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Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

50 points by jay_kyburz ↗ HN
A friend and I were just watching this video about Horizon Worlds.

https://about.fb.com/news/2022/04/testing-creator-monetization-horizon-worlds/

Does anybody have any insight into why it looks the way it does?

A small game development team could make some dramatic improvements to this.

Do they not have game developers on the team?

Is there no art director?

Why is there no lighting?

Why are the characters wrists all held unnaturally?

Why do the football emotes float up into their heads?

What does a football mean?

71 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread
mattwest
Even if the metaverse looked good, which is doesn't, the entire development is a waste of time, resources, and human talent. The idea of extracting money from individuals for goods which don't exist or provide utility, is appalling. If the metaverse ultimately becomes popular and revenue-generating, it will be a sad day for humanity.
jackosdev
It will happen one day, but until someone buys a headset they keep using for more than a few days before locking it in their cupboard, it's not going to happen
jnwatson
That ship has sailed a long time ago. Second Life was an early adopter, but games have been selling virtual goods for a long time.

Not to mention NFTs.

carapace
Years ago we had a friend who lived on our couch and played Second Life all day (we used to tease him that he didn't have a First Life.) One thing I saw that astonished me was that someone had written a tool that could create mirror images of a model (reverse one axis.) They were charging people per-use to create flipped duplicates of models they already had. (It doesn't need to be said but I can't help it: this is a function that would be a drop-down menu item in e.g. Blender!) I tried to explain him about artificial scarcity and Turing's Universal Machine, but he acted as though I was the one who didn't get it. (He's right, I don't.)
beering
Is this model flipper not simply SaaS? Aren’t a lot of the companies launched on this website just this concept but bigger?
carapace
Yup. (I'm still flummoxed by the success of Dropbox. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
danschuller
Yes, since at least 1977!

Oubliette, a PLATO graphical (well lines :)) multiplayer RPG had a secondary market where people would in-game items for real-world cash.

silisili
Agreed. Even if every other person on Earth is in the Metaverse, I'll still not be and continue insulting every last one of them for their idiocy.

Maybe we can make our own neo-luddite community, where people do real things with real objects.

jen729w
> or provide utility

You may not think it provides utility. If someone else is willing to pay for it – whatever 'it' is – then by definition they do.

I think people are bananas for spending $200k on a car when you can get the bus. But hey, not my money. You do you.

djbusby
Entertainment is a utility. You may not think so but millions of humans do.
lifeplusplus
Because web developers aren't game developers... Oh and hardware limits of quest
samplatt
>Why do the football emotes float up into their heads?

I think it only LOOKS like the clouds float into their heads because that one guy on the far right has hair geometry that makes it look like the background is clipping through it.

armchairhacker
I have a theory that it's all a facade, and Facebook is using the metaverse to attract investors / publicity and/or hide funding.

Either that or Zuck / Facebook execs are just in a massive echo chamber. Just like crypto enthusiasts. Yeah it looks bad to us but they're so deluded they literally don't realize.

warning26
> Either that or Zuck / Facebook execs are just in a massive echo chamber.

I know people who work at Facebook, and based on my conversations with them, it is definitely this one.

gwking
The emperor has no pants.
typon
Well, in the Horizon Worlds metaverse, people have no legs at all.
seibelj
I would argue HN is the biggest echo chamber in tech. The hive mind is very strong here
ethbr0
In what ways do you see it as being strong?
seibelj
rust is amazing! crypto is evil! upvotes please!
ethbr0
IMHO, that's a shallow read of nuanced debates.
piva00
And in those posts you see plenty of discussion with pro/anti arguments.

It's not a hivemind just because people have strong opinions you disagree with.

Apocryphon
a16z is crypto central now and they're funding Adam Neumann, everything's even more of a facade- or farce- than it has been in past years. Is that what happens right before a bubble bursts?
carrolldunham
I remember stumbling on that video after randomly typing metaverse into youtube search - it's a video with the head of Meta himself personally promoting his intended technique for monetization of the metaverse, and it had about 300 views, after being up for a month or so. The hype is so fake
xeromal
https://youtu.be/7xvNNt-dRrA?t=93

playstation home had the quality of the metaverse in 2008. lol

typon
This is why the argument about "weak" hardware makes no sense. A GPU from 2008 is at least an order of magnitude worse in peak perf than a modern "weak" GPU.
porcc
A GPU from 2008 has to fill a quarter of the pixels at half of the refresh rate and has no latency, weight, or heat requirements. The Quest 2 has to carry a massive burden being on a face and fill nearly 4k pixels at 72 FPS. Meta has stringent requirements on maintaining that FPS to prevent VR sickness
ryanyde
Software has to run on the Quest, which costs $300 delivered.
browningstreet
And just how many people have to wear these headsets for how many hours to justify the billions being poured into this Big Next Thing..? Married couples can sit in front of a tv together and play console games… are they going to sit next to each other with face masks on for hours upon hours..?

Earnest question: I’m not a gamer nor would ever consider buying a VR thing.

Schroedingersat
That doesn't explain why it looks like complete garbage compared to 12 year old games on an 18 year old psp that cost less.
lwneal
The Oculus/Meta Quest 2 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2. That chip's GPU, the Adreno 650, has a pixel fill rate of 14 GP/s. Compare this to a GPU like the NVidia RTX 3090, which has a fill rate of 190 GP/s.

Lighting, textures, transparency, and many of the effects that make things look good in modern games, at the resolution and framerate required for smooth VR, can't currently be done on a $400 headset.

At least in terms of the cartoonish graphics, it seems to me like a case of "fast, cheap, good, pick two".

[1] https://chipguider.com/?gpu=adreno-650-645-mhz

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090...

bobbles
I mean you can literally run HL: Alyx on the quest 2 so this doesnt really hold up?
westoncb
It does not run on the Quest 2; people stream it from gaming PCs.
podgib
No, you can use a quest 2 to play HL: Alyx on your PC via Oculus Link or Air Link. In that case, all the rendering is happening on your PC, and the quest is just a display. The Quest 2 can't run HL: Alyx itself.
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jagger27
A quick look on Wikipedia[0] shows that 14 GP/s is bad, but really not that bad. It's not like games from 10 years ago when that kind of fill rate was common all looked this bad. Consider that even the humble Xbox 360 had plenty of better looking games than this and only had a <1 GP/s pixel peak fill rate.

I don't think this is a particularly good argument in Meta's favour.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...

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westoncb
There are plenty of games and apps on Quest 2 that look far better and run with good performance though... Horizons is weird because it's an ugly outlier relative to other Quest 2 titles. It feels like some kinda misstep imo.
porcc
Like which ones? I think Horizon is on par at least but definitely a step above the competition. Rec Room pales in comparison.
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jay_kyburz
>At least in terms of the cartoonish graphics, it seems to me like a case of "fast, cheap, good, pick two".

This is a good point. You would think Facebook would choose "fast, good" not "fast, cheap"

fomine3
It's not the case of fast/cheap/good choice. Good (high quality rendering) one requires external computing unit (like PC) so not handy device. For computing abilities, Quest2 was near the best (except Apple SoC) as a standalone HMD at that time despite it was extremely cheap.
jay_kyburz
Good art direction doesn't really have anything to do with the technology. You can make something look good by making the right choices. Game developers were able to make games look good with far fewer polygons a long time ago.

I think they are making bad choices.

So for example, yes its hard to animate feet walking around on the ground, but it was a weird choice to just cut everybody off at the waist. You could have given everybody hover shoes, or a chair, or a Segway or really a lot of things.

Also, if you can't afford lighting, you can at least paint some shadowing on and around the character faces. There _are_ textures on the characters, Zuck has weird rosy cheeks, I think whoever is creating these characters is just doing a bad job of it.

But I would be very surprised if you couldn't at least have 1 key light in the scene.

condercet
I think the recent metaverse push is well compared with a certain search company’s attempt to become a social network.
emptyparadise
It's a virtual office park running on low end hardware. I don't think anybody is enjoying making it, so not that much effort goes into making it look nice.
fareesh
Hardware limitations of the headset most likely
tlarkworthy
One issue is that viewing VR on 2d is incomparably worse than experiencing on a VR set. The feeling of presence makes up for the bad graphics. You feel much more connected to content in VR than you do with a AAA game on a projector, despite it's low poly look.
piggybox
What do you think about Roblox and Minecraft then?
thebigman433
Along with some of the other things mentioned, mostly including the extremely low power hardware, the app is also extremely early in development. The art will certainly undergo many reworks, so they probably dont want to invest heavily in it yet. Plus the whole vision is extremely technically complicated, with significant challenges to it, while the art is something that can be focused on later.

Imo the biggest thing is that the current stage of the platform is barely even a beta, but is being pitched very officially.

Unrelated to the above, I think their whole vision is incredibly bland and boring, which is, above all else, what will be the biggest downfall.

doctorhandshake
Agreed. To state the obvious, they established an unsustainable burn rate on this project, hyped it to hell, then Apple cut their runway by an order of magnitude.
Apocryphon
It feels like a central problem with these "total sandbox" games/virtual platforms is that there's no underlying aesthetic or- as OP mentions, art direction- to anchor it. So it stands for nothing. I suppose Second Life and Roblox are major exceptions to that, and have been wildly successful, but do we really need another version of those platforms but far more limited and in VR?

It reminds me of IMVU, which is surprisingly still alive and well.

ffhhj
IMVU had nicer graphics 15 years ago.
peppertree
Horizon worlds is boring. That's the bigger problem.
Apocryphon
Even the name is boring. It sounds like a fictional generic game in a show or a movie. (Sort of like "Mythic Quest.")
LarsDu
I'm in the process of developing a small indie game for the Oculus Quest. It's not easy to get good graphics, but one really obvious thing that is missing from Horizon World's is really simple -- textures.

I suspect the development team ditched most textures entirely as you can reduce virtually all rendering to a very small number of draw calls by having everything share a single texture. This saves the engineering teams (which must be quite large) a lot of time consuming issues with optimization

It could certainly look a lot better. I mean DOOM 3 runs on the Quest 1 and has normal maps, shadows, and nicely baked lighting.

If I were to guess, it comes down to probably one thing -- too many people are probably working on the project, and high level decisions like "adding legs", or using normal maps and non-shitty textures are simply too difficult to coordinate. It's the mythical man-month problem. That's why when you want to start off a game dev project, you need like 8 skilled people, not 160 headless chickens.

origin_path
It's probably to keep it easy for end users to create content. SL had the same issue. Pro game creators have way more money and skills than ordinary end users, so unless you want a really jarring set of contrasts between ultra-basic objects and super awesome objects you have to pin everything to the minimum visual quality. Sort of like why Twitter is popular - nobody can excel at anything because of the character count limit.
throwaway2016a
I think it is more that they are afraid that if they allow for anyone to upload texture they will end up with a large amount of inappropriate content on it. So they settled on a limited set of built in ones.
mercer
Not directly related to the topic, but one interesting thing I noticed in the video is that the characters have proper arms, rather than just disembodied hands. In the long interview Lex Friedman did with Carmack, the latter specifically mentioned how elbows didn't end up working from a 'UX' perspective (since they don't properly reflect real-world elbow positioning).

But perhaps this was only an issue from a first-person view, and the actual users of this, uh, abomination don't see their own elbows?

Anyways, more on topic, I agree that specs should be fine for much nicer graphics and it's baffling that with all their investments and even changing the name of the company, they produce this...

arnaudsm
We forget how uncustomizable Horizons is. Just like the internet in the 90s, innovation is faster in an open ecosystem. But Meta can't allow that for performance & safety reasons.

Open VRChat if you want to see a real metaverse.

throwaway2016a
What I don't see anyone mentioning is that Horizon Worlds has an emphasis on being able to create your entire world inside of the app using tools in VR.

I suspect that a lot of the content creation has to do with that.

For example:

- Art director? Most of the content is user generated.

- Game developers on the team? Why? Their goal is not to make the game themselves but to make tools that let other people make stuff.

- Lack of user uploaded texture. Well, that can be easily abused so better to not allow user uploaded textures at all.

- No way to sculpt custom shapes. Well... that would be hard to do at scale in pure VR and allowing them to upload models from computers essentially creates two classes of creators. The regular people and the pros.

Etc.

I don't work for Meta and have no idea if any of this is accurate but I think it seems plausible.

truemotive
If any of this is potentially true, the entire senior executive layer should be walked out of the building on a plank by pirates.
seydor
Looks like second life ~2005, except with no waist no legs. They do use big heads and anime eyes to make people look like babies, therefore likeable as per standard sales tactic. I think it's going to work
_jezell_
Because Facebook is trying to cobble together crap on top of Unity. They are using an inferior engine built by someone else and designed to make mobile games. There's no way they will rule the metaverse without owning the engine and getting serious about the non hardware side of the problem.

Too bad Epic isn't making a metaverse platform play.

truemotive
The paintbrushes aren’t at fault when the painter hasn’t learned the fundamentals of painting. Unity is extremely powerful.
_jezell_
I'm not sure I'd buy the paintings of a painter that didn't own his own brushes.
allenu
This looks so bad. The lighting is so awful. Why is the background brighter than the actual avatars themselves?

I assume their wrists are held up like that because in the real world, everybody is holding up their controllers. Maybe they're all sitting at their desks in this call and are resting their hands on their desks with the controllers in hand?

These all seem like basic UX and aesthetic issues that someone could've seen early on and corrected. If nobody caught these issues, then that's troubling. Or, if somebody caught them but couldn't do anything about them, that's also troubling.