What category has Google really succeeded in since the initial era of gmail/Android/chrome? I can't think of any recent successes off the top of my head.
Besides android being gigantic huge, you still have google maps, chrome, gmail, pixel phones, passkey, yubikeypush/2fa, the new cookie aproach, YouTube!!1 etc.
Why would Google need a 'recent' success to be able to win ar snail?
the point is probably about whether google still has the ability to go from 0 to 1. instead of 1 to n. from the outside they look like they are not so slowing becoming the bean counting accountant / MBA type of company.
What a weird framing? You say this as if gmail, android and chrome are all dead now. They’re still being used and improved. Even if they didn’t enter new “categories” they’re still in a lot of existing ones and very popular -like hundreds of million of users- even if alternatives exist.
First of all, Google Search has maintained dominance and relevance for decades. That’s no easy feat. They have news, patents, books, LLMs all added into it.
Google has a hugely popular cloud service. Especially if you include Google Workspace.
Obviously YouTube is huge and regularly gets new features. There is a YouTube app for almost every piece of hardware with a screen.
They have a pretty impressive mapping product suite. Everything from Google maps to Google earth and all their GIS products and tools (eg solar panels location SaaS).
The play store is huge. AND They have a huge variety of extremely popular consumer apps like Photos, Music, Home, etc.
>YouTube TV has piloted past a new milestone: The internet pay-TV service now has more than 8 million subscribers, according to the video giant. That means YouTube TV, available only in the U.S. starting at $72.99 per month, is far and away the biggest internet-streaming subscription TV service in the country.
Zero chance Google actually supplies Samsung with a real operating system they can use. Samsung will for sure release a headset with Meta’s Horizon OS before anything from Google.
I wonder if every category has a "winner". When compatibility was a determinant, you had winners (Microsoft, obv.). I'm not sure winner-takes-all applies any longer.
It's a silly caption isn't it, why would it be third-person view, nobody's going to see those sketches and assume it's an actual product render, surely.
It's fairly trivial to add a HDMI/DP input which directly drives the panels in the headset through a mux (e.g. the Pico Neo3 Link could run standalone or from DP input), but that's probably not what you want, because in that case the HDMI source has to perform all of the 3D rendering and lens correction, using software that probably only supports Windows. If you want to be able to plug in any random HDMI source and have that rendered on a virtual screen then the headset needs a SoC with a low-latency HDMI receiver built in, so it can ingest the video and process it onboard before displaying it, and HDMI input isn't very common on these mobile SoCs.
Maybe you could convert the HDMI input into MIPI and feed that into the SoCs camera interface, but I think headsets like the Quest are already pretty much maxing out the SoCs camera capabilities just to read in all the actual cameras used for inside-out tracking. There's no bandwidth left to shove an extra HD video feed in as well.
tl;dr HDMI input that turns the device into a dumb PCVR headset: easy. HDMI input that mirrors arbitrary video: hard.
(This particular one uses USB-C for video input, but they also sell an HDMI adapter for it.)
Of course, in practice it's just a display and can be used for any purpose. I do appreciate the fact that you don't have to mess around with all the usual VR setup chores with these - it's really very plug and play.
FWIW despite the weird name that invokes cheap Amazon noname brand vibes, these guys have been around for a few years now. They do have other headsets that are in the same ballpark price-wise as XREAL, too - e.g. GOOVIS Young, which is pretty decent for on-the-go use with a smartphone etc. I've owned that one for three years and used it many times with no issues before splurging on G3 Max.
And yeah, $1K is quite a lot, but the 65 degree FOV and 2560x1440 (per eye) OLED that you get for it really does look amazing - I haven't regretted that purchase in the slightest. It's rather bulky, though, although still nowhere near as heavy as VR headsets. Still, not something I'd want to carry on the go.
I hope we'll get 4K per eye some day with this tech. Whichever brand does it first for reasonable $$$, it'll completely replace my primary display.
For Quest 3 specifically, "remote desktop into a computer" actually works surprisingly well if you 1) avoid the stock Meta software and use Steam Link instead, and 2) use wired connection to maximize bandwidth and minimize latency.
The second part needs some explaining. One undocumented feature of Quest 3 is that it supports (some) USB-C Ethernet adapters. There isn't really any UI for it that I know of; things just work so long as DHCP is there. This then gives you a direct wired 1GBps link to the PC, which Steam Link will happily utilize.
Imo a good WAP connected directly to your computer works just as well as with a high end cable. I have both and didn't notice a quality difference either way.
I have xreal glasses and a Quest 3. There's so much friction in using Steam Link/Quest Link/Virtual Desktop that it's barely worth using over the xreal airs. You need to use controllers to turn them on, and if you lose tracking or exit your guardian, the display turns off and you have to grab your controllers again to make any adjustments.
I agree; I use Goovis G3 Max myself when I need this kind of thing (which is bulkier and not AR, but has better FOV and higher resolution). But for people who already have a Quest 3, it can still be a useful trick sometimes.
You're not going to get HDMI (or at least not directly), but you can now get DisplayPort with many of the XR headsets. They're primarily using the alt-mode of USB-C as the cable is re-used for power as well.
This is an interesting move and feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But this isn't open source. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the store. Maybe there's an app revenue share involved?
Wait, at the end of the video he says "We're also as part of this going to be opening up our store to give you even more options to use whatever experiences you want. So whether they're on Steam, Xbox Cloud Gaming, our own App Lab, or even Google Play, if they're up for it." The blog post doesn't mention Steam or Google Play. It's not really clear what that means. Will they allow Steam to sell native Quest apps?
Edit: There's a better blog post that has more detail. https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/meta-horizon-os-open-hardwar... This one seems to suggest that being "open" to Steam just means allowing game streaming which they already do, while being "open" to Google Play means that they would allow Google to install the actual Play Store app on the headset, for 2D apps only. But Google doesn't want to. In any case it seems like they would specifically not be open to alternative app stores selling native 3D apps directly on the headset itself.
I think this is at least better than nothing for companies who want to build standalone headsets and not just headsets that are dependent on PCs. Up until now everyone's had to make their own OS and store and hope that people care enough to port over apps and games.
At the very least, this could lead to more high-end standalone headsets being available. Not every 3rd party headset has to be competing with the Quest line of headsets, so the lack of revenue from the store might not matter to some companies.
It seems to suggest they're limited to Qualcomm chipsets, and Qualcomm don't make a higher end VR chipset so it's hard to see where a high end headset would come from.
Displays and optics are a big one, lots of competing technologies there like OLED vs LED, pancake vs fresnel, movable optics, laser based displays, video pass through vs semitransparent or even HUD style for lower res overlays. They can also compete on audio quality for microphones and headphones, different battery solutions like hot swappable packs, corded or built in. Maybe different form factors that can distribute weight or higher quality head straps for comfort. Tracking options like more cameras for inside out or a different system for pairing with controllers or full body trackers. Even external dedicated compute that works with Air Link. If they’re making the hardware they can add whatever extra chips or sensors they want.
I don't think that's a given long term. Even already the chip in the Quest 3 is rated at the same GPU grunt as an nVidia 1060, the minimum supported chipset originally for PCVR. The next gen is already announced and is significantly more powerful again, able to power 4k displays. I would project in 3 years from now we have something that can actually be considered at least moderately high end in stand alone form factor from Qualcomm.
Yeah, if it was "we acknowledge that is bad for hardware to have one installation path" and they were allowing itch.io to have an indie VR store that might be cool but they are very much not.
Far enough down the line, it will all end up in EU regulation. Doesn't everything?
Or if Meta doesn't become strong enough to be considered a monopoly, you always have the choice to go with their competitors (as is currently the case). I can still install anything I want on my Pico 4.
This seems kind of interesting to me, it's a shame it's from Meta so I'll likely never touch it because of the toxicity of their core products, but I'm glad to see this, as it seems like it could stimulate some competition.
I think the mention of Steam will be to do with the Steam Link app they released for Meta quest devices fairly recently that lets you stream your VR games from your desktop computer to the quest wirelessly https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0E2C-406B-9135-38...
The use-cases for AR are so awful. The last thing I want is to consume already a passive medium with my family wearing goggles. Such an anti-social platform.
MS did the entire VR headset partnership thing, got some very good headsets out (for the time), and then just dropped the project and put it into maintenance mode. If they had kept working on it, it would've done well, as it wasn't falling flat on its face, it was just getting going when they dropped it.
They made the weird business decision to drop the products they had third party cooperation and an enthusiastic userbase for, in favor of an experimental product (Hololens) that ended up only being affordable to businesses and which afaik has never really taken off in the same way as WMR had been.
IMO the issues Microsoft had weren't unexpected. If you look at the disaster that was their US military Hololens project it turns out a fairly significant portion of the population experiences motion sickness and other fundamental issues[0].
This is a hard problem to solve and from what I understand it is similar to issues that are screened for in specialties. For example - fighter pilots and astronauts are screened for all kinds of fundamental things:
- Vision
- Tolerance to motion sickness
- Tolerance to Gs
- Tolerance to claustrophobia (for flight suits, tight cockpits, etc)
If you don't have 20/20 vision (or better), puke all the time in sims, and freak out when put in a flight suit you're just not a fighter pilot, astronaut, etc. Once you make that cut then you train on improving what you fundamentally have and even then wash-out rates are high.
With the Hololens project the goal was to strap a Hololens on pretty much any random soldier. If some fairly large portion of the population just can't make it work the utility and value of the project drops to zero. Imagine standardizing on a gun sight or other key technology that just won't work for even 1/10 of your (already limited recruits), potentially even for otherwise elite soldiers.
I think they realized they will have similar fundamental issues in the enterprise - the utility of a Teams meeting with everyone in Hololens drops pretty significantly when a non-zero portion of employees get sick after a few minutes.
I'm not sure how these issues with the technology can be overcome. Sure, if some gamers can make it work that's cool but that doesn't provide the overall value to the technology MS was hoping for.
Nobody's tried anything like the broad scale pitch Meta is making here. Everyone else has tackled the high end or specialized use cases. Meta's really the only company that's tried to make a true OS play that is meant to be accessible to everyone. Based on that alone I just don't think you can extrapolate from "X failed so this has already been tried". Nobody has tried what Meta is doing.
"we encourage the Google Play 2D app store to come to Meta Horizon OS, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms."
- I feel like this might be the rub of this. Google is way behind in building the android of spatial computing, and maybe this can play into the trust busting cases where meta can show Google not playing fair?
from what I've read on the internet they've been asking for this for a long time but google is blocking it, even before there were rumors of the apple headset.
As a user you can already sideload android APKs, I've tried it works great, but you also need to install apps that manage android permissions since you can't grant them through the quest settings.
having the android store there + integrations where android app devs can make the app VR ready would be a big plus. But, the blocker is that google still has ambitions of making some sort of big comeback on the android VR space and therefore are in direct competition with meta.
Meta likely has the most apps and most users of any one VR platform. Sure everyone needs apps, but they needs apps the least, especially from Play Store.
Unless you see using phone apps as 90" virtual screens as a killer feature at least.
Meta is desperate to get devs to develop apps on their platform. It is the only way to get more interest in VR. Devs dont want to be on it because there are no customers, consumers don't want it because there's no apps. They've been trying to market it hard but nothing has worked. They tried to brand it as a fitness device, a work device, and a game device, but the consumers are not biting.
I would really love to see proper educational content from Meta but i bet this is not were the 'next money thing' is.
Imagine a catalog of proper real life skills you can actually train reasonable good:
- cooking
- soldering
- welding
- Tons of woodworking things
- ...
You could also go to a lot of makers of tools and offer them to digitalize their products for them so someone can actually exercise with a cheap to super high end machine like specific CNCs or table saws etc.
Where would that fit in between watching others do it on YouTube for entertainment, and doing it for real where you can hold (or eat) the result at the end?
More hassle than a YouTube video, which is already more hassle than an article, but considering we’re talking about mixed reality, the ability to do the soldering, next to a detailed 3D model of exactly what you should be doing, in your line of sight, is a big selling point to me.
It seems one of the primary tradeoffs in edutainment is between actually learnable teaching and “content porn” where you sub content with food, cars, tech, etc.
When I think of truly learnable cooking videos the first thing that comes to mind is Kenji’s POV cooking videos / streams. Seems like something that could be relatively adaptable to a AR / MR format in a way that would differentiate it from other (still valid) content like the relatively educational food porn from Alex / @FrenchGuyCooking.
I'm actually making a version of Kenji's macaroni and cheese (except with shredded baby back rib meat added) for lunch as we speak! His channel is great.
I would also be interested in a Chef Jean Pierre simulator, where you learn classic French recipes in a subtly deranged metaverse with a butter-based economy.
As cheap to perform in as YouTube video, almost as vivid as the real thing, but again with most of the bullshit ("reality has a lot of detail") removed, just like with a YouTube video. Ideally, it would be suitable for experimenting with something you might want to then try out for real, but which would be too risky (time, money, embarrassment) to start with for real.
I really want some good VR train sims. It’s vaguely educational! A standalone quest train sim would be an instant buy for me. Probably not for many other people.
A previous company I worked at was using mixed reality years ago (>4) to train manufacturing operators on manufacturing processes.
It ended up looking like a simulated workbench with low-detail models of CAD parts that needed to be assembled - it was pretty cool. Engineering companies are very ready for this technology.
A local school here trains nurses in a VR environment that is situated inside a fully built out wing of a hospital. The headsets come down from the ceiling, all the equipment is real, but there are dummies in the beds, and some observation screens for others who supervise.
Why would you want to see it "from Meta"? There's no way a single company, that isn't even in the education business, can product that kind of content and keep it up to date. Meta's play is the right one – make an OS and software platform and let people build whatever they want on it.
Coincidentally, I saw Meta ads plastered all over London today - showcasing a welder who claims she practiced/learned welding with a Meta Oculus sitting at home.
Meta playing 3d chess here. Opening up the OS to other hardware providers is a great strategic move imo. Excited to see what innovations other hardware manufactures add.
Not to devalue their engineering departments, but I really don't remember any innovations in the software space from ASUS, Lenovo or alike hardware vendors. To me they're all essentially the same stuff, with different kind of junkware (or, in case of Lenovo, malware) bundled.
What I read is "we reached out to a bunch of vendors who dabbled in VR/AR/XR/whateveryounameit but failed to produce anything outstanding, so we made a deal of licensing them some software so maybe they'll fare better". Meta did the right thing in a sense that they made some sales, but I wouldn't hold my breath as a end-consumer.
I kinda agree. I don't think any of them are likely to be major players in the space, but I think they might be able to build niche products that serve specific markets better than Meta's generalist VR headset. They might try a lightweight, battery free, sitting headset for gamers or media applications, for example.
And I think just generally they're more likely to try random things than Meta are to get hype around some unique feature. Take the Asus Zenbook Duo as an example, it's not necessarily a great product but it's interesting and some people will buy it for that. Plus industry learns something from experiments like this.
Either way, it's a good move for Meta and it's good for the industry that there is a fully-featured OS available for hardware manufacturers.
Meta has a lot of work to do on DevEx for non-gaming experiences. Say what you want with the Vision Pro, but it comes with a lot of niceities like SwiftUI. When you develop with the Quest, you're stuck with Unity or Unreal Engine -- it's almost too much freedom to develop simple productivity apps.
for 2D you can also plain old android apps, they work here.
the point though is that there's not that much room for 3D stuff without going through either unity or unreal or writing everything yourself from scratch.
if your goal is to make some sort of `spatial computing` tool, well there nothing here you can use. each app is it's own little silo that has little room for interaction.
I'd love to be able to write my own custom apps that can exist in the home screen/environment and that can interact with each other in non trivial ways.
it would make it feel more like a personal space rather than a 3D slideshow that I can use to launch games.
Simply rendering your Unity Application within your React Application is just the beginning! The Unity Context exposes a lot more fun functions and properties to play around with such as two way communication or requesting fullscreen or a pointerlock. The possibilities are endless, what's next is up to you!
Love it or hate it. Everything ends up in JavaScript!
A video about their upcoming spatial SDK ("augments") already leaked [0] and you are correct, it's based on JavaScript, using their Spark toolkit [1] which is hardly surprising - when the company already ships a production AR dev kit, why would they not use it?
I don't hate it. JS has its worts, but so does every language. I don't think there is a single language even close to JS for lowering the bar of entry to software development. All of the bad things about it that "real computer science" folks complain about are the exact same features which give it a far more broad reach than Rust or Golang. Software development experiences the exact same problem that the internet at large has suffered. The lower and lower bar of entry invites less and less competent folks to create things they never before would have been able to create. Some of these things are genuinely useful and we benefit greatly by lowering the bar, and most of these things end up being shit because the people who made them really had no clue what they were doing.
Lowering the bar of participation greatly increases the amount of shit that is created, but also increases the amount of exceptional examples which can come from a domain. If 80% of everything created is almost complete garbage, then lowering the bar of entry for participating will exponentially increase the amount of shit out there. But it will also enable a few really great apps which wouldn't have existed otherwise. I think we need better filtering than to raise the bar so only true experts can participate.
Or it just happened to monopolise the browser at a time when the web was being invented, and has nothing to do with the features of the language.
As a language for new developers is terrible: 100 different ways to do anything, most of them a muddle of paradigms that's inexplicable to anyone without 2 decades of experience, and so on.
Imagine a new developer using ChatGPT to generate: python, C, go, etc. vs. generating javascript. Most of the generated js is incomphrensible to newbies, but for the others generally obvious.
> Or it just happened to monopolise the browser at a time when the web was being invented, and has nothing to do with the features of the language
But applets were doing a lot more in the 90's and Flash dominated into the 2010s. However you feel about JS today, it's difficult to say it was all "first-mover advantage".
At one point in time the React/React Native teams put out a blog post devoid of any actual details about “multi platform” support and mentioned VR in it. I’m surprised I haven’t hear anything else about it since.
Yeah it's kind of mind-boggling to me that the creators of React (which SwiftUI is ofc heavily inspired by) and the most successful cross-platform quasi-native library (React Native), have not managed to bring those powers to their biggest investment.
I wonder if it's being used internally? Just looked back on the blog post and they actually say "Although most of the development for VR will still be internal, we hope to share more as soon as we can. We also anticipate that improvements to React Native for VR will surface in open source." Makes me wonder if possibly they are using it to create some app themselves, would be interesting to decompile some APKs and see.
> The biggest innovation with Vision Pro is visionOS. visionOS provides native app frameworks, so developers can build apps for it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, and yet its something Meta have failed to offer for years. Every app on Quest has to reinvent how buttons work, how a scroll view works, how far away from the user the content should be etc.. and every app works differently. On visionOS, all of this is handled by Apple, and every app looks and feels the same.
Meta does have standardized utilities for translating movement to touch/drag/etc. interactions on arbitrary virtual surfaces:
But it doesn't seem (AFAIK) to answer the other side of this, which is the UI design system so apps have a consistent look and feel. Which is perhaps more common coming from a game development perspective, but ever since the Mac OS shareware days, Apple's understood that it's empowering to a certain kind of developer if you make it easy/the default path for them to build experiences that match a standardized look and feel. I'm honestly surprised that Meta didn't at least make an optional SDK for this.
It says 'to more device makers', not all, and anyway it wouldn't even have to be open source but just public releases? I expect it's a case of applying and meeting whatever standards though.
The fact that you still have to apply as a developer is a bit discouraging. (though that might change...). I can't seem to find anything on github.
Hoping that this is an oversight and that they will open-source the core platform in the next few months/years. It would be so awesome to hack/build on this platform
Is it based on some prior art (BSD, Linux...), or a new proprietary OS written from scratch? The post is not too rich in actual information, beside that now other tech-giants can use it too...
Would you rather have the typical "iOS developer experience" and XCode? Or are you under the impression that Android development hasn't progressed? Additionally, there is also Flutter which is starting to account for a good percentage of new apps.
Yes I would indeed take the iOS developer experience and Xcode anytime over the mess that is the Android SDK, Android NDK, Gradle (or whatever the current build system flavour of the month is), Android Studio, Java, Kotlin, ... and I bet for VR/AR one needs to fall back to native code to get any sort of performance, and the Android NDK is by far the most user hostile SDK I have seen across all platforms since I started with computing in the mid-80s (followed closely by the Android SDK and Android Studio) and all of that only improves at a glacial pace, if at all.
"This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people."
Hopefully they stick to a proper license model with AOSP as a cornerstone.
I can't recall when I first heard the name "OS" used to mean just another linux distro, whereas my increasingly old-man brain expects the term OS to mean a unique kernel, not a repackaging of a different one. Certainly by the 2010s that usage was common.
I feel like these days some would even call something an "OS" if it's running in a docker container, without providing any kernel at all. Which is to say the meaning of the term is expanding.
I do like the fact that you just accepted the evolution of the term rather than having a rant about how it changed and eventually being accused in the replies of gatekeeping the term os
From personal experience as far back as the 80's (and from my understanding going back before that as well), OS has never meant kernel.
An Operating System is the collection of software that allows you to operate a computer, so that means kernel, program loader, simple text editor, simple disk management, etc.
As computer users became more savvy, and hardware became more powerful, more and more functionality was included in the OS (graphical interfaces, utility apps, etc.).
I don't think many people would have trouble calling Android an operating system, and that's just the Linux kernel with utility apps, loader, and app libraries, yet very different from something like Redhat.
I don't think it's a stretch in the least to call Horizon an OS.
> Most current usage of the term "operating system" today, by both popular and professional sources, refers to all the software that is required in order for the user to manage the system and to run third-party application software for that system.
Note it says "most current usage". That is because the usage was changing at that time, or had only recently changed. (I picked 2006 because I remember it changing around then.) If we go back another 2 years:
> In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations ...
Sure sounds like that doesn't include userland. Definitions which include userland are marked as "colloquial".
Famously in the 1990s, Microsoft tried to argue in court that an OS included a web browser, and that discussion is cited in these old articles... Many reasonable people at the time thought that position was bullshit.
> I definitely heard it used to literally mean only the kernel. Circa 20 years ago and earlier.
You're correct that people have been conflating the kernel and the operating system as the same thing for a long time, but it's not technically correct to call "Linux", for example, an operating system. Stallman would appreciate that people stop doing that ;)
> I definitely heard it used to literally mean only the kernel. Circa 20 years ago and earlier.
You may have, but it was a nonstandard usage. Even your 2004 Wikipedia article distinguishes between OS and kernel. Userland is certainly part of it.
AmigaDOS, 1991, manual p22: "Each AmigaDOS process represents a particular process of the operating system— for example, the filing system [...] AmigaDOS provides a process that you can use, called a Command Line Interface or Shell. (https://archive.org/details/1991-baker-jesup-et-al-the-amiga...)
> This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people.
Which gives some context to the calls for Google to bring the play store content library to Horizon.
I wonder if this "opening" of the operating system is their way of putting the metaverse project out to pasture - analogous to donating it to the Apache Foundation - without admitting that the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure.
Exactly this. Facebook makes money by network effects. They are incentivized to grow network engagement, more than they are to make direct money off new network members.
Which, I guess, makes sense. I think it is absolutely nuts that people would buy an OS developed by an ad company that relies on user profiling for their whole business. But then again it works for Google.
Having a personal computer at home was a game-changer, though. "The Metaverse" has been around for a couple years now, and yet consumer VR (which has been around for eight years now) is still just a "gimmick", rather than a must-have.
The IBM Personal Computer released in 1981. By 1989... yeah.
iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
> iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
Advanced phones with proper os, apps, camera had been around for years, and personal digital assistants before that. Tablets, too. iPhone got the form factor and ui exactly right and triggered an explosion, but it was far from the first. We might still be in the "smartphone, pre-iPhone" years.
I don't know what exactly is the right analogy for this, but two other points of context which make me discredit this line of thinking.
1. Feature/smart 'Phones' were around before the iPhone *and* were already pretty much ubiquitous. VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (either in people's houses or in distribution centres not being sold).
2. VR has arguably existed in some ways before the Quest, Nintendo Virtual Boy was from the mid-90s.
Maybe the iPhone comparison isn't right, but if we're decades into developing this technology and still very early in development I think we should assume we're a LONG way off these things becoming mainstream consumer devices and we should be wary of any company that brings them to the consumer market.
> VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (sic)
Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million. Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players.
If you allow for some overlap, that's roughly ten million monthly users, and in sales VR is already more successful than a lot of computer platforms of the past.
> Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million.
There is no way that those numbers are right.
EDIT: Yeah, Steam has 120 million active users per month. And the 6+ million users for Quest is from 2022, during the pandemic and metaverse bubble. Would be curious to know the trends for 2023 and 2024 thought.
It’s crazy because if you try the Quest it’s quite insane how good it is already. If I were to guess what could give it an iPhone moment:
- lighter/more comfortable
- faster to get started when you put the headset on
- more social experiences and event organized in VR
- shorter time from headset on to hanging out with your friends in VR
A number of years ago I convinced a bunch of my friends to buy the Quest after being blown away by board games in VR, but turns out Catan only worked for the Go and it was a lot of work to do something together in VR.
IMO there needs to be some sort of lobby that does not take you away from hanging out with your friends when you’re in between games. I should be able to easily join a lobby or pause a game to go to a lobby and wave at my friend who’s playing to pause and join me in the lobby
There is, but it is kind of crappy. It's crossplay, but not in a meaningful way. You can't create a room and share a room code. The best you can do is invite a friend, but only if they are on the same platform. They've never done anything to improve it or make it more player friendly. They released it and forgot about it.
It's this and one other point: Games that people aren't bored of in an hour.
To me, very few games have come out for VR that don't feel like gimmicky experiences. Even Half Life Alyx, as advanced as it was, kinda felt like a theme park ride after a while. I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously.
It's hard to justify strapping a TV to my face and feeling uncomfortable for one-off experiences. Even if there was a game with some depth and replayability, I would be even more annoyed to play it on such an uncomfortable headset.
Almost everyone I know is not using their VR headset anymore. I'm not sure it will ever move past that phase, because people want it to be smaller and, simultaneously, more technically immersive. So we're in some weird in between zone where it's neither.
>I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously.
The "technical" reason for it is very very very simple: Nearly no video games are actually improved by "increased immersion" to an extreme. Chess won't be more fun because you have to physically move digital chess pieces around a virtual board, people playing Call of Duty do not want to physically move their arms around to aim, and don't want to jump around to move, and if you aren't doing those things you don't want the downsides that are inherent to a VR system, like extreme seclusion of wearing a headset, physical ability being an inherent filter, clunky UI, nausea etc.
The TWO areas where VR is useful, flight simulators and driving simulators, haven't even fully adopted VR simply because it's too much hassle.
VR is only a gimmick unless you can benefit from that extra immersion, and most things cannot.
The Wii sold gangbusters because everyone and their grandma could understand "swing remote to swing tennis racket", but you couldn't actually build a hyperaccurate tennis sim off of that because a Wiimote is NOT a tennis racket and you cannot get beyond that. VR is the same way. Everyone can experience the "Oh VR is soooo coool" gimmick but very few genres inherently benefit from what VR provides.
Where VR shines, in my opinion, is in fitness. Where the goal is ultimately to move around in a gamified way. That's effectively how I use my Quest 2 and I'm not alone. Recently I've been trying to increase my table tennis skills.
But why does it need a heavy screen attached to your head? Just get some shorts and go outside, and if you can afford a quest 2 then surely you can afford a tennis table
It's not that heavy. I don't have the room for a tennis table nor am I close enough to my friends to play it for 30 minutes every night like I do in VR.
I think part of the problem is this weird insistence that VR means having to physically move arms around etc. For most games, the visual experience of VR can vastly improve immersion, but control schemes nearly universally suck. Simulators work so much better largely because they don't fall into the same trap - if you're playing a flight sim, say, you're still probably using the same stick/throttle/pedals as you would without the headset. For space sims, I find that headset + mouse combo works amazingly well (End Space is a good showcase of what can be done there). And so on.
But for some reason there's practically no uptake on any of this outside of sims. I would love to see a first-person shooter that is fully VR enabled while still allowing me to use WASD + mouse. In fact, I already kinda sorta do that by using 2D theater mode with games like Insurgency: Sandstorm, but that doesn't give you the actually useful VR stuff like the ability to turn your head to look around etc. If somebody were to make an FPS that did all that, they'd have my money in a heartbeat.
That some reason is motion sickness. There has to be consistency with your perception, else it develops into compounding vection feelings. It tend not to apply for vehicular controls hence sim usage.
That varies from person to person. I have played games with keyboard and mouse in VR (e.g. Polynomial 2, or the unofficial GTA 5 VR mod), and it works great for me.
>The TWO areas where VR is useful, flight simulators and driving simulators, haven't even fully adopted VR simply because it's too much hassle.
I see this come up, over and over again. It's so obviously wrong based on even a basic reading of the market. The Quest is unambiguously the most popular VR headset and it's store has barely any cockpit simulators at all.
At a smaller scale, Eleven Table Tennis is an extremely accurate VR Table Tennis game that supports paddle attachments. It is extremely close to the real thing, professionals use it for practice.
> Nearly no video games are actually improved by "increased immersion" to an extreme. Chess won't be more fun because you have to physically move digital chess pieces around a virtual board
Couldn’t disagree more. Experiences in VR are insanely immersive and this is why there’s so much love for VR.
Also, I played Catan (a board game) in VR and it was the most social experience I’ve ever had in a video game.
It's a completely different level compared to Wii.
The amount of sensors we have on controllers now means, it can pick your slight wrist movements for top spin, side spin and more accurately measure bat speed. The physics engine on these games are so close to being realistic.
Now, let's compare it to IRL and since I played college level cricket, I'll tell you the difference.
When I practiced as an amateur, I was able to face at the most 25-30 pitches per day. Of them, only 1 or 2 were what I can remotely call "quality" pitches and I'd have to spend 3 hours per day.
In the Metaverse, in 3 hours, I'd have faced 750 quality pitches including 95mph pitches (The highest I ever faced in IRL was 70mph) including extremely difficult curve balls, deception etc.
All this for a marginal cost of $0 and the physics and simulation will only get better
I game quite a bit and had access to multiple headsets at home because of the work my wife did, for a couple years. Official permission to use the hardware for whatever.
I tried beat saber for like 10 minutes and never bothered with anything else. The headset’s just too big a hassle, and blocking out the world sucks a lot.
Plus I can’t help but think of the VR headset guy from the Pearl Jam video “Do the Evolution” when I look at the damn things.
Kinda like how I think of the dad from Serial Experiments Lain any time one of my kids walks in and I’m in front of a glowing screen.
Speaking of Serial Experiments Lain, there is also the guy walking around the street in the AR headset which everyone thought was weird. Funny that it's still weird 27 years later.
I have access to a Vive headset for school project right now and do not find it very fun to use, Beat saber remains the only VR game that is at least on the same tier of replayability as osu.
They actually do have cross game party chat these days, just FYI. Just make the party and then hop into the game. Support is a little inconsistent as games are not forced to support the feature, though.
The Quest is insanely good, for a single person in isolation, once it's up and running. But there's a ton of friction that shouldn't exist before that happens, and Meta hasn't nailed most of the UX here yet. For example:
- App sharing / libraries doesn't work properly yet. (The owner has to secretly log in to each individual app themselves, before anyone else can use it on the device. There is no documentation informing anyone of this requirement)
- Add/ons or DLC also don't work properly yet. (You have to 're-unlock' each individual DLC, for it to share to anyone else on device in something like Beat Saber, for example)
- Child permissions don't work properly yet. (The notification does work, but a parent is not allowed to approve an app from that notification, the child has to entirely shut down and restart the whole device, before an approval takes effect)
- Screen sharing doesn't work, at all. (If you have a child, you just can't ever mirror their view onto a TV or Tablet -- full stop, no exceptions. Which also means, there's no way to help a child who is wearing a headset -- ever). Note that "taking the headset off" triggers a state reset, so a child can't hand the headset over to their parent for help, since the face sensor will kill state the second a face is removed.
- Windowing UI doesn't really work yet. (You can have windows, but only three, and only side-by-side, and only for a select few apps) -- it's more usability-restricted than even stage manager on an iPad. You can tell the Quest is designed around the expectation that you will be in one-and-only-one full-screen game, pretty much the entire time your wearing the headset.
- Online sharing is app-dependent, a bunch don't work. Many more don't work at first, you have to spend 30 to 60 minutes "unlocking" the right to match-make. (making the online/networking more seemless is critical because of the nature of the device -- you can't both look at it the way you might with a TV or PC or Laptop or Tablet, since it's a worn device)
None of this is dealbreaking stuff, none if it needs any kind of "new invention" or anything to fix. But as a product, friction is still really high here, and I can see why it's not necessarily super popular outside of techie/gaming scenes yet.
This is definitely not true. The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.
Also not sure what state reset you're talking about. I've definitely grabbed the headset from another person and continued with the game.
> The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.
You don’t have your kid on a child account, you have your kid using an adult account. Child accounts can’t screen share —- it’s acknowledged in the Quest FAQ - https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experiences/o...“only the primary account can cast”
> Not sure what state reset you’re talking about.
Setup a child account. Let your kid login. Have the kid take the headset off. Congrats, everything just got killed, and it’s now PIN-locked to the adult account. When the adult types in a PIN, it trashes the child’s session, and starts an Adult session.
(We work around this by gently holding the face sensor with a finger while moving the headset around between people, to trick the headset into thinking it’s still being worn -— but this is ridiculously broken, no one should have to do that just to get it to work)
Even as a kid before the iPhone came out, it wasn't hard to see the appeal of a smartphone. People loved their Blackberries and Palm Treos. Having internet access wherever you go was incredibly appealing even before the hardware, software, and infrastructure were ready to make that mass marketable.
VR makes a ton of sense for video games, but I just don't see how it could enhance the rest of my day-to-day life. I don't see it becoming a good general purpose computing platform that most people use all day. I see it being useful for specific niche tasks like CAD, but I'll never put on a headset just to send an email, file my taxes, or browse the internet.
I see tons of appeal for headsets in day-to-day life. Maybe Im unique but I spend a solid hour a day lying in bed reading or on my tablet, I think this experience of using a computing device while lying down could be vastly improved with the right headset and thats an hour every day straight away.
I'm still a little nonplussed. i don't like apple stuff, but did a couple demos at work with the vision elite or whatever its called.
Came away very impressed with the technology, but really didn't like having the damn thing strapped to my head for 15-20 minutes.
it reminds me of getting the original 3ds that could do some cool AR stuff, and could do 3d without glasses, but ultimately was an impressive tech demo that I mostly didnt use.
I already spend too much of my day in front of phones and monitors, I'm not sure if the answer is moving the screens closer to our eyes and shutting out more of the world.
industrial applications for sure can have a niche with this, but as a mass market device I think there's a long way to go, even if the experience looks good.
Consumer VR hasn't had it's Blackberry moment yet!
Coincidentally, someone I interacted with mentioned "I never thought I'd get rid of my Blackberry" in passing, which reminded me of the term once popular term "Crackberry".
VR headsets can be fun for some games, but the hardware and software still have a lot of maturing to do, it's not like smartphones where it feels very developed and there's not much more room for obvious growth/improvement.
Yesterday i was close to buying a Pico 4 (Cheaper non meta Quest 3 equivalent), then i realised there has been zero fully triple a games since my friend blew me away with a Half Life Alyx demo 4 years ago.
I find it incredible there's still only 1 actual "serious" VR game - lots of people then recommended Skyrim VR, a game from 2011.
It's not at all, no. There's plenty of compelling games, there just aren't any AAA games (not ones built for VR only anyway) because the market simply isn't big enough to justify the incredible production costs.
If you're dead set on only AAA games then yeah, it's not a useful purchase, but that doesn't mean it's "standing still".
It's both. Meta can be "giving it away" and "hoping to establish an OS foothold" but if there is no major interest in playing in this space, it's going to be a very empty metaverse.
Using the name « horizon » without showing Horizon Worlds at all definitely hints at Horizon Worlds being a side social feature of the Horizon OS, versus this being an OS specifically FOR the horizon worlds metaverse.
Meta/Facebook really has trouble with focus, I hope they can pick 1 vision for VR.
I think they have the most focus out of any big tech company. They have like 4 products.
They’re trying to build a platform to build VR experiences on. That’s clearly their goal. Horizon Worlds is “just an app” to show that off. It’s a “hero use case”.
I looked at it seriously for content authoring but gave it up.
The big problem is you cannot import images, textures, 3-d models and such from ordinary tools. You have something like constructive solid geometry to work with but only so much and there is a slider you can use to set the number of players and the more players the less geometry you can use.
I want to make worlds based on photographs (particularly pano and stereo) and art. McDonalds needs to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup. Either way it is a non-starter.
HW supports collaboration (more than one person shares the world) but https://aframe.io/ lets me make the content I want. If I have to choose one or the other I am going to pick the second.
My take on Meta Quest is that it seems highly successful as a gaming environment based on an app store but is skews towards single-player experiences. Like a lot of AAA games, the excellent Asgard’s Wrath 2 has some multiplayer tacked on but it is all meaningless like leaderboards and the occasional ghost that shows up in a procedurally generated dungeon.
Of course, Meta wants to make multiplayer experiences but somehow they just can’t do it.
The most popular gaming experiences on Quest are all social - Gorilla Tag, Rec Room, VR Chat, Population One, Contractors etc.
It makes sense that expensive AAA experiences like Asgard's Wrath are single player since that's a fairly dominant model in gaming. The Quest doesn't have the player base to support a AAA multiplayer model at this point.
Not really. There is no money in VR/AR headsets. All the money is in the services that back them. Even further, the less money is in making headsets, the more money is in the services.
To say nothing about your data, which is Facebook's primary revenue driver.
It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are.
I'm not keen on more headsets having a Meta data vacuum built-in, but this isn't the opposite of putting the metaverse stuff to pasture.
They're just shifting from an Apple strategy of full-control vertical integration to a Android/Windows strategy of platform ubiquity.
> It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are.
Which would be weird cause the hardware (Quest 3/Quest Pro) is top notch, while Metas software for it is garbage. Everything good is provided by 3rd party companies.
Pixel phones are great too, but Google would be a radically different company if they tried to saturate the demand for Android hardware on their own.
Making flagship/reference hardware on the Oculus legacy is a much better strategy for Meta and lets them focus on platform vision and data collection, which is exactly the company they spent the last 15+ years building.
1. Zuck always wanted to own a platform. He was a developer at heart and wants a product that developers can build on. He’s personally invested in this.
2. I’m pretty sure a lot of the cost quoted for their “Metaverse” stuff included their CapEx for a ton of GPUs which probably have a lot of other uses within the company.
I wonder how 1. works. Won't any developer tell you that platforms are traps, to be avoided unless necessary (or unless you're prepared in advance to jump off it at any time)? I feel platforms are only interesting to business folks, particularly those selling access to them.
Animals usually realise there is something off about a trap. They interact with it extremely cautiously, sometimes leaving it for a few nights and then coming back.
Eventually their desire for whats in the trap overcomes their caution and they put their head in.
I mostly meant when Apple goes crazy like Vision Pro being $3500, Mac Studio and Mac Pro prices, etc. Those are low-volume items and I think Vision Pro will be relegated to that niche too. If they cut a lot of useless fluff like the eyeball cams/screens, and focus on fit/price they can have a good V2. But the "spatial computing" thing was dead on arrival, it'll never take off as it hasn't taken off in 40 years. People don't want to wave their arms in the air all day.
While we can debate plenty on what the right amount of App Store fees might be, it is objectively true that developers absolutely care about the market of available consumers on the high end platform.
The number of employees who can see failure coming does not matter when they are organized by hierarchy and coerced to work toward failure under threat of losing their wage.
Meta kind of doesn't have a choice. The major platforms are now owned by Apple, Google, and Microsoft (and also to a lesser extent IBM and Amazon). The strategic risks of being dependent on other companies' platforms are huge. Meta is desperately hunting for a disruptive innovation that will allow them to control the next major platform. A lot of people are betting that will be AR/VR but it could be something completely different.
Speaking from the perspective of a person who is very into VR. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong. First, Facebook/Meta pushing hard with low-end hardware that caused the existing VR gaming to take leaps backward. PCVR was progressing fine before Zuckerberg intervened. Now the VR space is just cluttered with so many low effort, low res games. None of the big players want to get involved, because everyone is so convinced it is too "niche." Meanwhile, you have people who really want to spend money on VR and there's nothing worth spending the money on.
Why would they shut down the Metaverse? It’s clearly the future and Zuck brought it up again in the last podcast that people are linking to. Apple just release a bad headset that just confirmed the bet that Meta took
How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?
At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better.
Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.
100k/yr is not reasonable for Bay Area, let alone top talent. There are people working on it making $1M/yr+. Junior developers straight out of college are making more at Meta. You're also assuming everything went to just engineering payroll, which is obviously not true.
Then FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr.
And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast?
Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).
That's confusing the decision to work on something with the quality of the folks working on it. Brilliant engineers often work on things which are risky from a market perspective. It doesn't make them less brilliant at engineering when it turns out there isn't a market for the thing.
John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.
I want to make a snarky comment about how any reasonable person would want 10x that to work for Facebook but 500 human lifetimes is still a wild amount of time for what they’ve gotten.
In terms of difficulty/complexity, nothing you've listed there comes anywhere close to the r&d required to go from the original oculus prototype to volume shipping the meta quest 3.
"Opening" what? I can't think of anything here that even remotely resembles opening something to a public or donating a project to any foundation.
They realized they have an asset, and they made some money by licensing it. Sales department did their job, story at 11. But it would've been a boring non-story, so a copywriter used the corporate brandbook - and "open" is the buzzword of the last few years when it comes to the technology.
Someone need to make an LLM SaaS to de-bulshittify the news.
Agreed. Zuck on Dwarkesh's podcast definitely seemed to be doing some aggressive retconning, making it seem like AI was always the plan, and the metaverse never was. Of course the opposite was true.
Am I the only weirdo who does not want, under any circumstance, to move to a world where head-mounted computer systems are normal? It's bad enough we have the things in our pockets. I don't want mine mounted in front of my eyes.
I can hear the replies already, "If you don't want one, don't use one," but if something becomes normal enough, the outside world does change around it. Why invest in street signs, for example? Who prints maps or encyclopedias now? Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?
It's not just that I don't want to use it. I don't want it to become normal among other people either.
For what it's worth, we are many decades away from this being the new normal in daily life. It'll more likely start to chip away at iPad and computer sales though.
As for your examples, such as maps/encyclopedias, they still do even in the smartphone age.
>Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?
There's a great movie called Virtual Nightmare that is basically about this. But I don't think it's such a bad thing, to be honest. We'll have a world where art can be more easily exchanged and public spaces become more collaborative. And the flip side is that hopefully, "offline" will have less ads and there will be a renewed focus on more indie and subversive decoration.
Change isn't always bad, and it isn't always good.
I fondly remember the times where Glassholes were rightfully mocked. Now it's cool to drive around in your Tesla wearing an Apple Vision. It really seems to have become very normalized.
> Now it's cool to drive around in your Tesla wearing an Apple Vision.
This may have more to do with your particular social circle (or mine) than a general trend in pop culture. I don't know anyone who thinks any of those are cool.
It's funny to me because pretty much every single issue that the Google Glass had still persists:
- it's too damn expensive (you look like a rich klutz wearing one)
- the content is mostly just normal games and videos that you watch in stereo
- the FOV and camera resolution are too poorly miniaturized to do anything serious with
Why doesn't it surprise me that public perception did a 180 when they saw the brushed-aluminum model with an Apple logo on it? At this rate Apple should sponsor a second Hindenberg just to check if their luck's run dry.
Part of the difference is that Glass was uploading images (and audio?) to Google for them to use however they like. That was the asshole invasion of privacy. People trust Apple more, right or wrong.
No, you’re not the only one, or even in the minority (outside of the terminally online tech bubble). I feel the same way.
But I also see the value of AR/VR to a number of industries that need more visual interaction metaphors. CAD/CAM, architecture, and real estate come to mind. I could totally see buying a house across the country “sight unseen” based on a 3D scan (if regulatory guards are in place to prevent modifying the scan).
Having an open OS architecture for AR/VR apps is key to making this happen. Current offerings all fall short in various ways, so I’m curious to try this out.
It's only a natural extension of the things that we have in our pocket. I would rather be immersed in the whole virtual world rather than stare at a 7 inch screen for a large part of my day.
Lets face it, we spend considerable amounts of time in front of a screen. A bigger and more immersive screen will be a better experience for everyone.
if it takes a similar course as the form factors of mobiles from the 1990s to today it may become quite convenient to use... Also many including me prefer Wikipedia over printed encyclopedias. Getting that context while navigating the world may even become a necessity to collaborate or compete with AIs efficiently in the future.
On the other hand I do appreciate beauty in nature and design.
It feels like a competition to own a comparatively narrow market (if we're talking about VR). And, within that context, it may indeed be a good idea. But I just cannot see VR headsets being anything approaching common, primarily because people do not like tech accessories they cannot put away unless they have a high fashion value or effectively look like something else. VR headsets, today, check none of these boxes. AR might end up being a different story.
The Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End famously presents a future in which people's interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality via contact lenses. It's not presented as a necessarily bad thing, but who actually controls access to information is a very important consideration.
Just because I can't stop a ship from sinking, it doesn't mean there's no point to trying to get off of it and encourage others I might reach to do the same.
Just giving an anecdotal response that I am very much the opposite. I'm absolutely thrilled for that future. There's something magical about that blend of real + digital that to me feels more human than sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen.
It will definitely be a cultural change though, and I totally get how that can be almost repulsive from a different perspective. I just want you to be aware though that there are people who at least are interested in that future.
This is interesting, hopefully it gets more HMD options out there, but even better get more developers making ar/vr games.
Was the OS a limiting factor in any of this, though? I've only used a Vive and my Oculus 2 and 3 so I'm not sure what other HMDs use, I assumed some Android distro that just connects to steamvr/openxr/whatever.
Are Asus, Lenovo and Xbox really trying to get into the vr/ar ecosystem? Are they going to be Oculus clones? Their own r&d? Is this all a pipedream?
the advantage of using meta’s OS is that you get the whole Meta Quest Store library (or, i guess, Meta Horizon Store) meanwhile before, you’d have to convince devs to manually publish for your platform
Given React and PyTorch I'd say they've always been doing that. Also they've been releasing open source models for years and pretty much from the beginning.
"Open platform" my ass. I still have to jump through ridiculous hoops to mod BeatSaber (which is the only way to make it worth playing for more than a few minutes). Quest 3 makes modding even harder. This announcement is trying to frame App Lab as an open app distribution platform; it isn't. Those "basic technical and content requirements" apps have to meet are basically the same ones that Apple or Google or Meta themselves enforce for their app stores. Entire classes of applications, particularly those that undermine platform-owners' business models are not allowed.
Additionally, Horizon is generally a terrible operating system. Useless and intrusive "social" features out the wazoo, laden with tracking/spyware, and it isn't even good for anything beyond launching apps that take over the whole environment. Want to use your fancy headset to open up apps in 3d space and do some multitaking work? Well I sure hope you're happy with exactly 3 2d apps (all equally sized) lined up in a row in a fixed location, because that's all you're getting. If you want to do anything real you need to install an app that launches its own environment for multitasking, but of course then you can only pull in windows from a remote PC, so if you want to run any local applications it's back to basics for you. Oh, and of course you can't mix those remote PC windows with local apps. As poor as Apple's Vision OS is in the multitasking department Horizon falls far behind even it.
I was half tempted to get a quest after playing beat saber on a friend's device. it's kind of amazing how much better it is than the next best thing you could do on one, some team just knocked it out of the park designing and implementing that game
Pistol whip is pretty good too. Those two get your light saber sword fight fantasy, and the Matrix Gun-Fu fantasy :)
And though I haven't an athletic bone in my body, the fitness / boxing apps are actually a great way to get some exercise in.
Generally, quest 2 was one of the things I haven't had any interest whatsoever until after a year's campaign, my friend basically forced me to try it during a visit :-). I have one now, largely for those 3 apps.
This is ultimately what they want: their owned walled garden, where they get to be the decider, hold the power, track the user's as first party data, etc. It makes perfect sense. They want this to be the next Android OS (with Play Store equivalent of course).
This is really the only move that gets them back in (perhaps only somewhat) with the dwindling ads market.
Much as I don't like it, it is a legitimate tactic. I just don't see it being effective in the current market, even with Apple as a player.
If what they ultimately want is their own walled garden, then wouldn't opening things up be the opposite of what they should do? I mean, it's a lot harder to re-take control that you previously released than it is to hold onto it from the start. Look at Apple's difficulties tighteninng up control on the mac for example. It has to be a very long game. Compare that to the iPhone, iPad, vision OS that have been tightly controlled from the start and they have no difficulties (other than regulatory) holding the reins tightly.
> If what they ultimately want is their own walled garden, then wouldn't opening things up be the opposite of what they should do?
The are only opening things up in their marketing speak. There is not actual opening up happening. "Open" sounds cool, inclusive, and like you are creating a stable platform for others to build on top of (IBM opened up x86, Linus opened up Linux, etc).
Judge by what they do not what they say -- most valid advice in this age of lies.
You can - it's just far less fun than BeatSaber with mods. The biggest improvement is from being able to select from the community list of songs that are available that may better suit your taste than the songs that come built in. It's a rhythm game so using a rhythm you like makes it much more fun.
I assume there are sort of natural skill ceilings but if you practice with more difficult scenarios and really push yourself you'd be amazed at what you can do. I've got an essential tremor[1] and I usually play on Expert+ for the vanilla tracks which is usually do-able for me.
1. On that note - my tremor does hurt me here too but unlike twitch shooters (which I loved before my tremor got bad) and things like guitar hero (which require comparatively precise movement) beat saber is usually pretty forgiving about precision of placement and angles - so long as your rhythm is correct you can go pretty far with it.
Lack of any songs I actually care about, and the actual note mapping from the devs has been pretty bad up until recently. The modding community has had them beat for ages. Without mods the game would be a breif curiosity before I got bored with the provided songs, most of which don't suit my taste.
OG BeatSaber comes with a small-ish selection of tracks, most of them obscure and not generally known. Good or bad, they get boring quickly. Modding lets you expand to arbitrary number of tracks, including pretty much all the ones you like. It's what makes it fun and worth returning to. Not being able to add your own music, makes BeatSaber not worth the sticker price (much less if you're getting Oculus just to play it).
Also note that people were used to this capability, because before BeatSaber became a poster child for Oculus, it was streamed to other headsets from PC, where adding custom tracks was tacitly allowed.
No, that's basically correct. Mods are primarily for downloading community-made tracks/maps for songs not included with the game. There are also officially licensed DLC song packs, but they're quite pricy and still only provide access to a limited selection of tracks.
Not quite; piracy of the paid DLC is one thing, but modding is to add songs (which should be read as, entire Beatsaber custom-made tracks) that otherwise are not available through any other avenues.
If I paid for the song (even somewhere else, even on a subscription like spotify/apple music), I should be able to dance/move to it. I don't think one should have to re-buy every song in a videogame. Especially when the work is done for free to put in the dance moves by modders.
But you do sign in to use an Android phone, or iPhone. Although, I agree with the point that someone would never want to sign in with their Facebook account there, with FB account holding so much personal information about them! For gaming, somebody would rather prefer to use an alias like dungeonmaster669 instead of their verified actual identity.
You don’t have to sign in to use an iPhone or Android phone, though you to have to sign in to use their app stores. Presumably with the advent of DMA though you can avoid creating an Apple ID or Google account if using a 3rd party store (though probably you’ll need some other account for that store, that’s how it always goes…).
Fe: gaming - yes, this is why Apple had separate IDs for gaming center.. and I think Microsoft does this too for Xbox vs Microsoft account?
I also basically have to have a smartphone, and smartphones are entirely self contained devices.
On a scale of trust for how companies are handling my data, Apple, and to a much lesser extent, Google, are still more trustworthy than Facebook, I feel.
They mention Steam Link but don't mention it isn't allowed to sell in-app purchases (maybe a decision on Steam's side to be fair; they dont want games on Steam themselves having a "remote desktop" overlay workaround where you buy DLC without paying the 30% revenue tax).
> I sure hope you're happy with exactly 3 2d apps (all equally sized) lined up in a row in a fixed location, because that's all you're getting.
To be fair that is all I really want. Regardless, its still a privacy nightmare which makes it a no-go for me, combined with the fact that the most powerful ("productivity") app I can expect to run on it would be something like excel which makes me not really need anymore than 1 window, at which point its no better than a regular laptop.
I'm waiting for the Simula One, or maybe XReal Air support for linux
EDIT: To be clear, the kind of apps I'd want to be running (what I run on my regular laptop) that I doubt would be available on Meta OS include things like: Godot, Blender, VSCode, terminal windows, probably a bunch of other stuff but those are the main ones
Whatever the purpose is behind it, I'm just glad that their work benefits me for once. I could not tell you the last time Tim Cook or Bill Gates sponsored something that genuinely improved my day-to-day life.
On the podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, he was quite explicit that he believes that open-sourcing has worked out for them in the past and they're interested in it in the future but they'll only do it so long as it helps them. If they make something awesome that it would be worse for them to release he won't release it. And the license is anti-competitor (if you have 700 million users or more, you can't use Llama) so he's quite clear that this is a business decision.
> We’re also developing a new spatial app framework that helps mobile developers create mixed reality experiences. Developers will be able to use the tools they’re already familiar with to bring their mobile apps to Meta Horizon OS or to create entirely new mixed reality apps.
Like porting my whole android app + spatial features or...?
My guess is that they saw how nicely Apple made basic app development (read 2.5D planes with list views and spatial UX) and they are gonna try their best to shape their “app framework” in a similar fashion.
> If Meta really believes in the Metaverse, why do they need the Horizon brand? Why not just the Meta OS?
Perhaps for the same reason why Apple OS, Google OS or Microsoft OS don't exist as customer OSes - each OS is scoped to a specific function/device-class, and maybe superceded in the future.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadBesides android being gigantic huge, you still have google maps, chrome, gmail, pixel phones, passkey, yubikeypush/2fa, the new cookie aproach, YouTube!!1 etc.
Why would Google need a 'recent' success to be able to win ar snail?
First of all, Google Search has maintained dominance and relevance for decades. That’s no easy feat. They have news, patents, books, LLMs all added into it.
Google has a hugely popular cloud service. Especially if you include Google Workspace.
Obviously YouTube is huge and regularly gets new features. There is a YouTube app for almost every piece of hardware with a screen.
They have a pretty impressive mapping product suite. Everything from Google maps to Google earth and all their GIS products and tools (eg solar panels location SaaS).
The play store is huge. AND They have a huge variety of extremely popular consumer apps like Photos, Music, Home, etc.
>YouTube TV has piloted past a new milestone: The internet pay-TV service now has more than 8 million subscribers, according to the video giant. That means YouTube TV, available only in the U.S. starting at $72.99 per month, is far and away the biggest internet-streaming subscription TV service in the country.
-Feb 6, 2024
I can easily see less tech savvy consumers being confused.
bold of you to assume your hdmi cable won't naturally form some hoops.
I don't think anyone is currently making an all-purpose VR headset which can also do HDMI mirroring though.
Technically you can just remote desktop into a computer from your VR headset, but that won't work in every scenario.
Maybe you could convert the HDMI input into MIPI and feed that into the SoCs camera interface, but I think headsets like the Quest are already pretty much maxing out the SoCs camera capabilities just to read in all the actual cameras used for inside-out tracking. There's no bandwidth left to shove an extra HD video feed in as well.
tl;dr HDMI input that turns the device into a dumb PCVR headset: easy. HDMI input that mirrors arbitrary video: hard.
XREAL as well as some drone FPV goggles support non-/partially-head-tracked HDMI input, albeit with much smaller FOV for comfort reasons.
https://goovis.net/products/g3max
(This particular one uses USB-C for video input, but they also sell an HDMI adapter for it.)
Of course, in practice it's just a display and can be used for any purpose. I do appreciate the fact that you don't have to mess around with all the usual VR setup chores with these - it's really very plug and play.
(xreal is also in this category imo but at least its a bit cheaper)
And yeah, $1K is quite a lot, but the 65 degree FOV and 2560x1440 (per eye) OLED that you get for it really does look amazing - I haven't regretted that purchase in the slightest. It's rather bulky, though, although still nowhere near as heavy as VR headsets. Still, not something I'd want to carry on the go.
I hope we'll get 4K per eye some day with this tech. Whichever brand does it first for reasonable $$$, it'll completely replace my primary display.
The second part needs some explaining. One undocumented feature of Quest 3 is that it supports (some) USB-C Ethernet adapters. There isn't really any UI for it that I know of; things just work so long as DHCP is there. This then gives you a direct wired 1GBps link to the PC, which Steam Link will happily utilize.
https://oscarliang.com/fpv-goggles/
PS: I have a barely used Meta Quest Pro for sale. ;)
Short video from Zuckerberg: https://twitter.com/NathieVR/status/1782436898654273981
This is an interesting move and feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But this isn't open source. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the store. Maybe there's an app revenue share involved?
Wait, at the end of the video he says "We're also as part of this going to be opening up our store to give you even more options to use whatever experiences you want. So whether they're on Steam, Xbox Cloud Gaming, our own App Lab, or even Google Play, if they're up for it." The blog post doesn't mention Steam or Google Play. It's not really clear what that means. Will they allow Steam to sell native Quest apps?
Edit: There's a better blog post that has more detail. https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/meta-horizon-os-open-hardwar... This one seems to suggest that being "open" to Steam just means allowing game streaming which they already do, while being "open" to Google Play means that they would allow Google to install the actual Play Store app on the headset, for 2D apps only. But Google doesn't want to. In any case it seems like they would specifically not be open to alternative app stores selling native 3D apps directly on the headset itself.
At the very least, this could lead to more high-end standalone headsets being available. Not every 3rd party headset has to be competing with the Quest line of headsets, so the lack of revenue from the store might not matter to some companies.
I don't think that's a given long term. Even already the chip in the Quest 3 is rated at the same GPU grunt as an nVidia 1060, the minimum supported chipset originally for PCVR. The next gen is already announced and is significantly more powerful again, able to power 4k displays. I would project in 3 years from now we have something that can actually be considered at least moderately high end in stand alone form factor from Qualcomm.
Or if Meta doesn't become strong enough to be considered a monopoly, you always have the choice to go with their competitors (as is currently the case). I can still install anything I want on my Pico 4.
The use-cases for AR are so awful. The last thing I want is to consume already a passive medium with my family wearing goggles. Such an anti-social platform.
They made the weird business decision to drop the products they had third party cooperation and an enthusiastic userbase for, in favor of an experimental product (Hololens) that ended up only being affordable to businesses and which afaik has never really taken off in the same way as WMR had been.
This is a hard problem to solve and from what I understand it is similar to issues that are screened for in specialties. For example - fighter pilots and astronauts are screened for all kinds of fundamental things:
- Vision
- Tolerance to motion sickness
- Tolerance to Gs
- Tolerance to claustrophobia (for flight suits, tight cockpits, etc)
If you don't have 20/20 vision (or better), puke all the time in sims, and freak out when put in a flight suit you're just not a fighter pilot, astronaut, etc. Once you make that cut then you train on improving what you fundamentally have and even then wash-out rates are high.
With the Hololens project the goal was to strap a Hololens on pretty much any random soldier. If some fairly large portion of the population just can't make it work the utility and value of the project drops to zero. Imagine standardizing on a gun sight or other key technology that just won't work for even 1/10 of your (already limited recruits), potentially even for otherwise elite soldiers.
I think they realized they will have similar fundamental issues in the enterprise - the utility of a Teams meeting with everyone in Hololens drops pretty significantly when a non-zero portion of employees get sick after a few minutes.
I'm not sure how these issues with the technology can be overcome. Sure, if some gamers can make it work that's cool but that doesn't provide the overall value to the technology MS was hoping for.
[0] - https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-hololens-fails-us-army-te...
As a user you can already sideload android APKs, I've tried it works great, but you also need to install apps that manage android permissions since you can't grant them through the quest settings.
having the android store there + integrations where android app devs can make the app VR ready would be a big plus. But, the blocker is that google still has ambitions of making some sort of big comeback on the android VR space and therefore are in direct competition with meta.
Meta likely has the most apps and most users of any one VR platform. Sure everyone needs apps, but they needs apps the least, especially from Play Store.
Unless you see using phone apps as 90" virtual screens as a killer feature at least.
(Android was like a year later)
Same fate can happen to metaverse - someone can make a better VR platform.
Doesnt help them that what they have is shit.
Imagine a catalog of proper real life skills you can actually train reasonable good:
- cooking - soldering - welding - Tons of woodworking things - ...
You could also go to a lot of makers of tools and offer them to digitalize their products for them so someone can actually exercise with a cheap to super high end machine like specific CNCs or table saws etc.
When I think of truly learnable cooking videos the first thing that comes to mind is Kenji’s POV cooking videos / streams. Seems like something that could be relatively adaptable to a AR / MR format in a way that would differentiate it from other (still valid) content like the relatively educational food porn from Alex / @FrenchGuyCooking.
I would also be interested in a Chef Jean Pierre simulator, where you learn classic French recipes in a subtly deranged metaverse with a butter-based economy.
If its good enough, you can train cutting a 1000 onions without cutting 1000 onions.
With complex machines, you can learn how to control them and than focus on actually using them instead of first learning were all the buttons are.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/588030/Derail_Valley/
But I agree with the sentiment. Sim games are the killer app of VR and I just want more sims. Where's my Das Boot simulator?
https://www.lincolnelectric.com/en/education/training-progra...
https://www.fronius.com/en/welding-technology/our-expertise/...
I would love to see all of this in a free/paid marketplace and with a basic learning progress framework behind it.
It ended up looking like a simulated workbench with low-detail models of CAD parts that needed to be assembled - it was pretty cool. Engineering companies are very ready for this technology.
What I read is "we reached out to a bunch of vendors who dabbled in VR/AR/XR/whateveryounameit but failed to produce anything outstanding, so we made a deal of licensing them some software so maybe they'll fare better". Meta did the right thing in a sense that they made some sales, but I wouldn't hold my breath as a end-consumer.
And I think just generally they're more likely to try random things than Meta are to get hype around some unique feature. Take the Asus Zenbook Duo as an example, it's not necessarily a great product but it's interesting and some people will buy it for that. Plus industry learns something from experiments like this.
Either way, it's a good move for Meta and it's good for the industry that there is a fully-featured OS available for hardware manufacturers.
Why not just call it Horizon OS?
https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/native/android/mo...
if your goal is to make some sort of `spatial computing` tool, well there nothing here you can use. each app is it's own little silo that has little room for interaction. I'd love to be able to write my own custom apps that can exist in the home screen/environment and that can interact with each other in non trivial ways. it would make it feel more like a personal space rather than a 3D slideshow that I can use to launch games.
I say this as a joke, yet: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-unity-webgl
Love it or hate it. Everything ends up in JavaScript![0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svlL_ndNdj0
[1] https://spark.meta.com/
Lowering the bar of participation greatly increases the amount of shit that is created, but also increases the amount of exceptional examples which can come from a domain. If 80% of everything created is almost complete garbage, then lowering the bar of entry for participating will exponentially increase the amount of shit out there. But it will also enable a few really great apps which wouldn't have existed otherwise. I think we need better filtering than to raise the bar so only true experts can participate.
As a language for new developers is terrible: 100 different ways to do anything, most of them a muddle of paradigms that's inexplicable to anyone without 2 decades of experience, and so on.
Imagine a new developer using ChatGPT to generate: python, C, go, etc. vs. generating javascript. Most of the generated js is incomphrensible to newbies, but for the others generally obvious.
But applets were doing a lot more in the 90's and Flash dominated into the 2010s. However you feel about JS today, it's difficult to say it was all "first-mover advantage".
And Java applets with their loading times and dependence on the visitor having Java installed ... nah, not really a competitor.
I truly don't get it.
https://reactnative.dev/blog/2021/08/26/many-platform-vision
> The biggest innovation with Vision Pro is visionOS. visionOS provides native app frameworks, so developers can build apps for it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, and yet its something Meta have failed to offer for years. Every app on Quest has to reinvent how buttons work, how a scroll view works, how far away from the user the content should be etc.. and every app works differently. On visionOS, all of this is handled by Apple, and every app looks and feels the same.
Meta does have standardized utilities for translating movement to touch/drag/etc. interactions on arbitrary virtual surfaces:
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/11/22/buildin...
https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-isdk-...
But it doesn't seem (AFAIK) to answer the other side of this, which is the UI design system so apps have a consistent look and feel. Which is perhaps more common coming from a game development perspective, but ever since the Mac OS shareware days, Apple's understood that it's empowering to a certain kind of developer if you make it easy/the default path for them to build experiences that match a standardized look and feel. I'm honestly surprised that Meta didn't at least make an optional SDK for this.
Hoping that this is an oversight and that they will open-source the core platform in the next few months/years. It would be so awesome to hack/build on this platform
Hopefully they stick to a proper license model with AOSP as a cornerstone.
I feel like these days some would even call something an "OS" if it's running in a docker container, without providing any kernel at all. Which is to say the meaning of the term is expanding.
An Operating System is the collection of software that allows you to operate a computer, so that means kernel, program loader, simple text editor, simple disk management, etc.
As computer users became more savvy, and hardware became more powerful, more and more functionality was included in the OS (graphical interfaces, utility apps, etc.).
I don't think many people would have trouble calling Android an operating system, and that's just the Linux kernel with utility apps, loader, and app libraries, yet very different from something like Redhat.
I don't think it's a stretch in the least to call Horizon an OS.
I definitely heard it used to literally mean only the kernel. Circa 20 years ago and earlier.
For example, if we look at "Operating system" on Wikipedia from 2006:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Operating_system&...
> Most current usage of the term "operating system" today, by both popular and professional sources, refers to all the software that is required in order for the user to manage the system and to run third-party application software for that system.
Note it says "most current usage". That is because the usage was changing at that time, or had only recently changed. (I picked 2006 because I remember it changing around then.) If we go back another 2 years:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Operating_system&...
> In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations ...
Sure sounds like that doesn't include userland. Definitions which include userland are marked as "colloquial".
Famously in the 1990s, Microsoft tried to argue in court that an OS included a web browser, and that discussion is cited in these old articles... Many reasonable people at the time thought that position was bullshit.
You're correct that people have been conflating the kernel and the operating system as the same thing for a long time, but it's not technically correct to call "Linux", for example, an operating system. Stallman would appreciate that people stop doing that ;)
You may have, but it was a nonstandard usage. Even your 2004 Wikipedia article distinguishes between OS and kernel. Userland is certainly part of it.
AmigaDOS, 1991, manual p22: "Each AmigaDOS process represents a particular process of the operating system— for example, the filing system [...] AmigaDOS provides a process that you can use, called a Command Line Interface or Shell. (https://archive.org/details/1991-baker-jesup-et-al-the-amiga...)
MS-DOS 6.22 (1994) concise user's guide consistently refers to the entire thing including command.com as the operating system (the kernel here is named msdos.sys.) (https://ia801204.us.archive.org/33/items/msdos_manual_622/ms...)
Hell, the whole Linux vs GNU/Linux thing, which has been around since 1992 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy), was explicitly about the fact that "Linux" is just the name of the kernel.
Which gives some context to the calls for Google to bring the play store content library to Horizon.
The IBM Personal Computer released in 1981. By 1989... yeah.
iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
Advanced phones with proper os, apps, camera had been around for years, and personal digital assistants before that. Tablets, too. iPhone got the form factor and ui exactly right and triggered an explosion, but it was far from the first. We might still be in the "smartphone, pre-iPhone" years.
1. Feature/smart 'Phones' were around before the iPhone *and* were already pretty much ubiquitous. VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (either in people's houses or in distribution centres not being sold).
2. VR has arguably existed in some ways before the Quest, Nintendo Virtual Boy was from the mid-90s.
Maybe the iPhone comparison isn't right, but if we're decades into developing this technology and still very early in development I think we should assume we're a LONG way off these things becoming mainstream consumer devices and we should be wary of any company that brings them to the consumer market.
Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million. Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players.
If you allow for some overlap, that's roughly ten million monthly users, and in sales VR is already more successful than a lot of computer platforms of the past.
I find it really hard to believe that 3 million people put on PSVR2 every month. That thing gets basically no content.
There is no way that those numbers are right.
EDIT: Yeah, Steam has 120 million active users per month. And the 6+ million users for Quest is from 2022, during the pandemic and metaverse bubble. Would be curious to know the trends for 2023 and 2024 thought.
- lighter/more comfortable
- faster to get started when you put the headset on
- more social experiences and event organized in VR
- shorter time from headset on to hanging out with your friends in VR
A number of years ago I convinced a bunch of my friends to buy the Quest after being blown away by board games in VR, but turns out Catan only worked for the Go and it was a lot of work to do something together in VR.
IMO there needs to be some sort of lobby that does not take you away from hanging out with your friends when you’re in between games. I should be able to easily join a lobby or pause a game to go to a lobby and wave at my friend who’s playing to pause and join me in the lobby
It's this and one other point: Games that people aren't bored of in an hour.
To me, very few games have come out for VR that don't feel like gimmicky experiences. Even Half Life Alyx, as advanced as it was, kinda felt like a theme park ride after a while. I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously.
It's hard to justify strapping a TV to my face and feeling uncomfortable for one-off experiences. Even if there was a game with some depth and replayability, I would be even more annoyed to play it on such an uncomfortable headset.
Almost everyone I know is not using their VR headset anymore. I'm not sure it will ever move past that phase, because people want it to be smaller and, simultaneously, more technically immersive. So we're in some weird in between zone where it's neither.
The "technical" reason for it is very very very simple: Nearly no video games are actually improved by "increased immersion" to an extreme. Chess won't be more fun because you have to physically move digital chess pieces around a virtual board, people playing Call of Duty do not want to physically move their arms around to aim, and don't want to jump around to move, and if you aren't doing those things you don't want the downsides that are inherent to a VR system, like extreme seclusion of wearing a headset, physical ability being an inherent filter, clunky UI, nausea etc.
The TWO areas where VR is useful, flight simulators and driving simulators, haven't even fully adopted VR simply because it's too much hassle.
VR is only a gimmick unless you can benefit from that extra immersion, and most things cannot.
The Wii sold gangbusters because everyone and their grandma could understand "swing remote to swing tennis racket", but you couldn't actually build a hyperaccurate tennis sim off of that because a Wiimote is NOT a tennis racket and you cannot get beyond that. VR is the same way. Everyone can experience the "Oh VR is soooo coool" gimmick but very few genres inherently benefit from what VR provides.
But for some reason there's practically no uptake on any of this outside of sims. I would love to see a first-person shooter that is fully VR enabled while still allowing me to use WASD + mouse. In fact, I already kinda sorta do that by using 2D theater mode with games like Insurgency: Sandstorm, but that doesn't give you the actually useful VR stuff like the ability to turn your head to look around etc. If somebody were to make an FPS that did all that, they'd have my money in a heartbeat.
I see this come up, over and over again. It's so obviously wrong based on even a basic reading of the market. The Quest is unambiguously the most popular VR headset and it's store has barely any cockpit simulators at all.
As for tennis, one of the perks of Quest is that you can take it anywhere, including a real tennis court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atuIRf59hzc
At a smaller scale, Eleven Table Tennis is an extremely accurate VR Table Tennis game that supports paddle attachments. It is extremely close to the real thing, professionals use it for practice.
Couldn’t disagree more. Experiences in VR are insanely immersive and this is why there’s so much love for VR.
Also, I played Catan (a board game) in VR and it was the most social experience I’ve ever had in a video game.
The amount of sensors we have on controllers now means, it can pick your slight wrist movements for top spin, side spin and more accurately measure bat speed. The physics engine on these games are so close to being realistic.
Now, let's compare it to IRL and since I played college level cricket, I'll tell you the difference. When I practiced as an amateur, I was able to face at the most 25-30 pitches per day. Of them, only 1 or 2 were what I can remotely call "quality" pitches and I'd have to spend 3 hours per day.
In the Metaverse, in 3 hours, I'd have faced 750 quality pitches including 95mph pitches (The highest I ever faced in IRL was 70mph) including extremely difficult curve balls, deception etc.
All this for a marginal cost of $0 and the physics and simulation will only get better
I tried beat saber for like 10 minutes and never bothered with anything else. The headset’s just too big a hassle, and blocking out the world sucks a lot.
Plus I can’t help but think of the VR headset guy from the Pearl Jam video “Do the Evolution” when I look at the damn things.
Kinda like how I think of the dad from Serial Experiments Lain any time one of my kids walks in and I’m in front of a glowing screen.
Gross.
I have access to a Vive headset for school project right now and do not find it very fun to use, Beat saber remains the only VR game that is at least on the same tier of replayability as osu.
- App sharing / libraries doesn't work properly yet. (The owner has to secretly log in to each individual app themselves, before anyone else can use it on the device. There is no documentation informing anyone of this requirement)
- Add/ons or DLC also don't work properly yet. (You have to 're-unlock' each individual DLC, for it to share to anyone else on device in something like Beat Saber, for example)
- Child permissions don't work properly yet. (The notification does work, but a parent is not allowed to approve an app from that notification, the child has to entirely shut down and restart the whole device, before an approval takes effect)
- Screen sharing doesn't work, at all. (If you have a child, you just can't ever mirror their view onto a TV or Tablet -- full stop, no exceptions. Which also means, there's no way to help a child who is wearing a headset -- ever). Note that "taking the headset off" triggers a state reset, so a child can't hand the headset over to their parent for help, since the face sensor will kill state the second a face is removed.
- Windowing UI doesn't really work yet. (You can have windows, but only three, and only side-by-side, and only for a select few apps) -- it's more usability-restricted than even stage manager on an iPad. You can tell the Quest is designed around the expectation that you will be in one-and-only-one full-screen game, pretty much the entire time your wearing the headset.
- Online sharing is app-dependent, a bunch don't work. Many more don't work at first, you have to spend 30 to 60 minutes "unlocking" the right to match-make. (making the online/networking more seemless is critical because of the nature of the device -- you can't both look at it the way you might with a TV or PC or Laptop or Tablet, since it's a worn device)
None of this is dealbreaking stuff, none if it needs any kind of "new invention" or anything to fix. But as a product, friction is still really high here, and I can see why it's not necessarily super popular outside of techie/gaming scenes yet.
This is definitely not true. The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.
Also not sure what state reset you're talking about. I've definitely grabbed the headset from another person and continued with the game.
You don’t have your kid on a child account, you have your kid using an adult account. Child accounts can’t screen share —- it’s acknowledged in the Quest FAQ - https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experiences/o... “only the primary account can cast”
> Not sure what state reset you’re talking about.
Setup a child account. Let your kid login. Have the kid take the headset off. Congrats, everything just got killed, and it’s now PIN-locked to the adult account. When the adult types in a PIN, it trashes the child’s session, and starts an Adult session.
(We work around this by gently holding the face sensor with a finger while moving the headset around between people, to trick the headset into thinking it’s still being worn -— but this is ridiculously broken, no one should have to do that just to get it to work)
VR makes a ton of sense for video games, but I just don't see how it could enhance the rest of my day-to-day life. I don't see it becoming a good general purpose computing platform that most people use all day. I see it being useful for specific niche tasks like CAD, but I'll never put on a headset just to send an email, file my taxes, or browse the internet.
Came away very impressed with the technology, but really didn't like having the damn thing strapped to my head for 15-20 minutes.
it reminds me of getting the original 3ds that could do some cool AR stuff, and could do 3d without glasses, but ultimately was an impressive tech demo that I mostly didnt use.
I already spend too much of my day in front of phones and monitors, I'm not sure if the answer is moving the screens closer to our eyes and shutting out more of the world.
industrial applications for sure can have a niche with this, but as a mass market device I think there's a long way to go, even if the experience looks good.
Coincidentally, someone I interacted with mentioned "I never thought I'd get rid of my Blackberry" in passing, which reminded me of the term once popular term "Crackberry".
I find it incredible there's still only 1 actual "serious" VR game - lots of people then recommended Skyrim VR, a game from 2011.
Is VR gaming in an absolute standstill?
If you're dead set on only AAA games then yeah, it's not a useful purchase, but that doesn't mean it's "standing still".
0: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...
In 1989 market was still fragmented and PCs were weak (286, amiga, mac + old 8bits like atari and commodore).
Meta/Facebook really has trouble with focus, I hope they can pick 1 vision for VR.
They’re trying to build a platform to build VR experiences on. That’s clearly their goal. Horizon Worlds is “just an app” to show that off. It’s a “hero use case”.
The big problem is you cannot import images, textures, 3-d models and such from ordinary tools. You have something like constructive solid geometry to work with but only so much and there is a slider you can use to set the number of players and the more players the less geometry you can use.
I want to make worlds based on photographs (particularly pano and stereo) and art. McDonalds needs to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup. Either way it is a non-starter.
HW supports collaboration (more than one person shares the world) but https://aframe.io/ lets me make the content I want. If I have to choose one or the other I am going to pick the second.
My take on Meta Quest is that it seems highly successful as a gaming environment based on an app store but is skews towards single-player experiences. Like a lot of AAA games, the excellent Asgard’s Wrath 2 has some multiplayer tacked on but it is all meaningless like leaderboards and the occasional ghost that shows up in a procedurally generated dungeon.
Of course, Meta wants to make multiplayer experiences but somehow they just can’t do it.
It makes sense that expensive AAA experiences like Asgard's Wrath are single player since that's a fairly dominant model in gaming. The Quest doesn't have the player base to support a AAA multiplayer model at this point.
To say nothing about your data, which is Facebook's primary revenue driver.
I'm not keen on more headsets having a Meta data vacuum built-in, but this isn't the opposite of putting the metaverse stuff to pasture.
They're just shifting from an Apple strategy of full-control vertical integration to a Android/Windows strategy of platform ubiquity.
Which would be weird cause the hardware (Quest 3/Quest Pro) is top notch, while Metas software for it is garbage. Everything good is provided by 3rd party companies.
Making flagship/reference hardware on the Oculus legacy is a much better strategy for Meta and lets them focus on platform vision and data collection, which is exactly the company they spent the last 15+ years building.
Ironically Google Daydream was also very polished and now Google is starting again but with a gigantic dent in their credibility.
2. I’m pretty sure a lot of the cost quoted for their “Metaverse” stuff included their CapEx for a ton of GPUs which probably have a lot of other uses within the company.
Eventually their desire for whats in the trap overcomes their caution and they put their head in.
Watch out, the VR mafia is gonna get ya!
Seriously though, any well informed and level headed person could see this coming a mile away. Apparently, such people are in short supply at Meta.
At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better.
Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.
And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast?
Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).
While in many cases folks are overpaid in big tech, some of them are insanely talented people who can do things others simply cannot.
Probably because of this:
> How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?
John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.
That's not what he said though. What he said is that Meta is basically incompetent.
That's equivalent to the amount of labor it took to build some of the minor Egyptian pyramids.
They realized they have an asset, and they made some money by licensing it. Sales department did their job, story at 11. But it would've been a boring non-story, so a copywriter used the corporate brandbook - and "open" is the buzzword of the last few years when it comes to the technology.
Someone need to make an LLM SaaS to de-bulshittify the news.
I can hear the replies already, "If you don't want one, don't use one," but if something becomes normal enough, the outside world does change around it. Why invest in street signs, for example? Who prints maps or encyclopedias now? Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?
It's not just that I don't want to use it. I don't want it to become normal among other people either.
As for your examples, such as maps/encyclopedias, they still do even in the smartphone age.
>Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?
There's a great movie called Virtual Nightmare that is basically about this. But I don't think it's such a bad thing, to be honest. We'll have a world where art can be more easily exchanged and public spaces become more collaborative. And the flip side is that hopefully, "offline" will have less ads and there will be a renewed focus on more indie and subversive decoration.
Change isn't always bad, and it isn't always good.
I'll consider it a tragedy if it ends up being the case that they can't imagine having grown up actually seeing the real world.
This may have more to do with your particular social circle (or mine) than a general trend in pop culture. I don't know anyone who thinks any of those are cool.
- it's too damn expensive (you look like a rich klutz wearing one)
- the content is mostly just normal games and videos that you watch in stereo
- the FOV and camera resolution are too poorly miniaturized to do anything serious with
Why doesn't it surprise me that public perception did a 180 when they saw the brushed-aluminum model with an Apple logo on it? At this rate Apple should sponsor a second Hindenberg just to check if their luck's run dry.
I dislike Apple's version for other reasons, but for something to out-dork me really takes a lot.
But I also see the value of AR/VR to a number of industries that need more visual interaction metaphors. CAD/CAM, architecture, and real estate come to mind. I could totally see buying a house across the country “sight unseen” based on a 3D scan (if regulatory guards are in place to prevent modifying the scan).
Having an open OS architecture for AR/VR apps is key to making this happen. Current offerings all fall short in various ways, so I’m curious to try this out.
Lets face it, we spend considerable amounts of time in front of a screen. A bigger and more immersive screen will be a better experience for everyone.
I would rather do neither of these things.
I would rather _not_ be immersed in the whole virtual world AND _not_ stare at a 7 inch screen for a large part of my day.
(written from a 16 inch laptop that I stare at for work)
I've been trying to exist more (in terms of "time-spent") without my phone in my pocket as it seems to be primarily a driver of distraction.
I'm sticking with this line of reasoning. This is already bad enough. I do not think more of it will make things better.
On the other hand I do appreciate beauty in nature and design.
But why not have both?
It will definitely be a cultural change though, and I totally get how that can be almost repulsive from a different perspective. I just want you to be aware though that there are people who at least are interested in that future.
If these only replace desk work, I might agree with you. My fear is that wearing them full-time becomes normalized.
But yeah, I’d personally not want much beyond that.
Of course, to each their own.
Was the OS a limiting factor in any of this, though? I've only used a Vive and my Oculus 2 and 3 so I'm not sure what other HMDs use, I assumed some Android distro that just connects to steamvr/openxr/whatever.
Are Asus, Lenovo and Xbox really trying to get into the vr/ar ecosystem? Are they going to be Oculus clones? Their own r&d? Is this all a pipedream?
It's not altruism of course. It's a strategy. But it's a different strategy from the closed pure walled garden strategy they have executed previously.
Additionally, Horizon is generally a terrible operating system. Useless and intrusive "social" features out the wazoo, laden with tracking/spyware, and it isn't even good for anything beyond launching apps that take over the whole environment. Want to use your fancy headset to open up apps in 3d space and do some multitaking work? Well I sure hope you're happy with exactly 3 2d apps (all equally sized) lined up in a row in a fixed location, because that's all you're getting. If you want to do anything real you need to install an app that launches its own environment for multitasking, but of course then you can only pull in windows from a remote PC, so if you want to run any local applications it's back to basics for you. Oh, and of course you can't mix those remote PC windows with local apps. As poor as Apple's Vision OS is in the multitasking department Horizon falls far behind even it.
And though I haven't an athletic bone in my body, the fitness / boxing apps are actually a great way to get some exercise in.
Generally, quest 2 was one of the things I haven't had any interest whatsoever until after a year's campaign, my friend basically forced me to try it during a visit :-). I have one now, largely for those 3 apps.
This is really the only move that gets them back in (perhaps only somewhat) with the dwindling ads market.
Much as I don't like it, it is a legitimate tactic. I just don't see it being effective in the current market, even with Apple as a player.
Or the next Apple with the next iOS ?
Google famously made Android "open source" and allows third party manufacturers to run it.
The are only opening things up in their marketing speak. There is not actual opening up happening. "Open" sounds cool, inclusive, and like you are creating a stable platform for others to build on top of (IBM opened up x86, Linus opened up Linux, etc).
Judge by what they do not what they say -- most valid advice in this age of lies.
Lunatics like these can't be sated by the official songs: https://youtu.be/CKwX349aV98 https://youtu.be/sJQSy3KG-oQ?t=33
That first chart averages 12 notes per second for 5 straight minutes and the player only missed a single note.
1. On that note - my tremor does hurt me here too but unlike twitch shooters (which I loved before my tremor got bad) and things like guitar hero (which require comparatively precise movement) beat saber is usually pretty forgiving about precision of placement and angles - so long as your rhythm is correct you can go pretty far with it.
OG BeatSaber comes with a small-ish selection of tracks, most of them obscure and not generally known. Good or bad, they get boring quickly. Modding lets you expand to arbitrary number of tracks, including pretty much all the ones you like. It's what makes it fun and worth returning to. Not being able to add your own music, makes BeatSaber not worth the sticker price (much less if you're getting Oculus just to play it).
Also note that people were used to this capability, because before BeatSaber became a poster child for Oculus, it was streamed to other headsets from PC, where adding custom tracks was tacitly allowed.
There's moral discussions to be had I'm sure, but the purpose of the beat sabre mods is pretty factual :).
This is especially true within the rhythm game community, for which many fans simply like to make rhythm songs and for people to play them.
That is absolutely a valid usecase that should be allowed.
I don't want to sign in to use a headset, period.
Fe: gaming - yes, this is why Apple had separate IDs for gaming center.. and I think Microsoft does this too for Xbox vs Microsoft account?
On a scale of trust for how companies are handling my data, Apple, and to a much lesser extent, Google, are still more trustworthy than Facebook, I feel.
To be fair that is all I really want. Regardless, its still a privacy nightmare which makes it a no-go for me, combined with the fact that the most powerful ("productivity") app I can expect to run on it would be something like excel which makes me not really need anymore than 1 window, at which point its no better than a regular laptop.
I'm waiting for the Simula One, or maybe XReal Air support for linux
EDIT: To be clear, the kind of apps I'd want to be running (what I run on my regular laptop) that I doubt would be available on Meta OS include things like: Godot, Blender, VSCode, terminal windows, probably a bunch of other stuff but those are the main ones
Like porting my whole android app + spatial features or...?
Churning through so many VR brands. The app that used to be called Oculus and is now called Meta Quest will soon be called Meta Horizon.
If Meta really believes in the Metaverse, why do they need the Horizon brand? Why not just the Meta OS?
Perhaps for the same reason why Apple OS, Google OS or Microsoft OS don't exist as customer OSes - each OS is scoped to a specific function/device-class, and maybe superceded in the future.