Look at how much R&D spending has gone up over the last years, all while macos and iOS does not become any better and new iPhones are straightforward stepwise improvement on previous years version.
One thing i hope i that this VR stuff will finally make Apple and others think about latency.
It still feels snappier to play a gameboy or use a windows 95 computer with a CRT screen which is bizarre.
There was this huge push years ago about Retina and resolution because "eye candy sells" but gaming and mobile has been pushing the Hz/Fps game in the last years, and i know the new Apple displays have "Promotion", but still theres tiny click latencies all over the place not to talk about how long it takes many apps to open on "supercomputers".
I wonder if anyone has made comparison from click to screen on a gameboy compared to say a macbook pro.
if Meta ends up being the owners of "Android of VR" by this investment and VR ends up being as big as mobile Zuck will show everyone why they did this. I'm optimistic that Meta's plan is going to work and AR/VR will be a huge market. Gaming and work meeting apps are the core of the VR experience and I'm convinced that many people would want those experiences
In my opinion we just haven't reached the tipping point yet. Very few cared about "smart" phones with touch screens until Apple came out with the iPhone. Other manufacturers like Nokia or HTC had devices with similar capabilities for years but consumers shunned them. The experience needs to be good enough for people to consider these devices - again Apple's headset could be the first to really establish the category.
I'm not sure I agree. There were proto-smartphones in the early 90s, but they couldnt become widespread until the tech was there to deliver the necessary baseline experience.
I think we're only just getting to that level of tech now. Nobody wants to cart around a gaming computer with cabled to a headset, especially in an era of smartphones etc. You need a headset that can deliver a solid experience, untethered by cables at minimum, to arrive at the Palm Pilot PDA equivalent point in the XR => widespread adoption timeline.
Which phones are you thinking of? I would consider either the Nokia Communicator in 1996 or the Ericsson R380 from 1999, as the first proto-smartphones. Or are you counting things like Apple Newton as a proto-smartphone?
I guess your question is the gist of my point. The Apple Newton is a great touchpoint as it points in a particular direction, but it was 1) the wrong form factor, 2) too expensive, 3) emphasized the wrong features. Still, it pointed a clear direction.
From Newton to iPhone is 15+ years, but it's not totally unreasonable to consider the Osborne 1 with an acoustic coupler to be the real starting line, given its popularity as a portable comms computer, and really iPhone 3G/3GS is probably a better "we've arrived" point than the first iPhone.
Of course, VR tech could be "started" much earlier than the current fad. However, I think DK1 was Osborne 1 in terms of the technology meeting the needs of the medium, maybe Newton-level on the timeline if you're already a VR enthusiast and have enthusiast blinders on. That was 2013, only 10 years ago. Theres still underlying tech that isn't totally "there" in terms of supporting the "right" VR experience, but most people who have tried any modern headset can feel the potential. It's like using a Windows Mobile from 2003; it feels like a glimpse of an inevitable future, even though you can simultaneously recognize that it's time has not yet come.
The biggest problem of XR is the vision-blocking headset, not the tethering. And since all current XR technologies require a fully vision blocking headset, they have a fundamental problem that building a better vision blocking headset can't really solve.
And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough. Having something strapped over your eyes for a long period of time (say, an hour) is just fundamentally unpleasant. Even normal glasses are uncomfortable and people avoid them as much as they can.
> And since all current XR technologies require a fully vision blocking headset, they have a fundamental problem that building a better vision blocking headset can't really solve.
That's not necessarily true. There are several optical passthrough AR glasses today - they're not as light as one would like, they require external compute, and they need quite a lot of UX work - but they exist today. The most recent example is the Xreal Air 2 [0].
> And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough.
I think that's fine as a solution, if
> And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough. Having something strapped over your eyes for a long period of time (say, an hour) is just fundamentally unpleasant. Even normal glasses are uncomfortable and people avoid them as much as they can.
we can resolve this. The headsets are getting smaller, and the AR glasses are getting more powerful. Meta are working this from both angles with the headsets and their glasses. The glasses seem to be doing alright (more time required) [1], and lighter headsets are possible [2].
My suspicion is that people are willing to tolerate some degree of discomfort - discomfort that will get smaller over time - if it's a sufficient value-add to their life. We're at the very start of that; check back in a year from now when developers have had plenty of time with the Quest 3 and the Vision Pro demonstrating Apple's vision for UX and software.
Honestly I want it as a work experience, but the resolution wasn't high enough to be useable when I tried it, and it required too much GPU. I haven't tried the newer generation, but the Vision Pro looks pretty c
lose to what I want from VR. If it can be used with my Steam library, too, it'll be an automatic purchase. Even without, I'm interested, if only to have the nice super-portable multi-monitor display. Not sure I'm $3k interested, but I might be.
If you have the extra money, pick up a Quest 3. The resolution is fine for reading and writing text and it doesn't require you to use a gaming computer. There are limits to how small you can make the font but I find it to be a comfortable size for both viewing and productivity. Try Immersed since it is free, featureful and designed for productivity but keep in mind there are other options. It works with both Mac and Windows and has good QoL features like an AR portal so you can see where your keyboard and mouse are at when you're in a VR environment. Quest 3 works with SteamVR but you have to make sure you have a good router and an ethernet connection to the computer hosting your Steam library. Be warned that the headstrap that comes with the Quest can be uncomfortable for some people and you will probably want to spend the money on a better after market one. Prescription lenses are also available if you wear glasses.
Agreed - once the tech is there AR/VR make sense in so many applications and meta wants too be the first company to win in that space. Yeah tens of billions in losses doesn’t look good now, but in 7 years when they’re potentially the winner it will be worth the hundreds of billions in revenue.
Exactly and this is looking very likely as I said before: [0].
Again, we are slowly realizing why Meta is spending billions on XR headsets and Apple's move to spatial computing just validates the spending.
I expect the Vision Pro to under perform in sales, but it is the next generation of Vision products (2nd and 3rd) that is going to be extremely competitive and cheaper against Meta Quest.
Most people don't bother to turn on webcam on work meetings. Vast majority of people don't bother with video calls either and just use old good voice if not text. Why would those crowds bother with VR?
(I) you don't need those crowds to have a high value product. Vast majority of people don't own a games console or a gambling account or buy many books either.
(II) many of the same people that don't bother turning on webcam at work meetings do care about it when talking to their family or spend hours immersed in MMORPGs or exploring other people's world's through video and being seen to follow all the right trends on social media.
Sure, mainstream VR has been "just around the corner" since before the average person had access to the internet and I think there are still technical and fashion questions about how mass market-ready the tech is and whether Meta is remotely the right company to market its Android, but if we judged the long term potential of a tech by people's enthusiasm for being observed by their boss even the internet would have been written off...
They wouldn't have lost nearly as much if they had just kept the Oculus headsets for their original purpose, mainly VR gaming, and marketed them better to consumers, instead of pivoting so hard on AR, the bullshit "we'll all be living and working in the Metaverse" skit, and mandating Facebook accounts, therefore alienating the VR users, gamers and game developers in the process, basically their entire user market.
The Quest headsets are great tech, well priced, and they have some cracking games that get you hooked, but the marketing to the general public was next to non-existent, and the whole mandatory Facebook account plus the paradigm shift from games to AR and Metaverse soured them badly.
If they want to salvage this they need to go back to VR games only.
Meta verse is a long term play, VR gaming is profitable now. FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now.
Meta's handling of the Oculus strikes me as one of the shortest "long term plays" I have every seen. Meta cares a lot about profit and they've turn a maybe-soon-to-be-profitable division into one that's dug a hole billions of dollars deep. Now the board is unhappy with these losses, teams have been downsized and they are back where they started minus billions and billions of dollars.
I don’t understand this. Unless VR gaming was a net loss, why wouldn’t you keep investing in it? If you were currently making a profit from gaming, shouldn’t you just hedge your bets and continue to make money?
The thing is that VR gaming seems to be a tiny niche. Even if profitable on paper, is it really worth the organizational costs to maintain a division that addresses a tiny market with no synergies of any kind with the rest of the business?
If this was not the case, you would see lots of Facebook restaurants or cleaners or hair salons etc. since these are all easy to make profitable.
How does it not synergize with the metaverse? If it takes off , there will 1000% be games. And why would a division that makes money have some negative organisational cost?
If gaming is profitable but the ads business is more profitable and less capital intensive, you would be advised to stick to ads. Particularly when it's expensive to borrow.
Reality Labs have spent $20bn already. How much does the return on that capital have to be to convince the stock market that it was a good idea?
> FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now.
The problem is the users largely don't give a shit about any of that. What VR adoption there is among the public is exclusively gaming, apart from the weird crypto-web 3 adjacent real estate scams going on in this second life clones. Which, while they have a lot of big numbers to throw around, most of it has been a massive [insert fart noise] in terms of generating anything tangible like new technologies or better performing systems. It's just a crypto sub-culture that includes some (notably bad) VR games bolted to their sides.
Like I have just never seen any evidence at all that regular people are interested in the lightest in participating in any of these metaverse spaces. Video conferencing has purposes, and we saw that demonstrated well during the pandemic, but like, doing what is basically video conferencing with shitty graphics and bland visuals with everyone running around as corporate-art-styled avatars just... sucks ass. It really tremendously sucks and offers no real benefits over standard Zoom calls which we already have numerous profitable services offering. That, combined with collaboration spaces like Slack and Teams and good old telephones has basically all business communication covered, and none of it is made better in the slightest with the stupid metaverse proposed by Facebook.
And for the public, I mean, what can you even say is better? Wandering around a crappy 3D mall to shop for products is infinitely more work for a customer than just opening Amazon. We've already learned this lesson! For a while there we had websites that emulated traditional storefronts with image mapped jpegs representing products on offer and just like... no. The market spoke deafeningly loud: It was WAY EASIER to shop from a list of things to buy instead, and it was way, WAY easier for businesses to maintain those lists rather than building what amounts to a custom videogame to sell their products within.
VR is really cool tech. The metaverse is a dud and Facebook doesn't have enough money, nor really does anyone, to force it the way it would have to be to see wide adoption.
You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major news outlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. since "the public" weren't on online forums. Those that were saw that the internet was going to be huge but they were a tiny minority of nerds, enthusiasts and university students who didn't have much of a voice in the traditional media. Ironically, internet forums are now the traditional media to the nascent social metaverse. The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities. A confounding aspect is the real time and unrecorded nature of interactions in the metaverse. Unless you're a streamer who also publishes their previous streams there is little record of the social activity happening there. There are no web pages or blog posts no search and no links and the social graphs are contained within whatever app you are using so they're only available to participants. In effect, the metaverse is entirely invisible to the traditional web but it's a one way mirror since web content can be pulled into the metaverse inside flat windows, which seems another parallel to the early internet on which people posted content from traditional media but the media didn't at first broadcast content originating on the web.
Anyways, all this is to say: don't let yourself get blindsided by a new paradigm while you're resting on the laurels of the last revolution.
> You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major news outlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. since "the public" weren't on online forums. Those that were saw that the internet was going to be huge but they were a tiny minority of nerds, enthusiasts and university students who didn't have much of a voice in the traditional media.
Well yes but the difference there is the Internet for all it's flaws is a new form of communication that improves upon it's predecessors. Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications; magazines became e-zines, newsletters became... newsletters I suppose, directories went online, newspapers became RSS feeds/websites. Basically any print media you wanted could incredibly easily become a website that was then infinitely updatable and didn't require sending a physical slice of paper to get the same information across. The trade-off was of course the technical competence required to use the Internet, but people adapted quickly(ish) to that once they understood it and computers were more widely available. There is a cost, but the benefits are clear as day, and the adoption/simplification trend with the migration to platforms combined with the ubiquity of devices with Internet access has only accelerated all of that.
Now I grant, this is with the benefit of hindsight, but still, I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping experience that is directly translatable in this way. VR shopping is slower, it requires an investment in niche technology, the experience itself is far from universally improved with many users having serious motion sickness issues with it, and the medium of text which remains an essential part of the shopping experience (prices, descriptions, dimensions) is uniquely difficult to convey in the VR format, you essentially need to create either popups which are obnoxious, or floating text that is difficult to read.
The ONE aspect I can see is you could visually inspect the item you're looking to purchase in 3D, and while that's neat and useful, it's just as easily accomplished with AR which has been available and quite useful in the Amazon and Wayfair apps for years at this point, and lets you see, for example, a piece of furniture in your given room by just looking at where you'd put it through your phone camera, which doesn't require a headset, motion sensors, and the visualization is better because it collaborates with your existing lighting and decor instead of existing in a void. And, the benefit of in-person shopping which allows the tangible examination of a product is entirely unconveyable in VR because while vibration motors in the hands allow you to experience a proxy of touch, your hands still go straight through it, and the vibration features quickly run up against a wall of limitations with regard to like, simulating the touch and feel of different materials which is basically all you'd want to inspect in this regard.
> The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities.
Right, and this is the problem for Facebook. Because the product we're all unable to look inside just... isn't very compelling and doesn't show any signs of being it. Being able to communicate with people all over the world about niche or even mainstream interests has obvious appeal, that was the entire reason for the rise of social media later, and internet forums before. I struggle to conceive of this same level of appeal for metaverse content because it's... the same thing, but worse in basically every respect: it's costly to engage with, the density of interaction is significantly lower, the content you can experience is much more vast if that content is 3D models, but vastly REDUCED in th...
> Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications
> I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping
I think I know where the disconnect is. You're comparing to the wrong historical period, granted they were rather short. I think this is a common mistake, for the metaverse it isn't 2002 when Amazon started selling clothing, it's not even 1995 when CNN launched their website, I don't even think it's 1991 since we haven't settled on a protocol that would allow the equivalent of websites which would be something like the worlds you see in VRChat but not limited to a single app. It's going to happen soon though, it seems like USD might be the HTML of the metaverse[0] and once that gets hammered out things will really take off.
Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web.
> metaverse content because it's... the same thing but worse
You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. You can have flat content in it if you want but it's not the reason people go to VR. The term used most often for the things people seek out in VR are "experiences" those can be interactive games, social gatherings or just passive full immersion. It's similar to what people seek out in the real world, novelty, surprise, laughter, connection. The best way to get across why this is better than just leaving your house is to imagine you live in a small town, without VR your options are pretty limited but with VR you have (or will eventually have as more content becomes available) any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home. That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation.
Coming back to the flat content. Low resolution doesn't really matter that much when you're watching a movie on a theatre sized screen with a bunch of other people from around the world. What matters is being able to turn to the person beside you and say "omg this is my favorite part!" or whispering back and forth about the film or getting up and acting out the scene with friends and laughing about it. No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want.
The best parts of social VR or "the metaverse" aren't browsing web pages, looking at pictures or watching movies. They're sitting around a room talking to people, wandering through a crowded world like you're at a party and taking in all the conversations, dancing, trying out different worlds and games with friends for the first time, going to a live show or any of the other varied experiences on offer.
It's about being with people not about consuming content.
> I think I know where the disconnect is. ... I don't even think it's 1991 since we haven't settled on a protocol that would allow the equivalent of websites which would be something like the worlds you see in VRChat but not limited to a single app. It's going to happen soon though, it seems like USD might be the HTML of the metaverse[0] and once that gets hammered out things will really take off.
With all due respect I think this is a highly optimistic view that isn't borne out by any of the current trends. Current headsets have interoperability but we're already seeing a number of manufacturers walling off their hardware from the larger market, by name, Apple and Facebook, one more aggressively than the other. The Internet exploded both because it was built upon a set of open shared standards, and because it was, as said previously, a natural progression of communication technology: print, but faster. VR is not faster than... I mean really, anything. It's slower for basically all forms of communication, not because of the hardware or whatever but because of what it is, because of the physical footprint of the devices. The most convenient one you can point to is the Vision Pro, and it's also (I believe) the most expensive by a solid margin, and it's still almost 2 pounds of stuff strapped to your head.
> Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web.
I mean, I think that's utlimately where we agree. I think because of that, it's overall adoption will remain niche. I think the web's ability to engage people in commerce is one of the big reasons that it has exploded the way it has.
> You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. ... any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home.
Right, absolutely agree. But again, the vast, vast, vast majority of content is flat content. Text, pictures, video, and even the vast majority of videogames are 100% flat. And, it isn't just that the majority is flat; the production expense to create content that is not flat introduces exponentially greater cost to the entity creating it. You say "once we have all these experiences it'll be better" and hey, I want that, I'm in this and I love VR. But VR content is harder to make, harder to test, the hardware is more involved, there are safety concerns to go over that are just not a thing in other media, on and on. Anyone can write press releases and with newer tech, just about anyone can make videos, and even podcasts are still pretty dead simple. But VR content is in a completely different league, you're in for four or even five figures just to begin.
> That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation.
Because the people on the terminal were the fellow weirdos like you who had a similar terminal, being on the early internet you already probably had a LOT in common with all those people right off the bat, solely on the basis that you were both the kind of people who had access to the internet at all.
> Coming back to the flat content. ... No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want.
I mean, it's less a concern for the video and far more for text. And you can say all day "well it isn't for text" and yeah, I get that, but you're missing that text is still the predominant form of communication in technology. If you can't do text effectively, huge a...
Nope. FB ("Meta") are shoveling cash onto a bonfire and will not reap the benefits because a competitor that people trust will beat them to produtc-market-fit long before they recoup their "investment".
Yeah, but if you buy into the first mover advantage assumption that might well be too late. He who invented the virtual sword fighting algorithms shall never be defeated and all that.
They could also just pretend to buy into the first mover assumption, if a large enough fraction of the stock market does, that will be good enough.
Yes, I agree that that the AI-generated virtual worlds are getting better each day, but Mark & Co are making a pretty massive assumption that people (a) want to spend large amounts of time in a virtual world and (b) his virtual world.
We'll see very soon from the uptake of the Apple Vision Pro how many people want that (virtual) reality. ;-)
The institutional knowledge and skills from building a mature VR gaming landscape could arguably be used as a stepping stone to their "metaverse" though.
The strategy to not care about gaming today because it won't be dominant in the future is hard to understand.
Given that we will spend all our days in VR in 10 years or so, who will own that space?
The company that designs future products today and only needs to sit on it for a decade until the technology and human society have caught up?
Or the company that goes all in on VR gaming, a technology that exists today, and completely owns that space until the technology is mature enough to branch out beyond gaming?
I think they were presenting that as a conditional, not as a sure-fire bet.
With that, though: the access to the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, thanks to no small amount by Meta's subsidies [0].
If it does take a pivotal role in our technological future (which I believe it will, but I'm not expecting you to), I would imagine it'd end up being like the smartphone: many vendors will sprout up and drive costs down, especially for low-income markets.
The Meta verse is an impossible dream. Thinking a single company will own it is like thinking a single company could own multiplayer gaming, cloud documents, and remote work. It’s an impossible, absurdist maximalist goal that I don’t see how any company could fully deliver on.
Hardware is just hardware. Apple builds hardware that then becomes an ecosystem. Reality Labs was trying to build the hardware AND the ecosystem AND the apps.
This on top of an unworkable concept for Human Computer Interaction - Virtual Reality - which consumers have already rejected over and over again. There will be no consumer market VR headset because the concept is fundamentally alienating.
I suspect there are a lot of people on the spectrum in IT who seem convinced that somehow this is a tech problem. IT IS NOT, nor will it ever be. Getting in a VR headset and being in a reality where no one else is ever there, nor will they ever be (in the next 10-20 years, there is no tech that reliably emulates full body capture, not to mention touch and smell, two key parts of the human experience) is fundamentally unpleasant for the general public, because the general public, quite correctly, places a very high level of reward to being around other people, co regulating emotions, reading body language, and kissing and having sex.
Since none of that is mapped into VR, the concept of a general use VR OS with a consumer market is fundamentally dystopian and perhaps even physiologically and psychologically unsafe.
Having said that - I have worked in VR since 2014 and anyone in their right mind will tell you that Reality Labs was a dumb idea. There is not, and there won’t be for a very long time, any mass consumer market for VR (billions of units) because VR is anti human, anti connective and is most likely bad for people if they use it for long hours.
I think VR can enable human connection where it otherwise isn’t possible due to distance. Of course, it isn’t a full substitute for in-person interaction, but it doesn’t have to be either or. We can have a great remote connection via VR and still exist in the real world.
Check out this podcast[0] between Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg where they meet remotely via the metaverse.
I don’t know that many people who would prefer this to a Zoom call.
Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity.
Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
The reason to prefer a conference type app in VR over AR is likely due to bandwidth, it takes a huge amount of data to cover an entire space from every possible angle at a retina like resolution, perhaps AI can be of use here in the future. The avatar generation/scanning is being worked on and Meta are not releasing this until it has been streamlined.
Not sure I understand why doing this in AR would consume more data.
What I’m proposing is you’d just have a “floating head” type call with someone else. The environment around you would be the real one that’s already there.
> I don’t know that many people who would prefer this to a Zoom call.
puts hand up
VRChat, even in its nascent, unrefined, laggy phase, is still much more engaging than any video call I've been on. Sharing the same space with someone improves the experience of communication immeasurably. It's hard to explain, but they no longer feel like a face on a screen, and that enables a much stronger bond.
> Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity.
Yes, this is true at present. However, they're actively working on reducing the requirements for the scan; this is them demonstrating what's possible at the high-end. This is a similar strategy to what Apple's doing with the Vision Pro: they're setting the benchmark before trying to shrink the cost.
Speaking of, you can already see a potential future towards low-cost scanning in Apple's Personas. They're obviously much lower in quality, but they're quick and easy to scan. The future is trending towards that kind of experience, not getting imaged by a dedicated rig.
> Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
Both are good! You're not wrong about the potential of AR teleconferencing. VR teleconferencing lets you set the scene and share an environment with the users, though, which has its own benefits. (Especially when it comes to spatial arrangement; it's much easier / less mind-bendy to have a single shared environment than to have everyone have their own view of the proceedings. Curious to see how Apple will deal with this, though.)
There is an over sampling of individuals like yourself who enjoy VR here on HN, on Reddit, or on any other tech platform where enthusiasts naturally gather.
I believe every single word of what you said about enjoying VRchat, and that product has been out for ages. What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.
My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.
AR is, like you said, soon entering its infancy thanks to Apple doing a PARC and releasing a high cost developer prototype.
> There is an over sampling of individuals like yourself who enjoy VR here on HN, on Reddit, or on any other tech platform where enthusiasts naturally gather.
Without a doubt, yeah.
> What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.
Just above 90,000 [0]. Yes, a far cry from the billions of existing social networks. But I think that's because of a couple of factors, owing to...
> My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.
this. I believe the rejection of consumer VR is not primarily because of the alienation factor - it's because the experience has sucked and costs a lot more than people are willing to spend on a new experience.
I'm a long-time believer in VR; I've been paying attention to it from its 2012 resurgence. However, in that decade, I've seen a few fundamental reasons for why people either don't bother trying it out, or give up shortly afterwards:
- Cost. A good PCVR experience can easily cost thousands of dollars. For VRChat, you really do want that experience (you can only access a subset of content on standalone), and it does not come cheap.
- Comfort. The headsets are not comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
- Isolation. You can't see outside of your space, and other people can't see what you're doing.
- UX. The companies progressing VR have historically not been very good at UX - it's very easy to have a subpar experience with the software.
- Software. There's some high-quality content, but there's not enough of it to sustain interest.
The reason I still believe in it as a medium, despite these problems, is that they're not fundamentally insurmountable blockers. Despite all of these very annoying problems, the strength of the medium still shines through to those who can tolerate it.
There are paths forward for each of these problems; the cost of hardware will be driven down, headsets will get lighter and smaller, there are solutions to let reality in and to let others into your reality, and software troubles can be fixed with iteration and concerted effort from companies who can be bothered.
My existence proof of these things are the existence of the Quest lineup, the Bigscreen Beyond, and the Vision Pro. They all solve parts of the problem - with the Vision Pro being the strongest showing to date - and it's not too hard to envision a future in which one ecosystem has a solution to all of them. It will just take time and effort.
At present, I see the ecosystem being not unlike pre-iPhone smartphones; they exist, they work, but they're lacking the fundamental polish and comforts that a wider audience requires. And like the iPhone, there will come a moment where those things come together, and it will become accessible to the wider consumer market.
I don't think that's happening soon - the Vision Pro is three thousand dollars more and a few hundred grams more than it needs to be - but there's a path forward.
I also don't consider AR to be a separate technology; it's a part of the wider spectrum of XR. Improvements in AR will feed into VR, and vice versa. The Vision Pro is a VR headset masquerading as an AR headset, after all.
This comment reads like it came from 2021 when Carmack was still there and it maybe looked like they were serious about it. Absolutely nobody is interested in VR anything from FB as long as Zuck is the pitchman.
Metaverse is old. It's literally the dream of the 90s and 00s.
Linen labs, second life, every animated live in a village game ever. There is no log term play for the "metaverse". There is for VR computing platforms. Unfortunately, Meta has missed that boat trying to take on the Wii and Wii U lobby.
As a concept, virtual universes are actually popular, when you take away the requirement of VR headsets. The barrier of entry is about the cost of an indy game or maybe, a A game title. My kids spend more time playing in the Animal Crossing and Minecraft universe than on the oculus by a mile. Check that, they spend more time in the Goat Simulator or Deeeeer universe.
That's what all console makers did to gain market share though. Sell cheap HW on the loss, then make it back on games sales. And VR tech is still expensive and not commoditized yet like consoles which are now just PCs.
Not true. Nintendo historically made profit on every game system that came out, which explains their use of older, cheaper technology. I don’t know if this is true for the Switch though.
Nintendo also makes notoriously bad consoles (by spec, not uniqueness). Their IP is more of the reason they succeed than is the case for most consoles. Their hardware is always years behind the specs for competitors.
Definitely true of the Switch. I’m not sure if it’s true of their older hardware, though - the FC, SFC, N64 and GC were all fairly advanced for their times and still modestly priced at launch. The N64 in particular was a pile of high-end custom silicon - if they weren’t selling at a loss, they were getting one hell of a sweetheart deal from SGI and Rambus.
My understanding is that the “old technology” approach guided their portable lineup more than anything, and only started to be adopted by their mainline consoles as they started to struggle there and felt they needed a different approach from Sony/MS to compete.
It didn't take Microsoft and Sony a decade to make a dent in video games. With games, it's not about the hardware anyway. If it were we'd all be rushing to buy the Dreamcast V.
You're compering apples to carrots. In the case of VR, it definetly is about the hardware. To give users a good VR experience you need to be able to drive high resolution displays at high refresh rates, otherwise you'll get a nausea inducing ugly screen-door image that nobody will appreciate no matter how good your games are.
What I'm saying is that VR can improve leaps and bounds, like home theaters have. It doesn't mean the market for it will grow the same way. It's still a niche interest for most. Sony doesn't invest much in PS VR, and you'd think they would if they thought it'd sell to their customers.
FWIW, they told me I would lose my entire Oculus library if I didn't change from a simple Oculus email login to a Meta account and all that entails (I'm a CV1 owner). Threatening the loss of a few hundred dollars of software unless I gave up my privacy definitely left a sour taste in my mouth. I didn't even care about the Quest, they just decided I wasn't going to be able to use my software anymore.
Is the headset usable without any kind of account? A quick search suggested you'd still need a Meta account of some kind (allegedly separate from a Facebook account).
It really is, high quality passthrough is an entirely new experience especially for people who aren't really into full VR. Even if you're comfortable with VR, using a mixed reality app allows you to keep interacting with people around you which takes that VR time out of isolation and puts it back into daily life. I'm very curious what the rumoured Quest 3 Lite is going to be, I'm guessing it'll be something similar to the Immersed Visor targeted at AR with limited VR capabilities.
> and they have some cracking games that get you hooked
My main issue with VR is that I only got hooked to Beat Saber. There are some other titles that I quite liked (I expect you to die, demeo), but they never had other games, to the level of Beat Saber, for me to be really excited with the platform.
>My main issue with VR is that I only got hooked to Beat Saber.
But that's subjective, no? I personally never got hooked on Beat Saber but instead on 'In Death Unchained'. Like I said, the main problem is marketing. There are great games and experiences out there but probably few know them because there's no hype around them the way there is for Cyberpunk, GTA, CoD and other mainstream AAA franchises that drive insane amounts of money just form preorders of buggy games.
Seems more objective to me in that the quest has shitty software beyond one or two games. One or two games wont carry a platform very long regardless of marketing. Shitty software hurts the hardware most.
AR is for seeing what the customer is seeing and feeding customized ads and specialized offers. It is the ability to show smaller prices to poor and bigger prices to wealthy, increasing margins. It is an invaluable tool for marketers. It is potentially big big money for Facebook but meager offering for customers. VR is for luring users into AR advertising dystopia. Metaverse is a masquerade. Too bad for them they spent so much on the 3D red herring.
you don't see it in those photos but when those things are done they get a barcode that lets you "flip over" the cards. I started developing them a few months before Zuckerberg announced the metaverse and felt in many ways my work was related. (e.g. I can go to a conference and pass out 20 cent glasses to the audience so they can view my 3-d images) I've known for a long time that the cards were going to have an MR component the same way the real numbers have the imaginary numbers, it was a matter of time.
That time has come.
There is a demo for the Quest 3 where your room gets invaded by little aliens and you have to shoot them to catch them and stuff them in a container. Chunks of your wall and ceiling fall away and you can see out to an alien world outside. It's just amazing.
I am showing the demo to as many friends and family as I can so I can get good at presenting it and then I am going to show it to museum directors and similar people because I really want to sell something like that to somebody like that. It's now possible to make something like a theme park experience at a dramatically lower cost. If the technology becomes really mainstream there will be a limited window that this can be sold as something place-based but if it is slow to take off that window is longer.
The Quest 3 has gotten about 1% of the excitement that Apple Vision has but it is here and now and I think fully realized. I think also Meta has learned from many of its marketing mistakes because Zuckeberg wants to win that one. To confront the "people play with it then abandon it" they are providing a license to a game that comes out in a month. I think you'll never see another creepy Zuckerberg avatar. People are so burned out on Meta that the story has been almost buried but I think a lot of people are going to try a Quest 3 and become a believer.
The "social media" requirement with AR also sent us reeling in mil-spec-landia, where every little widget HAS to be insulated - or at least insulate-able - from wide area networks, and anything that needs a cloud to run is DOA.
Sure, I guess you can configure an image on GovCloud or one of the other ITAR cloud services but . . have you ever tried to deploy a consumer app image on a NIST-and-FEDRAMP-and-WHATEVERELSE-certified container? There's a reason the big vendors just give up and run on-prem. You end up with a whole other release of your software that you get to maintain, forever. Maybe this has gotten better in the last few years . .
It costs a lot of money to hire and onboard people. Especially now since tech wages have gone up over last few years and existing employees are probably cheaper and onboarded.
So it doesn't make sense that Meta would lay people off and rehire others just for fun. They can be greedy or sadistic, not both. Its pretty obvious they use layoffs to get rid of poor performers and divisions they don't want to invest in any more.
The underlying assumptions here are that companies can reliably identify poor performers (I would tend to doubt this, especially at a scale of tens of thousands of employees), that layoffs don't cause negative repercussions among the employees who are kept on (something I know from personal experience to be false) and that skilled employees of a no-longer-in-demand division would be unsuited to the new, hot division (a bugbear of mine is how corporations drive their employees to specialize, then lay them off once they thing they no longer need the specialization).
The only immoral thing here is your countries'/states' labor laws, in my opinion.
In many EU countries they wouldn't be able to fire people "just because we want to", and also, in some countries companies have to offer you other positions if relevant.
Not being a particular Zuck fan or hater I have to admit I like the fact he has decided to spend billions on a fairly out there R&D project. I also happen to believe VR is commercially useless but the R&D will yield tangential technologies that benefit us more directly, such as the control interfaces.
People have forgotten that Bezos used to receive very similar treatment over the cloud and everything non book store until it suddenly exploded.
To +1 and say the same thing another way: If you don't like their strategy, don't buy their stock. Just wait for the innovations to diffuse Xerox PARC-style, and reap the benefits. It might take a decade and return 1% of promised, but the benefits will be felt by billions across centuries. That's how real innovation works. Future me thanks the current investors for their contribution to society.
Or maybe the current investors will get rich; that's what keeps them coming back.
Well, many people are invested in them because of ETF/index funds. But you are right. They could do awesome stuff generally but they focus so much on a creepy metaverse that really few people want.
Imo FB or Meta is hurting from missing the hardware platform boat. Their apps are at the whim of Apple and Google with Apple already neutering FB with the do not track feature. I think they want to own the vr/ar hardware and ecosystem so they don’t end up in that same position again.
A shame. VR had the potential to be a game changer and provide growth. Given the lack of growth driving tech the past decade it would have been a breath of fresh air for indie developers. While fads such as AI aim to deliver destruction VR would have been a net positive.
I believe "Reality Labs" is to Meta what a black budget is to a country.
It is impossible to spend that much money on AR R&D. This is Meta's moonshot factory, and I'm sure this funds 10s-100s of projects that may not have anything to do with AR.
Extreme research and development. You can look through their blog [0] to get an idea of it. They're working on technology that can't be productionised for years, potentially decades, as part of their long-term bet.
Tech companies don’t do that, they always look for the next big thing. Should Apple have kept making Intel macs forever instead of spending tons on R&D for their own chips? Should Microsoft keep selling office subscriptions and not pour money into AI? It’s better for everyone if they do.
AT&T was the leading tech company at one point. Yet today they're the mainstay of dividend strategy portfolios. That a company stays "Tech" is a flawed assumption here. At some point, this capital is just being wasted.
That's kind of by design, though. One of the mandates of modern corporates is "generate value for the shareholders at all costs". This frequently means betting on and pushing risky ventures to be the first or, even better, the second to set foot on a whole new market.
Many gaming streaming projects fell before Microsoft and Nvidia cracked the code, and MS is using it to pull people to their ecosystem. Sony lost a lot of money over the years flailing around with GaiKai until they had a stable streaming offer. Even Google lost much of their investment in Stadia.
Similar stories goes with AR games, live streaming, targeted ad services, etc. Some companies have to burn cash and take losses to map all the pitfalls and opportunities of the new market.
The whole metaverse thing is poorly define and kinda useless, but executives firmly believe that when you get all the high income families hooked up with eyes and ears covered by technology, you'll be able to advertise and sell products and they won't be able to look away without turning off their entire platform, and most people don't make this sacrifice.
They're more than willing to burn a lot of cash and kill many jobs for the small chance of breaking through and reaching that magical market with the excessive ammount of disposable income of the top Apple fans and engagement levels not even tiktok or the most predatory gacha games could reach.
I work in the fintech space. A few years back we started on a skunkworks project to see if XR technology has a place in our world, specifically around data analysis, storytelling and insight gathering - more specifically, would it add value beyond doing what people already can do today on monitors and not just be a cool 'gimmick' (though I realised does hold some commercial value in the eyes of our marketing team).
After dozens of conferences, lots of client demos, and feedback I am convinced it has a place in our world and we have a much better idea of what and how. The question is when and, in some ways, the hardest to solve for.
We could not have done a lot of this without Meta headsets as they were cheap enough to start with and easy to develop on and iterate so personally thankful are taking this long-term bet as it is helping the whole sector. We did contact Meta to see if they wanted to partner in some way or support us as its mutually beneficial but got nowhere, might be case of finding the right person given the vastness of the org.
"Lost" is a strange word to use in this context. Its an investment. An investment is only a loss if its written off because the company decided that the whole project and direction is a dead end. That does not seem to be the case (at least not yet).
In any case what is really interesting to ponder reading this piece of news is the gross imbalance of resources in the tech industry and how capriciously they are spent. Imagine spending that kind of money on practically any tech subdomain and it would be transformative. E.g., You could build a completely new mobile operating system. Or you could build an entire new AI/ML oriented language ecosystem and have some spare change.
The flip side (in the scenario where the VR hype does eventually get traction) is the enormous moat created.
Even after losing this much, the reported profit for the current qtr is $11 billion. Aswath Damodaran did an analysis of Meta and calculated even if the $100B invested yield 0 in downstream revenue and value it is not impacting valuation of Meta much.
I see no reason to take this bet, it may not be best executed but kind of investment I expect to see from trillion-dollar companies.
A few days ago, I randomly decided to click on Mark Zuckerberg's instagram account and see who he's following. He appears to be following several AI avatars based on actual celebrities, but with different names. There's a Paris Hilton lookalike that's called 'Amber'. The avatars have a few short videos posted which are VERY realistic, I almost couldn't tell the difference. My guess is the plan is to pay real celebrities $$$$ for their image and likeness and turn them into personal avatars hyper customized to each audience. Imagine Kylie Jenner or Taylor Swift personally checking in on how your day was, while actively asking questions, giving commentary, etc. And of course, they'll be ocassionally recommending how awesome you'd look in the latest outfit from <paid brand>.
I have to wonder, for the average HN commenter, does your team have a net positive cash result on your employer. Because statistically speaking it has to be less than 50%
Big tech is like a giant VC fund. You have one part, maybe not even that huge, thats printing money, the rest beg SVPs for funding once a year and hope for the best, future gambles that no one expects to generate revenue immediately
Facebook has been taking massive losses on virtual and augmented reality since basically day zero with the purchase of Oculus back in the DK1 days.
That has made it impossible for literally anybody other than the other ologopolists to compete in this space, which arguably will be the long term computer peripheral & data collection system of record.
I reckon that those billons are not flushed down the toilet right? They must have produced some IP or tech, that even though not immediately sellable today, can be monetized (patent troll) or integrated into their future product?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadIt still feels snappier to play a gameboy or use a windows 95 computer with a CRT screen which is bizarre.
There was this huge push years ago about Retina and resolution because "eye candy sells" but gaming and mobile has been pushing the Hz/Fps game in the last years, and i know the new Apple displays have "Promotion", but still theres tiny click latencies all over the place not to talk about how long it takes many apps to open on "supercomputers".
I wonder if anyone has made comparison from click to screen on a gameboy compared to say a macbook pro.
I think we're only just getting to that level of tech now. Nobody wants to cart around a gaming computer with cabled to a headset, especially in an era of smartphones etc. You need a headset that can deliver a solid experience, untethered by cables at minimum, to arrive at the Palm Pilot PDA equivalent point in the XR => widespread adoption timeline.
Which phones are you thinking of? I would consider either the Nokia Communicator in 1996 or the Ericsson R380 from 1999, as the first proto-smartphones. Or are you counting things like Apple Newton as a proto-smartphone?
From Newton to iPhone is 15+ years, but it's not totally unreasonable to consider the Osborne 1 with an acoustic coupler to be the real starting line, given its popularity as a portable comms computer, and really iPhone 3G/3GS is probably a better "we've arrived" point than the first iPhone.
Of course, VR tech could be "started" much earlier than the current fad. However, I think DK1 was Osborne 1 in terms of the technology meeting the needs of the medium, maybe Newton-level on the timeline if you're already a VR enthusiast and have enthusiast blinders on. That was 2013, only 10 years ago. Theres still underlying tech that isn't totally "there" in terms of supporting the "right" VR experience, but most people who have tried any modern headset can feel the potential. It's like using a Windows Mobile from 2003; it feels like a glimpse of an inevitable future, even though you can simultaneously recognize that it's time has not yet come.
And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough. Having something strapped over your eyes for a long period of time (say, an hour) is just fundamentally unpleasant. Even normal glasses are uncomfortable and people avoid them as much as they can.
That's not necessarily true. There are several optical passthrough AR glasses today - they're not as light as one would like, they require external compute, and they need quite a lot of UX work - but they exist today. The most recent example is the Xreal Air 2 [0].
> And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough.
I think that's fine as a solution, if
> And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough. Having something strapped over your eyes for a long period of time (say, an hour) is just fundamentally unpleasant. Even normal glasses are uncomfortable and people avoid them as much as they can.
we can resolve this. The headsets are getting smaller, and the AR glasses are getting more powerful. Meta are working this from both angles with the headsets and their glasses. The glasses seem to be doing alright (more time required) [1], and lighter headsets are possible [2].
My suspicion is that people are willing to tolerate some degree of discomfort - discomfort that will get smaller over time - if it's a sufficient value-add to their life. We're at the very start of that; check back in a year from now when developers have had plenty of time with the Quest 3 and the Vision Pro demonstrating Apple's vision for UX and software.
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xreal-air-2
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/23922425/ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses...
[2]: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/
lose to what I want from VR. If it can be used with my Steam library, too, it'll be an automatic purchase. Even without, I'm interested, if only to have the nice super-portable multi-monitor display. Not sure I'm $3k interested, but I might be.
Again, we are slowly realizing why Meta is spending billions on XR headsets and Apple's move to spatial computing just validates the spending.
I expect the Vision Pro to under perform in sales, but it is the next generation of Vision products (2nd and 3rd) that is going to be extremely competitive and cheaper against Meta Quest.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36223235
Sure, mainstream VR has been "just around the corner" since before the average person had access to the internet and I think there are still technical and fashion questions about how mass market-ready the tech is and whether Meta is remotely the right company to market its Android, but if we judged the long term potential of a tech by people's enthusiasm for being observed by their boss even the internet would have been written off...
The Quest headsets are great tech, well priced, and they have some cracking games that get you hooked, but the marketing to the general public was next to non-existent, and the whole mandatory Facebook account plus the paradigm shift from games to AR and Metaverse soured them badly.
If they want to salvage this they need to go back to VR games only.
Maybe, but in practice they tried to force a low quality immature tech, to the already skeptical general public, way too soon.
They should have kept it brewing in their basement and release it gradually years in the future when it would be more mature.
They had to spin it into the "metaverse" which is this mythical thing that might be big enough theoretically to make "real" money for them.
If this was not the case, you would see lots of Facebook restaurants or cleaners or hair salons etc. since these are all easy to make profitable.
And when they are, it's usually <5% margin.
If gaming is profitable but the ads business is more profitable and less capital intensive, you would be advised to stick to ads. Particularly when it's expensive to borrow.
Reality Labs have spent $20bn already. How much does the return on that capital have to be to convince the stock market that it was a good idea?
The problem is the users largely don't give a shit about any of that. What VR adoption there is among the public is exclusively gaming, apart from the weird crypto-web 3 adjacent real estate scams going on in this second life clones. Which, while they have a lot of big numbers to throw around, most of it has been a massive [insert fart noise] in terms of generating anything tangible like new technologies or better performing systems. It's just a crypto sub-culture that includes some (notably bad) VR games bolted to their sides.
Like I have just never seen any evidence at all that regular people are interested in the lightest in participating in any of these metaverse spaces. Video conferencing has purposes, and we saw that demonstrated well during the pandemic, but like, doing what is basically video conferencing with shitty graphics and bland visuals with everyone running around as corporate-art-styled avatars just... sucks ass. It really tremendously sucks and offers no real benefits over standard Zoom calls which we already have numerous profitable services offering. That, combined with collaboration spaces like Slack and Teams and good old telephones has basically all business communication covered, and none of it is made better in the slightest with the stupid metaverse proposed by Facebook.
And for the public, I mean, what can you even say is better? Wandering around a crappy 3D mall to shop for products is infinitely more work for a customer than just opening Amazon. We've already learned this lesson! For a while there we had websites that emulated traditional storefronts with image mapped jpegs representing products on offer and just like... no. The market spoke deafeningly loud: It was WAY EASIER to shop from a list of things to buy instead, and it was way, WAY easier for businesses to maintain those lists rather than building what amounts to a custom videogame to sell their products within.
VR is really cool tech. The metaverse is a dud and Facebook doesn't have enough money, nor really does anyone, to force it the way it would have to be to see wide adoption.
Anyways, all this is to say: don't let yourself get blindsided by a new paradigm while you're resting on the laurels of the last revolution.
Well yes but the difference there is the Internet for all it's flaws is a new form of communication that improves upon it's predecessors. Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications; magazines became e-zines, newsletters became... newsletters I suppose, directories went online, newspapers became RSS feeds/websites. Basically any print media you wanted could incredibly easily become a website that was then infinitely updatable and didn't require sending a physical slice of paper to get the same information across. The trade-off was of course the technical competence required to use the Internet, but people adapted quickly(ish) to that once they understood it and computers were more widely available. There is a cost, but the benefits are clear as day, and the adoption/simplification trend with the migration to platforms combined with the ubiquity of devices with Internet access has only accelerated all of that.
Now I grant, this is with the benefit of hindsight, but still, I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping experience that is directly translatable in this way. VR shopping is slower, it requires an investment in niche technology, the experience itself is far from universally improved with many users having serious motion sickness issues with it, and the medium of text which remains an essential part of the shopping experience (prices, descriptions, dimensions) is uniquely difficult to convey in the VR format, you essentially need to create either popups which are obnoxious, or floating text that is difficult to read.
The ONE aspect I can see is you could visually inspect the item you're looking to purchase in 3D, and while that's neat and useful, it's just as easily accomplished with AR which has been available and quite useful in the Amazon and Wayfair apps for years at this point, and lets you see, for example, a piece of furniture in your given room by just looking at where you'd put it through your phone camera, which doesn't require a headset, motion sensors, and the visualization is better because it collaborates with your existing lighting and decor instead of existing in a void. And, the benefit of in-person shopping which allows the tangible examination of a product is entirely unconveyable in VR because while vibration motors in the hands allow you to experience a proxy of touch, your hands still go straight through it, and the vibration features quickly run up against a wall of limitations with regard to like, simulating the touch and feel of different materials which is basically all you'd want to inspect in this regard.
> The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities.
Right, and this is the problem for Facebook. Because the product we're all unable to look inside just... isn't very compelling and doesn't show any signs of being it. Being able to communicate with people all over the world about niche or even mainstream interests has obvious appeal, that was the entire reason for the rise of social media later, and internet forums before. I struggle to conceive of this same level of appeal for metaverse content because it's... the same thing, but worse in basically every respect: it's costly to engage with, the density of interaction is significantly lower, the content you can experience is much more vast if that content is 3D models, but vastly REDUCED in th...
I think I know where the disconnect is. You're comparing to the wrong historical period, granted they were rather short. I think this is a common mistake, for the metaverse it isn't 2002 when Amazon started selling clothing, it's not even 1995 when CNN launched their website, I don't even think it's 1991 since we haven't settled on a protocol that would allow the equivalent of websites which would be something like the worlds you see in VRChat but not limited to a single app. It's going to happen soon though, it seems like USD might be the HTML of the metaverse[0] and once that gets hammered out things will really take off.
Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web.
> metaverse content because it's... the same thing but worse
You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. You can have flat content in it if you want but it's not the reason people go to VR. The term used most often for the things people seek out in VR are "experiences" those can be interactive games, social gatherings or just passive full immersion. It's similar to what people seek out in the real world, novelty, surprise, laughter, connection. The best way to get across why this is better than just leaving your house is to imagine you live in a small town, without VR your options are pretty limited but with VR you have (or will eventually have as more content becomes available) any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home. That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation.
Coming back to the flat content. Low resolution doesn't really matter that much when you're watching a movie on a theatre sized screen with a bunch of other people from around the world. What matters is being able to turn to the person beside you and say "omg this is my favorite part!" or whispering back and forth about the film or getting up and acting out the scene with friends and laughing about it. No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want.
The best parts of social VR or "the metaverse" aren't browsing web pages, looking at pictures or watching movies. They're sitting around a room talking to people, wandering through a crowded world like you're at a party and taking in all the conversations, dancing, trying out different worlds and games with friends for the first time, going to a live show or any of the other varied experiences on offer.
It's about being with people not about consuming content.
[0] https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-usd-html-metaverse-foundatio...
With all due respect I think this is a highly optimistic view that isn't borne out by any of the current trends. Current headsets have interoperability but we're already seeing a number of manufacturers walling off their hardware from the larger market, by name, Apple and Facebook, one more aggressively than the other. The Internet exploded both because it was built upon a set of open shared standards, and because it was, as said previously, a natural progression of communication technology: print, but faster. VR is not faster than... I mean really, anything. It's slower for basically all forms of communication, not because of the hardware or whatever but because of what it is, because of the physical footprint of the devices. The most convenient one you can point to is the Vision Pro, and it's also (I believe) the most expensive by a solid margin, and it's still almost 2 pounds of stuff strapped to your head.
> Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web.
I mean, I think that's utlimately where we agree. I think because of that, it's overall adoption will remain niche. I think the web's ability to engage people in commerce is one of the big reasons that it has exploded the way it has.
> You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. ... any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home.
Right, absolutely agree. But again, the vast, vast, vast majority of content is flat content. Text, pictures, video, and even the vast majority of videogames are 100% flat. And, it isn't just that the majority is flat; the production expense to create content that is not flat introduces exponentially greater cost to the entity creating it. You say "once we have all these experiences it'll be better" and hey, I want that, I'm in this and I love VR. But VR content is harder to make, harder to test, the hardware is more involved, there are safety concerns to go over that are just not a thing in other media, on and on. Anyone can write press releases and with newer tech, just about anyone can make videos, and even podcasts are still pretty dead simple. But VR content is in a completely different league, you're in for four or even five figures just to begin.
> That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation.
Because the people on the terminal were the fellow weirdos like you who had a similar terminal, being on the early internet you already probably had a LOT in common with all those people right off the bat, solely on the basis that you were both the kind of people who had access to the internet at all.
> Coming back to the flat content. ... No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want.
I mean, it's less a concern for the video and far more for text. And you can say all day "well it isn't for text" and yeah, I get that, but you're missing that text is still the predominant form of communication in technology. If you can't do text effectively, huge a...
They could also just pretend to buy into the first mover assumption, if a large enough fraction of the stock market does, that will be good enough.
Yes, I agree that that the AI-generated virtual worlds are getting better each day, but Mark & Co are making a pretty massive assumption that people (a) want to spend large amounts of time in a virtual world and (b) his virtual world.
We'll see very soon from the uptake of the Apple Vision Pro how many people want that (virtual) reality. ;-)
Given that we will spend all our days in VR in 10 years or so, who will own that space?
The company that designs future products today and only needs to sit on it for a decade until the technology and human society have caught up?
Or the company that goes all in on VR gaming, a technology that exists today, and completely owns that space until the technology is mature enough to branch out beyond gaming?
Is there any reason to assume that VR will be anything other than a niche of a niche in rich countries in such a short time frame?
With that, though: the access to the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, thanks to no small amount by Meta's subsidies [0].
If it does take a pivotal role in our technological future (which I believe it will, but I'm not expecting you to), I would imagine it'd end up being like the smartphone: many vendors will sprout up and drive costs down, especially for low-income markets.
[0]: https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/meta-q...
Hardware is just hardware. Apple builds hardware that then becomes an ecosystem. Reality Labs was trying to build the hardware AND the ecosystem AND the apps.
This on top of an unworkable concept for Human Computer Interaction - Virtual Reality - which consumers have already rejected over and over again. There will be no consumer market VR headset because the concept is fundamentally alienating.
I suspect there are a lot of people on the spectrum in IT who seem convinced that somehow this is a tech problem. IT IS NOT, nor will it ever be. Getting in a VR headset and being in a reality where no one else is ever there, nor will they ever be (in the next 10-20 years, there is no tech that reliably emulates full body capture, not to mention touch and smell, two key parts of the human experience) is fundamentally unpleasant for the general public, because the general public, quite correctly, places a very high level of reward to being around other people, co regulating emotions, reading body language, and kissing and having sex.
Since none of that is mapped into VR, the concept of a general use VR OS with a consumer market is fundamentally dystopian and perhaps even physiologically and psychologically unsafe.
Having said that - I have worked in VR since 2014 and anyone in their right mind will tell you that Reality Labs was a dumb idea. There is not, and there won’t be for a very long time, any mass consumer market for VR (billions of units) because VR is anti human, anti connective and is most likely bad for people if they use it for long hours.
Check out this podcast[0] between Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg where they meet remotely via the metaverse.
[0] https://youtu.be/MVYrJJNdrEg
Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity.
Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
What I’m proposing is you’d just have a “floating head” type call with someone else. The environment around you would be the real one that’s already there.
puts hand up
VRChat, even in its nascent, unrefined, laggy phase, is still much more engaging than any video call I've been on. Sharing the same space with someone improves the experience of communication immeasurably. It's hard to explain, but they no longer feel like a face on a screen, and that enables a much stronger bond.
> Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity.
Yes, this is true at present. However, they're actively working on reducing the requirements for the scan; this is them demonstrating what's possible at the high-end. This is a similar strategy to what Apple's doing with the Vision Pro: they're setting the benchmark before trying to shrink the cost.
Speaking of, you can already see a potential future towards low-cost scanning in Apple's Personas. They're obviously much lower in quality, but they're quick and easy to scan. The future is trending towards that kind of experience, not getting imaged by a dedicated rig.
> Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
Both are good! You're not wrong about the potential of AR teleconferencing. VR teleconferencing lets you set the scene and share an environment with the users, though, which has its own benefits. (Especially when it comes to spatial arrangement; it's much easier / less mind-bendy to have a single shared environment than to have everyone have their own view of the proceedings. Curious to see how Apple will deal with this, though.)
I believe every single word of what you said about enjoying VRchat, and that product has been out for ages. What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.
My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.
AR is, like you said, soon entering its infancy thanks to Apple doing a PARC and releasing a high cost developer prototype.
Without a doubt, yeah.
> What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.
Just above 90,000 [0]. Yes, a far cry from the billions of existing social networks. But I think that's because of a couple of factors, owing to...
> My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.
this. I believe the rejection of consumer VR is not primarily because of the alienation factor - it's because the experience has sucked and costs a lot more than people are willing to spend on a new experience.
I'm a long-time believer in VR; I've been paying attention to it from its 2012 resurgence. However, in that decade, I've seen a few fundamental reasons for why people either don't bother trying it out, or give up shortly afterwards:
- Cost. A good PCVR experience can easily cost thousands of dollars. For VRChat, you really do want that experience (you can only access a subset of content on standalone), and it does not come cheap.
- Comfort. The headsets are not comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
- Isolation. You can't see outside of your space, and other people can't see what you're doing.
- UX. The companies progressing VR have historically not been very good at UX - it's very easy to have a subpar experience with the software.
- Software. There's some high-quality content, but there's not enough of it to sustain interest.
The reason I still believe in it as a medium, despite these problems, is that they're not fundamentally insurmountable blockers. Despite all of these very annoying problems, the strength of the medium still shines through to those who can tolerate it.
There are paths forward for each of these problems; the cost of hardware will be driven down, headsets will get lighter and smaller, there are solutions to let reality in and to let others into your reality, and software troubles can be fixed with iteration and concerted effort from companies who can be bothered.
My existence proof of these things are the existence of the Quest lineup, the Bigscreen Beyond, and the Vision Pro. They all solve parts of the problem - with the Vision Pro being the strongest showing to date - and it's not too hard to envision a future in which one ecosystem has a solution to all of them. It will just take time and effort.
At present, I see the ecosystem being not unlike pre-iPhone smartphones; they exist, they work, but they're lacking the fundamental polish and comforts that a wider audience requires. And like the iPhone, there will come a moment where those things come together, and it will become accessible to the wider consumer market.
I don't think that's happening soon - the Vision Pro is three thousand dollars more and a few hundred grams more than it needs to be - but there's a path forward.
I also don't consider AR to be a separate technology; it's a part of the wider spectrum of XR. Improvements in AR will feed into VR, and vice versa. The Vision Pro is a VR headset masquerading as an AR headset, after all.
[0]: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...
Metaverse is old. It's literally the dream of the 90s and 00s. Linen labs, second life, every animated live in a village game ever. There is no log term play for the "metaverse". There is for VR computing platforms. Unfortunately, Meta has missed that boat trying to take on the Wii and Wii U lobby.
As a concept, virtual universes are actually popular, when you take away the requirement of VR headsets. The barrier of entry is about the cost of an indy game or maybe, a A game title. My kids spend more time playing in the Animal Crossing and Minecraft universe than on the oculus by a mile. Check that, they spend more time in the Goat Simulator or Deeeeer universe.
Plus Nintendo has several failures, the Virtualboy, the Gamecube, WiiU.
My understanding is that the “old technology” approach guided their portable lineup more than anything, and only started to be adopted by their mainline consoles as they started to struggle there and felt they needed a different approach from Sony/MS to compete.
You can play a game at 40hz on a TV but in VR that would instantly give you motion sickness.
Different limitations and challenges.
FWIW, that was only ever a requirement for Occulus Quest, and they removed the requirement over a year ago.
> and they have some cracking games that get you hooked
My main issue with VR is that I only got hooked to Beat Saber. There are some other titles that I quite liked (I expect you to die, demeo), but they never had other games, to the level of Beat Saber, for me to be really excited with the platform.
But that's subjective, no? I personally never got hooked on Beat Saber but instead on 'In Death Unchained'. Like I said, the main problem is marketing. There are great games and experiences out there but probably few know them because there's no hype around them the way there is for Cyberpunk, GTA, CoD and other mainstream AAA franchises that drive insane amounts of money just form preorders of buggy games.
"Yeah, well you know, that's just like, your opinion, man."
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111219354336635872
and
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110721329572538223
you don't see it in those photos but when those things are done they get a barcode that lets you "flip over" the cards. I started developing them a few months before Zuckerberg announced the metaverse and felt in many ways my work was related. (e.g. I can go to a conference and pass out 20 cent glasses to the audience so they can view my 3-d images) I've known for a long time that the cards were going to have an MR component the same way the real numbers have the imaginary numbers, it was a matter of time.
That time has come.
There is a demo for the Quest 3 where your room gets invaded by little aliens and you have to shoot them to catch them and stuff them in a container. Chunks of your wall and ceiling fall away and you can see out to an alien world outside. It's just amazing.
I am showing the demo to as many friends and family as I can so I can get good at presenting it and then I am going to show it to museum directors and similar people because I really want to sell something like that to somebody like that. It's now possible to make something like a theme park experience at a dramatically lower cost. If the technology becomes really mainstream there will be a limited window that this can be sold as something place-based but if it is slow to take off that window is longer.
The Quest 3 has gotten about 1% of the excitement that Apple Vision has but it is here and now and I think fully realized. I think also Meta has learned from many of its marketing mistakes because Zuckeberg wants to win that one. To confront the "people play with it then abandon it" they are providing a license to a game that comes out in a month. I think you'll never see another creepy Zuckerberg avatar. People are so burned out on Meta that the story has been almost buried but I think a lot of people are going to try a Quest 3 and become a believer.
Sure, I guess you can configure an image on GovCloud or one of the other ITAR cloud services but . . have you ever tried to deploy a consumer app image on a NIST-and-FEDRAMP-and-WHATEVERELSE-certified container? There's a reason the big vendors just give up and run on-prem. You end up with a whole other release of your software that you get to maintain, forever. Maybe this has gotten better in the last few years . .
This seems immoral.
We can acknowledge that it is disruptive to employees lives
So it doesn't make sense that Meta would lay people off and rehire others just for fun. They can be greedy or sadistic, not both. Its pretty obvious they use layoffs to get rid of poor performers and divisions they don't want to invest in any more.
In many EU countries they wouldn't be able to fire people "just because we want to", and also, in some countries companies have to offer you other positions if relevant.
People have forgotten that Bezos used to receive very similar treatment over the cloud and everything non book store until it suddenly exploded.
Or maybe the current investors will get rich; that's what keeps them coming back.
It is impossible to spend that much money on AR R&D. This is Meta's moonshot factory, and I'm sure this funds 10s-100s of projects that may not have anything to do with AR.
[0]: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/
Many gaming streaming projects fell before Microsoft and Nvidia cracked the code, and MS is using it to pull people to their ecosystem. Sony lost a lot of money over the years flailing around with GaiKai until they had a stable streaming offer. Even Google lost much of their investment in Stadia.
Similar stories goes with AR games, live streaming, targeted ad services, etc. Some companies have to burn cash and take losses to map all the pitfalls and opportunities of the new market.
The whole metaverse thing is poorly define and kinda useless, but executives firmly believe that when you get all the high income families hooked up with eyes and ears covered by technology, you'll be able to advertise and sell products and they won't be able to look away without turning off their entire platform, and most people don't make this sacrifice. They're more than willing to burn a lot of cash and kill many jobs for the small chance of breaking through and reaching that magical market with the excessive ammount of disposable income of the top Apple fans and engagement levels not even tiktok or the most predatory gacha games could reach.
After dozens of conferences, lots of client demos, and feedback I am convinced it has a place in our world and we have a much better idea of what and how. The question is when and, in some ways, the hardest to solve for.
We could not have done a lot of this without Meta headsets as they were cheap enough to start with and easy to develop on and iterate so personally thankful are taking this long-term bet as it is helping the whole sector. We did contact Meta to see if they wanted to partner in some way or support us as its mutually beneficial but got nowhere, might be case of finding the right person given the vastness of the org.
In any case what is really interesting to ponder reading this piece of news is the gross imbalance of resources in the tech industry and how capriciously they are spent. Imagine spending that kind of money on practically any tech subdomain and it would be transformative. E.g., You could build a completely new mobile operating system. Or you could build an entire new AI/ML oriented language ecosystem and have some spare change.
The flip side (in the scenario where the VR hype does eventually get traction) is the enormous moat created.
I see no reason to take this bet, it may not be best executed but kind of investment I expect to see from trillion-dollar companies.
There is no other entity that has collected so much information on the weaknesses of human behavior and used it to such poor effect.
Big tech is like a giant VC fund. You have one part, maybe not even that huge, thats printing money, the rest beg SVPs for funding once a year and hope for the best, future gambles that no one expects to generate revenue immediately
Facebook has been taking massive losses on virtual and augmented reality since basically day zero with the purchase of Oculus back in the DK1 days.
That has made it impossible for literally anybody other than the other ologopolists to compete in this space, which arguably will be the long term computer peripheral & data collection system of record.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)