I knew I shoulda bought my holiday gifts this past weekend! It’s official. Meta confirmed that it’s raising the price of its Quest 2 VR headset by 33%, from $299 to $399. To placate the (understandably) incensed buyers, it’s including a free copy of Beat Saber, a $30 game with in-app purchases. Meta claims rising costs forced its hand, and to be fair, even at $399 it’s still got the biggest bang for the VR buck. But, once again, timing is everything. Some critics feel it was a desperate move for Meta to show some good financial news; others feel that when you’re growing a nascent market it’s not a good tactic to hit them with a price increase. 

At $299, the Quest 2 was the VR equivalent of buying a cheap printer and then spending oodles of money on ink cartridges. It was supposed to get everyone all tooled up for VR. 

Now, at the same time as Meta’s increasing the cost to enter VR, the chatter is all about a new generation of headsets and glasses that may prove that people would rather be in XR (extended reality, a combination of physical and virtual worlds). While completely immersive VR might be good for gaming and entertainment, XR makes a lot more sense in the enterprise where you really need to remain conscious of your real-world surroundings. Virtual reality statistics show that 27% of VR industry experts say that user experience such as technical glitches and bulky hardware is a huge challenge in the growth of VR and its mass adoption.

The holy grail for XR is to make devices equally suited to factory floors, strolling through town, and gaming. One of the most important features in this class of headsets is pass-through video. Pass-through allows you to step outside your view in immersive VR to see a real-time view of your surroundings. If you’re a Quest user, you’ll notice that it uses pass-through video (in grainy black and white) to help you set up your set up your guardian boundary, so you don’t knock into furniture while you’re playing. Next-gen devices will also offer higher resolution pass-through, hands-free usage (be it hands, fingers, or voice), wider angle displays, and brighter images. But, they will be more expensive. 

Extended reality is an umbrella term for a continuum of experiences. As I write, Meta is looking at an enterprise solution with its new XR product dubbed Cambria. Cambria includes a pass-through camera for AR, face and eye tracking, and other enhancements in addition to Oculus-type VR . It’ll likely be more expensive than the Quest (over $800). Microsoft HoloLens 2 is already based on XR technology. That’s why you can play a game in VR while still seeing the real room you’re in. (HoloLens 2 starts at over $3,000.) Varjo is another good example of an XR headset ($2,500) promising resolution equivalent to the human eye. And the VR subsidiary of TikTok is planning to launch a price-sensitive headset called the Pico 4 VR-Pro.

Apple’s designs for its new headsets are starting to leak. Expect a sleeker, more fashionable design and multiple 3D-sensing modules for detecting hand gestures and recognizing objects in the vicinity of the wearer. It will also (according to publications like MacRumor) support voice control, skin detection, spatial detection, expression detection, and spatial audio. Interestingly, one of the patents filed is for finger cuffs—replacing hand controllers, not landing you in jail. It’s reported to even have its own operating system built specifically for XR. I’m sure it will be expensive and guessing the company has fingers crossed for the return of those “lines around the block” days of the iPhone. 

HTC announced Vive Flow, a lighter-weight design resembling a heavy pair of sunglasses. It’ll be lighter, higher resolution, and optimized for mixed reality and metaverse experiences ($500). Google announced the second coming of Google Glass for AR and is thought to be releasing its VR headset, while SONY’s about to launch Playstation VR2. It’ll work exclusively with the PS5, which means the serious gamer audience.

Luke Bilton, Chief Growth Office of ExpoPlatform, tells us where he thinks event tech will be most useful as we move on to Q4. 

• On-demand content available following the show will, interestingly, be far more important than simultaneous streaming of hybrid events.
• Apps will have a high impact on the in-person event experience. Lead retrieval and mobile event apps are high in importance, but just one app per event, please!
• Exhibitor ROI and having a seamless experience are the greatest issues to be solved now. Organizers want to demonstrate that all the leads exhibitors get (whether online or in-person) can be integrated to create a seamless journey.

The full report is worth reading. 

A few weeks ago I wrote in some detail about the Metaverse Standards Organization. It’s being hosted by Khronos, which has a storied history of open standards creation. But I mentioned that some notable players, including big metaverse companies, were absent from the initial roster. Well, wouldn’t ya know it? They’ve gone and formed their own standards group. It’s called OMA3 (Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3). My knee-jerk reaction is that it’s where you’ll find the hip kids such as Animoca, which is a group of NFT and blockchain-based properties including The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Dapper Labs — all Web 3 natives. They even call their standards group a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), implying that decisions will be born of its members in an equal way. Does the metaworld really need two standards organizations? My suggestion is that Khronos work on its expertise which is more likely to be in graphics standards and let OMA work on interoperability between worlds. 

Algorithmic Anxiety
From tooth whiteners to poorly tailored clothing, we’ve all bought stuff we really didn’t need because the Internet suggested the results would be life-changing. But where does that all-knowing AI go too far? The New Yorker’s Kyle Chaka takes a look. 

Hollywood vs. Los Gatos
Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix, written by Dade Hayes (Deadline Hollywood) and Dawn Chmielewski (Reuters), looks at the businesses and the personalities behind companies such as Disney, Apple, AT&T/WarnerMedia, Comcast/NBCUniversal, and even the now defunct Quibi as they mounted their challenges to unseat Netflix as the King of Streaming.

Watch Party
No, not the kind you wear on your wrist; it’s the kind where you invite your buds to watch something together, chatting online as you watch. Amazon, Hulu, and Disney each offer their own brand of the watch party. YouTubers can use WatchParty. But it just got easier to organize a movie or sports night while you chat, message, and watch your friends with Kosmi, which supports multiple services and even lets you play card games together. Scener is another one worth looking at.