Zuckerberg doubling down like this seems quite crazy. I know he was bullish on VR/AR/MR but he's now gambling the future of his company on it. With the bleak view Carmack had on their R&D and his departure, I doubt a breakthrough product is coming any time soon.
Meta just took on debt for the first time ever in the last few months. Meta could cancel all Reality labs work and keep slowly taking on debt while keeping their central properties alive. It would make for a very boring company but would likely result in decent returns for shareholders. This is what Oracle has done -- their company is boring but their shareholders are happy.
In order to have any sort of future growth story, Meta pretty much needs to create or somehow capture major economics from a new platform like they did for web2.0 and mobile web. Due to antitrust concerns IMO, they can't just acquire their way into more value by acquiring a company like Pinterest so their remaining options are moonshots like AR/VR to invest heavily for the next platform to become ubiquitous and then extract economics from it.
Disclaimer, I'm in the minority of people that's long Meta's vision into VR and own a good amount of Meta stock.
I truly believe that there's like a 95% chance that Meta builds a great product but it hemorrhages money and will ultimately need to be gimped - but I'm really in it for the 5% chance that it is a home run on the financials.
What Zuck is doing represents everything I admire about Silicon Valley (and honestly it's a short list of things) and sure he's a strange personality and questionable past but his vision and persistence into this is something I would hope to see succeed and valued.
The quality of the product is irrelevant to me as well as millions of others who distrust Meta at the most fundamental level. Right out the gate it has that going against it. Outside the US just about every country is gunning to regulate or fine it somehow. Highly recommend selling what you can now before Q2
No, they keep shadow profiles on people that never used them as well as record private phone conversations. If they were an individual they would be in prison for stalking so much. Even google is nowhere as bad as Meta, the only company objectively worse is linkedin.
My argument is more like "I hate Meta because it silently allowed, even encouraged the ruling party in my country to spread hate, to the point that it led to riots in my city"
There are millions who distrust Meta, but public perception changes rapidly and companies this size don't die quickly. Their cash cow with ads allows them to stay solvent and make big risks
I'm not saying that Meta will definitely have a change in perception but that's what I'm betting on if they truly do have a competent Metaverse.
The best example of this change is Microsoft - it wasn't too long ago that it was the most hated tech company by the tech community and shareholders alike and now it's the ~least hated~ big tech out there.
I can't remember any time microsoft was distrusted and considered outright hostile or even a threat to democracy and civil society like fb. I am sure meta will remain a profitable company for itself and be around a decade or two more, even Yahoo is still around but my caution is don't hold its stock because it could be devalued significantly in the short term and then stabilize eventually due to its whatsapp and instagram dominance. Gen-z and younger millenials don't like it much. It is also struggling to get competitive talent due to its reputation and has gotten to a point where innovation=aquisition.
Interesting position. My personal thought process around it was : Even if Meta succeeds at bringing a technological marvel to the market(I haven’t seen anything convincing that they will) they have amassed astronomical bad reputation with Facebook that anything that is remotely associated with Meta/Zuckerberg would be seen very skeptically. I know I wouldn’t jump in and create assets in their virtual world like I uploaded so many pictures and shared location to Facebook in their early days..
Do you believe their bad reputation can be fixed in such short timeframe?
I think at the end of the day it's whoever creates the best product - right now, I only see Apple with the resources and ambition to tackle something like this but Meta already has a huge head start.
I would like to compare it to AWS' lead in cloud due to their head start but this is obviously a much larger gamble.
I agree with you (although I don't own Meta stock). There isn't an imminent threat of Facebook collapsing, but if you look at things mid to long term the situation for Facebook isn't that rosy. There is serious competition from newer social media platforms like TikTok. And more importantly, Facebook's revenue is 100% dependent on advertising and their ability to do effective ad targeting is basically dependent on the policies that Google and Apple implement in Android/iOS and Chrome/Safari. Even if you think that Google for example isn't going to seriously change how tracking works in Chrome/Android (since they are also highly dependent on ad revenue), increasing regulation, especially in the EU but also possibly in the USA in the future, could force things to change.
The situation is especially bad for Meta here compared to Google because even though most Google revenue comes from ads, Google still has a bunch of other product verticals like Google Workspace (G Suite), GCP, Android, Chromebooks, GPay, and numerous other products (including moonshot bets like Waymo). And Google doesn't need to rely on ad retargeting nearly as much, they can serve personalized ads just based off the text in search queries and gmail.
In the long term it is very important that Meta diversifies and finds new scalable sources of revenue. Even if you don't think VR has a high probability of success, it's one of their best shots at finding something that has the potential (if everything goes well) to eventually generate serious revenue and diversify their business. It's easy to throw stones but what else do people want from Meta? It's extremely dangerous for them to do nothing. Since they're printing money today they can afford to make these huge bets on their future, and without huge future bets their future looks pretty bleak.
> It's easy to throw stones but what else do people want from Meta?
Exactly. However, I think their AI play will need to come into fruition - AI as a service will need to be their second cash cow before anything Metaverse
I don’t think any of googles other bets, even when combined, make anyth8ng close to their ad revenue, they are 100% dependent just like Facebook. As I understand it, their advantage over meta is that lots of search is browser based and also they get intent from user keywords
The main problem is Meta has no imagination and is just going to play it safe and G rated.
The killer VR apps are all in creating a rated R type Metaverse that is seedy and dangerous. 80s Manhattan style, not safe for work or children.
That would be something wild and create a huge buzz. Instead, we have Horizon Worlds.
Basically, Starbucks with fake coffee.
The only thing I like about Meta is trading the stock over the next few years as Wall Street goes into convolutions over the burn rate of Reality Labs at each earnings release.
This is a good take and something I needed to be reminded of. I find myself hating Zuckerberg and Musk, etc. but I absolutely want to live in a world where humans have walked on Mars, we have amazing VR tech, and cars all run on quiet and clean electricity. They must have real strength of vision to keep pursuing these things that are impossible level challenges, while the entire world hates them for it.
VR tech already seems pretty good now. It's a niche interest, but I did have fun playing the games. What more is needed?
I just don't see Zuck being the person to deliver "amazing VR tech". He doesn't inspire excitement the way Jobs did, and even then, Jobs was just selling expensive MP3 players. The vision for VR is a bit more grand than that.
I think there's some chance of success but if you look at what Nintendo brings in annually (~$16B) on something that is much, much more accessible it's a little shaky. Maybe all it will take is the magic game that has everyone clamoring for it but even then people have to continue using it.
I believe Zuckerberg's play with buying Oculus was brilliant. I had basically stopped using anything Facebook but I couldn't resist the temptation to play Robo Recall with a Quest. So now he got a set of updated personal data from me and I even paid him for the privilege.
I believe what Zuckerberg is doing here is to publicly announce that he has funding ready to purchase whoever could be the next Oculus. Based on Carmack's complaint, I don't have high hopes of Meta building the metaverse in-house. But if I was considering working on metaverse technology, this might be a nudge for entrepreneurs and their investors to get started, because Zuckerberg just painted the map leading to a unicorn exit.
I like electronics and have AI + PCB experience. Anyone wanna start the next Oculus ;) ?
I want to admire their tenacity and faith. Lot of great things can come out of that. But then there's the financial side and responsibility. So it's a tough call. But as a non-stock owner for Meta, I'd favor tenacity of innovation than an ever increasing stock price.
I've been an avid Quest 2 user. There is nothing else like it. I use it for portable workouts and it does the job pretty well. Meta is years ahead of anyone else in this field.
But will this ever reach mainstream adoption? I think Zuck and others need to understand that the ask of putting a headset on is a pretty big one and is one of the biggest impediments, even if the stuff inside that headset can be pretty cool! I just don't see a path to that ever becoming normalized in our society or workplace.
I feel Zuck is letting his personal bias inform his decisions because he is an avid early adopter and is perhaps super comfy with VR headsets. I mean he bought Oculus in the first place !
I personally think stuff like VR/AR doesn't become truly mainstream until we hit a contact lenses level form factor. I know that sounds way out there but I don't see any other way. Getting to a sunglasses form factor will be a big win but still won't be enough to go mainstream, perhaps 25% of the way. And even that is easily 10 years away if not more.
If I was part of their innovation team, I'd buy another smaller company like Nreal Air that's innovating in he sunglasses display/AR space quite well and then try to marry VR/AR with that. If they can achieve that, they will get a big jump in adoption. It will require an external computation box, perhaps a smartphone sized one, but that's still an easier ask than putting a whole headset on.
Sunglasses type form factor makes sense. I think a contact lens form factor would hurt adoption though. Some people wear contacts full time and you wouldn’t want another similar sized device stuck on top of it. A lot of people do not wear contacts and it can be a major struggle to force yourself to stick something onto your eyeballs.
Presumably they could just manufacture them ("them" being magical computers the size of a contact lens, so I know I'm going out on a bit of a ledge here) to also include your prescription along with the magic computer bits.
I agree that sticking contact lenses isn't going to be too fun unless the utility is really super compelling and then it becomes a part of your routine. Imagine overlays on demand for any context.
Light weight glasses is another option but it does limit the utility a lot in many scenarios.
I just picked up a second hand quest 2, pretty cool. What workout app(s) do you use? So far beat saber can get the heart rate up a little depending on what song and difficulty you choose but I haven't tried anything else. Mostly I've just been playing through Alyx.
I'm bullish on VR/AR but FB seems to have totally lost the plot. The metaverse is a joke, the Meta Quest 2 software is utter garbage (super buggy, unintuitive, extremely frustrating), and the Quest Pro was incredibly lackluster.
I enjoy my Quest 2 overall once you get into a game but the OS is trash and FB's layer on top of Android is not well done. My friends and I spend way more time than we should just trying to get into a "Home" all together and launching a game from the OS is a crapshoot. The OS is completely full of papercuts from unresponsive UI to things like switching to passthrough kills party audio for a second or two. Staying in passthrough for more than a minute (sometimes less) will kick you from the game you are playing which is infuriating. Do they think that people don't need to step away to deal with kids/pets/drinks/bathroom/etc? I can't tell you how many gaming sessions have been ruined or screwed up because someone had to take a short break and the OS/Game just shit the bed.
I was excited for the Quest Pro and was ready to buy one if it was compelling... it was not. The specs are a minor bump over the Q2, the color passthrough camera feels very "beta", and from videos I've watched of it in action I'm glad I didn't get one. The (literal) bending of "reality" when using passthrough looks terrible and feels like it would really break immersion. The controllers did look interesting and I haven't heard anything really bad about them, they do seem like a big step up from the Q2 controllers. You can pair the QPro controllers with the Q2 so that might be something I look into though I'd prefer to never get Meta another dollar if I can help it. I'm looking forward to whatever Apple is working on.
Sidenote: Maybe it's an industry term that I just don't know/understand but "of overall costs" doesn't make sense to me. The Subtitle has "Company says 20% of spending to go toward Reality Labs" which makes a lot more sense.
>> The controllers did look interesting and I haven't heard anything really bad about them, they do seem like a big step up from the Q2 controllers. You can pair the QPro controllers with the Q2
Yes, the Touch Pro controllers are absolutely wonderful on both the Pro and the 2. Extremely cool that Meta added support on the 2 and, if not for the issue below, I’d happily recommend them to Quest 2 owners who have the $300 to blow.
Unfortunately, the Quest 2’s controllers are probably the worst in the industry for developing thumbstick drift. Worse than even the Switch.
Given that sort of unfortunate pedigree and the premium price of the Touch Pros, it’s baffling to see that they skimped on Hall effect sensors for the thumbsticks. It’s extremely hard to recommend spending hundreds of dollars on controllers that may very well need to be RMA’ed in a few months.
Isn’t it possible that since they cut costs (inhumane way to describe layoffs), as long as they keep the investment dollars the same, the percentage would go up?
As much as I’m unhappy about the death of PCVR thanks to the Quest 2, I have to agree with Carmack that it was very close to being the Right Device for bringing VR to the masses - and the sales numbers mostly reflect this.
But I can’t help but feel something dysfunctional happened internally since the Quest 2 launch.
The Quest Pro should not have been launched at $1500 with its current feature set/SoC and no depth sensor. And I find it difficult to accept the “enterprise market” claim as anything more than a cope when I go into BestBuy and see it being demoed to consumers and displayed prominently in an endcap.
Then you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert” had fewer attendees than an average Wendy’s and the performance was low res 2d video on a screen. Embarrassing stuff.
As far as gaming is concerned: Meta spent hundreds of millions acquiring some of the largest third party VR devs over the past couple years - and still not a single game has been announced.
It sure smells like rotten bureaucratic infighting combined with Zuck doggedly chasing where he thinks the puck is going and Carmack’s resignation letter certainly doesn’t disabuse me of the notion.
I think in the Quest you can see Zuckerberg trying to create Meta's iPhone. Most of Apple's profit comes from selling hardware for more than it costs to make it. Sure there are other phones but most people would prefer an iphone, for various reasons. Branding is not the least of which.
I see the quest pro as a similar product to the iphone pro. Technically better, but almost as much of a status symbol to ramp up profits long term as much as anything.
I suspect we'll see those two lanes continue to be developed with fairly fast releases on a similar schedule to iphones - with Mark's dream being that one day Meta will be the new Apple complete with the walled garden app store.
I think Zuck is impatient. He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution.
Yet VR must be a huge gaming success before something like a social network in VR can happen. Quest 2 and Rift before it is almost that, but still a large part of gaming fans remain unconvinced. But that is surely possible to solve.
We are at the Doom/Quake stage and he wants to skip WoW, Fortnite and get directly to what comes after that by building the equivalent of VRML or Second Life. Its too early.
Also AR is a distraction, not possible to do well with tech existing today, if ever.
>He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution
You don't need a gaming stage to make it useful any more than you needed a gaming stage of face to face video conferencing to make FaceTime and Zoom and the like extremely useful.
The proper plan is to try to get many use cases working, and try to solve technical problems for each, until one of them meet in a useful product or solution. Claiming it has to be a certain way will miss quicker and possibly much more fruitful cases.
But here's the thing: no group but gamers is excited enough about VR to even be a candidate for a market right now. The only people who want to strap goggles to their face are those looking for gaming experiences. Why try to dodge that reality?
There is massive interest in the business markets, and their size dwarfs gaming. The best selling gaming platform in history was playstation 2 with ~150M sold. Zoom has 300M users daily. Other business platforms add hundreds of millions more users. The business hardware for conference rooms stuff is massivley bigger than games. And all the players in this hardware, from Logitech, to Bose, are all working towards this too. Gaming is a small market compared to what companies are trying to do with this space.
Disrupting the having to fly far for a meeting when one could get the same experience is such a bigger, likely easier to satisfy, market, makes gaming become an afterthought.
Or you can listen to the Zuckerberg interview with Lex Fridman where he states
What’s your evidence for massive interest in business markets? I use a quest for gaming, but find the idea of interacting with colleagues for corporate stuff to be just hideous.
I listed one good place for evidence - Zuckerberg's interview. I also have done consulting on such projects for a few of the players. All the big players have extensive groups working on this. For example: Microsoft has bought AR and VR companies and rolled the tech into Teams, and their many AR/VR projects have been business (and military) directed for a long time. NVidia has the Omniverse for 3d content creation and sharing (among other projects).
As far bas as 2016 there were 200_ companies working in this space, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, MS, Sony - and they are not simply trying to make game goggles.
A simple google for this should make it clear to you that the game angle is a tiny slice of what is being pursued, since the game market is tiny compared to the broader uses.
There are already uses for telemedicine, virtual meetings, virtual site inspections, remote education, military, training, flight simulators, geography uses, dangerous environment uses, prototyping, broader healthcare, engineering, music and other events (concerts and other things have been held on various platforms). Digital twin creation and inspection are huge business use cases for all of industry and DoD, with billions a year currently being spent on development of the tech.
>but [I] find the idea of interacting with colleagues
Your experience is not what will drive the industry - and the entire point is to make it seamless. And the uses for AR/VR is so vastly larger than gaming or you in a business meeting that it should be clear that gaming is a tiny slice of the possibilities, and is demonstrably a tiny slice of all the major players working on VR/AR projects and products.
For a tiny intro, start here [1] and chase down links. Or simply look at any of the big companies I listed and search for their AR/VR work - the majority of work is not for gaming.
VR has a place. I don't know if Meta is capable of getting it there. Occulus is a great piece of tech, I own one and I enjoy it. My wife who does not game at all, also likes it. There are games like Beat Saber a few others that are good for getting the masses in. And games like Half Life Alyx that can get gamers in. But outside of that there is nothing that really makes it seem like an improvement to life, its still a novelty.
>when you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert”
Why would I want to go to a low resolution hologram concert and sit in my house instead of being at a concert? That's not cool. People don't take photos of that, they don't talk about it at lunch the next day, they don't reminisce about that. Its divorced from people.
I think that the "Metaverse" is actually on the right track somewhere but doesn't have the vision of a product to get it finished. I would love the Metaverse as some kind of "tabletop" simulator. My vision of the metaverse after Zuck's announcement was that it would be cool if I could play rpgs in there, where I can customize my avatar, and a gm can build a dungeon out. Let me do fantastical otherworldly things, not just try and save myself a 20 minute drive.
That is where I think metaverse will win, unique experiences that I can only get in there. The problem is that the Metaverse is trying to see copies of real world experiences, but worse.
I'm bullish on the metaverse only because I see it as the only viable solution to one of the biggest problems in the world right now: loneliness.
Sure, metaverse interactions are a distant second to real world interactions, but at this point, real-world doesn't work out for lonely people anymore, and I haven't seen any compelling real world solutions either.
Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed. You'd ideally fix it irl. But if you can't, at least giving people a virtual experience of togetherness might be worth it
Tiktok has demonstrated the upper levels of dissociation possible on a phone. The logical next step for the app purveyors of the world is a device that affixes itself to your face and keep reality out entirely.
I sat with my long distance gf to watch TV together, and genuinely forgot that we weren’t in the same room. It was magic. Taking the goggles off and instantly going back to being alone in my house was an eye opener; I realised that while VR is not as good as really being there, it’s so much better than a video chat for feeling close.
My gut feeling is that it's hard to build these devices in ways that are affordable, profitable, untethered, and realistic. I think that hating Facebook and disrespecting Zuck is driven just as much by the popularity of the pastime (hating) as by anything real.
Credit to Zuckerberg for staying the course. I think that other products will soon come out from other companies over the next year or two that because extremely popular, and AR/VR WILL go mainstream, and practically no one will ever admit that he was right about it being a good overall direction to go in. And if they don't end up making a lot of money from these things it won't prove that it wasn't the right direction. It's hard to pull off and there is going to be a lot of competition.
Definitely not the same. The upside of 3d TV was very minimal. Most of the times you would get an inferior experience in fact.
With VR, the upside of VR for immersive experience such as flight simulators, is massive.
Having said that, your point maybe has some merit if we refer to people wanting to wear headsets for zoom meetings, which is a bit of what meta is aiming at.
Granted for immersive gaming experiences (I were a PC gamer who bought a VGA card and Roland LAPC-1 soundcard back then just to enjoy the full experience of Origin's Wing Commander) but definitely not for Zoom or spending time with friends.
AR glasses perhaps will work - less cumbersome and intrusive than a headset.
At this point doesn't feel like there's many other options long term for Facebook. If they weren't doing this, how long would they have before all that money is gone anyway? Anyone have suggestions on something besides VR to replace their current business?
As someone in the VR industry, I think VR will succeed in spite of Facebook.
Meta horizons is a solution in search of a problem, and they refuse to recognize that. Meanwhile the rest of us are making money solving actual problems that actually exist today. I do industrial and cockpit simulations, things that are unsafe or expensive to train on IRL, which is basically an ideal use for VR.
Capitalism simulator VR 22 is not something that anyone wants. It doesn't fill a need or solve a problem other than "how do we extract more money from consumers?". People are starting to become resentful of their entire life being monetized, who wants to have their recreation monetized?
In Facebook's hands, they won't want to compete in the businesses where there are actual use cases today. Because of their size, they have the resources to try to invent a whole new market (walled garden), and only then find consumers for it.
Zuck immediately needs to hope on the AGI train before it leaves the station. He needs to pivote from Metaverse craziness. He needs to come out for making a mistake and course correct ASAP.
He has massive walled garden of data that no one else has. He had MetaAI folks who knows how to build LLMs. He has AppliedML team who knows how to productize AI. He now even has better reputation for saner policies and privacy, thanks to Twitter. He should be able to spin up AI based search engine in 6-12 months. He can produce AI based Office in similar time frame. All the stars are aligned for him if he has courage to course correct.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadIn order to have any sort of future growth story, Meta pretty much needs to create or somehow capture major economics from a new platform like they did for web2.0 and mobile web. Due to antitrust concerns IMO, they can't just acquire their way into more value by acquiring a company like Pinterest so their remaining options are moonshots like AR/VR to invest heavily for the next platform to become ubiquitous and then extract economics from it.
Slowly face into obsolescence as kids abandon Facebook and Google/apple use their monopolies to totally invalidate your ability to serve ads?
I truly believe that there's like a 95% chance that Meta builds a great product but it hemorrhages money and will ultimately need to be gimped - but I'm really in it for the 5% chance that it is a home run on the financials.
What Zuck is doing represents everything I admire about Silicon Valley (and honestly it's a short list of things) and sure he's a strange personality and questionable past but his vision and persistence into this is something I would hope to see succeed and valued.
I hate meta
Why
Because they track me
Why do they do that
To show me things I might want
Why is that bad
Insert slippery slope
—
At some point you need to be objective and ask if a little of that hate is just herd mentality.
That’s an extraordinarily generous interpretation of Facebook’s motivation.
I'm not saying that Meta will definitely have a change in perception but that's what I'm betting on if they truly do have a competent Metaverse.
The best example of this change is Microsoft - it wasn't too long ago that it was the most hated tech company by the tech community and shareholders alike and now it's the ~least hated~ big tech out there.
Do you believe their bad reputation can be fixed in such short timeframe?
I would like to compare it to AWS' lead in cloud due to their head start but this is obviously a much larger gamble.
The situation is especially bad for Meta here compared to Google because even though most Google revenue comes from ads, Google still has a bunch of other product verticals like Google Workspace (G Suite), GCP, Android, Chromebooks, GPay, and numerous other products (including moonshot bets like Waymo). And Google doesn't need to rely on ad retargeting nearly as much, they can serve personalized ads just based off the text in search queries and gmail.
In the long term it is very important that Meta diversifies and finds new scalable sources of revenue. Even if you don't think VR has a high probability of success, it's one of their best shots at finding something that has the potential (if everything goes well) to eventually generate serious revenue and diversify their business. It's easy to throw stones but what else do people want from Meta? It's extremely dangerous for them to do nothing. Since they're printing money today they can afford to make these huge bets on their future, and without huge future bets their future looks pretty bleak.
Exactly. However, I think their AI play will need to come into fruition - AI as a service will need to be their second cash cow before anything Metaverse
The killer VR apps are all in creating a rated R type Metaverse that is seedy and dangerous. 80s Manhattan style, not safe for work or children.
That would be something wild and create a huge buzz. Instead, we have Horizon Worlds. Basically, Starbucks with fake coffee.
The only thing I like about Meta is trading the stock over the next few years as Wall Street goes into convolutions over the burn rate of Reality Labs at each earnings release.
I just don't see Zuck being the person to deliver "amazing VR tech". He doesn't inspire excitement the way Jobs did, and even then, Jobs was just selling expensive MP3 players. The vision for VR is a bit more grand than that.
I believe what Zuckerberg is doing here is to publicly announce that he has funding ready to purchase whoever could be the next Oculus. Based on Carmack's complaint, I don't have high hopes of Meta building the metaverse in-house. But if I was considering working on metaverse technology, this might be a nudge for entrepreneurs and their investors to get started, because Zuckerberg just painted the map leading to a unicorn exit.
I like electronics and have AI + PCB experience. Anyone wanna start the next Oculus ;) ?
I've been an avid Quest 2 user. There is nothing else like it. I use it for portable workouts and it does the job pretty well. Meta is years ahead of anyone else in this field.
But will this ever reach mainstream adoption? I think Zuck and others need to understand that the ask of putting a headset on is a pretty big one and is one of the biggest impediments, even if the stuff inside that headset can be pretty cool! I just don't see a path to that ever becoming normalized in our society or workplace.
I feel Zuck is letting his personal bias inform his decisions because he is an avid early adopter and is perhaps super comfy with VR headsets. I mean he bought Oculus in the first place !
I personally think stuff like VR/AR doesn't become truly mainstream until we hit a contact lenses level form factor. I know that sounds way out there but I don't see any other way. Getting to a sunglasses form factor will be a big win but still won't be enough to go mainstream, perhaps 25% of the way. And even that is easily 10 years away if not more.
If I was part of their innovation team, I'd buy another smaller company like Nreal Air that's innovating in he sunglasses display/AR space quite well and then try to marry VR/AR with that. If they can achieve that, they will get a big jump in adoption. It will require an external computation box, perhaps a smartphone sized one, but that's still an easier ask than putting a whole headset on.
Light weight glasses is another option but it does limit the utility a lot in many scenarios.
Other famous ones are Supernatural, FitXR etc. But they all have subscription models and Les Mills doesn't.
I enjoy my Quest 2 overall once you get into a game but the OS is trash and FB's layer on top of Android is not well done. My friends and I spend way more time than we should just trying to get into a "Home" all together and launching a game from the OS is a crapshoot. The OS is completely full of papercuts from unresponsive UI to things like switching to passthrough kills party audio for a second or two. Staying in passthrough for more than a minute (sometimes less) will kick you from the game you are playing which is infuriating. Do they think that people don't need to step away to deal with kids/pets/drinks/bathroom/etc? I can't tell you how many gaming sessions have been ruined or screwed up because someone had to take a short break and the OS/Game just shit the bed.
I was excited for the Quest Pro and was ready to buy one if it was compelling... it was not. The specs are a minor bump over the Q2, the color passthrough camera feels very "beta", and from videos I've watched of it in action I'm glad I didn't get one. The (literal) bending of "reality" when using passthrough looks terrible and feels like it would really break immersion. The controllers did look interesting and I haven't heard anything really bad about them, they do seem like a big step up from the Q2 controllers. You can pair the QPro controllers with the Q2 so that might be something I look into though I'd prefer to never get Meta another dollar if I can help it. I'm looking forward to whatever Apple is working on.
Sidenote: Maybe it's an industry term that I just don't know/understand but "of overall costs" doesn't make sense to me. The Subtitle has "Company says 20% of spending to go toward Reality Labs" which makes a lot more sense.
Yes, the Touch Pro controllers are absolutely wonderful on both the Pro and the 2. Extremely cool that Meta added support on the 2 and, if not for the issue below, I’d happily recommend them to Quest 2 owners who have the $300 to blow.
Unfortunately, the Quest 2’s controllers are probably the worst in the industry for developing thumbstick drift. Worse than even the Switch.
Given that sort of unfortunate pedigree and the premium price of the Touch Pros, it’s baffling to see that they skimped on Hall effect sensors for the thumbsticks. It’s extremely hard to recommend spending hundreds of dollars on controllers that may very well need to be RMA’ed in a few months.
Serious question
But I can’t help but feel something dysfunctional happened internally since the Quest 2 launch.
The Quest Pro should not have been launched at $1500 with its current feature set/SoC and no depth sensor. And I find it difficult to accept the “enterprise market” claim as anything more than a cope when I go into BestBuy and see it being demoed to consumers and displayed prominently in an endcap.
Then you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert” had fewer attendees than an average Wendy’s and the performance was low res 2d video on a screen. Embarrassing stuff.
As far as gaming is concerned: Meta spent hundreds of millions acquiring some of the largest third party VR devs over the past couple years - and still not a single game has been announced.
It sure smells like rotten bureaucratic infighting combined with Zuck doggedly chasing where he thinks the puck is going and Carmack’s resignation letter certainly doesn’t disabuse me of the notion.
I see the quest pro as a similar product to the iphone pro. Technically better, but almost as much of a status symbol to ramp up profits long term as much as anything.
I suspect we'll see those two lanes continue to be developed with fairly fast releases on a similar schedule to iphones - with Mark's dream being that one day Meta will be the new Apple complete with the walled garden app store.
I think Zuck is impatient. He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution.
Yet VR must be a huge gaming success before something like a social network in VR can happen. Quest 2 and Rift before it is almost that, but still a large part of gaming fans remain unconvinced. But that is surely possible to solve.
We are at the Doom/Quake stage and he wants to skip WoW, Fortnite and get directly to what comes after that by building the equivalent of VRML or Second Life. Its too early.
Also AR is a distraction, not possible to do well with tech existing today, if ever.
You don't need a gaming stage to make it useful any more than you needed a gaming stage of face to face video conferencing to make FaceTime and Zoom and the like extremely useful.
The proper plan is to try to get many use cases working, and try to solve technical problems for each, until one of them meet in a useful product or solution. Claiming it has to be a certain way will miss quicker and possibly much more fruitful cases.
Disrupting the having to fly far for a meeting when one could get the same experience is such a bigger, likely easier to satisfy, market, makes gaming become an afterthought.
Or you can listen to the Zuckerberg interview with Lex Fridman where he states
Why try to dodge that reality?
As far bas as 2016 there were 200_ companies working in this space, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, MS, Sony - and they are not simply trying to make game goggles.
A simple google for this should make it clear to you that the game angle is a tiny slice of what is being pursued, since the game market is tiny compared to the broader uses.
There are already uses for telemedicine, virtual meetings, virtual site inspections, remote education, military, training, flight simulators, geography uses, dangerous environment uses, prototyping, broader healthcare, engineering, music and other events (concerts and other things have been held on various platforms). Digital twin creation and inspection are huge business use cases for all of industry and DoD, with billions a year currently being spent on development of the tech.
>but [I] find the idea of interacting with colleagues
Your experience is not what will drive the industry - and the entire point is to make it seamless. And the uses for AR/VR is so vastly larger than gaming or you in a business meeting that it should be clear that gaming is a tiny slice of the possibilities, and is demonstrably a tiny slice of all the major players working on VR/AR projects and products.
For a tiny intro, start here [1] and chase down links. Or simply look at any of the big companies I listed and search for their AR/VR work - the majority of work is not for gaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_augmented_reality
>when you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert”
Why would I want to go to a low resolution hologram concert and sit in my house instead of being at a concert? That's not cool. People don't take photos of that, they don't talk about it at lunch the next day, they don't reminisce about that. Its divorced from people.
I think that the "Metaverse" is actually on the right track somewhere but doesn't have the vision of a product to get it finished. I would love the Metaverse as some kind of "tabletop" simulator. My vision of the metaverse after Zuck's announcement was that it would be cool if I could play rpgs in there, where I can customize my avatar, and a gm can build a dungeon out. Let me do fantastical otherworldly things, not just try and save myself a 20 minute drive.
That is where I think metaverse will win, unique experiences that I can only get in there. The problem is that the Metaverse is trying to see copies of real world experiences, but worse.
If VR is costing them 10s of billions of dollars yearly, where else could that much money have gone?
Sure, metaverse interactions are a distant second to real world interactions, but at this point, real-world doesn't work out for lonely people anymore, and I haven't seen any compelling real world solutions either.
Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed. You'd ideally fix it irl. But if you can't, at least giving people a virtual experience of togetherness might be worth it
I think this is fixed by going outside and talking to people.
If it's not working out so we need to find new solutions
Credit to Zuckerberg for staying the course. I think that other products will soon come out from other companies over the next year or two that because extremely popular, and AR/VR WILL go mainstream, and practically no one will ever admit that he was right about it being a good overall direction to go in. And if they don't end up making a lot of money from these things it won't prove that it wasn't the right direction. It's hard to pull off and there is going to be a lot of competition.
With VR, the upside of VR for immersive experience such as flight simulators, is massive.
Having said that, your point maybe has some merit if we refer to people wanting to wear headsets for zoom meetings, which is a bit of what meta is aiming at.
AR glasses perhaps will work - less cumbersome and intrusive than a headset.
Google's case is harder to make.
Meta horizons is a solution in search of a problem, and they refuse to recognize that. Meanwhile the rest of us are making money solving actual problems that actually exist today. I do industrial and cockpit simulations, things that are unsafe or expensive to train on IRL, which is basically an ideal use for VR.
Capitalism simulator VR 22 is not something that anyone wants. It doesn't fill a need or solve a problem other than "how do we extract more money from consumers?". People are starting to become resentful of their entire life being monetized, who wants to have their recreation monetized?
In Facebook's hands, they won't want to compete in the businesses where there are actual use cases today. Because of their size, they have the resources to try to invent a whole new market (walled garden), and only then find consumers for it.
He has massive walled garden of data that no one else has. He had MetaAI folks who knows how to build LLMs. He has AppliedML team who knows how to productize AI. He now even has better reputation for saner policies and privacy, thanks to Twitter. He should be able to spin up AI based search engine in 6-12 months. He can produce AI based Office in similar time frame. All the stars are aligned for him if he has courage to course correct.