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The $499 HTC Vive Flow is VR for people who don’t like VR - The Verge

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 08:01 AM PDT

After years of focusing on business-oriented virtual reality, HTC is launching a $499 entertainment-focused headset called the Vive Flow in November, with preorders starting globally today.

The new Vive Flow looks radically different from most HTC Vive devices. It's a standalone piece of hardware modeled after a pair of sunglasses, and at first glance it could pass for an augmented reality headset, not just a VR one. But behind those slightly bug-eyed mirror shades, you'll find a lighter version of earlier Vive headsets — minus some major features.

The Vive Flow, which was leaked heavily before HTC's reveal today, is a compromise between capability and approachability. The device has a 1.6K-per-eye display (HTC didn't provide the exact resolution) with a 100-degree field of view at a 75Hz refresh rate. That's a little more limited than the 120 degrees and 90Hz rate that you'll find on the more costly Vive Focus 3 and roughly the same refresh rate but a lower field of view than the original Quest. It's also slightly comparable to the Oculus Quest's refresh rate before a recent upgrade and a little more cramped than its 110-degree field of view.

Two front-facing cameras handle inside-out motion tracking, and HTC plans to support hand tracking as well, although the feature wasn't available during a pre-launch demo and didn't give an exact timeline for its rollout. It's using the last-generation Qualcomm XR1 chipset (as opposed to the Quest 2's XR2), and it's got a respectable 64GB of storage space but — unlike the Focus 3 — no slot for an expansion card.

Lightweight hardware is a big selling point for HTC. "We wanted to get to something lighter, more wearable, easier to travel with," says Dan O'Brien, HTC's head of VR. The Flow weighs 189 grams, compared to around 500 grams for the Oculus Quest 2, and has a hinged design that folds up to fit in a $49 carrying case.

Unlike earlier Vive headsets, the Vive Flow won't come with a controller. Instead, you connect the headset wirelessly to an Android smartphone and use the phone as a combination remote / touchpad. Similar to the mobile Google Daydream or Samsung Gear VR remotes, it's basically a virtual laser pointer with buttons for selecting items and calling up the homescreen.

Leaked photos showed the Flow plugged into a black box, which some people speculated might be an external computing device. It's actually a $79 battery pack that should let you use the headset for four to five hours. The Flow technically has its own battery, but HTC says it only lasts a few minutes — it's designed to let you swap power sources without turning off the headset. So you'll need either the HTC battery, which is sold separately from the headset, or (according to HTC) any 10,000mAh power bank and a USB-C cable.

In addition to controlling the device, the phone connection lets you mirror Android apps, calling up a virtual copy of your phone's homescreen and letting you launch apps like streaming video services in a floating window. The headset doesn't pair with iPhones, and while HTC hasn't ruled out future support, it indicated there were serious barriers to making iOS play well with the Flow.

HTC wants people to use the Vive Flow for visually immersive but mostly stationary experiences. So you can watch a 360-degree video or sit in a virtual environment, but you can't use apps that require full-fledged virtual hands. (This rules out most well-known VR games.) The camera tracking gives you a more natural experience than a headset that can only detect the angle of your head, but the app catalog and the somewhat loose-fitting glasses-style design mean you probably won't be walking around.

HTC says the Flow will launch with 100 apps and support 150 by the end of the year. In addition to uses like streaming video, its release announcement promotes the Tripp meditation app and the VR therapeutic service MyndVR, which is tailored for older adults. You can also engage with VR social spaces like Vive Sync and watch streaming video, something that's proven popular on AR glasses. The Flow will support a limited subset of the apps on HTC's Viveport store, and users can subscribe to a discounted, Flow-focused $5.99-per-month version of Viveport's app subscription service.

The Vive Flow seems basically pitched as a VR headset for people who find current VR headsets overcomplicated or intimidating. O'Brien describes the device as something that's easy to put in a bag while traveling without worrying about extra pieces like controllers. "We wanted to make something that was super easy and flexible," he says. Instead of directly competing with gaming-oriented headsets, HTC is trying to carve out a new category of its own.

HTC's focus on older users ("the huge Boomer population," as a MyndVR representative put it) is part of this strategy. So is the push for a glasses-like design instead of the straps you'll find on most headsets. "There's the user that really just wants this thing to be un-intimidating and easy to pop on and off," O'Brien says — and that's who the Flow is made for. The result has a lot in common with the now-discontinued Oculus Go, but with a svelter look and upgrades like the inside-out camera tracking.

My brief experience with the Vive Flow was a mixed bag. The Flow is, in fact, remarkably light — presumably in part because HTC offloaded its battery. But without a strap system to keep the headset in place, the screen kept slipping down my face and blurring the top half of my VR experience. HTC plans to offer alternate swappable face gaskets for different fits, and one of them worked better than the original. But I still had to be careful while turning my head, and the feeling of carefully balancing the headset wasn't exactly relaxing.

The Flow was exponentially more bearable than earlier "glasses-style" VR headsets I've tried. It's just still a lot more unsteady-feeling than the Focus 3, Quest, or practically any other major headset, and there's no alternate strap option for people who want a more secure fit. There's a diopter adjustment dial so you can change the focus on each eye individually, but like the Quest 2, you inconveniently can't change the focus while you're actually looking at an image — you have to take the headset off, twist the wheels a notch, and then put it back on again.

The smartphone-based controller, the Vive Flow's biggest departure from standard VR design, is theoretically reasonable but practically awkward. I used an HTC-provided Android device that worked fine as a VR laser pointer. But thanks to the long-running trend of ever-bigger phones, I could barely fit my hand around HTC's phone to tap virtual buttons on the screen. It's also a strange choice for any headset aimed at older users, who are dramatically less likely to own smartphones.

Hand tracking could partly solve the interaction issue. But gesture interfaces remain frustratingly hit-or-miss and typically require holding your fingers up to perform fine motions, which also seems like a bad option if your hands have limited mobility, and I didn't get to try HTC's version in my demo. O'Brien says HTC is still toying with options for other control systems — its plan is to release the headset and then tweak its design based on how people use it.

More generally, it's not clear HTC's emphasis on portability is the key to winning over VR doubters. Companies have been pitching "VR you can throw in your bag" for years now, and outside of people whose jobs involve headsets, I haven't seen a single human being cite that as a selling point — while I've heard even skeptics praise bulkier headsets for being comfortable. HTC also says people will feel less awkward wearing this glasses-like design in public settings like airplanes. As someone who actually has worn a VR headset on an airplane, I'm not sure that's enough to erase its fundamental weirdness.

There isn't really a clear audience for the Flow in the US market. It's far more expensive and less feature-rich than the Facebook-subsidized Oculus Quest 2 but without specialized features that might make it appealing for businesses or other organizations. (Film festivals and schools could use a no-frills VR headset for 360-degree video, for instance... but the Flow isn't it.) HTC has designed social apps like Sync that could have relatively broad appeal. But outside its meditation and video options, my Flow demo didn't offer a great sense of its day-to-day value. I found mostly small games that I might play occasionally, not tools I'd spend $499 to access.

But HTC has built a strong base of VR business hardware, and for now, it seems content to release the Flow as an experiment. At the very least, you won't find another major headset like it — even if it does make you sort of look like a bug.

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Facebook captured more than 2,000 hours of first-person video to train next-generation A.I. - CNBC

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 05:00 AM PDT

In this article

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Facebook on Thursday announced a research project in which it collected 2,200 hours of first-person footage from around the world to train next-generation artificial intelligence models.

The project is called Ego4D, and it could prove to be crucial to Facebook's Reality Labs division, which is working on numerous projects that could benefit from AI models trained using video footage shot from the perspective of a human. This includes smart glasses, like the Ray-Ban Stories that were released by Facebook last month, and virtual reality, in which Facebook has invested heavily since its 2014 $2 billion acquisition of Oculus.

The footage could teach artificial intelligence to understand or identify something in the real world, or a virtual world, that you might see from a first-person perspective through a pair of glasses or an Oculus headset.

Facebook said it will make the Ego4D data set publicly available to researchers in November.

"This release, which is an open data set and research challenge, is going to catalyze progress for us internally but also widely externally in the academic community and [allow] other researchers to get behind these new problems but now be able to do it in a more meaningful way and at a greater scale," Kristen Grauman, lead research scientist at Facebook, told CNBC.

The data set could be deployed in AI models used to train technology like robots to more rapidly understand the world, Grauman said.

"Traditionally a robot learns by doing stuff in the world or being literally handheld to be shown how to do things," Grauman said. "There's openings to let them learn from video just from our own experience."

Facebook and a consortium of 13 university partners relied on more than 700 participants across nine countries to capture the first-person footage. Facebook says Ego4D has more than 20 times more hours of footage than any other data set of its kind.

Facebook's university partners included Carnegie Mellon in the U.S., the University of Bristol in the U.K., the National University of Singapore, the University of Tokyo in Japan and the International Institute of Information Technology in India, among others.

The footage was captured in the U.S., U.K., Italy, India, Japan, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Facebook said it is hoping to expand the project to more countries, including Colombia and Rwanda.

"An important design decision for this project is we wanted partners that first of all are leading experts in the field, interested in these problems and motivated to pursue them but also have geographic diversity," Grauman said.

Facebook's Ray-Ban Stories Glasses

Sal Rodriguez | CNBC

The announcement of Ego4D comes at an interesting time for Facebook.

The company has steadily been ramping up its efforts in hardware. Last month, it released the $299 Ray-Ban Stories, its first smart glasses. And in July, Facebook announced the formation of a product team to work specifically on the "metaverse," which is a concept that involves creating digital worlds that multiple people can inhabit at the same time.

Over the past month, however, Facebook has been hit by a barrage of news stories stemming from a trove of internal company research leaked by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower. Among the research released were slides that showed Instagram was harmful to the mental health of teenagers.

The footage was captured using off-the-shelf devices like GoPro cameras and Vuzix smart glasses.

For the sake of privacy, Facebook said participants were instructed to avoid capturing personal identifying characteristics when collecting footage indoors. This includes people's faces, conversations, tattoos and jewelry. Facebook said it removed personally identifiable information from the videos and blurred bystanders' faces and vehicle license plate numbers. The audio was also removed from many of the videos, the company said.

"The university partners who did this video collection, step No. 1 for all of them was a pretty intensive and important process to create a policy for proper collection," Grauman said.

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