10 ms·

Not really the worst strategy. You can totally see where he was coming from. He just vastly overestimated how far VR could go in even 10 years of heavy investme

Not really the worst strategy. You can totally see where he was coming from. He just vastly overestimated how far VR could go in even 10 years of heavy investment, if ever. No amount of heavy investment, even for 10+ years, is going to make AR or VR as ubiquitous as mobile. You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses. It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. And, he is correct, it needs to have apps so compelling that people find hard to participate in society without one. It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035.

melony 4y ago
The counter argument is that they have sank billions into this with top tier optoelectronic engineers working on realizing the vision. It is about as good an effort as you can reasonably get. If they want to go further, they will have to start building out their own exotic semiconductor basic research labs. Perhaps their only mistake is not scaling up the hardware R and D earlier. One potential play is a joint venture with Apple, unpalatable yes, but they are the only other large scale consumer electronics company with the EEs and hardware talent needed to execute this. I doubt even the military and government research labs can do a better job.
- orik 4y ago
  If there was something like a join venture between Apple & FB, it would be incredibly compelling as a software engineer interested in AR/VR to go work for them on it.
  - melony 4y ago
    They will probably pay you less than what you can get in other divisions. Nobody I know chose to work for Apple for the total compensation.
bluescrn 4y ago
> It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035. 20 years of mobile phone development gave us things that we could barely have imagined back in 2000 or so.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  I don't think that's true. We were imagining them, and even trying to build them -- the hardware just wasn't capable of it. Newton, Palm and Handspring showed us the way, and those platforms died on the journey there. Apple arguably only added capacitive multitouch to the mix, apparently the last big piece of the puzzle to make mobile devices natural and fluid (OK, wireless networks weren't quite there when the original iPhone came out). I'd argue that there are many, many puzzle pieces still needed to begin imagining an AR future. While the Newton showed an incomplete vision of its future, it begged all the right questions. My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
  - bentcorner 4y ago
    > My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick... This feels like the similar kind of problems of understanding how to accommodate the human into the platform. Early mobile platforms were just "desktop, but smaller". You were expected to interact with the device using a stylus. Small checkboxes and UI elements were common. The device needed to regularly tether to a desktop. Lots of VR games still allow you to move/rotate using thumbsticks. Part of it is that these games are ports of desktop experiences that wouldn't work any other way. Over time developers will better understand what works and what doesn't, and will design games/apps that don't make you nauseous. There's also likely a bunch of vision problems that still need to be worked through. I have no expertise in VR but with my limited usage it feels quite close, and I think these problems are not insurmountable.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- 4y ago
spywaregorilla 4y ago
I tend to agree. His points feel pretty good to me. His assumptions are very bad.
- nfw2 4y ago
  I can see how his assumptions seemed reasonable at the time given that google glass already existed
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Maybe. I thought we'd have more accessible shitty AR sooner. But VR has a lot of hard problems that don't seem solveable with a good hour of reflection in order to get it to the VR people see in movies.
chaostheory 4y ago
This reminds me of how the public viewed computers before Windows 95, or when the iPhone just came out. The flaws are many and severe, but you’d be shortsighted if you couldn’t see the potential
- ethbr0 4y ago
  There's a quip somewhere about how the essence of futurist misprediction has been confusing unlike-in-quality and unlike-in-capability. Unlike-in-quality is the same thing, only better. It rarely changes the world, because it's not an infinite value proposition. Unlike-in-capability, on the other hand, is offering something that literally didn't exist before. It approaches infinite value, because it has the capability to reshape the world into one that requires its existence. Mobile internet was unlike-in-capability. I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality. Maybe the only thing that gets me there is persistence, but the rub of that is that its requirements all require bulky physical configuration and/or isolation. At its worst, earliest form, a brick cell phone was still portable, and didn't isolate the user from the world around them.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    VR/AR is more unlike-in-capability than phones. If the hardware becomes a pair of glasses that have no friction in putting on, then it can engulf capabilities of TV, phone, PC, anything that has a screen. And unlike-in-quality part would be to project stuff on real world, be completely in a virtual world, etc. There is nothing like it. I just think that making the hardware is the toughest challenge. Zuck might be underestimating hardware progress. If he is right, godspeed, future would be amazing. If not, we'll have net positive experiment out of this and it will accelerate AR/VR hardware dev.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    > I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality. Have you actually tried it? VR in particular demos poorly for people where most of their experience with VR is Google Cardboard. Even VR systems from 5 years ago are dated. You have to try it, especially some notable non-gaming apps
nfw2 4y ago
Another required quality that might be surprisingly tricky to get right is durability. Sunglasses are notoriously brittle, and I can't for the life of me keep sunglasses in good shape for more than a few months. I don't know if there is any great solution besides fundamentally altering the form.
- davemp 4y ago
  The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges. So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable. Not that there aren’t a bunch of other issues for every day wear. (I wear contacts for vision correction because I find glasses very annoying).
  - lolinder 4y ago
    > So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable. It also has to be impossible for failure of the hinges to lead to damage of the electronic components. I've lost multiple laptops to hinges twisting in ways that they shouldn't have and fracturing the motherboard or keyboard, and that's in a form factor that gets much less abuse than glasses.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    > The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges citation needed. For me, it's the scratches and the surface issues. Even though I have no problem taking care of my regular glasses for years, most of my sunglasses become unusable and hard to see through from deteriorating surface and scratches after 6-10 months. No matter if I get $30 or $300 ones.
    - davemp 4y ago
      Isn't that just sunglasses manufacturers simply cheaping out on lens materials and coatings? I don't see what would be stopping VR/AR manufacturers from making quality lenses.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
6nf 4y ago
We had a VR excitement 'bubble' in the 90s. Loads of headsets came out, games supporting them, etc. It all died out within a few years. I guess people like Mark thought the reason for the die out was that the tech wasn't there yet. But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset. But that seems to be what Mark is working towards. He's thinking people will choose to work together via VR rather than just plain old video conferencing.
- kevmo314 4y ago
  > But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset. This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are... In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    That would be great if Meta was a VC fund placing hundreds of bets in the hopes of a moonshot paying off. But a (formerly) trillion dollar company placing such a big bet on such a small market is very surprising.
    - _carbyau_ 4y ago
      This is what I have an issue with. This is a side project. Something to make sure FB has a foot in the game for when the technologies make "it all" (whatever that is) possible. Part of me wonders if this is a decoy - look over here! While I do something useful elsewhere.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    Using a Quest we're clearly not there yet but we're also clearly far closer than a VirtualBoy. Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.
YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
Even with 'perfect' glasses, batteries, networking and tracking, you're still faced with the problem that the virtual world is populated by intangible apparitions while real-world obstacles remain very tangible. And conceptually, none of the solutions to those problems are ever going to become cheap or convenient, because they're problems with basic physics.
tkk23 4y ago
>You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses Why? You don't have to transport VR. VR is the complement to mobile phones: mobile phones are used when you leave home, VR is used when you don't leave home. The big question is: Are people going to leave home or are they going to stay home? My guess is that it depends on how much energy is available. If there is no infrastructure worth visiting for billions of people, then VR will become a success. >It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. If work happens in VR, then employer will finance the hardware for their employees.
paperwasp42 4y ago
Another requirement that seems to get ignored is that you need to have the overwhelming majority of the public not feel sick when you use it. I recently had a friend bring a VR headset to a party for people to try out. About 15% of the people who tried it felt dizzy or nauseous after using it. (I did not try it because I know from experience I'll have a headache and be dizzy for hours afterward.) Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!) And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform. Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  What kind of VR headset was this? In my experience Quest has the most comfortable experience ever and I’m prone to nausea. Disclaimer: I used to work at Oculus.
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    I've tried an Occulus at a salon a few years ago, got very sick after five minutes. The game I tried was SuperHot. I genuinely hated it. I will only reluctantly try again a VR headset; this is unfortunately not the kind of sickness you forget.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      Quest/Quest 2 specifically? Rift S? Rift CV1? Or the original Rift? I ask because the software and hardware has improved drastically. I'd be pretty surprised if you get sick from a Quest.
    - baby 4y ago
jonas21 4y ago
It's interesting that you have identified exactly the same shortcomings that mobile had when the first commercial mobile phones came to market in the 80s: - size - weight - battery life - heat - network reliability - cost These were all eventually overcome, incrementally. However, it did take about 30 years for that to happen, so 10 may have been a bit optimistic.
- conradfr 4y ago
  At least phones don't transform to paperweight once an algorithm running inside a server of a mega American corporation deems you unworthy.
h0l0cube 4y ago
> It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. The first AR glasses will be close to dummy terminals. For them to become feasible, wireless networking infrastructure has to become low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput – but not necessarily ubiquitous. There's no need to have powerful compute in a small form-factor if that can be outsourced to nearby servers, and this is something that could be possible in the confines of a major city, and the hardware would be rolled out much like another mobile carrier.
herval 4y ago
With Apple allegedly joining the space in less than 2 months, and multiple sunglasses-sized devices out there already (nreal, rokid, etc), I think we'll know very soon whether XR has a chance of going mainstream this decade

melony 4y ago

The counter argument is that they have sank billions into this with top tier optoelectronic engineers working on realizing the vision. It is about as good an effort as you can reasonably get. If they want to go further, they will have to start building out their own exotic semiconductor basic research labs. Perhaps their only mistake is not scaling up the hardware R and D earlier. One potential play is a joint venture with Apple, unpalatable yes, but they are the only other large scale consumer electronics company with the EEs and hardware talent needed to execute this. I doubt even the military and government research labs can do a better job.

orik 4y ago
If there was something like a join venture between Apple & FB, it would be incredibly compelling as a software engineer interested in AR/VR to go work for them on it.
- melony 4y ago
  They will probably pay you less than what you can get in other divisions. Nobody I know chose to work for Apple for the total compensation.

bluescrn 4y ago

> It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035. 20 years of mobile phone development gave us things that we could barely have imagined back in 2000 or so.

codepoet80 4y ago
I don't think that's true. We were imagining them, and even trying to build them -- the hardware just wasn't capable of it. Newton, Palm and Handspring showed us the way, and those platforms died on the journey there. Apple arguably only added capacitive multitouch to the mix, apparently the last big piece of the puzzle to make mobile devices natural and fluid (OK, wireless networks weren't quite there when the original iPhone came out). I'd argue that there are many, many puzzle pieces still needed to begin imagining an AR future. While the Newton showed an incomplete vision of its future, it begged all the right questions. My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
- bentcorner 4y ago
  > My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick... This feels like the similar kind of problems of understanding how to accommodate the human into the platform. Early mobile platforms were just "desktop, but smaller". You were expected to interact with the device using a stylus. Small checkboxes and UI elements were common. The device needed to regularly tether to a desktop. Lots of VR games still allow you to move/rotate using thumbsticks. Part of it is that these games are ports of desktop experiences that wouldn't work any other way. Over time developers will better understand what works and what doesn't, and will design games/apps that don't make you nauseous. There's also likely a bunch of vision problems that still need to be worked through. I have no expertise in VR but with my limited usage it feels quite close, and I think these problems are not insurmountable.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
4y ago

spywaregorilla 4y ago

I tend to agree. His points feel pretty good to me. His assumptions are very bad.

nfw2 4y ago
I can see how his assumptions seemed reasonable at the time given that google glass already existed
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Maybe. I thought we'd have more accessible shitty AR sooner. But VR has a lot of hard problems that don't seem solveable with a good hour of reflection in order to get it to the VR people see in movies.

chaostheory 4y ago

This reminds me of how the public viewed computers before Windows 95, or when the iPhone just came out. The flaws are many and severe, but you’d be shortsighted if you couldn’t see the potential

ethbr0 4y ago
There's a quip somewhere about how the essence of futurist misprediction has been confusing unlike-in-quality and unlike-in-capability. Unlike-in-quality is the same thing, only better. It rarely changes the world, because it's not an infinite value proposition. Unlike-in-capability, on the other hand, is offering something that literally didn't exist before. It approaches infinite value, because it has the capability to reshape the world into one that requires its existence. Mobile internet was unlike-in-capability. I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality. Maybe the only thing that gets me there is persistence, but the rub of that is that its requirements all require bulky physical configuration and/or isolation. At its worst, earliest form, a brick cell phone was still portable, and didn't isolate the user from the world around them.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  VR/AR is more unlike-in-capability than phones. If the hardware becomes a pair of glasses that have no friction in putting on, then it can engulf capabilities of TV, phone, PC, anything that has a screen. And unlike-in-quality part would be to project stuff on real world, be completely in a virtual world, etc. There is nothing like it. I just think that making the hardware is the toughest challenge. Zuck might be underestimating hardware progress. If he is right, godspeed, future would be amazing. If not, we'll have net positive experiment out of this and it will accelerate AR/VR hardware dev.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  > I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality. Have you actually tried it? VR in particular demos poorly for people where most of their experience with VR is Google Cardboard. Even VR systems from 5 years ago are dated. You have to try it, especially some notable non-gaming apps

nfw2 4y ago

Another required quality that might be surprisingly tricky to get right is durability. Sunglasses are notoriously brittle, and I can't for the life of me keep sunglasses in good shape for more than a few months. I don't know if there is any great solution besides fundamentally altering the form.

davemp 4y ago
The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges. So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable. Not that there aren’t a bunch of other issues for every day wear. (I wear contacts for vision correction because I find glasses very annoying).
- lolinder 4y ago
  > So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable. It also has to be impossible for failure of the hinges to lead to damage of the electronic components. I've lost multiple laptops to hinges twisting in ways that they shouldn't have and fracturing the motherboard or keyboard, and that's in a form factor that gets much less abuse than glasses.
- twelve40 4y ago
  > The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges citation needed. For me, it's the scratches and the surface issues. Even though I have no problem taking care of my regular glasses for years, most of my sunglasses become unusable and hard to see through from deteriorating surface and scratches after 6-10 months. No matter if I get $30 or $300 ones.
  - davemp 4y ago
    Isn't that just sunglasses manufacturers simply cheaping out on lens materials and coatings? I don't see what would be stopping VR/AR manufacturers from making quality lenses.
jay_kyburz 4y ago

6nf 4y ago

We had a VR excitement 'bubble' in the 90s. Loads of headsets came out, games supporting them, etc. It all died out within a few years. I guess people like Mark thought the reason for the die out was that the tech wasn't there yet. But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset. But that seems to be what Mark is working towards. He's thinking people will choose to work together via VR rather than just plain old video conferencing.

kevmo314 4y ago
> But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset. This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are... In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  That would be great if Meta was a VC fund placing hundreds of bets in the hopes of a moonshot paying off. But a (formerly) trillion dollar company placing such a big bet on such a small market is very surprising.
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    This is what I have an issue with. This is a side project. Something to make sure FB has a foot in the game for when the technologies make "it all" (whatever that is) possible. Part of me wonders if this is a decoy - look over here! While I do something useful elsewhere.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Using a Quest we're clearly not there yet but we're also clearly far closer than a VirtualBoy. Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago

Even with 'perfect' glasses, batteries, networking and tracking, you're still faced with the problem that the virtual world is populated by intangible apparitions while real-world obstacles remain very tangible. And conceptually, none of the solutions to those problems are ever going to become cheap or convenient, because they're problems with basic physics.

tkk23 4y ago

>You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses Why? You don't have to transport VR. VR is the complement to mobile phones: mobile phones are used when you leave home, VR is used when you don't leave home. The big question is: Are people going to leave home or are they going to stay home? My guess is that it depends on how much energy is available. If there is no infrastructure worth visiting for billions of people, then VR will become a success. >It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. If work happens in VR, then employer will finance the hardware for their employees.

paperwasp42 4y ago

Another requirement that seems to get ignored is that you need to have the overwhelming majority of the public not feel sick when you use it. I recently had a friend bring a VR headset to a party for people to try out. About 15% of the people who tried it felt dizzy or nauseous after using it. (I did not try it because I know from experience I'll have a headache and be dizzy for hours afterward.) Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!) And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform. Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.

vlovich123 4y ago
What kind of VR headset was this? In my experience Quest has the most comfortable experience ever and I’m prone to nausea. Disclaimer: I used to work at Oculus.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  I've tried an Occulus at a salon a few years ago, got very sick after five minutes. The game I tried was SuperHot. I genuinely hated it. I will only reluctantly try again a VR headset; this is unfortunately not the kind of sickness you forget.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Quest/Quest 2 specifically? Rift S? Rift CV1? Or the original Rift? I ask because the software and hardware has improved drastically. I'd be pretty surprised if you get sick from a Quest.
  - baby 4y ago

jonas21 4y ago

It's interesting that you have identified exactly the same shortcomings that mobile had when the first commercial mobile phones came to market in the 80s: - size - weight - battery life - heat - network reliability - cost These were all eventually overcome, incrementally. However, it did take about 30 years for that to happen, so 10 may have been a bit optimistic.

conradfr 4y ago
At least phones don't transform to paperweight once an algorithm running inside a server of a mega American corporation deems you unworthy.

h0l0cube 4y ago

> It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. The first AR glasses will be close to dummy terminals. For them to become feasible, wireless networking infrastructure has to become low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput – but not necessarily ubiquitous. There's no need to have powerful compute in a small form-factor if that can be outsourced to nearby servers, and this is something that could be possible in the confines of a major city, and the hardware would be rolled out much like another mobile carrier.

herval 4y ago

With Apple allegedly joining the space in less than 2 months, and multiple sunglasses-sized devices out there already (nreal, rokid, etc), I think we'll know very soon whether XR has a chance of going mainstream this decade