They dont want to save money, they want to spend all the corporate’s money towards lofty goals and individually sell shares to suckers believing in those goals. Every employee and pre-IPO institutional investors wants to do that.
Have you actually tried applications / games on it? I own Oculus and I absolutely love it. Can't wait to see new iterations that will come out within the next 5 years. Companies ignoring Metaverse now will regret it later on, that's my guess.
"I think Quest 2’s price was an important factor in the success, and there is lots of data showing non-linear sales increases below certain price points for many types of devices. However, we need to acknowledge that even if today’s hardware were completely free, billions of people wouldn’t be using it. There are tons of lapsed users today that have a VR headset sitting in a closet, not being used. In contrast, there are near zero “lapsed mobile phone users"." [0]
Have you actually tried applications / games on it?
If selling it to people requires they experience first then it's dead because that automatically limits the size of the market to people who are willing and able to spend $300+ to try it.
For VR to become mainstream people need to want it before they've bought it.
Yes, both personally and for work. It's pretty underwhelming, doesn't really enable any experiences that you can't already have with a flat monitor, as shown by the basically dead VR software market. I think there's maybe some future for VR, maybe, but it's clearly currently on life support and I don't think Facebook has really shown anything interesting to turn that around.
> doesn't really enable any experiences that you can't already have with a flat monitor
Apart from presence, spatial awareness, 360 degree stereoscopy with 6DOF motion etc etc.
Gravity Sketch, Tilt Brush, Beat Saber can't exist on a flat monitor. Most VR games would be radically different on a flat monitor (if they worked at all)
> as shown by the basically dead VR software market.
The best applications you can point to are Gravity Sketch (2017), Tilt Brush (2016), and Beat Saber (2019). The OpenXR API standard hasn't seen an update since 2019. Valve has left the platform. HTC has left. Sony has left (yes, I know about the PSVR2, but it's clearly not a focus for the company). Microsoft, Nintendo, and Epic never even bothered trying to adopt the platform.
There is only one company seriously invested in this ecosystem in 2022. This is not a healthy platform. It's on life support.
Goalpost moving. I picked apps that countered a specific point you made - which had nothing to do with recency.
For the record I don't think VR is ever going to see sales like the smartphone market and I don't think it needs to. And I think the "metaverse" is a silly hype bubble. But I do think it's found a healthy niche. Most trends are upwards and income for devs is healthier than it's ever been.
Sticking the knife in like you're trying to do just seems to be a little unneccesary - and isn't born out by the numbers I've seen.
> For the record I don't think VR is ever going to see sales like the smartphone market and I don't think it needs to. And I think the "metaverse" is a silly hype bubble. But I do think it's found a healthy niche.
I was responding to a comment hyping VR and saying, "companies ignoring Metaverse now will regret it later on." I find much less to disagree with in your statement, here.
I think a lot of people in this thread, and a certain very high-up sociopath at Facebook, see a much larger future for VR than this little niche. I think VR's rather large fall from its 2016-2019 height is good evidence against that.
Okay, fair enough. I'll restate my original post, with a couple modifications which you correctly called me on.
VR doesn't really enable new experiences that people actually want in significant amounts. Tilt Brush has a couple dozen daily users[1] (remarkably consistent; demo stations, I wonder?). Beat Saber seems to be the one VR exclusive game that truly has been a lasting success, holding steady around 1000 to 2000 daily users on Steam and surely more on PlayStation. Maybe that's a clue that there's something there (I think it indicates more the popularity of rhythm games a la Guitar Hero, and a paucity of other VR titles worth playing). But I think if there really was something compelling about VR, we would have seen more than one successful game in the five years since VR has been on the market. Big names like Valve and Sony would have increased their VR resources, not mostly abandoned it. There just isn't good evidence that those couple things VR is genuinely capable of are something people actually want, and it's not like the big names didn't make an effort.
My point about the VR software market being dead is that there hasn't been a VR application worth talking about since 2020, with Half-Life Alyx. Everything they're putting out now[2] just looks like more of the bland flat-screen-with-Wii-controls experiences we've been seeing for five years. The gaming sites I follow don't really even bother doing VR reviews anymore. There just isn't significant work going on in this ecosystem, outside of Facebook.
You’re making an error here with your user estimations - you’re using steam as a way of tracking users, and while the quest 2 is also the most popular headset on steam, most users with a quest do not have a gaming pc, and primarily play games stand-alone
I've got access to the developer console for Open Brush which is merely the open source fork of Tilt Brush. I'm looking at the stats and your estimates are nonsense.
Now - we can get silly and quibble about "significant amounts" but I get the feeling you're not arguing in good faith. VR is a mixture of wonder and disappointment, it's both overhyped and at the same time a genuinely a new medium. I'm not especially interested in it's commercial success. It can limp along for another decade as long as there's enough interest to keep it alive - even on life support. I've seen enough genuinely innovative work created to justify my interest so far. It's the most interesting medium to arise in my lifetime (and I'm not especially young).
It may never take over the world and that's fine. It just needs to pay it's way and keep it's head above water.
I disagree but it won't be Hatebook. VR/AR porn will become huge in the next few years, including with connected devices. The main deterrent is getting the cost of the hardware down and Hatebook is doing it for them. If Pornhub were smart, they would poach a bunch of the Meta folks and go all in.
I’d love to have a highres headset which can create virtual monitors. That way I can be productive anywhere using multiple monitors, and more easily organize applications and windows spatially. Similar to what you used to - and sometimes still do - printing out 50 pages and laying them around the office
> I’d love to have a highres headset which can create virtual monitors.
You want HTC Vive Pro at a minimum (it's high enough resolution to see much less pixelation) with Virtual Desktop or Bigscreen, both of which you can get on Steam.
Support for Linux is sometimes spotty though. I sometimes have trouble with Steam VR on Linux. It does work but can require effort to get working, depending on your setup.
I guess I'd want double the density of the HTC Vive Pro, and preferably even higher.
Also, demos of the VD seem shaky. When I move my head, my monitor only seems to move 1 inch instead of the whole viewport shaking. This is because I'm also readjusting my eye-target.
Without eyetracking/gazetracking and proper SDKs these things will still feel like a mouse (aim with your head)
> I guess I'd want double the density of the HTC Vive Pro, and preferably even higher.
A valid opinion but I do think you should try it. I have an HTC Vive (not Pro). While the pixelation is pretty strong, I did get used to it for games. I couldn't get used to it for a high fidelity desktop screen or movies. This would be something that everyone can have a different opinion on for the same reason that everyone's eyes are different.
> Also, demos of the VD seem shaky. When I move my head, my monitor only seems to move 1 inch instead of the whole viewport shaking. This is because I'm also readjusting my eye-target.
Imagine this scenario: you move your eyes to the left or right and your computer screen is now blocking your view outside or to the person standing next to you. Or: you move your eyes to look at something on the left of the screen and instead the screen moves with your eyes so now you're looking at the center again.
Your eyes already do the tracking. Having the 3d scene move with your head and tracking would effectively double everything that moves. So I would counter-argue: it only looks shaky because you're viewing it on a screen recording instead of viewing it in 3D.
Eventually AR will be the next paradigm after the smartphone. It takes many billions to get there. We should be glad Apple/Meta are investing in it. Meta is literally betting the company on it. Even if they fail, the engineers will continue with whoever has the money to try next.
When it comes to employment, Facebook is usually regarded as being up there with Google. Well ahead of Amazon, that is for sure. Nobody considers Amazon as being a desirable place to work, even in engineering. Why didn't Facebook make the MANGA cut?
Facebook/Meta is not among the top five largest companies, though, so it stands to reason why it doesn't make the cut from that perspective.
> not to do with market cap
Thing is, MANGA actually works for market cap if you go back a year or two when it first started appearing. Netflix has just fallen big time in the interim. Tesla has taken its place.
It seems quite apparent that it, like FAANG before it, is old and outdated. Heralding from a time when it fit the times, but, like FAANG, no longer does. After all, MANGA itself replaced FAANG to recognize the changing environment, and the environment has changed again.
This is oft-repeated but it's not as simple as that.
There's no sharp line dividing the two. You already have "VR + passthrough" which is pseudo-AR. And AR turns into VR as soon as you cover up enough of the real world.
There's some experiences/applications that suit AR more than VR and vice-versa. Most devices will offer a mix of the two.
I think a ballpark to aim for is 95% reality, 5% overlay. Whether that's achieved using passthrough or not is a minor detail.
Since the benefits will be pretty subtle QoL things, the form factor has to be very ergonomic to make it worth it, so widespread use could be decades away.
HN crowd is, surprisingly, quite myopic about new technologies. Ethereum & VR headsets are great examples. Both of these are incredible and will definitely change the world in a very drastic way; yet, both are hated and ridiculed here.
Remember Google glass? Besides, I think new technologies are generally thought of conservatively by the majority and will only have a couple of supporters in the initial stages.
> Both of these are incredible and will definitely change the world in a very drastic way;
I'd easily take the other side of that bet.
More fundamentally, though, I take issue that "the HN crowd is myopic about new technologies". I'll just speak for myself, but I was easily excited about smartphones, the potential of SaaS businesses, I remember taking my first Uber thinking "I'm glad I'm not a taxi driver", etc. etc.
The fact that many on HN look at hucksterism and bullshit with a critical eye is something I think we should collectively be proud of.
Who on HN hates VR? That tech has been breathlessly praised here, at least years ago, but it’s just since fallen into the trough of disappointment for the time being. Eventually it’ll get to the plateau.
The gripe HN has with these technologies is the hype and speculation and it’s the responsible thing to do to point those out.
You see yourself as a non myopic but if you look at it historically, technology always panned out differently and in unexpected ways. Why do you presume you’re going to not make the same mistakes?
Both crypto and VR have been thoroughly debunked, many, many times, and yet people like you keep bringing them up as if you have not read any of the previous criticism. I'm not sure if there is anything that can be said to you that will help you see how deeply stupid these technologies are. Some of the critiques already posted to Hacker News have raised every valid point against these technologies. I can't think of anything more that can be said. At this point, we simply have to wait 20 years, and then you'll be able to see that these technologies never developed into anything much more than games.
I don't buy it, and honestly I think hardly anyone else does either.
I remember when I tried the first iPhone in 2007. Sure, it wasn't super fast, the screen was small and pixelated by today's standards, but I remember going "Holy shit, this is amazing." It was easy to see its utility on the first use of it.
Contrast that with a VR headset. I think "This is a cool game to play for 20 mins or so", but I have absolutely no desire at all to spend any portion of my time in "the metaverse". This is fundamentally solving a problem that people don't have, and it's a solution they don't want. I have yet to see anyone (who isn't somehow paid to shill it) be genuinely excited about the potential of "the metaverse".
What about when you tried the first touchscreen smartphone, which was probably resistive and came with a stylus?
Seems unfair to compare an emerging tech with the iPhone (which took an emerging tech to the next level) off the bat. It's almost an argument in bad faith.
On the contrary, I remember trying my first VR headset in the 90s when it was "Max Headroom-esque", so it's a bit rich to demand that I only consider the earliest smartphones by comparison, when VR has been progressing for 30 years.
And, to clarify, I think the current crop of VR headsets are quite cool. But again, I see them cool in small units of time. I also think many, many people have come to the realization that there is too much ever-present technology in their lives, and the last thing they want is to become the humans from Wall-E.
When it comes to crypto, given how antiquated our current financial settlement systems are, I can see its utility as a backend settlement layer, but 95% of what I see peddled in the crypto space is just some other get-rich-quick scheme.
When I tried my first PDA, which was before anyone had stuck a SIM card in one, I was completely blown away. I wrote an entire book on the thing, and emailed it to myself for final print template tweaks, before sending to a publisher. After writing nearly a million words on it, I was just as excited about it as when I first got it.
Probably helped that the latency of the device back then was completely unnoticeable, in contrast with today's smart devices that can't keep up with my typing on their touchscreens.
I have an OG Vive, Oculus Quest, and a Cosmos with the wireless adapter. Several hundred hours of SteamVR over the course of the past few years. All that said, I can do 1-2 hours of VR every other day or so at most. The idea that this will be as popular as smartphones in the next 5, even 10 years seems crazy to me. Being "in VR" is pretty exhausting no matter how lightweight the headset is.
Agreed. Time may prove us wrong but I don't see how it is in any way going to be the next big thing. the cell phone is something that most everyone had and needed already so there being a smartphone that can do more is an obvious next step forward and has tangible utility and doesn't require you to change anything fundamentally about yourself or your habits. requiring special and expensive basically single use kit to just get on the platform is a nonstarter for wide adoption. yeah people will use it and a subset will love it but it's not the next facebook or smartphone barring some giant leap in something that I can't imagine.
I was playing far cry today and was chatting with my wife about it. The only thing I want a VR headset for is so I can have fast peripheral vision playing games that don't have a 3rd person perspective.
Other than that, I can not see a real utility for it outside of AR specific uses like utility mapping or architectural stuff. Whereas with the phone, like you, I was pretty amazed with a rectangle that had all the knowledge of the world on it.
I think while VR is limiting in many ways, AR does have the potential to overtake the phone if it becomes a truly seamless extension akin to donning a pair of glasses. Seamless AR might be 10 or 20 years out I don't know, but I can see the utility.
> I remember when I tried the first iPhone in 2007. Sure, it wasn't super fast, the screen was small and pixelated by today's standards, but I remember going "Holy shit, this is amazing." It was easy to see its utility on the first use of it.
For the dumpster fire that it was (mostly imo due to hardware decisions / public perception), I had that same reaction with Google Glass.
It was super nice being able to see messages as they came in doing various tasks. Being able to ask random questions and get visual responses, rather than an assistant reading you a random snippet from the result that it thinks is appropriate. Or being able to almost-instantly snap a pic or record a quick video.
All of it felt like a game changer due to me not having to take my hands away from whatever I was doing or try to crane my neck and wrist to get my watch to display.
I think that in the coming years Apple/Google will come out with another similar device. I don't think phones as we know them now will go away overnight in favor of these devices though. But instead they will be essentially a different smartwatch form factor for a while.
Yeah, but the big difference is with VR you have to build a completely different experience.
iPhone already had a massive amount of apps for it as you could visit any existing website on it.
You don't have that with VR. It has to be built. Which is what Facebook is focused on. Building tools and AI to help creators build "worlds" that can be used in VR.
Imagine you favorite band is playing live, they don't visit your town. You can put on a VR headset join in on the event and experience it like you are there. You friends can come along without any of you guys being in the same country.
Your a primer league fan in the US, you can still experience the game like you are there.
All these experience will come as tech to build them gets better, but these are WAY harder problems then what the iPhone needed to solve when it first was released.
> Imagine you favorite band is playing live, they don't visit your town. You can put on a VR headset join in on the event and experience it like you are there. You friends can come along without any of you guys being in the same country.
That just sounds so contrived. You’d be paying money for that too… and it wouldn’t be much cheaper than going to see them live.
3D television was supposed to be the next big thing. I’ve used a VR headset before and it was neat but gimmicky and disorienting. People don’t like wearing things on their head over their eyes for extended periods of time for entertainment. I hear arguments about it’s a generational thing or it’ll catch on the more you use it but those have been said before about wearables. Ears seems fine but I think there’s something very different with covering your eyes that will be a blocker for mass market appeal.
None of the mass market metaverse things people talk about are actual problems people have. Anything that is an actual problem (remote VR surgery) isn’t mass market.
There's a lot of 1960s SciFi where future people are planning out interstellar travel routes with slide-rules. Even "The Foundation" series posits that basically all cool technology in the future is going to be based on mastery of nuclear power.
We do a bad job of extrapolating where the future will be from current trends. The frequent breakthroughs in physics and industrial, precision manufacturing of heavy machinery around the mid 20th century eventually slowed down. The remaining problems got too hard to make major leaps and bounds improvements on at the same pace, and the desire/value to keep pushing on it slowly faded. It' still there, but a computing revolution happened instead.
There's no reason to think the future revolving around improvements in networked computing is going to go on forever, we just don't know what the next "thing" is going to be. I'd argue most of the benefits of having the internet readily available at all times in all places are basically already realized by smartphones and anything else is mostly just going to be a refinement or intensification of stuff we already know. It will not be transformational in the way smartphones were. It's on a similar arc where the leaps-and-bounds improvements are harder to come by and it's not clear what we'd do with them when they happen. Gone are the days when anyone would notice a performance improvement in their day-to-day computing tasks from having a cutting edge CPU or GPU. Advancements are increasingly only useful for more niche use cases that refine and improve what we already have rather than dramatically altering the way we work. Faster mobile data is cool, but it doesn't change the way you use your phone and neither will a more immersive computing interface markedly change how you do the tasks you use a networked computer to do.
I don't know what the next field that undergoes such revolutionary change will be. If I were a betting man I'd put my money on major breakthroughs in biomechanics and life sciences, but who can say for sure?
>It is the obvious extension of existing trends in technology.
I'm not so sure, but perhaps... although there's some really big problems that need to get solved to get there, and some of them aren't technological problems.
1. The technology isn't there yet. To their credit, it might be getting close though. A not insignificant number of people still get sick from VR goggles. The resolutions just aren't at present sufficient. Available portable computing power might not be enough at present. IMO, the cartoonized VR environments we can currently produce on the fly aren't going to be of as much interest as more realistic environments and avatars. The spatial resolution of sensors and lack of tactile feedback aren't gonna cut it for even the most basic tasks.
2. People wearing VR goggles look dorky AF. In fact, they ARE dorky AF.
I don't think Facebook's upper management fully appreciates this issue. Social stigma is a hell of a thing to try and fight. It's not impossible to do, but it will be way more challenging than I believe they think it is.
3. No one wants to wear a blindfold in public. VR goggles are basically that and worse. AR might be able to address that, but for whatever reasons, having a screen in your hand doesn't trigger the same vulnerability response people would have to VR goggles. (It should, because it steal our attention like nothing else, but it doesn't.) People don't feel comfortable if they can't read the social cues of people around them and see danger approaching.
I think one of their strategies is the most promising: Turn AR/VR into a common workspace standard. Monitors are big, clunky, hard to move, inflexible, etc. If you could use VR to create a really clean functional workspace to replace the monitor, that might be a real winner and help drive up comfort and adoption issues.
This is still a really hard domain to solve though. In video calls, we still have a lot of people who call in on their phone. This technology is compatible with lots of devices. One person wearing a VR isn't going to be compatible with everyone else though. If I'm meeting you, in general and especially for anything with higher stakes, I don't want to talk to a fucking cartoon, I want to see your face.
It’s one of dozens and dozens of these technology paths branching out before us that seems somehow both obvious and not yet ready. Any day now we’ll have self driving cars, the metaverse, cryptocurrencies, robots doing chores…there are all these things that feel “obvious” and right here…yet so far away.
Use the Quest in a Homekit-enabled place and its obvious the Virtual Assistant governing home and the customer's general information lookup / admin operations must extend between the VR platform.
And beyond that--a level of trust around data privacy Facebook will never achieve is absolutely necessary.
The problem is Google, Amazon, Snap, Microsoft and others all want that market.
> it's entirely possible that the best days of Facebook are behind it.
It is certain that the hay days are over. The fight to be number two to Apple in VR / AR is going to be a bloodbath.
Imagine if they’d stuck with developing their own phone, if they’d iterated, and poached talent, and kept at it. They’d have had (so far) over 9 years to make it work. They could have sold the hardware at cost, or even made a loss.
That would have been worth it to own part of the market. It’s not like they don’t have money.
But would the ROI ever have outstripped the coast to end-around Android and iOS?
And then, on top of that, would FB have been able to produce something good enough to convince buyers to use a FB phone despite privacy concerns?
Seems like a big lift and the same challenge they'll face with VR and a bad privacy reputation. They're not just climbing the hardware/software/UX hill, they're also climbing the public opinion, regulation hill.
Making phones is extremely difficult. Even Google didn't do a great job of making a profit off its flagship, in-house line of Android phones despite them being the best Android experience available.
Apple owns almost all the profit-share in the market and the rest is mostly coming from low-margin, commodity phones. Facebook doesn't need the data of price-conscious people willing to penny pinch to buy a cheap-o Facebook phone. They need to hoover up the data of iPhone users. That's where the valuable advertising bucks are.
I’m not sure if VR is or isn’t the future but a lot of people seem to view it as more inevitable than it really is. Just because smartphones took off doesn’t mean VR will.
I am looking forward to Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel and all of the other meddling billionaires disappearing into a Metaverse. They might leave the rest of us alone then.
I'm afraid it will likely be the opposite. The downtrodden will escape to the metaverse where they can indulge in luxuries they'll never be able to experience in the real world, meanwhile real, tangible objects and experiences will command a premium pricetag and will be the playthings of the affluent.
People will rent digital objects and transfer real world wealth to the elite in order to do so.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadGoggles and VR/AR won't take off in any meaningful way for the next decade.
"I think Quest 2’s price was an important factor in the success, and there is lots of data showing non-linear sales increases below certain price points for many types of devices. However, we need to acknowledge that even if today’s hardware were completely free, billions of people wouldn’t be using it. There are tons of lapsed users today that have a VR headset sitting in a closet, not being used. In contrast, there are near zero “lapsed mobile phone users"." [0]
[0]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ruv739914jzquue/connect2021.txt?dl...
If selling it to people requires they experience first then it's dead because that automatically limits the size of the market to people who are willing and able to spend $300+ to try it.
For VR to become mainstream people need to want it before they've bought it.
Apart from presence, spatial awareness, 360 degree stereoscopy with 6DOF motion etc etc.
Gravity Sketch, Tilt Brush, Beat Saber can't exist on a flat monitor. Most VR games would be radically different on a flat monitor (if they worked at all)
> as shown by the basically dead VR software market.
Either your info is slightly out of date or you've using a rather strict definition of "dead": https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-quest-store-revenue-stats-da...
There is only one company seriously invested in this ecosystem in 2022. This is not a healthy platform. It's on life support.
For the record I don't think VR is ever going to see sales like the smartphone market and I don't think it needs to. And I think the "metaverse" is a silly hype bubble. But I do think it's found a healthy niche. Most trends are upwards and income for devs is healthier than it's ever been.
Sticking the knife in like you're trying to do just seems to be a little unneccesary - and isn't born out by the numbers I've seen.
I was responding to a comment hyping VR and saying, "companies ignoring Metaverse now will regret it later on." I find much less to disagree with in your statement, here.
I think a lot of people in this thread, and a certain very high-up sociopath at Facebook, see a much larger future for VR than this little niche. I think VR's rather large fall from its 2016-2019 height is good evidence against that.
Please avoid hyperbole. There's no need to overstate a sound argument.
VR doesn't really enable new experiences that people actually want in significant amounts. Tilt Brush has a couple dozen daily users[1] (remarkably consistent; demo stations, I wonder?). Beat Saber seems to be the one VR exclusive game that truly has been a lasting success, holding steady around 1000 to 2000 daily users on Steam and surely more on PlayStation. Maybe that's a clue that there's something there (I think it indicates more the popularity of rhythm games a la Guitar Hero, and a paucity of other VR titles worth playing). But I think if there really was something compelling about VR, we would have seen more than one successful game in the five years since VR has been on the market. Big names like Valve and Sony would have increased their VR resources, not mostly abandoned it. There just isn't good evidence that those couple things VR is genuinely capable of are something people actually want, and it's not like the big names didn't make an effort.
My point about the VR software market being dead is that there hasn't been a VR application worth talking about since 2020, with Half-Life Alyx. Everything they're putting out now[2] just looks like more of the bland flat-screen-with-Wii-controls experiences we've been seeing for five years. The gaming sites I follow don't really even bother doing VR reviews anymore. There just isn't significant work going on in this ecosystem, outside of Facebook.
[1] https://steamcharts.com/app/327140#All
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/ghostbusters-vr-bonew...
I've got access to the developer console for Open Brush which is merely the open source fork of Tilt Brush. I'm looking at the stats and your estimates are nonsense.
Now - we can get silly and quibble about "significant amounts" but I get the feeling you're not arguing in good faith. VR is a mixture of wonder and disappointment, it's both overhyped and at the same time a genuinely a new medium. I'm not especially interested in it's commercial success. It can limp along for another decade as long as there's enough interest to keep it alive - even on life support. I've seen enough genuinely innovative work created to justify my interest so far. It's the most interesting medium to arise in my lifetime (and I'm not especially young).
It may never take over the world and that's fine. It just needs to pay it's way and keep it's head above water.
You want HTC Vive Pro at a minimum (it's high enough resolution to see much less pixelation) with Virtual Desktop or Bigscreen, both of which you can get on Steam.
Support for Linux is sometimes spotty though. I sometimes have trouble with Steam VR on Linux. It does work but can require effort to get working, depending on your setup.
[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/382110/Virtual_Desktop/
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/457550/Bigscreen_Beta
Also, demos of the VD seem shaky. When I move my head, my monitor only seems to move 1 inch instead of the whole viewport shaking. This is because I'm also readjusting my eye-target.
Without eyetracking/gazetracking and proper SDKs these things will still feel like a mouse (aim with your head)
A valid opinion but I do think you should try it. I have an HTC Vive (not Pro). While the pixelation is pretty strong, I did get used to it for games. I couldn't get used to it for a high fidelity desktop screen or movies. This would be something that everyone can have a different opinion on for the same reason that everyone's eyes are different.
> Also, demos of the VD seem shaky. When I move my head, my monitor only seems to move 1 inch instead of the whole viewport shaking. This is because I'm also readjusting my eye-target.
Imagine this scenario: you move your eyes to the left or right and your computer screen is now blocking your view outside or to the person standing next to you. Or: you move your eyes to look at something on the left of the screen and instead the screen moves with your eyes so now you're looking at the center again.
Your eyes already do the tracking. Having the 3d scene move with your head and tracking would effectively double everything that moves. So I would counter-argue: it only looks shaky because you're viewing it on a screen recording instead of viewing it in 3D.
Here is an example from 2018:
https://www.seeker.com/gadgets/new-technique-generates-free-...
Wearing goggles is not very hi-tech or comfortable. Am just not seeing this become mainstream anytime soon.
FAAG
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If that's the case, then why MANGA and not MATAG? Netflix is only the 34th largest tech company by market cap. It doesn't fit alongside the others.
Netflix was, at least in the early days, famous for high salaries and being a tech-centric company, setting it apart from eg. Hulu.
These acronyms are employment -centric, not to do with market cap
When it comes to employment, Facebook is usually regarded as being up there with Google. Well ahead of Amazon, that is for sure. Nobody considers Amazon as being a desirable place to work, even in engineering. Why didn't Facebook make the MANGA cut?
Facebook/Meta is not among the top five largest companies, though, so it stands to reason why it doesn't make the cut from that perspective.
> not to do with market cap
Thing is, MANGA actually works for market cap if you go back a year or two when it first started appearing. Netflix has just fallen big time in the interim. Tesla has taken its place.
It seems quite apparent that it, like FAANG before it, is old and outdated. Heralding from a time when it fit the times, but, like FAANG, no longer does. After all, MANGA itself replaced FAANG to recognize the changing environment, and the environment has changed again.
15 years from now everyone will say "remember when we didn't have these computers literally strapped to our face all the time?"
It is the obvious extension of existing trends in technology.
There's no sharp line dividing the two. You already have "VR + passthrough" which is pseudo-AR. And AR turns into VR as soon as you cover up enough of the real world.
There's some experiences/applications that suit AR more than VR and vice-versa. Most devices will offer a mix of the two.
Since the benefits will be pretty subtle QoL things, the form factor has to be very ergonomic to make it worth it, so widespread use could be decades away.
I'd easily take the other side of that bet.
More fundamentally, though, I take issue that "the HN crowd is myopic about new technologies". I'll just speak for myself, but I was easily excited about smartphones, the potential of SaaS businesses, I remember taking my first Uber thinking "I'm glad I'm not a taxi driver", etc. etc.
The fact that many on HN look at hucksterism and bullshit with a critical eye is something I think we should collectively be proud of.
You see yourself as a non myopic but if you look at it historically, technology always panned out differently and in unexpected ways. Why do you presume you’re going to not make the same mistakes?
Wanna put money down on that?
I remember when I tried the first iPhone in 2007. Sure, it wasn't super fast, the screen was small and pixelated by today's standards, but I remember going "Holy shit, this is amazing." It was easy to see its utility on the first use of it.
Contrast that with a VR headset. I think "This is a cool game to play for 20 mins or so", but I have absolutely no desire at all to spend any portion of my time in "the metaverse". This is fundamentally solving a problem that people don't have, and it's a solution they don't want. I have yet to see anyone (who isn't somehow paid to shill it) be genuinely excited about the potential of "the metaverse".
What about when you tried the first touchscreen smartphone, which was probably resistive and came with a stylus?
Seems unfair to compare an emerging tech with the iPhone (which took an emerging tech to the next level) off the bat. It's almost an argument in bad faith.
And, to clarify, I think the current crop of VR headsets are quite cool. But again, I see them cool in small units of time. I also think many, many people have come to the realization that there is too much ever-present technology in their lives, and the last thing they want is to become the humans from Wall-E.
When it comes to crypto, given how antiquated our current financial settlement systems are, I can see its utility as a backend settlement layer, but 95% of what I see peddled in the crypto space is just some other get-rich-quick scheme.
The earliest smartphones did not even have touchscreens, I just used an example that would be easier to digest.
Probably helped that the latency of the device back then was completely unnoticeable, in contrast with today's smart devices that can't keep up with my typing on their touchscreens.
For the dumpster fire that it was (mostly imo due to hardware decisions / public perception), I had that same reaction with Google Glass.
It was super nice being able to see messages as they came in doing various tasks. Being able to ask random questions and get visual responses, rather than an assistant reading you a random snippet from the result that it thinks is appropriate. Or being able to almost-instantly snap a pic or record a quick video.
All of it felt like a game changer due to me not having to take my hands away from whatever I was doing or try to crane my neck and wrist to get my watch to display.
I think that in the coming years Apple/Google will come out with another similar device. I don't think phones as we know them now will go away overnight in favor of these devices though. But instead they will be essentially a different smartwatch form factor for a while.
iPhone already had a massive amount of apps for it as you could visit any existing website on it.
You don't have that with VR. It has to be built. Which is what Facebook is focused on. Building tools and AI to help creators build "worlds" that can be used in VR.
Imagine you favorite band is playing live, they don't visit your town. You can put on a VR headset join in on the event and experience it like you are there. You friends can come along without any of you guys being in the same country.
Your a primer league fan in the US, you can still experience the game like you are there.
All these experience will come as tech to build them gets better, but these are WAY harder problems then what the iPhone needed to solve when it first was released.
That just sounds so contrived. You’d be paying money for that too… and it wouldn’t be much cheaper than going to see them live.
Contrived and just dystopian, really.
I don’t know…
None of the mass market metaverse things people talk about are actual problems people have. Anything that is an actual problem (remote VR surgery) isn’t mass market.
We do a bad job of extrapolating where the future will be from current trends. The frequent breakthroughs in physics and industrial, precision manufacturing of heavy machinery around the mid 20th century eventually slowed down. The remaining problems got too hard to make major leaps and bounds improvements on at the same pace, and the desire/value to keep pushing on it slowly faded. It' still there, but a computing revolution happened instead.
There's no reason to think the future revolving around improvements in networked computing is going to go on forever, we just don't know what the next "thing" is going to be. I'd argue most of the benefits of having the internet readily available at all times in all places are basically already realized by smartphones and anything else is mostly just going to be a refinement or intensification of stuff we already know. It will not be transformational in the way smartphones were. It's on a similar arc where the leaps-and-bounds improvements are harder to come by and it's not clear what we'd do with them when they happen. Gone are the days when anyone would notice a performance improvement in their day-to-day computing tasks from having a cutting edge CPU or GPU. Advancements are increasingly only useful for more niche use cases that refine and improve what we already have rather than dramatically altering the way we work. Faster mobile data is cool, but it doesn't change the way you use your phone and neither will a more immersive computing interface markedly change how you do the tasks you use a networked computer to do.
I don't know what the next field that undergoes such revolutionary change will be. If I were a betting man I'd put my money on major breakthroughs in biomechanics and life sciences, but who can say for sure?
It's a bit like with climate change. We're not going to like what we need to do to stop it, but we must do it.
I'm not so sure, but perhaps... although there's some really big problems that need to get solved to get there, and some of them aren't technological problems.
1. The technology isn't there yet. To their credit, it might be getting close though. A not insignificant number of people still get sick from VR goggles. The resolutions just aren't at present sufficient. Available portable computing power might not be enough at present. IMO, the cartoonized VR environments we can currently produce on the fly aren't going to be of as much interest as more realistic environments and avatars. The spatial resolution of sensors and lack of tactile feedback aren't gonna cut it for even the most basic tasks.
2. People wearing VR goggles look dorky AF. In fact, they ARE dorky AF.
I don't think Facebook's upper management fully appreciates this issue. Social stigma is a hell of a thing to try and fight. It's not impossible to do, but it will be way more challenging than I believe they think it is.
3. No one wants to wear a blindfold in public. VR goggles are basically that and worse. AR might be able to address that, but for whatever reasons, having a screen in your hand doesn't trigger the same vulnerability response people would have to VR goggles. (It should, because it steal our attention like nothing else, but it doesn't.) People don't feel comfortable if they can't read the social cues of people around them and see danger approaching.
I think one of their strategies is the most promising: Turn AR/VR into a common workspace standard. Monitors are big, clunky, hard to move, inflexible, etc. If you could use VR to create a really clean functional workspace to replace the monitor, that might be a real winner and help drive up comfort and adoption issues.
This is still a really hard domain to solve though. In video calls, we still have a lot of people who call in on their phone. This technology is compatible with lots of devices. One person wearing a VR isn't going to be compatible with everyone else though. If I'm meeting you, in general and especially for anything with higher stakes, I don't want to talk to a fucking cartoon, I want to see your face.
Agreed, but they have form in this area. I remember when FB came out, and it was considered completely insane to use your real name on the Internet.
Use the Quest in a Homekit-enabled place and its obvious the Virtual Assistant governing home and the customer's general information lookup / admin operations must extend between the VR platform.
And beyond that--a level of trust around data privacy Facebook will never achieve is absolutely necessary.
The problem is Google, Amazon, Snap, Microsoft and others all want that market.
> it's entirely possible that the best days of Facebook are behind it.
It is certain that the hay days are over. The fight to be number two to Apple in VR / AR is going to be a bloodbath.
That would have been worth it to own part of the market. It’s not like they don’t have money.
And then, on top of that, would FB have been able to produce something good enough to convince buyers to use a FB phone despite privacy concerns?
Seems like a big lift and the same challenge they'll face with VR and a bad privacy reputation. They're not just climbing the hardware/software/UX hill, they're also climbing the public opinion, regulation hill.
Apple owns almost all the profit-share in the market and the rest is mostly coming from low-margin, commodity phones. Facebook doesn't need the data of price-conscious people willing to penny pinch to buy a cheap-o Facebook phone. They need to hoover up the data of iPhone users. That's where the valuable advertising bucks are.
People will rent digital objects and transfer real world wealth to the elite in order to do so.