Get ready to use VR with your mind

Greetings, AR enthusiasts.

The future of VR where you no longer need controllers is closer than you think. There is also news of a VR glove that helps with your fitness journey.

This week also saw Meta coming out about AirPlay on their headsets.

In today’s Phantom Thread, we will look at:

• Neural Wristbands could be ready sooner than you think

• Your Meta Quest 3 can track your entire arm now

• XR Startup Vi hopes to kickstart a fitness revolution in VR

• Meta wants Apple to allow AirPlay on Quest headsets

• Create your first Vision Pro app

• 4 New AR Tools

WEEKLY THREADS

^META
Neural Wristbands could be ready sooner than you think

The weave: Zuckerberg came onto the Morning Brew talk show to talk about Meta’s upcoming projects and he dropped the plan of shipping neural wristbands as soon as in the next few years.

The strands:

• Neural wristbands go onto your wrist and use the neural signals your brain sends to your arms to move them.

• The Vision Pro and Quest headsets have hand tracking features but the optical method they use isn’t reliable, especially if you’re in a dimly lit space.

• A physical interface like a wristband will make the gestures you do easier to detect, and be represented more accurately.

The fabric: Neural wristbands could be the next step in VR and AR since it can phase out the bulky controllers currently being used. Applications for this tech are evident in medical science where new surgeons can train in AR and VR and experienced doctors can do practice runs of procedures they’re going to be doing.

^META
Your Meta Quest 3 can track your entire arm now

The weave:  The Quest 3 recently got the ‘Wide Motion Mode’ feature that expands hand tracking to your entire upper body.

The strands:

• The new feature tracks your entire upper body using inside out upper body tracking.

• This can track your arm even if it is out of frame of the headset’s cameras, allowing you to move more freely in the virtual space.

• Meta has only brought this feature out on the Quest 3, but they say they’ll have this on all future headsets.

The fabric: This could enable devs to let you throw stuff, grab stuff from your back, which were only previously possible with physical controllers. Your fingers will be frozen in place when it moves out of frame of the cameras, so you might only be able to do basic stuff like hand motions before the estimation tech gets more accurate.

^VI
XR Startup Vi hopes to kickstart a fitness revolution in VR

The weave: New Virtual reality startup Vi has unveiled a series of renders that tease a new XR glove intended for home workouts. They also intend to launch a smaller headset to complement the gloves.

The strands:

• The gloves are only at the prototyping stage now, but when it comes out it will be able to track your reps and the weights you are loading.

• It does not matter if you already own a VR headset; the gloves are claimed to be hardware agnostic.

• The fitness content that the planned headset will be bundled with later will be subscription-based.

The fabric: One paragraph on what the main takeways from this news are for the AR industry. Make it as insightful and useful as possible. The idea is to provide a takeaway the reader can carry into their everyday conversations allowing them to appear smarter and knowledgeable.

^META
Meta wants Apple to allow AirPlay on Quest headsets

The weave: Meta VP of VR says that it is all on Apple to allow iPhones to be AirPlay’d onto a Quest headset. They have already asked for permission.

The strands:

• Quest doesn’t have a ton of native streaming content, so mirroring your iPhone can let you watch a lot more content than you could earlier.

• There are native apps for Netflix and Prime Video, but they haven’t been updated in years.

• The Netflix app can only stream at 480p, while the Prime Video app doesn’t even connect to their services.

The fabric: Apple doesn’t have much incentive to add mirroring because the Vision Pro has native versions of popular services like Disney+ and web versions of Prime Video. Netflix isn’t on Quest or Vision Pro either, but Netflix on the Vision Pro is way better than Quest’s 480p streaming version of it.

^{AR TUTORIAL}
Create your first Vision Pro app

The weave: Looking to start developing for the Vision Pro? Or are you simply looking at what developers have access to?

Here’s our step-by-step guide:

1. Install the latest version of Xcode

2. Create a new Project with the VisionOS app template.

3. Set the initial scene to Window and immersive space to Mixed.

4. You will now be taken to the code editor which will have three code files.

WEEKLY AR TOOL ROUNDUP

Featured AR tools:

• Scenebrook - Create interactive XR experiences without knowing how to code.

• Holo Wheels - Use AR to check how good your dream set of rims look like on your car.

• Moon Player - Lets you play any video on your VR headset even if they are not made for VR.

• XR Graph - A powerful math function visualizer that can bring any function you throw at it into the virtual metaverse.

FLASH FRAMES

Apple says the Vision Pro now has at least 1000 native apps available for download.

The Oregon State University in collaboration with Smart Information Flow Technologies create a VR interface that can let operators control a swarm of more than a 100 drones

ESPN Edge now lets you watch VR highlights on the Xtadium app available on the Meta Quest headset.

The first Somnium VR-1 headsets could start shipping as early as April. Somnium’s blog post, which also announced the shipping date, also said that production will be starting in March to meet that deadline

South Louisiana Veterans Administration has come up with a novel method of assisting patients with PTSD: VR therapy.

THAT’S ALL FOR THE WEEK