3 ms·

I am surprised that number is so low. I own both versions of Quest, and one of the best toys ever. I worked in the VR field in the 1990s, and I wished for a goo

I am surprised that number is so low. I own both versions of Quest, and one of the best toys ever. I worked in the VR field in the 1990s, and I wished for a good consumer rig. Now I have two. Quest is better than our SGI Reality Engine driven VR experiences, even though we had really nice custom built motion platforms. I am not fan of Facebook, but I have no complaints about how they manage their VR acquisition. I upload home videos to FB now just so I can watch them in a virtual cinema. Also, the Star Wars Vader series, pingpong, racketball, etc. are all first class experiences.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
I upload home videos to FB now just so I can watch them in a virtual cinema. With no offense to you intended that feels so incredibly wasteful from a network bandwidth perspective-- both the upload and the streaming back down to watch. It also seems incredibly privacy invading. I cannot understand how people stomach the business model.
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I only uploaded Arizona hiking videos, perhaps a few kayaking videos also. I did say that I am not a FB fan, but the Oculus is a very fun product. re: wasting bandwidth or computer resources. Compared to what has been used in my work for customers, this is a drop in the ocean. This is probably more detail than you want, but since you mentioned FB’s business model (and thanks for your comment): I had all but stopped using FB until Apple placed restrictions on apps sharing information without permission. Now I probably spend 4 or 5 minutes a day on FB. I seldom post but I like to see what my family is doing. That said, I have spent almost an hour today with family on FaceTime and the phone, and a 2 hour coffee with friends this morning. Much more satisfying than social media!
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    I feel like I'm missing out of a lot of cool experiences, but I just can't get behind the hardware being, effectively, a rental on Facebook's whim. Does it bother you that Facebook can deny your use of the Oculus hardware with little to no recourse available? re: bandwidth - I have a 90s sysadmin background. Analogous to being a "child of the depression" I have a permanent paranoia re: bandwidth scarcity. Years of making a living supporting corporate WANs running across drinking straw-sized pipes with to-the-moon-and-back latency has, no doubt, scarred me. I can't help but think that the world would be better, however, if developers tried to make things that worked "local first" and kept traffic on the local network as much as possible. Overall I'm probably destined for "hermit living in a shack" when it comes to the direction technology is going. I'm a market segment of about a baker's dozen of people, I'd guess. I have no tolerance for products that are unable to function without the use of a third-party system for any reason other by necessity. If a product requires compute or storage resources that, by necessity, need to be off-device then so be it. If the product needs off-device resources to drive a vendor lock-in model, DRM, etc, then it's a net negative for humanity. Living in a world where Lamport's famous distributed systems quote[0] is also really infuriating to me. I want my stuff to work when I want it to work. Nobody can take away my locally-hosted stuff. [0] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.tx...
    - mark_l_watson 5y ago
      The Quest and a few games are cheap enough that if the service were cut off, it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. It is OK to enjoy things, with a little detachment when it comes to not worrying about losing them.
jsnell 5y ago
It is not a low number at all! For comparison, the PS5 has sold 10M units worldwide in the same time.
- azinman2 5y ago
  But it's not a PS5 competitor. It's supposed to be a competitor to computers + smartphones (or at least that's the hype.. the 'next big thing'). These numbers are tiny for such hype.
- riffraff 5y ago
  Wasn't the PS5 severely limited in availability? If so, this doesn't seem the right comparison.
  - jsnell 5y ago
    So was the Quest 2 before the holidays. Look, the PS5 was the fastest selling games console in history. The Quest 2 being in the same ball park is really good. Anyone who thinks these sales are disappointingly low just didn't have realistic expectations.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    So was Oculus Quest. It was extremely difficult to find one in stock, even when Oculus Quest 2 came out. And getting Oculus Quest 2 was pretty much impossible for the first 3-4 months after the release last year (that I tracked). Not sure how difficult it is now, because I haven't checked. But for the first 3-4 months, it was definitely the same situation, with people stalking out restocks at local best buys and walmarts to get one.
cblconfederate 5y ago
You can use something like the Deo (?) player. It can access folders shared via windows media sharing for example.
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  Thanks. I also have my MacBook set up to stream to the Oculus.

EvanAnderson 5y ago

I upload home videos to FB now just so I can watch them in a virtual cinema. With no offense to you intended that feels so incredibly wasteful from a network bandwidth perspective-- both the upload and the streaming back down to watch. It also seems incredibly privacy invading. I cannot understand how people stomach the business model.

mark_l_watson 5y ago
I only uploaded Arizona hiking videos, perhaps a few kayaking videos also. I did say that I am not a FB fan, but the Oculus is a very fun product. re: wasting bandwidth or computer resources. Compared to what has been used in my work for customers, this is a drop in the ocean. This is probably more detail than you want, but since you mentioned FB’s business model (and thanks for your comment): I had all but stopped using FB until Apple placed restrictions on apps sharing information without permission. Now I probably spend 4 or 5 minutes a day on FB. I seldom post but I like to see what my family is doing. That said, I have spent almost an hour today with family on FaceTime and the phone, and a 2 hour coffee with friends this morning. Much more satisfying than social media!
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I feel like I'm missing out of a lot of cool experiences, but I just can't get behind the hardware being, effectively, a rental on Facebook's whim. Does it bother you that Facebook can deny your use of the Oculus hardware with little to no recourse available? re: bandwidth - I have a 90s sysadmin background. Analogous to being a "child of the depression" I have a permanent paranoia re: bandwidth scarcity. Years of making a living supporting corporate WANs running across drinking straw-sized pipes with to-the-moon-and-back latency has, no doubt, scarred me. I can't help but think that the world would be better, however, if developers tried to make things that worked "local first" and kept traffic on the local network as much as possible. Overall I'm probably destined for "hermit living in a shack" when it comes to the direction technology is going. I'm a market segment of about a baker's dozen of people, I'd guess. I have no tolerance for products that are unable to function without the use of a third-party system for any reason other by necessity. If a product requires compute or storage resources that, by necessity, need to be off-device then so be it. If the product needs off-device resources to drive a vendor lock-in model, DRM, etc, then it's a net negative for humanity. Living in a world where Lamport's famous distributed systems quote[0] is also really infuriating to me. I want my stuff to work when I want it to work. Nobody can take away my locally-hosted stuff. [0] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.tx...
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    The Quest and a few games are cheap enough that if the service were cut off, it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. It is OK to enjoy things, with a little detachment when it comes to not worrying about losing them.

jsnell 5y ago

It is not a low number at all! For comparison, the PS5 has sold 10M units worldwide in the same time.

azinman2 5y ago
But it's not a PS5 competitor. It's supposed to be a competitor to computers + smartphones (or at least that's the hype.. the 'next big thing'). These numbers are tiny for such hype.
riffraff 5y ago
Wasn't the PS5 severely limited in availability? If so, this doesn't seem the right comparison.
- jsnell 5y ago
  So was the Quest 2 before the holidays. Look, the PS5 was the fastest selling games console in history. The Quest 2 being in the same ball park is really good. Anyone who thinks these sales are disappointingly low just didn't have realistic expectations.
- filoleg 5y ago
  So was Oculus Quest. It was extremely difficult to find one in stock, even when Oculus Quest 2 came out. And getting Oculus Quest 2 was pretty much impossible for the first 3-4 months after the release last year (that I tracked). Not sure how difficult it is now, because I haven't checked. But for the first 3-4 months, it was definitely the same situation, with people stalking out restocks at local best buys and walmarts to get one.

cblconfederate 5y ago

You can use something like the Deo (?) player. It can access folders shared via windows media sharing for example.

mark_l_watson 5y ago
Thanks. I also have my MacBook set up to stream to the Oculus.