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Facebook wants to own the VR app ecosystem, & @blakejharrisNYC got an Zuckerberg email revealing FB tried to buy @unity3d to ensure integrations with their services. Zuck thought this would strongarm @EpicGames in integrating tightly with FB. What a misread on @TimSweeneyEpic!
Oh the stories @unity3d could tell about the invisible platform wars that have been happening in VR/AR over the past 5 years. Valve seems to be the only major XR player that deeply understand ecosystem development, but maybe that's because they've owned gaming's #1 app store.
It's likely @unity3d is probably trying to own aspects of the gaming platform like cloud hosting, especially with their recent terms of service update & public feud/breakup with @Improbableio. It's likely their business model directly competes with Unity:
improbable.io/company/news/2…
improbable.io/company/news/2…
The dark horse in the XR platform app wars is @TimSweeneyEpic & @EpicGames. @UnrealEngine's source is open & available to hack. UE4 invests in engineering demos at SIGGRAPH rather than marketing. Epic has their own store & Fortnite revenue. They've been leaders in @OpenXR.
The other big dark horse in all of these invisible walled garden, app ecosystem, platform wars is #WebXR & @mozillareality. Every successful open standard standard has a proprietary competitor, so app store battles won't go away. But many strengths of XR come from the open web.
So I'd love to see @EpicGames invest more in helping to cultivate the open web. Apple is MIA here as they'll want to own the XR platform. Google has the most open web strategy as everyone uses Chromium (Microsoft, FB, Samsung, etc). @mozillareality is the only indie player here.
.@mozilla's Firefox browser uses the Gecko rendering engine, but @mozillareality's new XR browser is built from scratch on Servo, which is written in Rust. Many of the developers of Mozilla's original WebXR integration in Firefox went off to start @supermediumvr which uses Gecko.
Another key player within the XR ecosystem & platform wars is @amazon's Sumerian, which is more of a cloud hosting play that leverages WebXR. I've heard lots of good things from developers about it, and @NellWaliczek is helping to lead the W3C WebXR spec writing process.
Microsoft failed to compete against iOS/Android, which led to their open source strategy. They're on the right side of privacy & self-sovereign identity, but they still try to own the OS platform. Windows Holographic OS is built for spatial computing, & @HoloLens is best AR HMD.
Valve's @SteamVR has the most cross-platform support, but they're also highly secretive, inaccessible, & closed as a culture. Their non-hierarchical structure means they can innovate & focus more on engineering than marketing hype but at the cost of communication & collaboration.
Other players in the space to keep an eye on in the XR platform space are @NianticLabs, @Snapchat, & @Netflix. China's VR ecosystem is an entirely different beast, but @AlibabaGroup, Tencent's QQ are huge players there with @HTCVive leading hardware in China.
Oh! Samsung is so self-centered on their own ecosystem that they've always been strange bedfellows with Facebook. They probably stongarmed Oculus into an exclusive Mobile deal with Gear VR & Facebook memory-holed them from history. Where's Gear VR in this photo of 1.0 VR devices? 
Samsung didn't mention Gear VR at their dev conf in 2017 or 2018. Samsung is working on their own standalone HMD.
I haven't heard any talk of Gear VR at Oculus Connect for the past 2-3 years. Oculus is going all in w the Quest.
Doesn't seem to be any meaningful collaboration here
I haven't heard any talk of Gear VR at Oculus Connect for the past 2-3 years. Oculus is going all in w the Quest.
Doesn't seem to be any meaningful collaboration here
.@magicleap is in a weird spot in the sense they chose secrecy & marketing hype over prioritizing the cultivation of a dev ecosystem. Oculus had the DK1 & DK2 before CV1. Magic Leap thought they could skip to right to CV1. Nope. That didn't work. Now they're playing catch up.
It'll be interesting to watch whether Facebook still supports PC gamers with updates to the Rift. Most likely but FB missed the mobile phone revolution & are beholden to the whims of iOS & Android. They're probably betting on the Quest as their best chance to own the XR platform.
It's miracle that @OpenXR catalyzed by @thekhronosgroup exists. It's an amazing effort with nearly all of the major players to turn XR into an open platform like the PC is an open platform. It'll be interesting to see where that goes if mobile VR becomes the defacto baseline.
Twitter is great at generating the first iteration of an idea (or series of ideas), but hard to do version control without the ability to edit or control threads.
Adding @joshcarpenter's developmental history of WebVR corrections here to the main thread:
Adding @joshcarpenter's developmental history of WebVR corrections here to the main thread:
I'm trying to convince @TimSweeneyEpic to change @UnrealEngine to a MIT open source license. They're killing with Fortnite, & UE4 fees are a security blanket blocking the larger innovation potential of open source. They'd take over Unity in a few years:
Well, it doesn't look like I convinced @TimSweeneyEpic to abandon UE4 licensing fees in favor of an open source license. But keep an eye on Epic for innovating how to be a sustainable & ethical platform company AND a successful, immersive content company:
Here's another fork of the thread that draws some of the connections between the challenges of sustaining the open web and the ethically-questionable business practices of surveillance capitalism. Isn't it a simple exchange? Nope. Privacy is complicated!
Google doesn't like to do stuff that doesn't scale. They've did fast iterations with Cardboard, but it never gained larger momentum because the experience sucked. Phone-based 3DoF Daydream still has huge friction. Lenovo Mirage has the most compelling, self-contained 6DoF HMD.
AR so many utility applications where Google will continue innovate. They've had a harder time making the transition to developing hardware & products, but Home & Pixel are bootstrapping their larger movements in conservational interfaces, AI, & spatial computing.
Google also has developed or acquired some of the most compelling VR apps: Tiltbrush, Google Maps, & Blocks.
Their Daydream efforts were downplayed at Google I/O, but lots happening w YouTube & 180-degree video at Vidcon.
Most of the ecosystem innovations are phone-based ARCore.
Their Daydream efforts were downplayed at Google I/O, but lots happening w YouTube & 180-degree video at Vidcon.
Most of the ecosystem innovations are phone-based ARCore.
My advanced copy of @blakejharrisNYC's "The History of the Future" just arrived. I'll be diving in this weekend. Look for a Voices of VR podcast interview with Blake early next week when it launches on February 19th.
I'd read all of @ID_AA_Carmack's internal Oculus emails.
He's got a no-nonsense, "tell it like it is" pragmatism that doesn't pull any punches. It provides a very authentic historical lens.
Here's John questioning the tech background of Oculus leadership:
uploadvr.com/john-carmack-o…
He's got a no-nonsense, "tell it like it is" pragmatism that doesn't pull any punches. It provides a very authentic historical lens.
Here's John questioning the tech background of Oculus leadership:
uploadvr.com/john-carmack-o…
Here's @ID_AA_Carmack questioning the experiential design feedback of Oculus CEO @brendaniribe, who is notoriously super sensitive to motion sickness. It's a great litmus test for VR comfort, but John is resistant to following his 3rd-person POV VR advice.
uploadvr.com/john-carmack-o…
uploadvr.com/john-carmack-o…
