We probably aren't there because of consumer demand. None of the headsets have really gotten enough sales to justify the research in those things to make them better. If they were selling like smartphones we would have a much different set of features.
But comparing the Vive XR to the specs in the announcement, the Quest 3 has a higher resolution, same FOV, same refresh rate (experimental sorry for higher refresh rate) at half the price but double the weight.
That's not true. The original HTC Vive has the same refresh rate (90Hz) and field of view (110° horizontal), but the Quest 3's resolution is 2064x2208 per eye while the Vive's is 1080x1200. The Vive XR Elite has the same refresh rate (90Hz) and field of view (110° horizontal), but a lower resolution of 1920x1920 per eye. It also costs twice as much as the Quest 3.
The Vive XR Elite's lower claimed weight of 270 grams is without the battery. With battery it weighs 625g, which is heavier than the Quest 1 (571g), Quest 2 (503g), or Quest 3 (515g).
Indeed. HL Alyx through the Quest 2 is the only thing that kinda got me immersed because the environment looks so good. But it takes a while because it's really like looking through a small window.
I don't need/want all the mixed reality and metaverse BS. I just want a good FoV and resolution. They really invest in the wrong areas, imo.
> Terrible marketing website. I tried and failed to find improvements over Quest 2.
"2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough. Delivers full-color, high-fidelity views of your surroundings while you see virtual objects appear in your physical space. Accurate depth projection and room mapping gives you freedom to move throughout your space and interact with virtual characters or objects in the room around you."
"2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2 for next-level clarity and lifelike graphics. 4K+ Infinite Display with 25PPD and 1218 PPI brings the best resolution across the entire Quest line of devices."
"Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, delivering double the GPU processing power for faster load times and more seamless gameplay compared to Meta Quest 2"
"2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough."
"Integrated stereo speakers with 3D spatial audio places you in your space with 40% louder audio range, bass range and optimal L/R matching capabilities. "
"8GB. 33% memory compared with Meta Quest 2"
"Pancake optics create a 40% slimmer optic profile* for more comfortable wear.
As compared to Quest 2 excluding the facial interface. "
"2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2"
"Pancake lens provides a slimmer optic profile without compromising the depth of your visual immersion. Increased sharpness by 25% in center FOV (~70% sharper in periphery), with significantly less stray or scattered light artifacts. "
- Display Resolution: 2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2 for next-level clarity and lifelike graphics. 4K+ Infinite Display with 25PPD and 1218 PPI brings the best resolution across the entire Quest line of devices.
- Power: Advanced hardware stack and the first headset with the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, delivering double the GPU processing power for faster load times and more seamless gameplay compared to Meta Quest 2. This brings enough power to support heavy applications like fast-action gaming, seamless full-color, high-resolution passthrough, and so much more.
- Mixed Reality: 2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough. Delivers full-color, high-fidelity views of your surroundings while you see virtual objects appear in your physical space. Accurate depth projection and room mapping gives you freedom to move throughout your space and interact with virtual characters or objects in the room around you.
- Audio: Integrated stereo speakers with 3D spatial audio places you in your space with 40% louder audio range, bass range and optimal L/R matching capabilities.
- DRAM: 8GB. 33% memory compared with Meta Quest 2, giving you more support to play your favorite apps with optimal performance.
- Headset Weight: 515 grams. Pancake optics create a 40% slimmer optic profile* for more comfortable wear.
- Optics: Pancake lens provides a slimmer optic profile* without compromising the depth of your visual immersion. Increased sharpness by 25% in center FOV (~70% sharper in periphery), with significantly less stray or scattered light artifacts.
I've had UBO for years without enabled annoyance lists (great naming BTW) and WOW, just WOW, after enabling them the internet seems like a completely different place. Thx!
After I lost all of my purchases after deleting my Facebook account (not that I used my old Quest anyways), I decided I would never purchase another Meta product (even though that's probably the LEAST abusive thing they do).
> Productivity: 1.5 hours minutes [sic] of usage on average
How is this accurate? What kind of "Productivity" tasks are people doing inside a Quest if it uses more power/battery than gaming? Also, "Social" drawing more power than "Gaming" too? Something seems weird.
Going by how my Macbook's battery life evaporates with 10 Chrome tabs + Slack + Zoom, I believe it. Gaming is definitely less load than multiple windows of modern work apps.
True, but nowhere near the level that a game would. As an example, it'll be hard to find a productivity/office application that is bottlenecked by the GPU, while for games, it's relatively easy to find.
Sure, but those only get rendered when stuff is actually changing on the screen, otherwise it stands still, compared to games which would (usually at least) continue to render N FPS no matter if the screen is identical or not compared to previous frame.
I'm pretty sure productivity refers mixed reality stuff such as projecting virtual screens and objects in the environment around you.[1] That requires more computation than rendering a fully virtual scene.
I'm clueless -- how do these things work? Are they standalone, or do you also need a gaming PC? Do you need internet connection, or is there stuff that works offline? Do you need Facebook account? Are they hackable, e.g., are there custom firmware options?
Standalone, but you can connect to PC if you want to play graphically intensive games. Quest 2 basically, you login with FB account so you need internet connection at first. Pretty "unhackable" afaik, you can install custom mods for games but thats pretty much it in terms of modifications I've seen.
Both standalone as well as connecting to pc works. I believe they work offline but I dont know for sure. Not hackable, what is often possible is using custom client software that handles the vr stuff on the pc.
The Quest works in both standalone and PC connected modes. A gaming PC will give you a different game library and way more rendering power, but PCVR is nearly an abandoned platform these days. Most VR money goes into standalone and PlayStation VR.
You will need internet to download games, but it can operate in offline mode as well if the game supports it.
You do need an account, but it can be a Meta account not connected to your Facebook if your choose.
They are not hackable in any way and there are no custom firmwares. In fact, the software side of these devices is incredibly complex (tracking, lens correction, very low latency rendering and control pipelines) and replicating the work that FB has done would be an effort for a large team of VR engineers. If you dig into some of the details of how they work you will realize they are a technological marvel to rival the iPhone.
Quest 2 works standalone with games made for it, or connected to PC and can use the Oculus store library as well as the Steam VR library. This makes it the most flexible VR headset on the market atm.
Along with the other comments, one extra thing to note is that the three-point tracking (head + 2 hands) is entirely standalone even when connected to a PC (platforms like Steam VR will translate it across), so you don't need any other hardware than that. Apps and games then generally either guesstimate the rest of your body positioning (using inverse kinematics) or just leave it out entirely by making you walk on your hands (like Gorilla Tag does - this actually works way better than it sounds).
There are some additional standalone body trackers, like SlimeVR, Sony mocopi, or HaritoraX, where you strap the hardware widgets on and they communicate inertial measurements with each other and your device without needing any base stations. But, since there's no OS-level support for them on Quest, support is app-by-app and usually requires a second device as a go-between (like a phone running the mocopi app).
PCVR makes it easy to use a ton of trackers and they're much more precise, but they require base stations (IR cameras on mounts you set up around your play space) since each one is basically a little IR transmitter with its position computed by the PC. If you see any "full body trolling" videos on Youtube it's generally people using these, since you can do strange things with them (handstands, pogo stick bouncing, multiple people sharing the same physical space, other Youtube creator nonsense) without the tracking getting confused or desynced.
streaming + vr seems like a recipe for disaster. even if you don't mind a few extra frames of latency when playing games on your TV, you absolutely will when head tracking is involved.
streaming + mouse & keyboard for shooters still feels like shit, even when I tried it on google stadia over google fiber.
honestly i kind of hope this game streaming fad never really takes off, because so far it just seems to make games worse. i'm convinced publishers want it as a means to further erode user ownership of the software they buy. "oh, sorry, the single player game you bought four years ago on a streaming platform is no longer available due to rights issues. would you like to buy the sequel for $70?"
Playing ultra-settings Starfield on an old retina MacBook air is mindblowing. GeForce Now, imo, is quietly the killer app of 2023.
> game streaming fad never really takes off
I am in the opposite camp. I want game developers to be freed from local hardware constraints, and indy developers to have access to the same graphical fidelities as AAA. Real, meaningful innovation in gaming is a possibility.
> and indy developers to have access to the same graphical fidelities as AAA
The bottleneck here isn't performance, it's the cost of producing high quality assets on a AAA scale. Streaming won't solve this.
As for "local hardware constraints", I've yet to see any streaming games that were not possible on local hardware. Personally, I'd rather upgrade my GPU or video game console every 5 years than lose all the very tangible benefits that come with running games on my own hardware (ownership, mods, preservation, etc.)
I will say that I think services like GeForce Now are the best use case for the technology. Since it is essentially a rentable high end gaming PC in the cloud, the user brings their own games. If GeForce now shuts down, you still have the option of downloading all the games you bought for on it to a PC. Nvidia is smart to position this as an additive experience, rather than a replacement like Stadia was.
While I like your idea, that needs to come with a cleaning service included :p
For a mainstream VR headset, you really need low latency. It's almost as bad as hard real-time machines because your users will get a mean headache and literally start to vomit if the latency between moving their head and the picture updating becomes too high. Rumor has it that reducing the screen latency by re-projecting a previously rendered frame was one of the big contributions that John Carmack developed to make Oculus feasible at all. So that means you now either need to stream ultra high resolution panoramas, which is too much data for even current 8k H265 codes to handle, or you need a streaming service with such an extremely low latency that just due to speed of light it basically has to be inside your city. Or well, you just accept that people will feel sick from the latency and reduce your target market to the 1% that can tolerate a 10ms delay on their vision.
They have discussed working on it for years. The problem is that very few people are close enough to a data center with rock solid internet and Wi-Fi to be able to hit the very narrow latency constraints.
I played HL Alyx for a few hours by streaming from PlutoSphere. It worked poorly due to frame drops and lag spikes.
I'm not VR pro, but the resolution sertainly feels lacking.
There were articles where people were writing how they are programming for many hours in their quest2. I cannot understand how this is possible with this bad text
Its okay if you have not used a high res screen recently. Its like using a shitty college classroom projector to program. I have a cheap 4k monitor so it kind of ruined vr for me for the moment. I will not get an 8k monitor until I have the screen in a headset first.
And this is weird to me. As a software engineer, who works with text all the time, I was buying IPS panels with as high resolution as I was able to justify for my entire career.
I don't see myself coding it quest, it is just too blurry.
Although this could be me and my personal preferences, as I also cannot program on something like macbook air 13", and there are people who can easily do it.
I used dual 2k 27" more than 10 years ago, now the main screen that I look at is 4k 32" and there are 2 2k 27" side by side. If linux didn't suck with mixed dpis and there were 240Hz IPS 27" (I use one of them for gaming), I'd already start considering 4k 27".
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Having said all of that, I certainly believe that there will be time when the FOV and resolution will be enough to replace monitors.
Like now, I have 3 monitors because I don't want to dance with workspaces etc. I still can focus only on one at one time.
Intelligent zoom and activation of windows/workspaces, improved to one that Apple shown in visionpro presentation, will be killer feature, as I objectively will be able to have multiple 4k screens without any table space used by monitors.
Going off the guesstimated PPDs and so on, I feel like the Apple Vision Pro is really going to be about the bare minimum to actually feel comfortable working on code stuff in VR/AR.
I don't think at this price point we can get really resolution for tasks like programming for at least few more years. Those screens are just still very expensive (and power hungry).
This seems like on paper it is quite close to the Apple Vision Pro. The performance per watt of the chips is probably not far off and both devices deal with the same basic design constraints of needing to fit comfortably on your head. The main difference seems to be the micro OLED and eye tracking on the Vision Pro vs. the Quest’s inclusion of controllers.
I’ll be curious how these two devices stack up to each other and exactly how different the user experiences end up being. The MR experience seems like it may be close. The VR gaming experience seems more emphasized on the Quest, but hand tracking has come a long way so I wouldn’t rule out the Vision Pro here either.
Overall I’m doubtful either device will hit mass market appeal.
Device with focus on mixed reality and productivity sporting the latest in mobile chips and hand tracking. It also does VR but MR is the new feature being brought to the table.
Vision pro is all about mixed reality. So is the quest 3. As far as I can tell most of the difference between 2 and 3 is the vastly improved mixed reality. Basically this device is positioning itself to be the consumer version of the vision pro.
Could be? If Quest 3 can deliver a nausea free experience then it may hit the same use cases as the Vision Pro. The controllers are also extremely precise, so Apple would need to pull off a nice trick to get hand tracking to that same level.
>AR/VR/Spatial is defined completely by immersion and lack-of-nausea, where less resolution and the inclusion of controllers demolish.
Not for me. I had loads of fun gaming on the Quest 2 in the pandemic lockdowns, and the controllers really help with gaming by providing accurate controls for weapons' triggers and haptics to feel weapons firing and when the tension in the bow before you fire arrow. Good luck feeling all that via waving your empty hands in the air.
I feel like HN simply loves to hate certain things without understanding them or using them, like the Quest while never actually using it for games and expecting it to be an early Apple Vision PRO. It's not, it was designed to be a games console, and for that it works quite well.
It also feels like there's a Paretto principle of VR experiences that people seem eager to avoid; the last '20%' of experiences offered by PCVR or Vision Pro might not be worth it. Even as a tech nerd, I don't really find myself pining for an upgrade to my original Quest. It offers the '80%' of the experience I'd actually want a headset for. I can watch 3D movies in bed, play immersive games or browse the internet surrounded by tabs. Adding iMessage to that equation will probably not be worth $3,000 for the average consumer.
Given the direction digital markets are headed (and the open precedent of VR), I think Meta is right to bet on that '80%'. It's much easier to pitch a console like the Quest than an overly-ambitious lockdown-helmet that costs as much as 2 used cars. Until Apple announces a better Vision lineup, it's going to be a bloodbath in terms of unit shipments.
Snapdragon vs M2
Vision Pro's resolution seems about 80% higher than the quest 3. To me, this is the most important factor to me in making augmented reality work.
It's also not premium looking / really ugly compared to the vision Pro, looks like a really nerdy toy that isolates you from reality even more than usual tech, which is something us tech people maybe don't value enough, but which Apple knows is very important for mass appeal (see, phones, computers), & is an obstacle for adoption.
There's a reason why Apple put a screen with eyes and the associated cameras inside, it's to make it look less stupid. That's really important for mass adoption.
These devices need to fit in a very specific power and heat envelope. Is the performance per watt 2x better at the TDP they both run at? We’ll need benchmarks to find out.
The difference in PPD is pretty significant when it comes to both actual mixed reality use around other people (assuming people can get over the dork factor in general) and anything at all related to virtual screens (whether productivity or just 'personal theater' usage).
I'm a bit out of the game on VR these days but I noticed there is no eye tracking which probably means no foveated rendering? I thought that was the new hottness these days.
The Quest Pro had eye tracking, but it was likely excluded for cost reason here. The performance increase from Foveated Rendering was minor on the Quest Pro because of the overhead needed to do high accuracy, low latency eye tracking.
Eye tracking will probably make it to the Quest 4, especially if Apple proves it out as a control input. Big If there IMHO.
It's that rooms, especially sunny ones, contain incredible amounts of variation in intensity, and that failing to capture/display that is at least as big a problem as not enough pixels per inch.
It also helps dramatically if the captured HDR surroundings can be fed on to an envmap for use in the 3D rendering phase.
Oh, that makes sense. Real life has a big dynamic range, so if you're trying to augment that, it won't look right unless it also can cover a big dynamic range.
I daily drove my quest 2 using immersed VR for a few months. In the end, the resolution was just not good enough for it to be better than my 3 monitor setup. But I'm looking forward to trying again in a couple of generations.
Big same. I want immersed to work so bad. But the resolution/dpi is garbage compared to even a shitty monitor. It also makes me nauseous but I'd be willing to deal with that if the experience was what I want it to be.
Yes, I knew I would need to live with some annoyances if I wanted to be an early adopter on this. I tried to adapt but in the end it was just too much of an inconvenience. And while my quest 2 is indeed currently collecting dust, I don't think headsets are a bad idea. Just that their current implementations are not good enough for my use case. Regardless of that, I'm optimistic about the future of using an HMD as your main general computing device's display. I'm willing to bet it will be a pretty common setup in 5 years or so.
Many here want/wanted the same thing. It has always puzzled me why. I like to use a piece of paper next to the computer and i also like the look and feel of a nice wooden desk and the sound of a pair of decend speakers. No matter how great the headset, i fail to see it as an improvement except for some very specific usecases.
The resolution was probably OK, you wanted lower FOV or higher pixels per degree (PPD). There are monitor replacement AR glasses with the same resolution or lower, but acceptable PPD due to their low FOV.
Looking forward to testing the Vision Pro for this usecase. Resolution looks high enough to possibly be The One, and if it replaces my monitors then the price might be worth it.
I have a Quest2 that only used for about 1 hour, is there any resale value or trade-in somewhere? it's collecting dust these two years, supposed to be a Christmas gift, did not work out at all.
I'm actually surprised -- I thought it would plummet once the 3 came out. Maybe it still will over the next few weeks if people with 2's upgrade to 3's and the marketplace gets flooded with 2's.
A.k.a. the budget version of Apple Vision Pro. Just $649.99 plus all your personal data! Strap it on your eyeballs and feed the machine, the algorithm hungers!
The Vision Pro wishes it could sell as many units as the Quest did. If the lifetime units sold exceeds the Quest 2's first quarter of shipments, it will be a small miracle.
> Just $649.99 plus all your personal data! Strap it on your eyeballs and feed the machine, the algorithm hungers!
My favorite part of Hacker News is how people rattle their adtech surveillance pans, but always hide away whenever someone mentions the NSA or PRISM. You guys remember last week when Canada used FIVE-EYES to grab telecom data off an unsuspecting, international citizen using commodity hardware?
Coming soon: the same duopoly of shit, but now on VR. As they say, don't throw stones from glass headsets.
Any word on what "tactile feedback" or "experiences you can feel" for the controllers means here? Did they just add vibration and punch it up with marketing bullshit, or is something fancier being described?
The quest controllers have always had some vibration, which is key to many experiences (and why I'm not taking Apple's offering seriously). Maybe they upped what the controllers can express?
Counter-intuitively, I think I'd be able to manage a headset better if it wasn't this box strapped to the front of my face, but rather an evenly balanced hockey helmet with a flip-up mask.
I can do hours wearing a hockey helmet, but these things are uncomfortable after a little while, and I think it's because it's just a more balanced thing that my neck muscles aren't constantly counteracting.
Not to suggest that that's the only thing that makes these a non-start for me, but I feel like that's one of the core issues.
I always hear good things about PlayStation VR. It seems a real shame that the only company in VR with any experience making wearable devices is using a proprietary platform.
At this point the optics seem… I dunno, pretty well worked out? So, I’d rather have Sennheiser VR than Facebook. Sennheiser knows how to balance a heavy thing on my head for hours.
Seriously, I'd rather have more weight than a face-forward center of gravity. If you're going to cram a laptop in there, put the non-optics behind my head.
There were add-on batteries for the Quest 2 that would attach to the back of the headset, thereby improving the balance which adding battery life. I never tried one.
I think, functionally, you have a point, but they wouldn’t sell nearly as many if it looked like a helmet. The devices have to be cool to sell, and headsets are uncool enough as it is.
These companies want a mass market product, not a niche product that only tech enthusiasts can appreciate.
Getting people to buy them is a superior barrier compared to getting people to keep using them afterwards. People won't appreciate how comfortable something is for long term use if they won't even start using it because it looks uncool compared to alternatives.
BOBOVR does something similar as a third-party add-on (https://www.bobovr.com/product/m2pro/). It's not quite a full welding mask design but the weight is meant to sit in a similar way. I'm sure they'll have something similar for the Quest 3 before too long.
Got a 2 on accident, an aunt was dazzled by ideas of exercising and meditating and was wildly underwhelmed by the actual experience, and gifted it to my family.
Kind of fun to have around very occasionally, but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy." Would never pay good money for one.
(and this is from a household where the Steam Deck is absolutely an essential toy.)*
*edit, come to think of it -- said aunt has logged more hours on my Steam Deck even though we don't live together, thanks to the Jackbox series. I feel like there's a lot of good anecdata here :)
The novelty wears off after a bit and then it’s mostly just a less convenient version of a game console (the limited software really hurts any other use)
The PC Oculus software was much better so there’s definitely more they can do; the Quest software is full of artificial limitations, like having window placement and sizing be unnecessarily limited. They’re also somewhat hostile to sideloading (not blocking it but making it more difficult than it needs to be) which probably hurts niche use cases
It's kind of interesting how garbage most the sideloaded apps are? I'm not expecting amazing, but, like even your average popular Roblox game has more polish.
Even without VR, I think Google StreetView (or equivalent competitors) are heavily underrated contents. Improving UI like FPS game would make significant difference even in desktop. Maybe it's too costly for operator due to bigger data and bad cache hit rate, and difficult to monetize.
> but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy."
I saw a reviewer mention that VR is like "having your favorite amusement park ride at home": it's awesome, but at the same time you're not going to ride a roller coaster for 3 hours everyday.
VR can be loads of fun, but I still find it exhausting, and very focus demanding. It will, for me, always remain a nice plus, but never as essential as something I can easily pause and put down.
Definitely. A bug and a feature for sure. Superhot lets you slow everything to matrix/bullet time which is super cool, but Pistol Whip is like LETS SEE HOW YOU FARE IN REAL TIME. :)
This resonates for me as well. It's just too exhausting and uncomfortable, and I hate the feeling of isolation from the real world.
I think it may be the case that the general public will find putting on VR goggles and losing their visual connection to the physical world around them to be weird and alienating in a way that fundamentally cannot be overcome by technical improvements.
Maybe VR goggles are OK for small doses and the novelty, but perhaps this is just too jarring and strange to ever become the primary way people interact with games (never mind the much touted non-gaming applications).
For hardware, visual connection to real is what Apple and Meta are solving with their latest products. For software, non-VR software in the room is still lacking but Apple and third parties will solve it. Many VR software are better with remain isolated.
Starting with the Quest Pro, I think this problem has been solved. When I started using it, aside from the lightness, I noticed that I didn’t care about adding in the light shields. I liked being able to have a decent view of both my left and right at the cost of immersion. I’m sure the vision pro will take this a step further
So I do have access to Indexes and the HTC ones, and they do seem to have some more stuff, but I'm also curious what other people think. I definitely could see it if they had more things like Google Earth, which is weirdly absent from the Quest.
Beatsaber and some other games can be a lot of fun, but they’re not new. What new experience are ready for this?
I get the quality is better, and that’s not nothing.
But other than that this largely seems like more of the same. VR still doesn’t seem to have advanced much in software to me. And Meta keeps pushing virtual meetings and such but that’s not my cup of tea.
I owned a Quest 2 and had some fun with it. I’ve owned previous headsets too. But I just don’t see anything that would makes me say “ooh I need that”.
This feels very “PC” to me. By which I mean they’re selling it because they can sell new hardware. The Pentium 9 is out! Which is fine.
But when Sony/Nintendo/MS want to sell a new console they put new and fancier games. They give you a specific reason to upgrade besides better specs. So you can play Horizon 12: We’re On The Moon Now. Or Bob’s Crazy Adventure. Whatever.
All this time and it still seems like the market is 95% games, and those aren’t advancing much beyond visuals. So I don’t feel like I’m really missing anything.
+1. I don't have a TV, so if I could just stream my macOS desktop and Xbox Cloud Gaming (which I already use) to a virtual 50+' screen that follows me as I walk around, that will be enough for me to buy in.
You can play games on lower resolution, lower refresh monitors, so why do people market higher resolution and particularly higher refresh rate monitors succesfully to gamers? Quality if experience, not just binary “can you minimally do it”, matters, and matters particularly to the segment of the market that has lots of disposable income.
If all the recent LLM stuff is any indication, I can't imagine they'll be very good. I think we've got a few decades to go before that can be anything other than a novelty.
What if they can’t? What if whatever it is that makes the app so compelling automatically rules it out on the Quest 3 for some reason? What if it demands a better input method or higher resolution?
Then I'd be impressed, frankly. I've got the original Quest, and features you'd expect to be broken or missing (eg. hand tracking, multitasking, game streaming, web browsing, sideloading, et. al) all work fine.
It's honestly quite sad that the core line of rhetoric here is a laconic "what if" statement around theoretical apps. The Quest exists and has sold tens of millions of units; the Vision Pro has yet to prove itself. Unless you have a specific example, this can only be interpreted as wishcasting.
The quest sold millions at the beginning of a pandemic when people were trapped at home and needed an escape.
How many people still use it? How many regret the purchase, how many would have bought it without the pandemic?
I see that as Meta’s big opportunity to grab success in VR. And it didn’t happen.
They’re trying to market this like the next thing everyone needs and after multiple tries I just don’t see it. I don’t even see how they get there, this is the same strategy as the Quest, Quest 2, PSVR, PSVR2, etc. Games are great but that pitch just isn’t working at really moving the needle. But that’s all they have.
Games moved 20+ million units. That's 'the needle', unless your goal is to depose the iPhone. And clearly Meta is content to leave it alone, since the Quest even has an iOS companion app. They're complimentary products, not cannibalistic.
On the other hand, I can guarantee that most people who already own an iPhone will regret buying a Vision Pro. It's too expensive and too redundant to matter as a piece of hardware. It's not a market-redefining release like the Quest was, nor is it a proprietary solution to unfixable problems. It's an expensive thing, and for most people the Quest value proposition will align long before the Vision Pro value proposition does. The Hololens already tried this avenue too; merely offering a premium version of mixed reality doesn't work (even when the military is your customer).
It'll be years before the dust settles, but the Quest has gotten undeniably far on it's own. You can rationalize that success however you want, but you'll consistently be confused if you hold it to unproven standards like "spatial computing". For me, the Quest is the first Facebook product I've used where I can understand the vision at a consumer level and from a top-down level.
This really feels like a Quest 2 + 1, which is fine. Same but better specs.
But the site appears to me like it’s positioning it as a Vision Pro competitor when it’s not even in the same league. “We have AR too so it’s the same!” The Vision Pro seems very clearly marketed at a different segment and primary use case to me.
The problem is that if Apple (or a 3rd party on the platform) figures it out I think there’s a good chance it can’t work well on a significantly cheaper headset like the Quest 3.
Then the Quest 3 may be the cheap thing that doesn’t do what people want. Like when you didn’t get an XBox 360 at Christmas because mom/dad got you a $25 TV plug-in Pac-Man game because “it’s the same thing”.
But Meta wants in on the party. And I feel like they’re trying to get their sales before the Vision Pro comes out and immediately becomes the thing that they get very unfavorably compared to (except price). Just like they rushed out a pre-announcement this was coming around the Vision Pro announcement.
Even if Apple face plants or never finds “it”and the Vision Pro isn’t successful I don’t see Meta being either. All these years and it’s still kind of “eh”.
I feel like the "killer app problem" is not unique to the Quest, but the whole VR ecosystem. I'm being cautiously optimistic Apple will finally break through and find an app that will appeal to the masses, and even though the price is not attainable for 95% of the population, that will trickle down and find it's way to the broader market.
As stated before, YMMV, because the killer apps for me have been iRacing and DCS in VR. If you aren't into simulation games, VR isn't really there yet for your genre. FPS's are getting there, kinda. Your brain still has to remind your body to crouch. Beatsaber, tennis, there's some novelty games but if you're asking yourself why would you buy VR, you already answered your own question. You shouldn't. Apple's headset, like the iPhone, will take some time to get apps working and finding their market fit. I do have hopes that Apple's headset brings VR into a more "stable" marketplace. Instead of just the few niche titles here and there that you play with Valve's headset or Oculus/Meta Quest.
Simulation games will ALWAYS benefit from more VR, more hardware, more wheels, more human interface controls.
I guess better AR support could allow some new types of things eventually but that probably won’t take off until you can walk around with in in daily life without it being awkward and uncomfortable
But those already have mass market acceptance. They’re not trying to prove they’re necessary. The iPhone (and other smartphones) literally changed the world. There’s only so much they can innovate after 15 years of record breaking success.
VR doesn’t have that. People weren’t chomping at the bit for the day it was 20% better. Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.
Yes, and I don’t expect this to change much in the foreseeable future, given current technological constraints. But why would you expect a third-generation product to suddenly change this?
As a slightly less wonky comparison, the entire market cap of Delta (the largest airline in the world by market cap) last year was $23B, so Facebook could've just outright purchased Delta and still had over $10B left over.
This is misleading. $36B is for all of Reality Labs, which includes Virtual Reality, but also their Augmented Reality glasses in development, Ray-Ban smart glasses, Horizon, Meta's AI org, the Portal product line (now discontinued), the unreleased smart watch, tons of R&D, etc.
> Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.
Depends on what you mean by relevance, 20 million Quest units have been sold which is more than Wii U lifetime sales (13.5 million), and about equals lifetime Gamecube sales and current Xbox Series S/X sales.
I'm sure it's not meeting expectations given how much they have subsidized them and how much they've spent on the metaverse, but I'm not sure I'd say the Quest itself is irrelevant. There's clearly an appetite for it.
Similar to the vision pro the killer app will eventually be AR.
Its pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.
Not sure if Quest 3 is there yet, but they're iterating towards it.
There's an underlying issue with the whole AR screen thing. They're heavily limited by the resolution of the screen in the goggles itself. These have a bit over half a 4k display per eye so you can only really have display resolutions of some fraction of that determined by what fraction of the area of a given eye display the fake screen takes up. If you blow it up until you're only looking at a portion of the screen you can have a larger one but then you're stuck to moving your head around to see your whole monitor. It's one of the big issues with the whole AR screen idea we'll need pretty beefy hardware to work around.
> It’s pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.
Is it? I don’t feel like it’s better right now (I know some people do, but I’m not convinced they’re the majority). Fixing the issues with VR is not trivial. There’s some deep flaws in the optics that we simply don’t know how to solve yet, and the weight needs to go down by a lot. I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable wearing them more than a couple of hours when they’re entirely closed… but that’s a hard requirement for a good experience. There’s a bunch of hard contradictions in making good VR/AR.
Remember that as VR technology improves, so will monitors.
Couldn’t virtualized monitors be customizable in a declarative way which would enable you to do stuff which would be completely impossible on hardware, though? Imagine i3wm with dynamic virtual hardware, that’s insane, not to mention what kinds of automated monitor setup configuration transitions you could make.
AR guy many years from now can instantly try a new 12-monitor setup while our dumb butts wait for 12 expensive things in the mail and then wire them all up. Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to have 16? More waiting. But nobody buys that many monitors. If it was just a number in a text file, people might try out a 16 monitor setup just for no reason.
The difference in capability could be massive, to the point we’d be truly amazed to jump into the future of AR. Not to mention the freedom of hands free portability, it could be wizard levels of awesomeness!
> Couldn’t virtualized monitors be customizable in a declarative way which would enable you to do stuff which would be completely impossible on hardware, though? Imagine i3wm with dynamic virtual hardware, that’s insane, not to mention what kinds of automated monitor setup configuration transitions you could make.
Ok. Let’s say that’s done. Is it really that much more useful? It has to be good enough to overcome the friction of having to wear a headset and any limitations that come with it like heat, battery life, weight, resolution, etc.
I’m not convinced such a setup would significantly enhance productivity/usability even with hypothetical glasses that do it all, let alone something like a Quest on your head.
I've seen someone here say that they really liked working with a virtual display from wherever, but the resolution of their whole display was 1080p. As someone who regularly uses dual 4k external monitors plus my laptop, I didn't understand how they could be productive. E.g. I may want to keep a browser with docs and a jupyter notebook of a particular investigation on my left, and an IDE of my repo on my right, plus chat with the colleague I'm working with below on my laptop, and all showing a lot of text or perhaps detailed graphs. If 8k monitors cross my affordability threshold before XR headsets with 4k (per eye) cross my affordability threshold, I would likely switch to more physical-screen pixels than to cut down to just 4k pixels strapped to my face.
I agree that's pretty obvious when it gets there. I think we just disagree on how far we are from that point. I think there's essentially no chance that the Quest 3 is good enough, and would put the hypothetical over/under[0] on that happening somewhere around 15-20 years out. The software to take full advantage of it isn't there either, and I don't think it can be meaningfully developed at all until the hardware is a lot closer.
[0]- Since we're on HN, I need to say -- this is a figure of speech. I am not offering or soliciting any actual wagers here.
When Valve releases a stand-alone headset that can play regular PC VR games that will be what changes the VR market. Until then it'll be just, "more of the same." Minor improvements/evolution, etc.
Biggest thing the industry could do in order to move VR/AR forwards would be to adopt SteamOS or a similar "normal" Linux OS and give end users root. That would really be a kick in the ass towards real innovation more than, "slightly better tracking; slightly lighter; now with color pass through!"
You're talking about streaming/remote control of a PC which can involve significant latency and lag spikes (unless you're tethered with a good USB cable). That is by definition not a stand-alone headset. You're just using it as a fancy VR dongle.
This necessitates two things:
* Your PC is powerful enough to run VR games
* Your PC is in an area that's convenient to play (with plenty of room)
Nearly all Quest 2 users are using it stand-alone. They're not hooking it up to a PC. There's a tiny fraction of users that do the PC VR thing with Steam but that's so small as to be negligible in the overall market.
You're actually kind of making my point: Imagine if you didn't need the PC or the tether and could just play those great, easy-to-mod PC VR games directly on the headset. The market for VR would undergo a massive, positive change.
I bought a cheapish wifi router to use for dedicated AirLink and I do SteamVR -> Quest 2. It works great. No latency (but I will admit the very occasional lag spike, it doesn't bother me and I don't miss a note while Beat Saber is going super fast, so it can't be that bad)
Yes, you do need a gaming PC. I got a gaming laptop for like $2400 AUD 3 years ago and it's going great with VR (and Starfield on Ultra, not in VR)
"The very occasional lag spike" completely destroys the ability to play Beat Saber. It'll drive you crazy (as it did me)!
...and I too tried dedicating my Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Wireless Long-Range Access Point (U6-LR-US) just for the headset to see if that would improve things (set it up with a new hotspot name so it'd be dedicated and only told the headset about it). The Wifi AP was on the wall just about 3 feet from my head and I still got the occasional lag spikes and I confirmed that they were due to the Wifi network (not just rendering spikes on my PC).
There's just too much random interference on the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz bands for it to be buttery smooth. I suppose I could turn my house into a Faraday cage and that might improve things :)
So you want powerful enough PC on your head? It's impossible for everyone. Valve doesn't make a chip. Even for Apple, their chip is great but not comparable with powerful GeForce.
The CPU/GPU part of the device does not need to go on your head. Manufacturers make it that way for convenience (and lower part count) but that doesn't necessitate that stand-alone headsets be made like that. Apple, for example has the battery in a separate little dongle that you're supposed to put in your pocket. If they can do that there's no reason they couldn't put the CPU/GPU hardware elsewhere too.
The Steam Deck can play some VR games just fine. It just wasn't made for that purpose so as it stands it's currently sub-optimal. With a few minor changes that very same chip/hardware could make a decent VR headset.
There isn't one and there never will be because people like different things.
Why do people like you constantly say "what's the killer app" ever time something new VR comes out? I've been doing VR since oculus dk1 and VR has been crazy enjoyable from time to time. VR is cheap as hell now. Quest2 was $300 for quite some time even before the Quest3.
If you can't find enjoyment with virtual reality from a $300 stand alone device that's a you problem.
Gaming is a huge market, and if you go in to any free to play game it's absolutely inundated with kids/preteens.
You can also roam using apps that let you do Google street view stuff in VR, create art, watch movies in a theater like experience alone or by yourself, and of course a lot of people use it for porn.
Even usual non-gamers love stuff like Walkabout Mini Golf or Star Wars Pinball.
Ah, I heard about Wander before but when I looked into it I wasn't sure you could really see all the pictures from anywhere on Google Street View. Thanks!
I've watched Netflix movies with no issues. The max session time I've ever done in VR is about 4 hours but that was playing a game and had no issues except the imprint from the headset in my forehead... I definitely know people that can't play at all without feeling sick though so ymmv.
Yeah - Excel and other 'productivity' apps are probably still the killer apps for PCs, especially for businesses. I assume businesses still drive the majority of PC purchases.
Some other factoids:
There are >1B PC gamers (source: random articles on the web). I'm guessing the number of mobile gamers is 2-3B.
There aren't that many active Excel users. Even Google sheets (free) has only a few hundred million users.
Most web browsing is now done on mobile. The transition happened sometime ~2015 for most of the world and something like 2017 for 'developer markets'.
...and remember, the smartest people in the world (including some super-perceptive folks like Jaron Lanier) innovated in this space in the 1990s -- no one back then was able to come up with a "killer app" back then. The hardware has gotten smaller, and we have more pixels.
Are these changes fundamental improvements? Are they enough to unlock some brand-new killer app that nobody could even envision in 30 years ago?
Exactly. I think Apple is doing something fundamentally different by emphasizing AR so much that they built the hardware around it with ultra-high resolution screen and no controllers.
If something can enable that next step, I think that may be it.
But I really question if that will ever pass being a niche product. VR may just never have a popular use besides some gaming. I’m not sure AR in a headset has a big future either. Some specialty applications sure. But common?
I want to walk into my back yard and visualize a new garden, then check on it through the year and get info on what the plants need. Same thing with my house and layout/furniture. Let me stand in a hotel room in a city I'm not familiar with and look around at the town around me, x-ray style.
Quest 2 grew the VR market by ~10x. What was the killer app? Beat Saber is the first install, but not what kept it going for 3 years.
It's the ecosystem. VR Chat for some, social game for others, immersive experiments like Bonelab, and a few studio titles.
I'm glad Meta didn't hype the Quest 3 too much. It's easy for VR expectations to outrun current tech. VR seems to be in the trough of disillusionment where it's moving forward (2023 games are way more playable than 2021 games) but it's a slow burn. "Hey this isn't a step change" is probably right about the Quest 3, but I think also misses the bigger picture. It's a platform and people are still figuring out what to build on it.
Beat Saber is still hella fun. I know some people that just play that (but play it daily) on their Quest. I'm not sure Facebook is particularly happy about that, however, since those people aren't buying apps or making them much money (maybe just the occasional song pack).
I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.
honestly, if the quest weren't tied to an account I would have considered getting one just to play beat saber too. it's fun and you feel like you're getting exercise at the same time.
The song packs come out really slowly too. They've released just one song pack with 11 songs on it this year, the Queen one back in May, as well as added 10 songs to existing song packs. For a total of 21 songs total this year so far.
And 210 official songs since it first came out back in 2018.
Meanwhile the PCVR version has a ridiculous 65,000[1] custom songs made for it at this point.
Not sure why they can't get closer to the Rock Band model, where it released new songs all the time, and had 2,743 songs total (and 84 songs THIS YEAR according to Wikipedia[2]...had no idea there was even an actively supported Rock Band game out there still).
Beat Saber should be making them enough money to allow them to at least do double or triple what they're doing now.
I agree! But the modding...that is all legally dubious, it makes sense that Meta can't just release whatever song they want. I wish it could be attached to spotify or something: you get to listen to the song because you have a subscription, and just play custom beat saber levels with it.
Heck, I would be happy if they just were able to do as well as Konami did with DDR. But Meta seems to be taking a slow growth approach on Beat Saber.
I understand they need to get the rights to it, I'm just surprised they aren't more aggressively doing so. Rock Band has shown it should be doable to negotiate a lot more licenses more quickly than they have.
I understand they like to make a bit of a visual stage experience to each song pack, but not every song pack needs that necessarily, and they should also be able to have multiple teams working on song packs in parallel you'd think, as opposed to one every once in a while, even if they insisted on making new visual themes for each one.
As it is, I'd love to buy more song packs from them, but I'm not that into Queen, or Lizzo, or several others they've done the past couple of years (Electronic Mixtape released in May 2022 was the last one that excited me). And other people have their tastes too. Putting out songs more often insures that people have something new they can support and a reason to get back into it more than once every other year.
The reason I brought up the custom songs, is they could potentially use those for ideas of what players would really like to see in the game, based on custom song usage, as well as possibly once they do get rights to those songs, possibly get permission from the creator to use the beat patterns (or whatever they're called) and save some development time.
I know they hired at least one person from the custom song community before, they could potentially get permission from some others (with some compensation).
I had a discussion with someone who had some real knowledge, and they said Meta can't really make a business with Quest just via Beat Saber. It has some backing, but not a lot of backing, most of their effort on Quest are elsewhere.
I totally get that, I just wish it wasn't so. To me, Quest is the ultimate fitness/active but casual gaming device.
I tried going down that rabbit hole once, and it seemed to break things (although I didn't spend a ton of time on it). I own it on Steam too, so I can play custom songs via that. It's just that's tied to my computer upstairs and I usually prefer to play untethered in my living room.
Most of my custom songs on the Quest I've done have actually been for the game Ragnarock, because it doesn't require sideloading anything, just copying files onto your Quest from your computer. That one is quite fun also.
I also have my computer upstairs and Quest in living room, but found that playing through Virtual Desktop works very well.
It does give extra peace of mind having the games run locally on the device in case of connection issues, and to avoid the occasional need to run upstairs to fix something.
In terms of hardware sales, yeah. But I agree I’m not sure the users stuck around.
It feels almost like a fad. It was in the right place at the right time by being available when people were in lockdown early in the pandemic. And it sold out, which of course increased demand more.
But three years later, things don’t feel that different from 1/1/2020. It feels like that wave came and went without any long term change in things.
I had fun for about an hour using virtual turn tables to mix my music collection, but after awhile it just felt kind of dumb - awkwardly fiddling with knobs in a virtual world with no tactile feedback. It's like it got me halfway towards being productive, but the quality of inputs and feedback are so poor that I quickly reached a ceiling. When it comes to actually getting things done, in my experience VR just gets in the way.
AR on the other hand is something I could easily see becoming useful. One cool use case that immediately comes to mind are instruction manuals. You get a new piece of furniture from Ikea and the AR instructions identify pieces you have laid on the ground and directs you where to put it. Or Legos, right? Real world inputs, and real world results.
Eleven Table Tennis. It's so much fun. The controller is the same weight as a paddle, and it's responsive enough to "feel" right. It's really improved my game and is a surprising amount of exercise.
Yea and everyone is getting in shape from VR too...
These are bogus marketing lines that people puppet back to each other.
I know 20 some kids and not a single one has even the slightest interest in VR.
It is really shocking to me how these kids that can play games all the time have absolutely no interest in VR. It is not uncool or passe, it is just absolutely nothing to them.
It is a niche product that enthusiast oversell because the reality is that most people just don't care.
Not marketing. In reality, tens of thousands of kids are spending ridiculous amounts of time in VR. They will grow up, normalize it, and the next wave will be much much bigger. Sounds like you haven't seen or experienced what I'm talking about, so you have no idea, just your anecdotes.
My kids are on Gorilla Tag and Roblox all day and I complain about it the same way my parents did about the all time I spent in chatrooms and forums back in the day.
It's a slow roll, but I think the seed has been planted.
I've found BigScreen (https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software) to be a fairly compelling killer app case for VR. Besides being able to trick your eyes into thinking they're in a movie theater, the social elements are great. On a weekly cadence I jump into a shared room with 6+ of my friends and we pick a bad movie to watch together as we MST3k it. There's something about positional audio when talking with someone that makes it easier to replicate the experience of hanging out in person versus a video meet.
We've been doing this since the pandemic started and it's the #1 way I stay in touch with a bunch of friends now. It's also ruined real life movie theaters for me since I'm used to being able to talk with friends while watching. We'll actively wait for a movie to hit streaming before "seeing it in the theaters" with each other.
All of this was already possible with the Quest 2, but I'm interested to see how the quest 3 can further make those hangouts feel even closer to the real thing. Dunno if it will be a big enough leap for everyone to jump from the 2 to the 3, but if the visuals comes through sharper, or the sound is better, or the controller is easier to hold for 2 hours - any of those things would be a win.
I haven't got to use VR much, since my apartment is too small for it, but I have played a few rounds of VR racketball.
I have no interest in VR videoconferencing, but shared presence is surprisingly interesting. When you've both got headsets and headphones on, you can't tell the difference from playing in the same room as your friend, even if you're physically hours from one another.
Big screen has the most toxic online community I have ever interacted with. I know there is worse out there but the amount of anti-LGBTQ chat I hear was disturbing for a place that is about watching movies.
Yeah, I wouldn't wade into anything public there - stick to private rooms with your friends. The moment you go into any sort of "I want to meet strangers" in VR setting you're really rolling the dice. I briefly hopped into the "shared lobby" for Big Screen at one point and encountered probably 3 or 4 negative internet stereotypes immediate (14 year old yelling obscenities, someone trying to hump my face, and someone just blasting noise so loud through their mic it was painful). Very much something you would only want to experience with trusted parties.
The killer app is a fun way to do fitness either alone or socially without having to go to the gym and without getting bored since the workouts are dynamic and unreal ie dodging bullets and fighting monsters
If you’re not active, and don’t want to be active; you’re not going to like it beyond watching movies in a virtual movie theater
They are releasing something like 50 new games, though they aren't making them exclusive, which follows what consoles seem to do now too.
The killer app for me has been being able to hop on to a VR game with my friends and somewhat feel like we're in the same room. It's too hard to get together frequently, and even setting up a VR 'date' is hard, but it's something.
What's the desktops killer app? What's mobile's killer app?
Computing to me is a general purpose system, which grows holistically. This kind of search for certainty, trying to annoint some specific app as the thing that a form factor is all for, is actively harmful to understanding the role of compute & how it fits into augments & enriches so many diverse different things we do.
Creating comfortable computing spaces is never going to be a fast burn. It's taken decades for the desktop to mature. This is a harder challenge, enmeshing with reality rather than being so tightly a self contained system.
I have a lot of questions & uncertainty about how computing rolls out a presence beyond the screen & into the world. It's unknown to me and maybe it flat up fails & never works. But I'd like some respect & acceptance that this is an open ended thing, not going to be so conveniently compact & singular as this ask tries to reduce it to. Searching so hard for certainty is dangerous, rejects the pioneering & open endedness & intergativeness that most rich complex & capable long lasting systems endure through. Let's not be so rash in demanding all our answers ahead of time.
We know that. It’s happened. Wordstar, VisiCalc, Photoshop, PageMaker or Quark Xpress, AutoCAD, Netscape Navigator, AOL. They, and their descendants, moved billions of units.
> What’s the mobile’s killer app?
Chat. Maps. The internet. Uber. Dating. Use as a camera. Email. Shopping. Again, billions of units.
No one has figured out a non-niche application for VR. Normal people don’t care. It’s not even on their radar.
That’s my point. More of the same isn’t going to change that. They either need the app to make it break through or some improvement that allows that app. This is a spec bump. Nice to those already interested, unlikely to attract new people.
Apple is trying something. They’re throwing hardware at it, especially in terms of a very very high resolution screen. They think that will make the difference, even given the price.
We’ll find out. But at least they’re trying something different. Because I don’t see why this would jump into the mainstream.
You have listed a dozen many-billion dollar sectors that have had massive impact on the world, stemming from computing. But it took decades for mass market productization to emerge in most of these areas.
Very very few were so clearly poised to take over. It's easy to point out established computing's wins. But you are demanding certainty & proof, & not granting a nascent form factor any time to find it's footing, to establish it's value.
Quest 3 seems to be .massively expanding the fidelity of the Quest 2's pass-through mode. You talk about Apple trying something, and I think they are, but Meta has been driving similar capabilities, if not harnessing them to such a sensible multi-tasking OS core.
VR suffers from inherent issue that its in a weird space of half immersion - the visuals are there but the motion feedback is not. The closest you can get is a VR motion racing rig, but those are prohibitively expensive. Even without the motion rig, generally 3 screens are often preferred due to better resolution and not having to wear a bulky device.
Besides some fun exercise games and social stuff like VR chat which is fun for a minority of people, once the novelty of 3d wears away, you are left with something that isn't as relaxing as sitting down and playing a regular game.
I think it's interesting to think about it as a hardware evolution question. If you look at a timeline of what it took to get to the modern smartphone, you could (arguably) say:
Each one of those evolutionary steps brought in a larger user base and grew the feature set of the prior generations hardware. The VR/AR/XR market comes with its own set of challenges so imagining where it maps onto that timeline is hard, but I would guess we are still more in the Handspring - WinCE era of these devices.
Wearable display systems have a solid and growing user base but the hardware is still a ways off from something that will have mass adoption. The roadblock is very much in the hardware, not the software IMO.
Pass-through VR porn has gotten really big in the past 6 months, and I'll just say I know that a LOT of people are waiting for the quest-3 entirely for that.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 464 ms ] threadI don’t know how anyone finds these experience immersive.
https://www.google.com/search?q=quest+2+horizontal+angle
Quest 2 was 90h/90v, Quest 3 is 110h/96v
In 2014 when I was using my Note 4 + Gear VR, I really thought in 5 years (2019) things would be incredibly advanced in VR.
Here we are in 2023 and obviously these headsets are way better than we had before, but nothing truly mind-blowing.
Foveated rendering + high immersive POV + high resolution.
I don't need the mobile processor to be twice as powerful, the difference in rendering is still crap compared to a full PC.
I understand there are some actual limits of physics in play here when it comes to FOV but I'm excited for it becomes a solved problem.
If you sort by release date, the Vive XR (2023) beats it on FOV+Rez+Hz, and weights 3x as less.
If you sort by FOV, the HTC Vive (2016) easily wins on FOV+Rez+Hz
But comparing the Vive XR to the specs in the announcement, the Quest 3 has a higher resolution, same FOV, same refresh rate (experimental sorry for higher refresh rate) at half the price but double the weight.
The Vive XR Elite's lower claimed weight of 270 grams is without the battery. With battery it weighs 625g, which is heavier than the Quest 1 (571g), Quest 2 (503g), or Quest 3 (515g).
I don't need/want all the mixed reality and metaverse BS. I just want a good FoV and resolution. They really invest in the wrong areas, imo.
"2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough. Delivers full-color, high-fidelity views of your surroundings while you see virtual objects appear in your physical space. Accurate depth projection and room mapping gives you freedom to move throughout your space and interact with virtual characters or objects in the room around you."
"2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2 for next-level clarity and lifelike graphics. 4K+ Infinite Display with 25PPD and 1218 PPI brings the best resolution across the entire Quest line of devices."
"2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough."
"Integrated stereo speakers with 3D spatial audio places you in your space with 40% louder audio range, bass range and optimal L/R matching capabilities. "
"8GB. 33% memory compared with Meta Quest 2"
"Pancake optics create a 40% slimmer optic profile* for more comfortable wear. As compared to Quest 2 excluding the facial interface. "
"2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2"
"Pancake lens provides a slimmer optic profile without compromising the depth of your visual immersion. Increased sharpness by 25% in center FOV (~70% sharper in periphery), with significantly less stray or scattered light artifacts. "
- Display Resolution: 2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2 for next-level clarity and lifelike graphics. 4K+ Infinite Display with 25PPD and 1218 PPI brings the best resolution across the entire Quest line of devices.
- Power: Advanced hardware stack and the first headset with the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, delivering double the GPU processing power for faster load times and more seamless gameplay compared to Meta Quest 2. This brings enough power to support heavy applications like fast-action gaming, seamless full-color, high-resolution passthrough, and so much more.
- Mixed Reality: 2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough. Delivers full-color, high-fidelity views of your surroundings while you see virtual objects appear in your physical space. Accurate depth projection and room mapping gives you freedom to move throughout your space and interact with virtual characters or objects in the room around you.
- Audio: Integrated stereo speakers with 3D spatial audio places you in your space with 40% louder audio range, bass range and optimal L/R matching capabilities.
- DRAM: 8GB. 33% memory compared with Meta Quest 2, giving you more support to play your favorite apps with optimal performance.
- Headset Weight: 515 grams. Pancake optics create a 40% slimmer optic profile* for more comfortable wear.
- Optics: Pancake lens provides a slimmer optic profile* without compromising the depth of your visual immersion. Increased sharpness by 25% in center FOV (~70% sharper in periphery), with significantly less stray or scattered light artifacts.
Folks, it's Meta, be easy on them. It's not like they have experience building websites...
There's two cookie notices options in there.
> Social: 2.2 hours of usage on average
> Productivity: 1.5 hours minutes [sic] of usage on average
How is this accurate? What kind of "Productivity" tasks are people doing inside a Quest if it uses more power/battery than gaming? Also, "Social" drawing more power than "Gaming" too? Something seems weird.
Ditto for Instagram.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOp7QrBs0c
You will need internet to download games, but it can operate in offline mode as well if the game supports it.
You do need an account, but it can be a Meta account not connected to your Facebook if your choose.
They are not hackable in any way and there are no custom firmwares. In fact, the software side of these devices is incredibly complex (tracking, lens correction, very low latency rendering and control pipelines) and replicating the work that FB has done would be an effort for a large team of VR engineers. If you dig into some of the details of how they work you will realize they are a technological marvel to rival the iPhone.
There is a homebrew scene however, on sidequest.
Maybe, but Halflife Alyx is almost worth the cost of entry on its own
Don't know about Quest 3, but probably the same.
There are some additional standalone body trackers, like SlimeVR, Sony mocopi, or HaritoraX, where you strap the hardware widgets on and they communicate inertial measurements with each other and your device without needing any base stations. But, since there's no OS-level support for them on Quest, support is app-by-app and usually requires a second device as a go-between (like a phone running the mocopi app).
PCVR makes it easy to use a ton of trackers and they're much more precise, but they require base stations (IR cameras on mounts you set up around your play space) since each one is basically a little IR transmitter with its position computed by the PC. If you see any "full body trolling" videos on Youtube it's generally people using these, since you can do strange things with them (handstands, pogo stick bouncing, multiple people sharing the same physical space, other Youtube creator nonsense) without the tracking getting confused or desynced.
Seems positive overall. Pancake lenses like in Quest Pro. Chipset fast enough to get dynamic shadows in games.
Send an email to NVIDIA's GeForce Now bizdev guy.
Develop a cheap-o streaming device and put all the juice in the display.
Congratulations, I just made you billions of dollars. Donate my cut to PETA.
streaming + mouse & keyboard for shooters still feels like shit, even when I tried it on google stadia over google fiber.
honestly i kind of hope this game streaming fad never really takes off, because so far it just seems to make games worse. i'm convinced publishers want it as a means to further erode user ownership of the software they buy. "oh, sorry, the single player game you bought four years ago on a streaming platform is no longer available due to rights issues. would you like to buy the sequel for $70?"
> game streaming fad never really takes off
I am in the opposite camp. I want game developers to be freed from local hardware constraints, and indy developers to have access to the same graphical fidelities as AAA. Real, meaningful innovation in gaming is a possibility.
The bottleneck here isn't performance, it's the cost of producing high quality assets on a AAA scale. Streaming won't solve this.
As for "local hardware constraints", I've yet to see any streaming games that were not possible on local hardware. Personally, I'd rather upgrade my GPU or video game console every 5 years than lose all the very tangible benefits that come with running games on my own hardware (ownership, mods, preservation, etc.)
I will say that I think services like GeForce Now are the best use case for the technology. Since it is essentially a rentable high end gaming PC in the cloud, the user brings their own games. If GeForce now shuts down, you still have the option of downloading all the games you bought for on it to a PC. Nvidia is smart to position this as an additive experience, rather than a replacement like Stadia was.
For a mainstream VR headset, you really need low latency. It's almost as bad as hard real-time machines because your users will get a mean headache and literally start to vomit if the latency between moving their head and the picture updating becomes too high. Rumor has it that reducing the screen latency by re-projecting a previously rendered frame was one of the big contributions that John Carmack developed to make Oculus feasible at all. So that means you now either need to stream ultra high resolution panoramas, which is too much data for even current 8k H265 codes to handle, or you need a streaming service with such an extremely low latency that just due to speed of light it basically has to be inside your city. Or well, you just accept that people will feel sick from the latency and reduce your target market to the 1% that can tolerate a 10ms delay on their vision.
I played HL Alyx for a few hours by streaming from PlutoSphere. It worked poorly due to frame drops and lag spikes.
There were articles where people were writing how they are programming for many hours in their quest2. I cannot understand how this is possible with this bad text
I don't see myself coding it quest, it is just too blurry.
Although this could be me and my personal preferences, as I also cannot program on something like macbook air 13", and there are people who can easily do it.
I used dual 2k 27" more than 10 years ago, now the main screen that I look at is 4k 32" and there are 2 2k 27" side by side. If linux didn't suck with mixed dpis and there were 240Hz IPS 27" (I use one of them for gaming), I'd already start considering 4k 27".
---
Having said all of that, I certainly believe that there will be time when the FOV and resolution will be enough to replace monitors.
Like now, I have 3 monitors because I don't want to dance with workspaces etc. I still can focus only on one at one time.
Intelligent zoom and activation of windows/workspaces, improved to one that Apple shown in visionpro presentation, will be killer feature, as I objectively will be able to have multiple 4k screens without any table space used by monitors.
But also I can't handle the poor resolution of most ultra-wide monitors either.
I’ll be curious how these two devices stack up to each other and exactly how different the user experiences end up being. The MR experience seems like it may be close. The VR gaming experience seems more emphasized on the Quest, but hand tracking has come a long way so I wouldn’t rule out the Vision Pro here either.
Overall I’m doubtful either device will hit mass market appeal.
Both of which are complete dealbreakers.
AR/VR/Spatial is defined completely by immersion and lack-of-nausea, where less resolution and the inclusion of controllers demolish.
You're right, both probably won't reach mass-market appeal, but the two certainly aren't comparable in any metric other than reach.
Not for me. I had loads of fun gaming on the Quest 2 in the pandemic lockdowns, and the controllers really help with gaming by providing accurate controls for weapons' triggers and haptics to feel weapons firing and when the tension in the bow before you fire arrow. Good luck feeling all that via waving your empty hands in the air.
I feel like HN simply loves to hate certain things without understanding them or using them, like the Quest while never actually using it for games and expecting it to be an early Apple Vision PRO. It's not, it was designed to be a games console, and for that it works quite well.
Given the direction digital markets are headed (and the open precedent of VR), I think Meta is right to bet on that '80%'. It's much easier to pitch a console like the Quest than an overly-ambitious lockdown-helmet that costs as much as 2 used cars. Until Apple announces a better Vision lineup, it's going to be a bloodbath in terms of unit shipments.
Snapdragon vs M2 Vision Pro's resolution seems about 80% higher than the quest 3. To me, this is the most important factor to me in making augmented reality work.
There's a reason why Apple put a screen with eyes and the associated cameras inside, it's to make it look less stupid. That's really important for mass adoption.
The difference in PPD is pretty significant when it comes to both actual mixed reality use around other people (assuming people can get over the dork factor in general) and anything at all related to virtual screens (whether productivity or just 'personal theater' usage).
Eye tracking will probably make it to the Quest 4, especially if Apple proves it out as a control input. Big If there IMHO.
The Quest 2 CPU was too weak, and while this one will be better the Apple chips are still way out in front there.
The proportion of people in tech I know with a Quest 2 they never use is amazing. We all want VR to work but fundamentally headsets are a bad idea.
It also helps dramatically if the captured HDR surroundings can be fed on to an envmap for use in the 3D rendering phase.
https://www.visor.com/
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=quest+2&_sacat=0&LH_Ite...
I'm actually surprised -- I thought it would plummet once the 3 came out. Maybe it still will over the next few weeks if people with 2's upgrade to 3's and the marketplace gets flooded with 2's.
> Just $649.99 plus all your personal data! Strap it on your eyeballs and feed the machine, the algorithm hungers!
My favorite part of Hacker News is how people rattle their adtech surveillance pans, but always hide away whenever someone mentions the NSA or PRISM. You guys remember last week when Canada used FIVE-EYES to grab telecom data off an unsuspecting, international citizen using commodity hardware?
Coming soon: the same duopoly of shit, but now on VR. As they say, don't throw stones from glass headsets.
I can do hours wearing a hockey helmet, but these things are uncomfortable after a little while, and I think it's because it's just a more balanced thing that my neck muscles aren't constantly counteracting.
Not to suggest that that's the only thing that makes these a non-start for me, but I feel like that's one of the core issues.
At this point the optics seem… I dunno, pretty well worked out? So, I’d rather have Sennheiser VR than Facebook. Sennheiser knows how to balance a heavy thing on my head for hours.
So I remember it, anyway - it's been over a year since I bothered with the Quest, so who knows how much I'm glossing over in memory.
These companies want a mass market product, not a niche product that only tech enthusiasts can appreciate.
Looking cool is very low on the priority list.
https://www.bigscreenvr.com/
Kind of fun to have around very occasionally, but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy." Would never pay good money for one.
(and this is from a household where the Steam Deck is absolutely an essential toy.)*
*edit, come to think of it -- said aunt has logged more hours on my Steam Deck even though we don't live together, thanks to the Jackbox series. I feel like there's a lot of good anecdata here :)
A thing that makes me think the latter might be the is how there's no real Google Earth for the Quest, which strikes me as madness?
(also, Aircar and having to jump through hoops to find Tiltbrush/Openbrush?)
It's kind of interesting how garbage most the sideloaded apps are? I'm not expecting amazing, but, like even your average popular Roblox game has more polish.
I saw a reviewer mention that VR is like "having your favorite amusement park ride at home": it's awesome, but at the same time you're not going to ride a roller coaster for 3 hours everyday.
VR can be loads of fun, but I still find it exhausting, and very focus demanding. It will, for me, always remain a nice plus, but never as essential as something I can easily pause and put down.
I LOVE "Pistol Whip," but I'm in my 40s. I literally can only do about 2 or 3 rounds of that in one day :)
I think it may be the case that the general public will find putting on VR goggles and losing their visual connection to the physical world around them to be weird and alienating in a way that fundamentally cannot be overcome by technical improvements.
Maybe VR goggles are OK for small doses and the novelty, but perhaps this is just too jarring and strange to ever become the primary way people interact with games (never mind the much touted non-gaming applications).
I dunno, I'm still waiting for a good recreation of Haunted Mansion in VR.
This seems like a semi common sentiment. To those who used both a Valve Index and a Quest 1 or 2, is this also true for the Index?
Beatsaber and some other games can be a lot of fun, but they’re not new. What new experience are ready for this?
I get the quality is better, and that’s not nothing.
But other than that this largely seems like more of the same. VR still doesn’t seem to have advanced much in software to me. And Meta keeps pushing virtual meetings and such but that’s not my cup of tea.
I owned a Quest 2 and had some fun with it. I’ve owned previous headsets too. But I just don’t see anything that would makes me say “ooh I need that”.
This feels very “PC” to me. By which I mean they’re selling it because they can sell new hardware. The Pentium 9 is out! Which is fine.
But when Sony/Nintendo/MS want to sell a new console they put new and fancier games. They give you a specific reason to upgrade besides better specs. So you can play Horizon 12: We’re On The Moon Now. Or Bob’s Crazy Adventure. Whatever.
All this time and it still seems like the market is 95% games, and those aren’t advancing much beyond visuals. So I don’t feel like I’m really missing anything.
Both of those are available on other platforms. They don’t need the Quest 3.
Why not just buy an Xbox?
What makes me need a Quest 3?
It sounds like you've convinced yourself you don't need the quest, so just don't worry about it?
Which makes sense, what you remember LLMs are magic boxes that tell you what they think you want to hear.
I feel like the answer to that question will come next year, when Apple's Vision Pro is out.
It's honestly quite sad that the core line of rhetoric here is a laconic "what if" statement around theoretical apps. The Quest exists and has sold tens of millions of units; the Vision Pro has yet to prove itself. Unless you have a specific example, this can only be interpreted as wishcasting.
How many people still use it? How many regret the purchase, how many would have bought it without the pandemic?
I see that as Meta’s big opportunity to grab success in VR. And it didn’t happen.
They’re trying to market this like the next thing everyone needs and after multiple tries I just don’t see it. I don’t even see how they get there, this is the same strategy as the Quest, Quest 2, PSVR, PSVR2, etc. Games are great but that pitch just isn’t working at really moving the needle. But that’s all they have.
On the other hand, I can guarantee that most people who already own an iPhone will regret buying a Vision Pro. It's too expensive and too redundant to matter as a piece of hardware. It's not a market-redefining release like the Quest was, nor is it a proprietary solution to unfixable problems. It's an expensive thing, and for most people the Quest value proposition will align long before the Vision Pro value proposition does. The Hololens already tried this avenue too; merely offering a premium version of mixed reality doesn't work (even when the military is your customer).
It'll be years before the dust settles, but the Quest has gotten undeniably far on it's own. You can rationalize that success however you want, but you'll consistently be confused if you hold it to unproven standards like "spatial computing". For me, the Quest is the first Facebook product I've used where I can understand the vision at a consumer level and from a top-down level.
This really feels like a Quest 2 + 1, which is fine. Same but better specs.
But the site appears to me like it’s positioning it as a Vision Pro competitor when it’s not even in the same league. “We have AR too so it’s the same!” The Vision Pro seems very clearly marketed at a different segment and primary use case to me.
The problem is that if Apple (or a 3rd party on the platform) figures it out I think there’s a good chance it can’t work well on a significantly cheaper headset like the Quest 3.
Then the Quest 3 may be the cheap thing that doesn’t do what people want. Like when you didn’t get an XBox 360 at Christmas because mom/dad got you a $25 TV plug-in Pac-Man game because “it’s the same thing”.
But Meta wants in on the party. And I feel like they’re trying to get their sales before the Vision Pro comes out and immediately becomes the thing that they get very unfavorably compared to (except price). Just like they rushed out a pre-announcement this was coming around the Vision Pro announcement.
Even if Apple face plants or never finds “it”and the Vision Pro isn’t successful I don’t see Meta being either. All these years and it’s still kind of “eh”.
Apple isn’t target VR (though it works), they’re trying something different. So I’m curious if it succeeds.
Simulation games will ALWAYS benefit from more VR, more hardware, more wheels, more human interface controls.
I feel like this is what I really want to know. "I built a custom car cockpit, and use it, and it's awesome"
I mean, the same is happening for smartphones and tablets. Yes, it won’t dramatically grow the market.
VR doesn’t have that. People weren’t chomping at the bit for the day it was 20% better. Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.
Meta alone has spent $36B on VR. To put this in perspective, iPhone development cost $3.6B. It’s the fastest, largest single investment into a new technology. https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...
For the cost of the object, you could set up a university program to figure out Anglo cost disease, then build ~10 subway lines at Japanese costs.
Asking why our society funds things the way they do is a very reasonable and responsible question
(And possibly gotten a better outcome, seeing as Delta has a helluva lot more experience than Facebook with ergonomics and normal people)
Depends on what you mean by relevance, 20 million Quest units have been sold which is more than Wii U lifetime sales (13.5 million), and about equals lifetime Gamecube sales and current Xbox Series S/X sales.
I'm sure it's not meeting expectations given how much they have subsidized them and how much they've spent on the metaverse, but I'm not sure I'd say the Quest itself is irrelevant. There's clearly an appetite for it.
Its pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.
Not sure if Quest 3 is there yet, but they're iterating towards it.
Is it? I don’t feel like it’s better right now (I know some people do, but I’m not convinced they’re the majority). Fixing the issues with VR is not trivial. There’s some deep flaws in the optics that we simply don’t know how to solve yet, and the weight needs to go down by a lot. I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable wearing them more than a couple of hours when they’re entirely closed… but that’s a hard requirement for a good experience. There’s a bunch of hard contradictions in making good VR/AR.
Remember that as VR technology improves, so will monitors.
AR guy many years from now can instantly try a new 12-monitor setup while our dumb butts wait for 12 expensive things in the mail and then wire them all up. Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to have 16? More waiting. But nobody buys that many monitors. If it was just a number in a text file, people might try out a 16 monitor setup just for no reason.
The difference in capability could be massive, to the point we’d be truly amazed to jump into the future of AR. Not to mention the freedom of hands free portability, it could be wizard levels of awesomeness!
Ok. Let’s say that’s done. Is it really that much more useful? It has to be good enough to overcome the friction of having to wear a headset and any limitations that come with it like heat, battery life, weight, resolution, etc.
I’m not convinced such a setup would significantly enhance productivity/usability even with hypothetical glasses that do it all, let alone something like a Quest on your head.
I've seen someone here say that they really liked working with a virtual display from wherever, but the resolution of their whole display was 1080p. As someone who regularly uses dual 4k external monitors plus my laptop, I didn't understand how they could be productive. E.g. I may want to keep a browser with docs and a jupyter notebook of a particular investigation on my left, and an IDE of my repo on my right, plus chat with the colleague I'm working with below on my laptop, and all showing a lot of text or perhaps detailed graphs. If 8k monitors cross my affordability threshold before XR headsets with 4k (per eye) cross my affordability threshold, I would likely switch to more physical-screen pixels than to cut down to just 4k pixels strapped to my face.
[0]- Since we're on HN, I need to say -- this is a figure of speech. I am not offering or soliciting any actual wagers here.
Biggest thing the industry could do in order to move VR/AR forwards would be to adopt SteamOS or a similar "normal" Linux OS and give end users root. That would really be a kick in the ass towards real innovation more than, "slightly better tracking; slightly lighter; now with color pass through!"
This necessitates two things:
Nearly all Quest 2 users are using it stand-alone. They're not hooking it up to a PC. There's a tiny fraction of users that do the PC VR thing with Steam but that's so small as to be negligible in the overall market.You're actually kind of making my point: Imagine if you didn't need the PC or the tether and could just play those great, easy-to-mod PC VR games directly on the headset. The market for VR would undergo a massive, positive change.
I'd also like to point out that tethering limits the fun you can have! Example: https://replay.beatleader.xyz/?scoreId=7668607
You can't play Beat Saber like that if you're tethered.
Yes, you do need a gaming PC. I got a gaming laptop for like $2400 AUD 3 years ago and it's going great with VR (and Starfield on Ultra, not in VR)
...and I too tried dedicating my Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Wireless Long-Range Access Point (U6-LR-US) just for the headset to see if that would improve things (set it up with a new hotspot name so it'd be dedicated and only told the headset about it). The Wifi AP was on the wall just about 3 feet from my head and I still got the occasional lag spikes and I confirmed that they were due to the Wifi network (not just rendering spikes on my PC).
There's just too much random interference on the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz bands for it to be buttery smooth. I suppose I could turn my house into a Faraday cage and that might improve things :)
So you want powerful enough PC on your head? It's impossible for everyone. Valve doesn't make a chip. Even for Apple, their chip is great but not comparable with powerful GeForce.
The Steam Deck can play some VR games just fine. It just wasn't made for that purpose so as it stands it's currently sub-optimal. With a few minor changes that very same chip/hardware could make a decent VR headset.
I like the idea but the vast majority of people buying smartphones don't have root and it rarely bothers them.
There isn't one and there never will be because people like different things.
Why do people like you constantly say "what's the killer app" ever time something new VR comes out? I've been doing VR since oculus dk1 and VR has been crazy enjoyable from time to time. VR is cheap as hell now. Quest2 was $300 for quite some time even before the Quest3.
If you can't find enjoyment with virtual reality from a $300 stand alone device that's a you problem.
It’s asking for the use case. If there isn’t a use case outside gaming, there is no value on the table for non-gamers.
You can also roam using apps that let you do Google street view stuff in VR, create art, watch movies in a theater like experience alone or by yourself, and of course a lot of people use it for porn.
Even usual non-gamers love stuff like Walkabout Mini Golf or Star Wars Pinball.
What portion of that market is VR?
That’s the issue I see. Gaming may be the best thing in VR, but VR hasn’t felt necessary to the average gamer at all. It’s still a small niche.
So what? Go play and enjoy.
>VR hasn’t felt necessary to the average gamer
Not even sure what that means. You come across as someone who likes to complain and never actually enjoy something. Good luck with that.
Fair point.
Later, it was the web browser.
Nowadays, it's mostly games.
Some other factoids:
There are >1B PC gamers (source: random articles on the web). I'm guessing the number of mobile gamers is 2-3B.
There aren't that many active Excel users. Even Google sheets (free) has only a few hundred million users.
Most web browsing is now done on mobile. The transition happened sometime ~2015 for most of the world and something like 2017 for 'developer markets'.
Over and over as computers got more powerful new killer apps appeared that changed the way people worked and the world did its business.
VR doesn’t appear to have anything like that. Just a small niche of the gaming market.
Are these changes fundamental improvements? Are they enough to unlock some brand-new killer app that nobody could even envision in 30 years ago?
I remain skeptical...
If something can enable that next step, I think that may be it.
But I really question if that will ever pass being a niche product. VR may just never have a popular use besides some gaming. I’m not sure AR in a headset has a big future either. Some specialty applications sure. But common?
Let's put our imaginations together. What use case for VR do we all wish we could see/can we think of that we don't see yet?
Aren't the VR headsets wired?
It's the ecosystem. VR Chat for some, social game for others, immersive experiments like Bonelab, and a few studio titles.
I'm glad Meta didn't hype the Quest 3 too much. It's easy for VR expectations to outrun current tech. VR seems to be in the trough of disillusionment where it's moving forward (2023 games are way more playable than 2021 games) but it's a slow burn. "Hey this isn't a step change" is probably right about the Quest 3, but I think also misses the bigger picture. It's a platform and people are still figuring out what to build on it.
I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.
I only connected with my facebook account a few months ago, I guess was grandfathered in under the previous system until they nagged me to do it.
And 210 official songs since it first came out back in 2018.
Meanwhile the PCVR version has a ridiculous 65,000[1] custom songs made for it at this point.
Not sure why they can't get closer to the Rock Band model, where it released new songs all the time, and had 2,743 songs total (and 84 songs THIS YEAR according to Wikipedia[2]...had no idea there was even an actively supported Rock Band game out there still).
Beat Saber should be making them enough money to allow them to at least do double or triple what they're doing now.
[1]: https://bsaber.com/ultimate-guide-to-beat-saber-custom-songs...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_downloadable_songs_for...
Heck, I would be happy if they just were able to do as well as Konami did with DDR. But Meta seems to be taking a slow growth approach on Beat Saber.
I understand they like to make a bit of a visual stage experience to each song pack, but not every song pack needs that necessarily, and they should also be able to have multiple teams working on song packs in parallel you'd think, as opposed to one every once in a while, even if they insisted on making new visual themes for each one.
As it is, I'd love to buy more song packs from them, but I'm not that into Queen, or Lizzo, or several others they've done the past couple of years (Electronic Mixtape released in May 2022 was the last one that excited me). And other people have their tastes too. Putting out songs more often insures that people have something new they can support and a reason to get back into it more than once every other year.
The reason I brought up the custom songs, is they could potentially use those for ideas of what players would really like to see in the game, based on custom song usage, as well as possibly once they do get rights to those songs, possibly get permission from the creator to use the beat patterns (or whatever they're called) and save some development time.
I know they hired at least one person from the custom song community before, they could potentially get permission from some others (with some compensation).
I totally get that, I just wish it wasn't so. To me, Quest is the ultimate fitness/active but casual gaming device.
Most of my custom songs on the Quest I've done have actually been for the game Ragnarock, because it doesn't require sideloading anything, just copying files onto your Quest from your computer. That one is quite fun also.
It does give extra peace of mind having the games run locally on the device in case of connection issues, and to avoid the occasional need to run upstairs to fix something.
Not sure about that[1][2]...
1: JP: https://trends.google.co.jp/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...
2: KR: https://trends.google.co.jp/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...
Did it really? So far I don't see any uptick in anything VR related in terms of average daily use.
I read somewhere that most people get VR, try it for a week, then get bored of it.
It feels almost like a fad. It was in the right place at the right time by being available when people were in lockdown early in the pandemic. And it sold out, which of course increased demand more.
But three years later, things don’t feel that different from 1/1/2020. It feels like that wave came and went without any long term change in things.
AR on the other hand is something I could easily see becoming useful. One cool use case that immediately comes to mind are instruction manuals. You get a new piece of furniture from Ikea and the AR instructions identify pieces you have laid on the ground and directs you where to put it. Or Legos, right? Real world inputs, and real world results.
These are bogus marketing lines that people puppet back to each other.
I know 20 some kids and not a single one has even the slightest interest in VR.
It is really shocking to me how these kids that can play games all the time have absolutely no interest in VR. It is not uncool or passe, it is just absolutely nothing to them.
It is a niche product that enthusiast oversell because the reality is that most people just don't care.
It's a slow roll, but I think the seed has been planted.
We've been doing this since the pandemic started and it's the #1 way I stay in touch with a bunch of friends now. It's also ruined real life movie theaters for me since I'm used to being able to talk with friends while watching. We'll actively wait for a movie to hit streaming before "seeing it in the theaters" with each other.
All of this was already possible with the Quest 2, but I'm interested to see how the quest 3 can further make those hangouts feel even closer to the real thing. Dunno if it will be a big enough leap for everyone to jump from the 2 to the 3, but if the visuals comes through sharper, or the sound is better, or the controller is easier to hold for 2 hours - any of those things would be a win.
I have no interest in VR videoconferencing, but shared presence is surprisingly interesting. When you've both got headsets and headphones on, you can't tell the difference from playing in the same room as your friend, even if you're physically hours from one another.
If you’re not active, and don’t want to be active; you’re not going to like it beyond watching movies in a virtual movie theater
Sim racing is amazing in VR - I got instantly faster, able to judge distances better, and the immersion is top notch.
They are releasing something like 50 new games, though they aren't making them exclusive, which follows what consoles seem to do now too.
The killer app for me has been being able to hop on to a VR game with my friends and somewhat feel like we're in the same room. It's too hard to get together frequently, and even setting up a VR 'date' is hard, but it's something.
VR is not in that position. It needs to prove its utility if it ever wants to escape being a niche.
What's the desktops killer app? What's mobile's killer app?
Computing to me is a general purpose system, which grows holistically. This kind of search for certainty, trying to annoint some specific app as the thing that a form factor is all for, is actively harmful to understanding the role of compute & how it fits into augments & enriches so many diverse different things we do.
Creating comfortable computing spaces is never going to be a fast burn. It's taken decades for the desktop to mature. This is a harder challenge, enmeshing with reality rather than being so tightly a self contained system.
I have a lot of questions & uncertainty about how computing rolls out a presence beyond the screen & into the world. It's unknown to me and maybe it flat up fails & never works. But I'd like some respect & acceptance that this is an open ended thing, not going to be so conveniently compact & singular as this ask tries to reduce it to. Searching so hard for certainty is dangerous, rejects the pioneering & open endedness & intergativeness that most rich complex & capable long lasting systems endure through. Let's not be so rash in demanding all our answers ahead of time.
We know that. It’s happened. Wordstar, VisiCalc, Photoshop, PageMaker or Quark Xpress, AutoCAD, Netscape Navigator, AOL. They, and their descendants, moved billions of units.
> What’s the mobile’s killer app?
Chat. Maps. The internet. Uber. Dating. Use as a camera. Email. Shopping. Again, billions of units.
No one has figured out a non-niche application for VR. Normal people don’t care. It’s not even on their radar.
That’s my point. More of the same isn’t going to change that. They either need the app to make it break through or some improvement that allows that app. This is a spec bump. Nice to those already interested, unlikely to attract new people.
Apple is trying something. They’re throwing hardware at it, especially in terms of a very very high resolution screen. They think that will make the difference, even given the price.
We’ll find out. But at least they’re trying something different. Because I don’t see why this would jump into the mainstream.
You have listed a dozen many-billion dollar sectors that have had massive impact on the world, stemming from computing. But it took decades for mass market productization to emerge in most of these areas.
Very very few were so clearly poised to take over. It's easy to point out established computing's wins. But you are demanding certainty & proof, & not granting a nascent form factor any time to find it's footing, to establish it's value.
Quest 3 seems to be .massively expanding the fidelity of the Quest 2's pass-through mode. You talk about Apple trying something, and I think they are, but Meta has been driving similar capabilities, if not harnessing them to such a sensible multi-tasking OS core.
Besides some fun exercise games and social stuff like VR chat which is fun for a minority of people, once the novelty of 3d wears away, you are left with something that isn't as relaxing as sitting down and playing a regular game.
PalmPilot -> Handspring -> WindowsCE -> Blackberry -> iPhone -> Android -> Modern Smartphone
Each one of those evolutionary steps brought in a larger user base and grew the feature set of the prior generations hardware. The VR/AR/XR market comes with its own set of challenges so imagining where it maps onto that timeline is hard, but I would guess we are still more in the Handspring - WinCE era of these devices.
Wearable display systems have a solid and growing user base but the hardware is still a ways off from something that will have mass adoption. The roadblock is very much in the hardware, not the software IMO.
This hardware has the capacity to do almost everything that Apple's device can do for a fraction of the cost (just not with Apple integration).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1408230/Walkabout_Mini_Go...
https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1707453830344868204