6 ms·

I tried the new PS5 VR2. It’s definitely better than Oculus Quest. Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR when Sony

by spaceman_2020 4y ago

I tried the new PS5 VR2. It’s definitely better than Oculus Quest. Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR when Sony is able to produce a better product with a fraction of the investment.

enra 4y ago
Not surprising really. Cultural problem. Sony = decades of experience on gaming hardware and games (and everything else) Meta = decades of experience running a/b tests on a website and copying features to sell ads (and acquiring few mobile apps to run more a/b tests)
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  Meta hired people that specifically had experience in hardware, wearables, and games for this big bet. Sure, you can say that maybe Meta's infrastructure is in it's infancy in this field, but so is everyone else's because, quite literally, Meta was the only (big) player in this field in the first place.
  - echevil 4y ago
    Meta hired them and required them to fit into Meta's culture
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    Can a game dev be productive in that sort of environment? What does the interview even look like? Being able to do LeetCode hard under pressure is even less meaningful when hiring good game devs.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    Except Meta also filtered with the same filters they used to form an engineering org around serving ads. I have pretty extensive experience in the embedded Android space and have worked on products everyone here knows, Meta reached out to me very excitedly, and when I let the recruiter know I don't do Leetcode they assured me the coding phone screen was a merely a formality and I'd do great. It took all my willpower not to leave the moment the interviewer dropped some generic LC merge sorted lists problem, though I don't think I did was that much better their eyes (poked at it for about all of 5 minutes, called it, and asked them some questions) They actually tried to set me up with a second phone screen but I declined, even on the principle of it, I don't like working at places that filter by LC. In cutting edge stuff like wearables especially, I'm sure you'll find a ton of people with no time for jumping through LC circus. I'm sure I could take a few months and grind out those problems in my sleep (or rather I've been told that), but I'd rather work on interesting and novel things.
    - hnav 4y ago
      merging sorted lists is not a leetcode nightmare interview question though, if you can't manage it in an interview, chances are you can't program very well IMO
      - jackblemming 4y ago
        OP didn't go into detail about the problem, so we have no idea what the actual problem or solution was. Empirical research has found many people don't do well in high stakes problem solving situations while being watched (shocking).
        engmgrmgr 4y ago
        Many people also don’t do well in high stakes problem solving situations even when not being watched. I’m not suggesting OP is dumb, but if someone is setting hiring criteria and thinks they need X skillset judged by Y, I think there’s a good chance they’re directionally correct. I get it, I’ve bombed interviews I was excited about and rationalized it anywhere and everywhere. Once I started hiring folks, my opinions evolved significantly. How else do you hire someone out of a pool of people that are all knowledgeable and likable? A bad hire, even if they’re super smart and just the wrong fit, is worse than not hiring anyone at all. If you climb the management ladder, you’ll likely be graded on your org’s hiring outcomes. If 10 people all seemed qualified, I’m going to burn down the risk as much as possible. If I’m wrong 1 time for this, but it not obviously wrong 9 others, I’ll call it a win. For context: this is coming from tiny startups to billion dollar companies and different things in between.
        notacoward 4y ago
        What if there's solid evidence (e.g. visible work in open source) that all ten can code? The problem is not that coding interviews exist at all but that they're mandatory for all levels and roles. At L5+ coding isn't even the most important skill, so LC-style coding interviews introduce a risk of false negatives without providing any actually useful information. BTW those false negatives occur disproportionately for some demographics, and it only takes a single mention of "culture fit" to make one wonder if that's the whole point.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    In which case Meat got, best case, competent people. Since those people started from scratch in an organization that never did what those new folks planned to do, as an organization Meta was still incompetent in that field compared to others. Now, being Meta and having all those new people, and the budget, could have built a proper org for hardware. Something that would require quite a cultural change so. And that latter bit is hard.
    - registeredcorn 4y ago
      I formally propose facebook's new name to be "Meat". :)
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Damn, I didn't catch that until your comment!
      - sebastien_b 4y ago
        Nah, I like “Meta” since it’s appropriately short for “Metastasize”.
potatolicious 4y ago
A lot more computing horsepower by being tethered, really. A standalone unit naturally can't have the same kind of graphical fidelity than something tethered to a full-powered current-gen console. I think there are two strategic errors worth considering here: - wireless vs. tethered. Was it really worth it going wireless or was there viability in being tethered? - the hype around PSVR2 is around the Horizon game, which seems like a legitimately great, full-length game that's both a gameplay and technical achievement. What if Meta had spent their $$$ on funding and shipping titles like it? Beat Saber is the only title of note for them and it's getting very old. One gets the feeling that Meta only begrudgingly services the gaming applications of Quest, even though it's the only application right now. This is understandable as the console market as a whole is far to small for Meta to be interested in long-term, but one can convincingly argue that the status quo doesn't serve them either: they have a product that doesn't have non-gaming PMF but also are visibly annoyed at being in the gaming market at all. Their existing customers have no confidence in the platform and have reasonable expectations to be jettisoned the moment they become inconvenient, while the company has no line of sight to another market. There's a lot of execution here that feels like it puts the cart before the horse. Of course you want a bigger-than-console-gaming market, but you have to excel in your space before you can convincingly lay claim to another. Finding viability (both product and financial) in your current market gives you freedom to pivot later. The step away from Quest Pro feels incoherent. You don't really see yourself and your product as a gaming product, so you pivot towards MR/productivity use cases... and now you're... pivoting back to gaming? What? Yeah, ok, the Quest Pro was definitely underbaked, but it suggests that the company has no confidence in its own strategy. If you believe in the MR/productivity path, double down and fix the problems with a follow-up. If you believe in VR gaming, then act like it!
- frozenport 4y ago
  They've been trying to fix the "MR/productivity path" for years without much success. Perhaps there is some future in industrial assistance but not clear if that translates to the next generation platform to subvert a teenage girl's self esteem. They could never make a convincing MR/productivity headset because there is absolutely no consumer demand for an inferior experience.
- 4y ago
jayd16 4y ago
By what measure? The headset is tethered, bulkier, more expensive, came out two years later and only has slightly higher resolution. It's good and I expect it to do well but it's not definitely better.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _0w8t 4y ago
  Yes, tethering simplifies a lot. Quest works with tethering better, but it does work without the cables with many games. And it took Meta like almost two years to optimize the wireless driver to make things really work. And given how terrible Sony has been with software, it was not surprising that they skipped the wireless option.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Unlike Facebook, Sony is a hardware company that basically makes everything. If Sony wants to spit out the best VR headset they can just call up their display division, camera division, sensors division, design division and put into a single device the bleeding edge and expertise of each one of them. Facebook on the other hand is left to toy with less stellar and more commercial offerings and does not have the history of hardware manufacturing experience to offer something exceptional.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >Facebook on the other hand is left to toy with less stellar and more commercial offerings I'm not sure what your point is when the PS VR2's optics are not as good as Facebook's. The PS VR2 while OLED suffers from mura and brightness issues. The amount of mura is inconsistent and can be pretty bad on some headsets. Since the panels can not get bright enough Sony is leaving the displays on longer which trades off increased brightness for more motion blur. The display is also using a pentile subpixel arrangement which is not as good as compared to a RGB stripe one. The peak pixels per degree of the optics is less than all competing devices on the market and is releasing with Fresnel optics in 2023. The PS VR2 doesn't stand out as being bleeding edge to me, unless by bleeding edge you mean the technology isn't mature enough to be ready yet to meet consumer exceptions. It just looks to be marketed as a better and updated version of the PS VR headset. No other headset is competing in the segment of the market that is powered by consoles.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    Are you comparing it to the quest pro? I haven't tried the vr2, but everybody I've seen that tried it said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      I was comparing it to the quest 2. >said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2. The Quest 2's optics are much better than the index, both in PPD and in that there is less god rays. There are likely more factors than the optics being considered. Or the OLED black levels are being over valued. How much a person likes the optics is pretty subjective so people are fine to prefer whatever they want.
berkle4455 4y ago
A wired VR device that can offload processing to a gaming machine is better than a wireless one? I'm shocked!
jerlam 4y ago
Linus Tech Tips seems to agree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8RS6SZRk_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8RS6SZRk_4
brundolf 4y ago
Meta doesn't know (or doesn't want to admit) it's a game company https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/4/23623081/meta-quest-3-ps3-xbox-one-video-games-yikes https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/4/23623081/meta-quest-3-ps3-...
paxys 4y ago
How is it even a comparison? Meta Quest 2 costs $400 and runs fully standalone. PS5 VR2 costs $550 and has to be plugged into a $500 gaming console. Compare it to a Quest Pro (at $1000, so still cheaper) and it’ll be a different story.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Well, Quest 2 untethered can play a few very simple games but it also requires you to tether to a PC to play anything that doesn’t look like Minecraft. Sony could have a mobile phone GPU in theirs but.. why would they?
  - bufferoverflow 4y ago
    You don't have to tether, you can stream wierelessly to Quest2 over wifi6. It's actually one of the most flexible VR headsets on the market.
blensor 4y ago
You might not like it but they are squeezing out an impressive amount of features out of the limited mobile chipset. Any kind of roomscale type of game or shared spaces type of game is going to be a nightmare being tethered. Something like that will be impossible altogether https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/11iht0l/do_not_try_this_at_home_or_outside_or_anywhere/ https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/11iht0l/do_...
vasco 4y ago
> Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR Patents. When AR/VR Renaissance happens in like 10 years, Facebook will be to it what nokia was to the smartphone wave. That's the best case scenario, the worst case scenario is they'll milk some patents with industrial applications.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cypress66 4y ago
Comments are saying that's not a fair comparison, but you're completely on point. Hardware isn't there yet for cheap, good looking standalone vr. Meta investing in that was a mistake. Instead of people being in awe when experiencing something like the PS5 VR, the "meta verse" (horizon worlds) became literally a meme because of the atrocious graphics. There are better looking quest games than horizon worlds, but still.
roland35 4y ago
Many people seem to confuse total Reality Labs spending with VR spending. VR is only one piece of it.
ramesh31 4y ago
>Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR when Sony is able to produce a better product with a fraction of the investment. It's not though. It's essentially an Oculus 1 with better resolution. Mobile untethered is the only real future for VR, and Meta is solving the hard problems there. Carmack knew this, and it's why he drove Quest to be fully self contained. Things like PSVR will only ever be niche toys for gamers.

enra 4y ago

Not surprising really. Cultural problem. Sony = decades of experience on gaming hardware and games (and everything else) Meta = decades of experience running a/b tests on a website and copying features to sell ads (and acquiring few mobile apps to run more a/b tests)

latency-guy2 4y ago
Meta hired people that specifically had experience in hardware, wearables, and games for this big bet. Sure, you can say that maybe Meta's infrastructure is in it's infancy in this field, but so is everyone else's because, quite literally, Meta was the only (big) player in this field in the first place.
- echevil 4y ago
  Meta hired them and required them to fit into Meta's culture
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Can a game dev be productive in that sort of environment? What does the interview even look like? Being able to do LeetCode hard under pressure is even less meaningful when hiring good game devs.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Except Meta also filtered with the same filters they used to form an engineering org around serving ads. I have pretty extensive experience in the embedded Android space and have worked on products everyone here knows, Meta reached out to me very excitedly, and when I let the recruiter know I don't do Leetcode they assured me the coding phone screen was a merely a formality and I'd do great. It took all my willpower not to leave the moment the interviewer dropped some generic LC merge sorted lists problem, though I don't think I did was that much better their eyes (poked at it for about all of 5 minutes, called it, and asked them some questions) They actually tried to set me up with a second phone screen but I declined, even on the principle of it, I don't like working at places that filter by LC. In cutting edge stuff like wearables especially, I'm sure you'll find a ton of people with no time for jumping through LC circus. I'm sure I could take a few months and grind out those problems in my sleep (or rather I've been told that), but I'd rather work on interesting and novel things.
  - hnav 4y ago
    merging sorted lists is not a leetcode nightmare interview question though, if you can't manage it in an interview, chances are you can't program very well IMO
    - jackblemming 4y ago
      OP didn't go into detail about the problem, so we have no idea what the actual problem or solution was. Empirical research has found many people don't do well in high stakes problem solving situations while being watched (shocking).
      - engmgrmgr 4y ago
        Many people also don’t do well in high stakes problem solving situations even when not being watched. I’m not suggesting OP is dumb, but if someone is setting hiring criteria and thinks they need X skillset judged by Y, I think there’s a good chance they’re directionally correct. I get it, I’ve bombed interviews I was excited about and rationalized it anywhere and everywhere. Once I started hiring folks, my opinions evolved significantly. How else do you hire someone out of a pool of people that are all knowledgeable and likable? A bad hire, even if they’re super smart and just the wrong fit, is worse than not hiring anyone at all. If you climb the management ladder, you’ll likely be graded on your org’s hiring outcomes. If 10 people all seemed qualified, I’m going to burn down the risk as much as possible. If I’m wrong 1 time for this, but it not obviously wrong 9 others, I’ll call it a win. For context: this is coming from tiny startups to billion dollar companies and different things in between.
        notacoward 4y ago
        What if there's solid evidence (e.g. visible work in open source) that all ten can code? The problem is not that coding interviews exist at all but that they're mandatory for all levels and roles. At L5+ coding isn't even the most important skill, so LC-style coding interviews introduce a risk of false negatives without providing any actually useful information. BTW those false negatives occur disproportionately for some demographics, and it only takes a single mention of "culture fit" to make one wonder if that's the whole point.
- hef19898 4y ago
  In which case Meat got, best case, competent people. Since those people started from scratch in an organization that never did what those new folks planned to do, as an organization Meta was still incompetent in that field compared to others. Now, being Meta and having all those new people, and the budget, could have built a proper org for hardware. Something that would require quite a cultural change so. And that latter bit is hard.
  - registeredcorn 4y ago
    I formally propose facebook's new name to be "Meat". :)
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Damn, I didn't catch that until your comment!
    - sebastien_b 4y ago
      Nah, I like “Meta” since it’s appropriately short for “Metastasize”.

potatolicious 4y ago

A lot more computing horsepower by being tethered, really. A standalone unit naturally can't have the same kind of graphical fidelity than something tethered to a full-powered current-gen console. I think there are two strategic errors worth considering here: - wireless vs. tethered. Was it really worth it going wireless or was there viability in being tethered? - the hype around PSVR2 is around the Horizon game, which seems like a legitimately great, full-length game that's both a gameplay and technical achievement. What if Meta had spent their $$$ on funding and shipping titles like it? Beat Saber is the only title of note for them and it's getting very old. One gets the feeling that Meta only begrudgingly services the gaming applications of Quest, even though it's the only application right now. This is understandable as the console market as a whole is far to small for Meta to be interested in long-term, but one can convincingly argue that the status quo doesn't serve them either: they have a product that doesn't have non-gaming PMF but also are visibly annoyed at being in the gaming market at all. Their existing customers have no confidence in the platform and have reasonable expectations to be jettisoned the moment they become inconvenient, while the company has no line of sight to another market. There's a lot of execution here that feels like it puts the cart before the horse. Of course you want a bigger-than-console-gaming market, but you have to excel in your space before you can convincingly lay claim to another. Finding viability (both product and financial) in your current market gives you freedom to pivot later. The step away from Quest Pro feels incoherent. You don't really see yourself and your product as a gaming product, so you pivot towards MR/productivity use cases... and now you're... pivoting back to gaming? What? Yeah, ok, the Quest Pro was definitely underbaked, but it suggests that the company has no confidence in its own strategy. If you believe in the MR/productivity path, double down and fix the problems with a follow-up. If you believe in VR gaming, then act like it!

frozenport 4y ago
They've been trying to fix the "MR/productivity path" for years without much success. Perhaps there is some future in industrial assistance but not clear if that translates to the next generation platform to subvert a teenage girl's self esteem. They could never make a convincing MR/productivity headset because there is absolutely no consumer demand for an inferior experience.
4y ago

jayd16 4y ago

By what measure? The headset is tethered, bulkier, more expensive, came out two years later and only has slightly higher resolution. It's good and I expect it to do well but it's not definitely better.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_0w8t 4y ago
Yes, tethering simplifies a lot. Quest works with tethering better, but it does work without the cables with many games. And it took Meta like almost two years to optimize the wireless driver to make things really work. And given how terrible Sony has been with software, it was not surprising that they skipped the wireless option.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

Unlike Facebook, Sony is a hardware company that basically makes everything. If Sony wants to spit out the best VR headset they can just call up their display division, camera division, sensors division, design division and put into a single device the bleeding edge and expertise of each one of them. Facebook on the other hand is left to toy with less stellar and more commercial offerings and does not have the history of hardware manufacturing experience to offer something exceptional.

charcircuit 4y ago
>Facebook on the other hand is left to toy with less stellar and more commercial offerings I'm not sure what your point is when the PS VR2's optics are not as good as Facebook's. The PS VR2 while OLED suffers from mura and brightness issues. The amount of mura is inconsistent and can be pretty bad on some headsets. Since the panels can not get bright enough Sony is leaving the displays on longer which trades off increased brightness for more motion blur. The display is also using a pentile subpixel arrangement which is not as good as compared to a RGB stripe one. The peak pixels per degree of the optics is less than all competing devices on the market and is releasing with Fresnel optics in 2023. The PS VR2 doesn't stand out as being bleeding edge to me, unless by bleeding edge you mean the technology isn't mature enough to be ready yet to meet consumer exceptions. It just looks to be marketed as a better and updated version of the PS VR headset. No other headset is competing in the segment of the market that is powered by consoles.
- cypress66 4y ago
  Are you comparing it to the quest pro? I haven't tried the vr2, but everybody I've seen that tried it said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    I was comparing it to the quest 2. >said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2. The Quest 2's optics are much better than the index, both in PPD and in that there is less god rays. There are likely more factors than the optics being considered. Or the OLED black levels are being over valued. How much a person likes the optics is pretty subjective so people are fine to prefer whatever they want.

berkle4455 4y ago

A wired VR device that can offload processing to a gaming machine is better than a wireless one? I'm shocked!

jerlam 4y ago

Linus Tech Tips seems to agree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8RS6SZRk_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8RS6SZRk_4

brundolf 4y ago

Meta doesn't know (or doesn't want to admit) it's a game company https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/4/23623081/meta-quest-3-ps3-xbox-one-video-games-yikes https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/4/23623081/meta-quest-3-ps3-...

paxys 4y ago

How is it even a comparison? Meta Quest 2 costs $400 and runs fully standalone. PS5 VR2 costs $550 and has to be plugged into a $500 gaming console. Compare it to a Quest Pro (at $1000, so still cheaper) and it’ll be a different story.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
Well, Quest 2 untethered can play a few very simple games but it also requires you to tether to a PC to play anything that doesn’t look like Minecraft. Sony could have a mobile phone GPU in theirs but.. why would they?
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  You don't have to tether, you can stream wierelessly to Quest2 over wifi6. It's actually one of the most flexible VR headsets on the market.

blensor 4y ago

You might not like it but they are squeezing out an impressive amount of features out of the limited mobile chipset. Any kind of roomscale type of game or shared spaces type of game is going to be a nightmare being tethered. Something like that will be impossible altogether https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/11iht0l/do_not_try_this_at_home_or_outside_or_anywhere/ https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/11iht0l/do_...

vasco 4y ago

> Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR Patents. When AR/VR Renaissance happens in like 10 years, Facebook will be to it what nokia was to the smartphone wave. That's the best case scenario, the worst case scenario is they'll milk some patents with industrial applications.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cypress66 4y ago

Comments are saying that's not a fair comparison, but you're completely on point. Hardware isn't there yet for cheap, good looking standalone vr. Meta investing in that was a mistake. Instead of people being in awe when experiencing something like the PS5 VR, the "meta verse" (horizon worlds) became literally a meme because of the atrocious graphics. There are better looking quest games than horizon worlds, but still.

roland35 4y ago

Many people seem to confuse total Reality Labs spending with VR spending. VR is only one piece of it.

ramesh31 4y ago

>Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR when Sony is able to produce a better product with a fraction of the investment. It's not though. It's essentially an Oculus 1 with better resolution. Mobile untethered is the only real future for VR, and Meta is solving the hard problems there. Carmack knew this, and it's why he drove Quest to be fully self contained. Things like PSVR will only ever be niche toys for gamers.