be able to view and post blog updates until around 2:00 p.m. my time (Central Standard Time), so I am only going to be able to comment on the first hour-and-a-half of Meta Connect.

UPDATE 12:18 p.m.: I’ve switched to a different livestream, this one by IGN, with almost 7,000 people watching. Virtual Reality Oasis was reporting problems with both video and audio from the Meta Connect livestream, so I’ll be switching back and forth. (I could also watch it via Facebook, but I’ll be damned if I have to set up a Facebook account just to do that! Back in 2018, I kicked Facebook to the curb, and I have zero intention of returning to its surveillance-capitalism embrace, with the sole exception of a Meta account I set up for the test unit Meta Quest 2 headset I got.)

UPDATE 12:31 p.m.: The show has finally started!

Mark starts off with the usual piffle about “the power of human connection”. 🙄 He’s talking about being in a room with a mixture of real-life humans and holographic humans and embodied AI tools. Mixed reality, smart glasses, and AI are key to what Mark calls the metaverse.

Mark introduces the Quest 3, which he calls “the first mainstream mixed-reality headset” to applause from the crowd, followed by a brief presentation of various examples of this mixed reality in a number of games and apps. Xbox cloud gaming is coming to the Quest later this year.

Augments are persistent, spatially-anchored digital objects (like digital portals and photo albums you can hang on your walls). You can double-tap on your headset to return instantly to the real world.

Now he’s talking about content, including new titles. Meta Quest 3 has twice the graphics performance of any previous headset and is 40% thinner than the Quest 2. Roblox is launching for the Quest, which is going to bring a lot of younger users to the headset!

Mark teased new Horizon content, saying that the visuals are improving. He also talked about tools for business, citing productivity and work apps. Coming soon is something called Meta Quest for Business, with integrations with apps like Office 365 (something that was previously promised). Lack of details is very frustrating!

Meta Quest 3 is shipping October 10th for US$499 (Mark slipped up and said “August 10th” LOL!).

UPDATE 12:47 p.m.: Now the talk switches to artificial intelligence, which is hardly surprising since that is where all the hype went after the previous metaverse hype cycle (which included Mark renaming his company from Facebook to Meta!). A new tool, called Emu (Expressive Media Universe) is an image-generation tool similar to DALL-E 2. You will be able to use AI chat to create stickers (wow, groundbreaking!🙄). AI editing tools will be added to Instagram next month, with a cute demo of Mark applying various textures to his dog, Beast.

(Right now Mark is just spouting AI word salad, and my eyes are rolling so hard they disappeared into my skull.)

Meta AI: your basic assistant you can talk to like a person, help you answer basic questions and requests. Based on Llama 2 large language model, through a partnership with Microsoft and Bing search. Emu: is built into Meta AI with the “/imagine” prompt built into various apps.

Max the sous-chef AI who will help you come up with a recipe, etc. Lily, the personal editor AI that can help you brainstorm and improve your writing. Lorena the travel expert AI to recommend a good national park to take the kids to. These are three of the many different types of AI chatbots Meta is dreaming up to answer queries and entertain you. Meta actually appears to have hired actors and celebrities to play these roles! (Honestly, this is kinda creeping me out.)

Oh, sweet minty Jesus, Snoop Dogg has been cast as your Dungeons & Dragons dungeonmaster. Nope, I’m out…NOBODY WANTS THIS, MARK. I never want to see that cursed image again!!! Who the fuck thought this was a great idea? Mark brought his keynote to a screeching halt as he fumbled with his cellphone to “chat” with Snoop Dogg (who I’m sure is being paid a pretty penny to give up his likeness for this ridiculous idea).

Snoop Dogg is your D&D dungeonmaster! (NOPE.)

Among the many other “experts” who signed on to be the face of a Meta AI chatbot is Paris Hilton, who role-plays your “detective” (I kid you not):

NOBODY ASKED FOR THIS, MARK!!!

Dear God, and there are plans to insert these and other AI chatbot avatars into Meta’s version of the metaverse. (I personally would pay good money to avoid any metaverse that has Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton in it, kthxbai!) And this is not the first time Paris Hilton has tried to imprint herself upon a metaverse: click here to read all about the MATERIA.ONE/Staramba Spaces metaverse debacle, which offered Paris-Hilton-themed NFT metaverse parcels. (Hulk Hogan was another celebrity involved in that particular mess, too.)

Here comes the part where Mark pays lip service to safety and security, since there are some serious user privacy concerns associated with all this new, AI-powered tech (something which Meta has notably been egregious about in the past). “I’m really optimistic about this,” says Mark, and once again, my eyes rolled so far back I was staring at my brain. Yeah, sure, Mark, I really want to have my every conversation with Detective Paris Hilton strip-mined as yet another opportunity to provide data to sell to advertisers for the next Cambridge Analytica scandal. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 As a commenter stated on the r/technews subreddit (source):

Does anyone else think AI chatbots are just another way to harvest data about people by engaging them in conversation?

Now Mark turns to the next generation of Ray-Ban smart glasses, which I must confess look a lot like regular glasses with slightly thicker arms. These new glasses will include Meta AI, so you can bring Snoop Dogg or Paris Hilton wherever you go (shudder). Next year, a software update will make these glasses multi-modal, so you can read signs in foreign languages, for example, which sounds kinda cool.

A brief video was shown where you will be able to livestream what you see from your own glasses to others, using as an example a racecar driver who is presenting what he sees to other viewers watching on their cellphones. These new glasses are available starting Oct. 17th for US$299.

UPDATE 1:16 p.m.: Mark has wrapped up his keynote, and is passing the torch to Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who in previous years has not shied away from speaking his mind and even criticizing what he sees as some missteps the company has made. He’s talking about the ability to double-tap on the side of your Meta Quest 3 to switch seamlessly between mixed-reality and pass-through of the real world.

You will no longer have to manually set up your play boundary in the Meta Quest 3, which will automatically map the room you are in, and the objects that are in that room, when you put the headset on:

(There are some livestream skips happening now, so I might miss something.)

Okay, I am taking a break, but if I have time later on today, I will add more.

UPDATE 2:02 p.m.: Here’s an article from Variety on the new line of Meta AI chatbots, which apparently also includes Kendall Jenner/Kardashian roleplaying as your “big sis” (gag). Here’s a quote from that article:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in unveiling the new AI chatbots, said the company wanted to create AIs that have distinct personalities, opinions and interests. “This isn’t just gonna be about answering queries,” he said. “This is about entertainment and about helping you do things to connect with the people around you.”

For now, the celebrity chatbots respond in text — their avatars don’t actually speak their responses. Zuckerberg said voice for the AIs will come probably early next year.

The line-up of Meta AI celebrity chatbots includes Kendall Jenner of the Kardashian clan

UPDATE 5:44 p.m.: Wow, I thought I had been sarcastic in my remarks about these AI chatbots, but the people over at the celebrity subreddit r/Fauxmoi, are savage! Here’s just a sample of their comments (source):

Ah yes, all the people you’d regret starting a conversation with.

Lmao I hate this.

Also: “Kendall Jenner as Billie, no-BS, ride-or-die companion” 😂 So funny, coming from someone with even less personality than a robot.

It’s giving Black Mirror.

Sounds horrifying. Hopefully it flops hard enough to discourage more companies from doing shit like this.

What the hell is this? Like what is it supposed to be/do? Paris Hilton is ‘Amber’ who is your detective friend to help you solve whodunnits. So they’ve taken real people and turned them into avatars but then also they aren’t really THAT person, they’re someone else brand new who has a completely different personality? What’s even the point?
Please can someone explain??

Meta is embarrassingly out of touch with the world, in a very “hello, fellow teenagers!” kind of way…

So, as you can clearly see, I’m not the only one who thinks this is just weird. I’m left wondering how much of that $21 billion Meta Reality Labs spent this past year went to pay for all these celebrities to agree to be the faces of their chatbots. And I wonder how they’re going to feel when (as is almost inevitable) their chatbot starts to act up and spit out unacceptable or incorrect responses to user questions? What will Paris Hilton do when the chatbot who wears her face goes rogue? I’m quite sure she did not think through all the potential implications of signing away her likeness on the contract Meta dangled in front of her! It really is very Black Mirror.

UPDATE Sept. 28th, 2023 2:54 p.m.: I have gotten busy with my full-time paying job as a university librarian, so I haven’t had much of a chance to watch the rest of yesterday’s virtual event. Once I do, I expect that I will have more to comment on!

FIVARS: The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories Runs February 21st to 28th, 2022

Established in 2015, FIVARS (short for the Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories) is a Canadian festival focused on curating the best immersive story-driven VR/AR/MR/XR content from around the world, with the aim of exploring and nurturing this platform for new narrative forms. Their website states:

As with the modern cinema experience, through Virtual Reality, we can explore truth, happiness, sadness, and the science fiction that will be tomorrow’s science fact. 

The difference is that, unlike modern cinema where you explore these worlds through a window, with Virtual Reality you can now transport into the center of the action, standing inside of the world you wish to explore. Just like real life, if you try to look away from what is in front of you, you will now see what is behind, below, above, to the right or left of you. 

The real-time response of your head’s movement creates a powerful sense of physical immersion that allows you or your intended audience to connect to the content on a deeper, more visceral level.

FIVARS (Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories) openly encourages viewers to enjoy and connect to stories in this newly emergent narrative form, while challenging content creators to showcase ideas that defy and transcend the status quo.

At the festival, there is also an opportunity to share conversations both with our team and other industry members in attendance to discuss how to take part in this snowballing revolution in tech, entertainment, research and information sharing.

The 9th FIVARS festival is a browser-based immersive virtual festival featuring 360 video projects from around the globe online, rwhich runs from February 21st to 28th, 2022, with additional private in-person showcases for interactive content.

  • Immersive festival featuring Virtual Reality, 360 Film and Dome Experiences in browser-based immersive theater–available on desktop, mobile, tablet or in VR headset
  • In-person interactive content (by appointment only in select cities, stay tuned for more information)
  • Talks & Panels with content creators and industry experts from around the world

And it’s not too late for creators to submit entries to the festival! The Late Deadline is January 25th, 2022, and the Extended Deadline is February 15th, 2022. More details are available via the FIVARS website.

Tickets are available to purchase via EventBrite. It promises to be an exciting event!

UPDATED! The Lynx R-1 Kickstarter Campaign Starts Today

Not too long ago, I first wrote about Lynx, a brand new, open ecosystem, standalone mixed reality headset (i.e. both virtual reality and augmented reality), by a French startup company founded a couple of years ago by Stan Larroque.

Today, I learned that the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for this device is launching today, at 7:00 p.m. CEST (which works out to noon here in Winnipeg). According to the email I received:

After months and months of work on the Lynx R-1, we are so proud to tell you that our product development (both R and D) is finished.

The Lynx R-1 is the finest hardware platform for Mixed Reality. It’s a great product for playing AR and VR games and browse the Metaverse, but also for applications in education, training and simulation that will change forever the way we interact with virtuality.

Lynx is a powerful alternative to headsets on the market that are products coming from ad companies like Facebook. Our business model is just not built on your data.

Remember this video? It was in February. Imagine what the experience feels like today after our tuning iterations and optimizations. We invited some content creators to come in our office in Paris during October to test and review with the community the Lynx R-1 headset. In the mean time, Stan, our CEO, will share with you the latest about the company tomorrow right before the launch of the Kickstarter campaign.

You can view the pre-launch Kickstarter page here (there’s not much to see yet!).

There will also be a Kickstarter launch livestream on YouTube, starting at 11:00 a.m. Winnipeg time (Central Standard Time), which you can watch here:

I’m eager to see this new headset!

For further information about this potentially game-changing product, please visit their website, or follow the project and its founder, Stan Larroque, on social media: Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

UPDATE 11:45 a.m.: In answering questions in the second half of the livestream video above, I learned that people wearing glasses can indeed use the Lynx R-1, and in virtual reality mode, there is a detachable foam faceplate which also accommodates glasses, and blocks out the light from the sides (something that I was wondering about myself).

Also, the company announced that virtual reality vloggers Cas and Chary and Sebastian Ang of MRTC will be among the first to review the Lynx R-1 headset. This is good news, as both channels are known to offer good, in-depth, unbiased reviews of VR/AR/MR/XR hardware and software.

The livestream has now concluded, and the Kickstarter page is due to launch within the hour! I’m so excited!

UPDATE 12:00 p.m.: And the Kickstarter page is now live! Here’s the video from the Kickstarter page:

UPDATE Oct. 6th, 2021: As of this morning, the Lynx R-1 Kickstarter has exceeded its target crowdfunding goal of €300,000, with 525 backers so far, and the campaign still has 34 days left to run! I am proud to say that I put my money where my mouth is, and I am one of those initial backers:

I expect there’s going to be some twists and turns in the Lynx saga before I get my product, but I am so firmly opposed by how Facebook/Oculus is doing business that supporting this project was an easy decision for me. And it would appear that at least 524 other people agree with me! Félicitations à Stan et à son équipe!