Why Facebook Is Staking Its Claim on VR Advertising

J.C. Kuang, Analyst Advertising, Insight Articles, Media & Entertainment, Virtual Reality

Oculus leadership announced June 16th it is testing a system for embedding advertisements directly into VR experiences on the Quest platform. The ads will run on 3 currently released titles including Resolution Games’ Blaston, and use personalized data from users’ corresponding Facebook marketing profile and general intent metrics such as previous purchases and wish lists from the Oculus store. This … Read More

How Can Facebook Bring Fortnite Into Virtual Reality?

J.C. Kuang, Analyst Apps & Games, Insight Articles, Media & Entertainment, Virtual Reality

On June 11th Oculus and Facebook announced their latest studio acquisition; BigboxVR. Excitement around the acquisition centers mostly around Bigbox’s flagship title; Population: ONE, which is a massively multiplayer battle royale shooter for VR. Specifically, media outlets have drawn comparisons between Pop: ONE and runaway hit Fortnite, which has dominated both the gaming market and conversations around the future of … Read More

VIVECON 2021: Why HTC Is All-In On HTC Vive Pro 2 and Vive Focus 3

J.C. Kuang, Analyst Devices & Technology, Enterprise Transformation, Events, Head-Mounted Displays, Insight Articles, Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality Intelligence Service

HTC Vive will launch a new piece of VR hardware at its online product event, VIVECON, on May 11-12.  Based on reporting from media outlets, it is likely the company is teasing an upgrade/refresh to the Vive Focus Plus and Vive Pro; HTC released the first headset in April 2019, and unofficially discontinued and replaced the second with the Vive … Read More

V28 Turns Oculus Quest 2 Into Must Have Product, But Still No Killer App

J.C. Kuang, Analyst Insight Articles

Arriving on April 23rd, Oculus’ v28 software update for the Quest platform brought a number of new and highly anticipated experimental/early release features to the company’s flagship VR headset, Quest 2. Among these were: Air Link, an inbuilt first-party tool for enabling wireless streaming to a linked home computer system, enabling PC-based VR games to be played in Quest 2 … Read More

Oculus Subscriptions Indicate Critical Inflection Point for VR Ecosystem

J.C. Kuang, Analyst Insight Articles

Executive leadership at Facebook and Oculus announced on Thursday they would begin offering VR developers the opportunity to implement subscription-based models for games and services available on its Quest store. In addition, several established properties such as VSpatial, FitXR, and Rec Room (which notably closed its largest funding round to date [$100M] in March of 2021). Oculus emphasized in its … Read More

Late, Then Never: Is Microsoft Finished With VR?

J.C. Kuang, Analyst Devices & Technology, Enterprise Transformation, Enterprise xR Intelligence Service, Head-Mounted Displays, Insight Articles, Media & Entertainment, Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality Intelligence Service

Media outlets have reported that Microsoft remains committed to the continuing development of its virtual reality platforms. Despite ongoing investment and improvement into Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) in the Hololens 2 platform, Microsoft has remained conspicuously silent on its overarching strategy, if any, for its line of fledgling OEM built VR devices. As others have pointed out, the original designs … Read More