4 ms·

As much as I’m unhappy about the death of PCVR thanks to the Quest 2, I have to agree with Carmack that it was very close to being the Right Device for bringing

As much as I’m unhappy about the death of PCVR thanks to the Quest 2, I have to agree with Carmack that it was very close to being the Right Device for bringing VR to the masses - and the sales numbers mostly reflect this. But I can’t help but feel something dysfunctional happened internally since the Quest 2 launch. The Quest Pro should not have been launched at $1500 with its current feature set/SoC and no depth sensor. And I find it difficult to accept the “enterprise market” claim as anything more than a cope when I go into BestBuy and see it being demoed to consumers and displayed prominently in an endcap. Then you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert” had fewer attendees than an average Wendy’s and the performance was low res 2d video on a screen. Embarrassing stuff. As far as gaming is concerned: Meta spent hundreds of millions acquiring some of the largest third party VR devs over the past couple years - and still not a single game has been announced. It sure smells like rotten bureaucratic infighting combined with Zuck doggedly chasing where he thinks the puck is going and Carmack’s resignation letter certainly doesn’t disabuse me of the notion.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago
I think in the Quest you can see Zuckerberg trying to create Meta's iPhone. Most of Apple's profit comes from selling hardware for more than it costs to make it. Sure there are other phones but most people would prefer an iphone, for various reasons. Branding is not the least of which. I see the quest pro as a similar product to the iphone pro. Technically better, but almost as much of a status symbol to ramp up profits long term as much as anything. I suspect we'll see those two lanes continue to be developed with fairly fast releases on a similar schedule to iphones - with Mark's dream being that one day Meta will be the new Apple complete with the walled garden app store.
bni 4y ago
I agree with everything in your comment. I think Zuck is impatient. He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution. Yet VR must be a huge gaming success before something like a social network in VR can happen. Quest 2 and Rift before it is almost that, but still a large part of gaming fans remain unconvinced. But that is surely possible to solve. We are at the Doom/Quake stage and he wants to skip WoW, Fortnite and get directly to what comes after that by building the equivalent of VRML or Second Life. Its too early. Also AR is a distraction, not possible to do well with tech existing today, if ever.
- SideQuark 4y ago
  >He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution You don't need a gaming stage to make it useful any more than you needed a gaming stage of face to face video conferencing to make FaceTime and Zoom and the like extremely useful. The proper plan is to try to get many use cases working, and try to solve technical problems for each, until one of them meet in a useful product or solution. Claiming it has to be a certain way will miss quicker and possibly much more fruitful cases.
  - zemvpferreira 4y ago
    But here's the thing: no group but gamers is excited enough about VR to even be a candidate for a market right now. The only people who want to strap goggles to their face are those looking for gaming experiences. Why try to dodge that reality?
    - SideQuark 4y ago
      There is massive interest in the business markets, and their size dwarfs gaming. The best selling gaming platform in history was playstation 2 with ~150M sold. Zoom has 300M users daily. Other business platforms add hundreds of millions more users. The business hardware for conference rooms stuff is massivley bigger than games. And all the players in this hardware, from Logitech, to Bose, are all working towards this too. Gaming is a small market compared to what companies are trying to do with this space. Disrupting the having to fly far for a meeting when one could get the same experience is such a bigger, likely easier to satisfy, market, makes gaming become an afterthought. Or you can listen to the Zuckerberg interview with Lex Fridman where he states Why try to dodge that reality?
      - ljw1001 4y ago
        What’s your evidence for massive interest in business markets? I use a quest for gaming, but find the idea of interacting with colleagues for corporate stuff to be just hideous.
ecshafer 4y ago
VR has a place. I don't know if Meta is capable of getting it there. Occulus is a great piece of tech, I own one and I enjoy it. My wife who does not game at all, also likes it. There are games like Beat Saber a few others that are good for getting the masses in. And games like Half Life Alyx that can get gamers in. But outside of that there is nothing that really makes it seem like an improvement to life, its still a novelty. >when you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert” Why would I want to go to a low resolution hologram concert and sit in my house instead of being at a concert? That's not cool. People don't take photos of that, they don't talk about it at lunch the next day, they don't reminisce about that. Its divorced from people. I think that the "Metaverse" is actually on the right track somewhere but doesn't have the vision of a product to get it finished. I would love the Metaverse as some kind of "tabletop" simulator. My vision of the metaverse after Zuck's announcement was that it would be cool if I could play rpgs in there, where I can customize my avatar, and a gm can build a dungeon out. Let me do fantastical otherworldly things, not just try and save myself a 20 minute drive. That is where I think metaverse will win, unique experiences that I can only get in there. The problem is that the Metaverse is trying to see copies of real world experiences, but worse.
joezydeco 4y ago
Was the Quest 2 cheap because the BOM was low, or because Facebook subsidized hundreds of dollars of each headset? If VR is costing them 10s of billions of dollars yearly, where else could that much money have gone?
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I'm bullish on the metaverse only because I see it as the only viable solution to one of the biggest problems in the world right now: loneliness. Sure, metaverse interactions are a distant second to real world interactions, but at this point, real-world doesn't work out for lonely people anymore, and I haven't seen any compelling real world solutions either. Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed. You'd ideally fix it irl. But if you can't, at least giving people a virtual experience of togetherness might be worth it
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 4y ago
  How is loneliness fixed by putting on goggles? Why wasn’t it solved by phones?
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Tiktok has demonstrated the upper levels of dissociation possible on a phone. The logical next step for the app purveyors of the world is a device that affixes itself to your face and keep reality out entirely.
  - dayglo 4y ago
    I sat with my long distance gf to watch TV together, and genuinely forgot that we weren’t in the same room. It was magic. Taking the goggles off and instantly going back to being alone in my house was an eye opener; I realised that while VR is not as good as really being there, it’s so much better than a video chat for feeling close.
- mathgladiator 4y ago
  > Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed I think this is fixed by going outside and talking to people.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    of course. And everyone knows that. But people still don't do it for any number of reasons. If it's not working out so we need to find new solutions

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

I think in the Quest you can see Zuckerberg trying to create Meta's iPhone. Most of Apple's profit comes from selling hardware for more than it costs to make it. Sure there are other phones but most people would prefer an iphone, for various reasons. Branding is not the least of which. I see the quest pro as a similar product to the iphone pro. Technically better, but almost as much of a status symbol to ramp up profits long term as much as anything. I suspect we'll see those two lanes continue to be developed with fairly fast releases on a similar schedule to iphones - with Mark's dream being that one day Meta will be the new Apple complete with the walled garden app store.

bni 4y ago

I agree with everything in your comment. I think Zuck is impatient. He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution. Yet VR must be a huge gaming success before something like a social network in VR can happen. Quest 2 and Rift before it is almost that, but still a large part of gaming fans remain unconvinced. But that is surely possible to solve. We are at the Doom/Quake stage and he wants to skip WoW, Fortnite and get directly to what comes after that by building the equivalent of VRML or Second Life. Its too early. Also AR is a distraction, not possible to do well with tech existing today, if ever.

SideQuark 4y ago
>He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution You don't need a gaming stage to make it useful any more than you needed a gaming stage of face to face video conferencing to make FaceTime and Zoom and the like extremely useful. The proper plan is to try to get many use cases working, and try to solve technical problems for each, until one of them meet in a useful product or solution. Claiming it has to be a certain way will miss quicker and possibly much more fruitful cases.
- zemvpferreira 4y ago
  But here's the thing: no group but gamers is excited enough about VR to even be a candidate for a market right now. The only people who want to strap goggles to their face are those looking for gaming experiences. Why try to dodge that reality?
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    There is massive interest in the business markets, and their size dwarfs gaming. The best selling gaming platform in history was playstation 2 with ~150M sold. Zoom has 300M users daily. Other business platforms add hundreds of millions more users. The business hardware for conference rooms stuff is massivley bigger than games. And all the players in this hardware, from Logitech, to Bose, are all working towards this too. Gaming is a small market compared to what companies are trying to do with this space. Disrupting the having to fly far for a meeting when one could get the same experience is such a bigger, likely easier to satisfy, market, makes gaming become an afterthought. Or you can listen to the Zuckerberg interview with Lex Fridman where he states Why try to dodge that reality?
    - ljw1001 4y ago
      What’s your evidence for massive interest in business markets? I use a quest for gaming, but find the idea of interacting with colleagues for corporate stuff to be just hideous.

ecshafer 4y ago

VR has a place. I don't know if Meta is capable of getting it there. Occulus is a great piece of tech, I own one and I enjoy it. My wife who does not game at all, also likes it. There are games like Beat Saber a few others that are good for getting the masses in. And games like Half Life Alyx that can get gamers in. But outside of that there is nothing that really makes it seem like an improvement to life, its still a novelty. >when you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert” Why would I want to go to a low resolution hologram concert and sit in my house instead of being at a concert? That's not cool. People don't take photos of that, they don't talk about it at lunch the next day, they don't reminisce about that. Its divorced from people. I think that the "Metaverse" is actually on the right track somewhere but doesn't have the vision of a product to get it finished. I would love the Metaverse as some kind of "tabletop" simulator. My vision of the metaverse after Zuck's announcement was that it would be cool if I could play rpgs in there, where I can customize my avatar, and a gm can build a dungeon out. Let me do fantastical otherworldly things, not just try and save myself a 20 minute drive. That is where I think metaverse will win, unique experiences that I can only get in there. The problem is that the Metaverse is trying to see copies of real world experiences, but worse.

joezydeco 4y ago

Was the Quest 2 cheap because the BOM was low, or because Facebook subsidized hundreds of dollars of each headset? If VR is costing them 10s of billions of dollars yearly, where else could that much money have gone?

spaceman_2020 4y ago

I'm bullish on the metaverse only because I see it as the only viable solution to one of the biggest problems in the world right now: loneliness. Sure, metaverse interactions are a distant second to real world interactions, but at this point, real-world doesn't work out for lonely people anymore, and I haven't seen any compelling real world solutions either. Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed. You'd ideally fix it irl. But if you can't, at least giving people a virtual experience of togetherness might be worth it

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 4y ago
How is loneliness fixed by putting on goggles? Why wasn’t it solved by phones?
- rchaud 4y ago
  Tiktok has demonstrated the upper levels of dissociation possible on a phone. The logical next step for the app purveyors of the world is a device that affixes itself to your face and keep reality out entirely.
- dayglo 4y ago
  I sat with my long distance gf to watch TV together, and genuinely forgot that we weren’t in the same room. It was magic. Taking the goggles off and instantly going back to being alone in my house was an eye opener; I realised that while VR is not as good as really being there, it’s so much better than a video chat for feeling close.
mathgladiator 4y ago
> Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed I think this is fixed by going outside and talking to people.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  of course. And everyone knows that. But people still don't do it for any number of reasons. If it's not working out so we need to find new solutions