[Music] hello and welcome to Tuesday news day your number one resource for the entire week's worth of VR news a lot has happened the past few weeks we got a ton of stuff from meta some of it good some of it incredibly alarming we got fresh details on valve's next headset and a couple of absolutely insane news bits that I think you're going to really like from VR headsets entering prisons to the original founder of oculus making a huge comeback in the XR industry yeah this is going to be a fun one but before we
get to all this a word from this video sponsor side quest as one of the largest VR app Platforms in existence with thousands of VR games and apps to explore side quest is just a great tool to have especially if you're a quest user and side quest has been working on their own social VR platform for the past few years banter and I think you can see exactly what banter is all about via their new trailer become the self- deluded Rockstar you've always wanted to be or push your tush or whatever you wish to push
and if nothing strikes your fancy then build your own build a space where none of the stairs make sense or frankly make an obstacle course where you get flung out of a snowman banter is where you can do anything or become anything you want play bant now all right side quest over we've got a lot to cover so let's just get right into the news just just a couple months ago it made news that a Florida judge had used a Quest 2 in the middle of a court trial to experience a crime in first person
in VR which is basically just a courtroom brain dance if you think about it but this was kind of a big deal as this was essentially the first time in history that a virtual reality experience was used as evidence in trial but this isn't the only way that VR has made its way into the United States justice system multiple California prisons have begun instating a VR program that is specifically designed for inmates that are currently in solitary confinement or stuck in small cages that are actually called quote therapeutic modules where they were sent because of
misbehavior within the prison while in solitary confinement inmates are subjected to an intensive 7-Day VR program where they basically live through a variety of real life scenarios ranging from everyday life scenes to Art and poetry to uncomfortable situations like physically running into someone on the street and having to deal with the altercation creative acts the company that creates the so-called programming that the inmates go through states that the usage of VR allows inmates to experience culture and situations in a way that they wouldn't normally be able to but almost more importantly it gets the inmates
out of the prison environment even if just for a moment and uh I'm not going to lie without any context there is something deeply unsettling about these pictures it looks dystopian to say the least and I think there's even something further unsettling about the base idea of prisoners using virtual reality as a form of escapism while being locked up it's reminiscent of a matrix scene getting lost in a virtual world while being physically confined but in reality at least in this specific scenario when given proper context the results are a bit more complicated cuz well
this VR therapy for inmates has actually been working really really well like shockingly well according to the guardian prisons that have piloted the programming reported a wait for it 96% reduction in infractions from participants and for example after one week of the program average infractions fell from 735 to 1 in one prison's case there were so few infractions that they decided to close an entire wing of solitary confinement because it just wasn't needed anymore and so as cyberpunk dystopian as this looks and feels really seems like this is a great example of some of the
amazing strengths of virtual reality and I think while researching this there was one quote that really stuck with me when given scenes of people casually walking around the Eiffel Tower as part of the solitary VR program and inmate said quote you see tourists regular people going to and from work and that's when it hit me I want to live life like that I deserve it I owe it to myself end quote all right but now let's catch up on everything that's been going on with meta because honestly the entire company has just been acting really
weird L and I think you'll see what I'm talking about and I'm almost embarrassed to say this but meta has essentially erased the term virtual reality from everything not just in their own marketing but in Internal Documentation in developer tools and even retroactively in VR headset descriptions if you're a VR developer well congrats you've been rebranded as a mixed reality developer in fact in a recent survey there's not even an option for a VR developer and while this is technically just a naming convention I do want to let this idea sink in for a moment
the leader of the VR industry by far has just name swapped the entire industry a decade in to something that literally nobody uses I mean even Microsoft discontinued the term mixed reality years ago but here we are and this isn't just conjecture this was recently confirmed by current meta CTO Andrew Bosworth which perfectly brings us to our next metat topic the pretty alarming internal memo that Bosworth sent to meta reality lab's employees recently titled 2025 the year of greatness the memo starts with this Gem of a quote this year likely determines whether this entire effort
will go down as the work of Visionaries or a legendary misadventure end quote basically this whole memo is a p talk to the reality Labs team saying Horizon worlds needs to succeed particularly on mobile like mobile phones not mobile VR and that it'll be this year's efforts that decides whether this entire um mixed reality industry was a legendary misadventure or not yikes and so you can pause and read the memo if you'd like honestly I got nothing but terrible vibes from it but I wasn't the only one at first I thought maybe I was just
a little crazy for thinking that the mixed reality rename was a bad idea and that maybe putting all your eggs in The Horizon world's basket Horizon being meta's social metaverse platform might also be a bad idea but turns out I'm not all that crazy John karmac the ex Oculus CTO and co-founder of ID software chimed in also saying that this entire memo and mixed reality move is both a flawed strategic Direction and an unfortunate terminology Revolution that somebody had to have championed and yeah I uh I think I know exactly who champion into this but
okay weird internal memos and renaming the entire industry is one thing but not everything has been terrible at meta and to be fair some of this actually kind of makes sense when you look at meta's most recent quarterly revenue reports in 2024 reality Labs broke records both good and bad Quest 3 3s Rayband Spar glasses and software sales hit an all-time high but reality Labs also posted record quarterly losses burning through around $5 billion most of it sunk into augment in reality R&D but here's the real kicker and I think the spur point for all
of this meta's biggest success last year and reason for their record Revenue wasn't because of VR stuff it was because of AI smart glasses and when you put that next to VR hardware sales that came nowhere close to the Quest 2 sales poor retention meta backed VR Studios shutting their doors well yeah it kind of feels like they're flailing and I hate to say it but I think meta kind of lost the plot while chasing entirely unrealistic expectations given the current state of VR rather than focusing on the technology acknowledging its current strengths and weaknesses
and capitalizing on the few places where people do actually use vrv day they're buckling down on Horizon worlds and weird terminology on imaginary people for Imaginary use cases and I don't know man it's just weird and I also find this to be a bit hilarious meta has been bankrolling like a dozen big tripa aish VR games for release on Quest over the past few years from Assassin's Creed to Medal of Honor to alien to Metro to even a Batman Arkham game and I can imagine meta probably expected a giant explosion of VR users from all
of these titles but the reception to all these games has really just been kind of okay and I mean none of these games are bad but they're also not really that great either meanwhile the thing that's actually been exploding VR usage has been with the child demographic with Gorilla tag and gorilla tag clones bringing in legitimately hundreds of millions of dollars of Revenue no joke and I can just imagine the absolute confusion of meta Executives as they realize they don't really know their own platform as well as they think they do this is where my
worries come in I have a feeling that meta doesn't really want these games like animal company to be exceeding at all in fact the push for Horizon worlds over the past year including a $50 million Horizon world's fund really just feels like a push to get people off of individual VR applications and onto a platform that meta owns with recent moves to make Horizon world's almost its own game engine meta wants the biggest VR games to be within their platform not just within their store but within Horizon and I also have a feeling given Bosworth's
recent words that meta is going to do literally whatever it takes to hit critical mass of users within Horizon even if it quite literally takes killing VR even if it's just the name but so much more happened in VR than just meta getting a little confused we've been talking about Deckard for well pretty much 4 years now but it seems we're closer to release than ever Gabe follower a known Val leer claims that valve's long rumored upcoming Standalone hybrid VR headset is actually launching this year and we have a supposed price Deckard will supposedly be
launching at $1,200 which doesn't quite hit the quest competitor price range that I was hoping for but reportedly even at $1,200 valve will still be selling this headset at a loss and according to Gabe followers leak Deckard will be running Steam OS Standalone come bundled with some in-house games or demos that have already been finished and of course featur controllers code name Roy that double as game pads for flat screen gaming we've already talked about most of those details in the past you can watch that video if you're interested and I would still take all
of this with the grain of salt but between the Steam VR driver leaks job listings valves not so subtle hints and the Litany of leaks that we've gotten over time Deckard is obviously gone its way and I have a feeling that the stars are almost lined but now we can talk about the big story Palmer lucky aka the guy that literally created modern VR is back and if you don't know who this is let me just give a quick crash course Palmer is well known as the guy that basically revived modern-day virtual reality initially creating
VR headsets out of a trailer to eventually launch the Oculus Kickstarter and long story short Facebook later meta acquired Oculus for $2 billion and things were seemly going pretty well until Facebook basically fired Palmer lucky for very Loosely supporting Trump during the 2016 election which by the way I find incredibly ironic in 2025 given Mark Zuckerberg the guy who essentially bought Oculus kicked out the founder for supporting Trump and then subsequently killed the Oculus brand is suddenly best friends with Trump but I digress after being blacklisted from the industry Palmer went on to build andal
a billion- dooll defense company from scratch that now manufactures a wide variety of Defense Technologies from drones to counter missiles and more but the big news is that andrel just took over the $22 billion contract for the US Army's integrated visual augmented system or ivas which is basically the biggest military XR project in history previously spearheaded by Microsoft's Hollow lens team the project was supposedly close to being canned after difficulties with the hollow lens Hardware but with and rolles involvement the project has received an entire New Life Palmer laid out most of his plans in
his blog and honestly it's pretty insane this isn't just a fancy Hollow lens with a heads up display he essentially wants to build a super power device night vision ultraviolet thermal AI enhanced overlays predictive combat intelligence drone integration it's what he calls a full-blown technoman heads up display one that I can imagine seamlessly integrates with ander's other offerings and so what was originally a pretty boring and honestly mid US Army contract that wasn't going too well is turning out to be likely one of the most advanced and probably expensive XR devices ever developed and so
yeah Palmer lucky is back maybe not in consumer technology and maybe not in a way that everyone would agree with but in a world where this contract will be fulfilled by somebody at some point I'm personally excited to see where Palmer will take it as designing head-mounted displays is literally this guy's life's work and in his blog he finishes out his personal announcement with a chilling quote whatever you are imagining however crazy you imagine I am multiply it by 10 and then do it again I am back and I'm only getting started and so I
think that's a pretty good place to wrap up there's been a ton of Doom and Gloom within the VR industry in a lot of ways the past few weeks and kind of this whole year and I don't really blame anybody for it given everything I just talked about with met which I really tried not to sound super negative about but it's just almost surreal the way things are going and also the past couple years have just been pretty tough dozens of Studios have closed tens of thousands of people have been laid off a lot of
hyped releases fell really flat and again you got meta making really weird decisions that do everything but Inspire confidence in the VR industry and of course this isn't just VR this is gaming as a whole but I'm going to say this today and it's going to be the same thing I say next year and it's going to be the same thing I say in 10 years this technology isn't going anywhere it's simply far too compelling that being said there are going to be ups and downs as there are with anything and I honestly don't even
think the VR industry has hit its Ruck bottom yet things might actually get worse before they get better if you think people say VR is dead now just wait and I know for the people that have been here this entire time it's really easy to look at VR today with a retrospective lens think about how much better things could have been if something arbitrary happened differently and it's also really easy to look at VR today and notice all the various ways that VR kind of sucks but I think that's missing the bigger picture and every
industry that's ever changed the world has gone through moments like this where expectations don't meet reality where progress feels frustratingly slow and where the wrong people seem to be making all of the decisions but if there's one thing I've learned covering this space for as long as I have it's that VR will always find a way forward not because of billion dooll corporations but because of the people who actually care the developers the creators the artists the engineers the dreamers those are the people that actually make up VR so yeah things might get a bit
worse before they get better but they're on the way and that original spark that inspired me to even get into VR still there and it's still there for you too if you know where to look and I think that's exactly where I come in now well I I can't promise a Tuesday news day every week I don't think you'd want that anyways I think you'll start seeing a few more videos from me but until next time thank you so much to my patreon supporters you guys make videos like this possible if you want to join
a great VR Community then check out my Discord server links below and of course don't forget to like this video if you loved it subscribe if you want more of this and hit that freaking Bell if you just can't live without it much love thrill out [Music]
