4 ms·

Its kind of underappreciated how much of a failure their entire software stack is (Bosworth should be the first to leave). For those paying attention, the tech

Its kind of underappreciated how much of a failure their entire software stack is (Bosworth should be the first to leave). For those paying attention, the technical VR "stuff that works" is basically written by Qualcomm. The user side Android system is, really badly done and irritating for people using it as people like Carmack have pointed out. This is possible the biggest software development blunder in history, they seem to have spent 10-20 billion dollars on... Qualcomm making a good vr headset for them and them failing to deliver a good experience with it.

ge96 3y ago
Does this include the newest headset? That one looked pretty good feature wise.
- WhatIsDukkha 3y ago
  Yes its still the underlying software thats terrible. It's an almost straight port of normal android into the headset which is at least familiar but they've really not made any progress in making it more VR and comfortable over time. Lots of small tweaking of whats probably not a great overall fit for VR. For a direct example look at the room boundary system and setup. Even with the new depth sensor and the color passthrough, it fails to figure out whether a table is a surface or a pillow of polygons, it fails to set reasonable wall boundaries (and then the ui is awful for addressing that) and then it nags and irritates people with those failures and misunderstandings. Last I checked, the room software still only stores one room in your house. If you go to your kitchen for your coffee... remake the room boundary over again. This is very fundamental for any AR to be built on and its terrible and unreliable. Edit- also, last I checked, if you turn off boundary nagging with the devtools you cannot use the passthrough mode whatsoever.
  - Panini_Jones 3y ago
    This is the head of AR software that's stepping down, as well, which doesn't even do SLAM or DFS afaik. They just chucked the custom silicon team out in September. I wonder if we'll ever see their mostly functional AR headset vs. Raybans with cameras.
  - andybak 3y ago
    It's flawed, but have you tried the competition?
    - AgentME 3y ago
      Yeah, the Quest's boundary setup process astounded me at how polished and user-friendly it is compared to the Vive and Index's room setup process. Anyone saying that the Quest's software is obviously terrible lives on a different planet than me. The Quest is so simple and works so well, especially compared to other VR headsets+software I've used. I really like the Index too which I use a lot and think does some small things better, but I find it hard to deny the Quest is much more approachable and polished.
      - aranelsurion 3y ago
        Quest 3 is my first and only VR device so I'm obviously not in the know in these matters, though I have to say I don't see what is so terrible about Quest's flavor of Android either. For a regular user, most everything seems to work well. Setup was easy, UI is polished and simple enough to get out of your way, and I personally haven't encountered any show-stopping bugs with it. Maybe I don't expect much out of it, as I see it more of an entry-point to actual VR applications I want to use, rather than something I'm more invested in. If anything, I was surprised how well it worked for a product still so early in its lifecycle.
        cwalv 3y ago
        It makes more sense when you realize some people have an extreme distaste for anything made by Facebook. If you want to dislike something bad enough, it's not hard to find/make up reasons to do so
  - majormajor 3y ago
    What is the connection between Android and the user-level app code around something like your "store multiple rooms" complaint? Seems pretty far away from the kernel and runtime there.
    - rabf 3y ago
      Multiple rooms works fine on my quest 2 and quest pro.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    > It's an almost straight port of normal android into the headset which is at least familiar but they've really not made any progress in making it more VR Congratulations to Meta VR teams. You've created a system perceptually more transparent than a thin sheet of glass.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    You should check again. Most of this is out of date. What constitutes accurate wall boundaries is a matter of opinion but it works well for me. I've never seen the nagging you're talking about, unless you mean when it loses tracking entirely?
- rustybolt 3y ago
  many features != good experience
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  The tech that works in it is still Qualcomm. The UI is going to be the same that the other quest headsets have
  - AgentME 3y ago
    What other headset shares the Quest's UI? Most headsets aren't even standalone like it.
    - upon_drumhead 3y ago
      Given they were talking about the quest 3, it shares the same UI as the quest 2
      - AgentME 3y ago
        Sorry, I thought the implication was that the UI was also made by another company. In my experience the UI and everything in the Quest 2 and 3 works great so I don't understand where the original poster is coming from at all.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Pico kinda copies the quest UI. I was surprised how similar it was. I bought one to hold me over until the quest 3 came out but it had a wobbly lens flaw that made me nauseous. It turned out to be quite common. I had to return it. Luckily the quest 3 is now out.
ahupp 3y ago
> the technical VR "stuff that works" is basically written by Qualcomm. I worked at Oculus on the product that became Quest from 2014-2019 and this statement could not be more wrong. You need more than a vulkan driver to make a VR headset, e.g: * lenses that minimize distortion and chromatic aberration, that are lightweight and compact * astounding amounts of work on inside-out tracking to make it work within latency and power budgets with sufficient accuracy * latency reduction and prediction throughout the stack * foveated rendering * supporting all of those things in Unity and Unreal And for every one of those there are 10 more that I'm forgetting. > The user side Android system is, really badly done and irritating for people using it as people like Carmack have pointed out. The user shell side we have today is entirely his creation, as a response to the less-than-stellar behavior of the Unity shell in the first release. I'm not sure Android is very material for the day-to-day user experience; it's just a particularly opinionated version of linux. There are plenty of missteps here, but none of them are things you've described.
- rabf 3y ago
  The hand tracking has seen continuous improvement and the depth correct passthrough is pretty good and I'm sure quite a feat to accomplish. Its worth noting that much of that 10 Billion wasn't just spent on Horizon Worlds as critics off-handedly suggest, but has been sunk in to lots of acquisitions (hardware and software companies) and research, much of which has yet to be seen in released products. I'm very impressed with the ambition of what they are trying to do and their committment to a longer term vision which is something that often is lacking in many companies. As an example Nvidia were working on AI tooling and hardware for a decade before it really started to pay off big.
  - paul7986 3y ago
    Just bought Meta's latest smart glasses and i use them almost daily because for taking pics and short videos they were almost perfectly and like most people I wear sunglasses almost daily. Im not sure they will win this race, but the glasses are solid for the two instances i mentioned. Other features aren't as solid like Hey Meta barely works.
- 3y ago
pyridines 3y ago
I'm shocked at how many bugs and UI issues I've encountered with the Quest 3 and the associated ecosystem (mostly the web store and android app). I can't help but think of Jonathan Blow's talk Preventing the Collapse of Civilization[1] when I use it. I tried listing all the issues I encountered, but gave up after 4 pages. The poor UX is a bizarre contrast to the foundational VR stuff, which is fantastic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
- cwalv 3y ago
  I've found the companion app to be pretty buggy with quest 3 too, but oddly haven't had a bad time with quest 2
calamari4065 3y ago
I write applications to run on the quest and it's miserable. Simply getting your apk onto the device is the most unnecessarily difficult things I've ever seen. In order to unlock developer mode, you have to have a Facebook account with your phone number associate with a Facebook developer group for your company which requires additional verification to set up. Then you are required to install the oculus app on your phone and link it into your Facebook account. If you're lucky, this will work the second or third time you try it. Even then, sideloaded apps are hidden away in a separate menu. Oh, and you think you can just use your quest tethered while you work in Unity? Good fucking luck. It's remarkably unreliable and unstable. Usually I get a black screen until I restart my headset, my computer, SteamVR, unity or a combination thereof. It's been over a year and I still don't know what the right incantation is. If you want to try air-link, you don't get hand tracking. Intentionally. It's not a technical limitation. Beyond that, it's mostly-standard Android, which is also painful to develop for, but in new and exciting ways. Conversely, targeting Valve Index and an ultraleap tracker is as easy as it gets. If your application runs on the PC where you're developing it, you're already done. It's plug and play almost every time. There's no extra layers of bullshit to wade through, you just open unity and hit play and that's it. Well, unless you count all the ways that PC development sucks. Development concerns aside, the quest is a low power phone with some cheap optics. Resolution is bad, frame rate is bad, battery is bad, it literally does not fit my face. I can't see anything because you only have three IPD choices and they're all wrong. Hand tracking is consistently worse than ultraleap, and with the latest update it's totally unusable for me. And I mean that I literally cannot select UI items. It nags me every 30 seconds about turning on my controllers. I also have this weird issue where different colors render at different depths. Red text floats above the surface and green is sunk below. It's really hideous. The Quest is worse than a PC HMD in every way except that it's cheap. That's it, that's all it has going for it. It's cheap and technically does run VR.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Is it really that hard? Make a meta account, make an org, use an app to enable dev mode, then just use the usual Android stack.
  - 3y ago
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
> This is possible the biggest software development blunder in history I hate to be that guy, but please google "therac-25". There's been absolutely no loss of life, just software shittily written. Yes, it's a blunder, but the hyperbole is unwarranted here.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > I hate to be that guy, but please google "therac-25". Or "UK Post Office Fujitsu".
  - DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    Beyond safety critical applications the Dutch automated welfare-fraud detection system (SyRI) also jumps to mind. Wrongful debt, convictions, children removed from their parents homes, and even suicides.
    - taneq 3y ago
      Australia's 'Robodebt' system likewise issued a whole lot of unjustified fines etc. and caused a lot of pain for a lot of people.
  - multjoy 3y ago
    That was, at heart, a disclosure issue. The Post Office knew that their prosecution was unsafe but went ahead with it anyway - they had a duty to disclose to the defence any material in their possession that undermined the prosecution case or advanced the defence case. This is a statutory duty and a police investigation is ongoing into the prosecution.
- taneq 3y ago
  The Therac-25 issue apparently only caused six known incidents. If you want an example of software killing people, how about the 737 MAX MCAS issue, or the Toyota unintended acceleration issue?
  - 3y ago
jayd16 3y ago
Qualcomm does all the ai models for spatial and hand tracking too or is it just the hardware?
virtualritz 3y ago
> This is possible the biggest software development blunder in history, [...] I would think Volkswagen's CARIOT is possibly a contender in that space too, soon. Caveat: I know a bunch of people who are or were in various roles, vertically well enough spread across that org, to form this opinion over the last years.

ge96 3y ago

Does this include the newest headset? That one looked pretty good feature wise.

WhatIsDukkha 3y ago
Yes its still the underlying software thats terrible. It's an almost straight port of normal android into the headset which is at least familiar but they've really not made any progress in making it more VR and comfortable over time. Lots of small tweaking of whats probably not a great overall fit for VR. For a direct example look at the room boundary system and setup. Even with the new depth sensor and the color passthrough, it fails to figure out whether a table is a surface or a pillow of polygons, it fails to set reasonable wall boundaries (and then the ui is awful for addressing that) and then it nags and irritates people with those failures and misunderstandings. Last I checked, the room software still only stores one room in your house. If you go to your kitchen for your coffee... remake the room boundary over again. This is very fundamental for any AR to be built on and its terrible and unreliable. Edit- also, last I checked, if you turn off boundary nagging with the devtools you cannot use the passthrough mode whatsoever.
- Panini_Jones 3y ago
  This is the head of AR software that's stepping down, as well, which doesn't even do SLAM or DFS afaik. They just chucked the custom silicon team out in September. I wonder if we'll ever see their mostly functional AR headset vs. Raybans with cameras.
- andybak 3y ago
  It's flawed, but have you tried the competition?
  - AgentME 3y ago
    Yeah, the Quest's boundary setup process astounded me at how polished and user-friendly it is compared to the Vive and Index's room setup process. Anyone saying that the Quest's software is obviously terrible lives on a different planet than me. The Quest is so simple and works so well, especially compared to other VR headsets+software I've used. I really like the Index too which I use a lot and think does some small things better, but I find it hard to deny the Quest is much more approachable and polished.
    - aranelsurion 3y ago
      Quest 3 is my first and only VR device so I'm obviously not in the know in these matters, though I have to say I don't see what is so terrible about Quest's flavor of Android either. For a regular user, most everything seems to work well. Setup was easy, UI is polished and simple enough to get out of your way, and I personally haven't encountered any show-stopping bugs with it. Maybe I don't expect much out of it, as I see it more of an entry-point to actual VR applications I want to use, rather than something I'm more invested in. If anything, I was surprised how well it worked for a product still so early in its lifecycle.
      - cwalv 3y ago
        It makes more sense when you realize some people have an extreme distaste for anything made by Facebook. If you want to dislike something bad enough, it's not hard to find/make up reasons to do so
- majormajor 3y ago
  What is the connection between Android and the user-level app code around something like your "store multiple rooms" complaint? Seems pretty far away from the kernel and runtime there.
  - rabf 3y ago
    Multiple rooms works fine on my quest 2 and quest pro.
- numpad0 3y ago
  > It's an almost straight port of normal android into the headset which is at least familiar but they've really not made any progress in making it more VR Congratulations to Meta VR teams. You've created a system perceptually more transparent than a thin sheet of glass.
- jayd16 3y ago
  You should check again. Most of this is out of date. What constitutes accurate wall boundaries is a matter of opinion but it works well for me. I've never seen the nagging you're talking about, unless you mean when it loses tracking entirely?
rustybolt 3y ago
many features != good experience
upon_drumhead 3y ago
The tech that works in it is still Qualcomm. The UI is going to be the same that the other quest headsets have
- AgentME 3y ago
  What other headset shares the Quest's UI? Most headsets aren't even standalone like it.
  - upon_drumhead 3y ago
    Given they were talking about the quest 3, it shares the same UI as the quest 2
    - AgentME 3y ago
      Sorry, I thought the implication was that the UI was also made by another company. In my experience the UI and everything in the Quest 2 and 3 works great so I don't understand where the original poster is coming from at all.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Pico kinda copies the quest UI. I was surprised how similar it was. I bought one to hold me over until the quest 3 came out but it had a wobbly lens flaw that made me nauseous. It turned out to be quite common. I had to return it. Luckily the quest 3 is now out.

ahupp 3y ago

> the technical VR "stuff that works" is basically written by Qualcomm. I worked at Oculus on the product that became Quest from 2014-2019 and this statement could not be more wrong. You need more than a vulkan driver to make a VR headset, e.g: * lenses that minimize distortion and chromatic aberration, that are lightweight and compact * astounding amounts of work on inside-out tracking to make it work within latency and power budgets with sufficient accuracy * latency reduction and prediction throughout the stack * foveated rendering * supporting all of those things in Unity and Unreal And for every one of those there are 10 more that I'm forgetting. > The user side Android system is, really badly done and irritating for people using it as people like Carmack have pointed out. The user shell side we have today is entirely his creation, as a response to the less-than-stellar behavior of the Unity shell in the first release. I'm not sure Android is very material for the day-to-day user experience; it's just a particularly opinionated version of linux. There are plenty of missteps here, but none of them are things you've described.

rabf 3y ago
The hand tracking has seen continuous improvement and the depth correct passthrough is pretty good and I'm sure quite a feat to accomplish. Its worth noting that much of that 10 Billion wasn't just spent on Horizon Worlds as critics off-handedly suggest, but has been sunk in to lots of acquisitions (hardware and software companies) and research, much of which has yet to be seen in released products. I'm very impressed with the ambition of what they are trying to do and their committment to a longer term vision which is something that often is lacking in many companies. As an example Nvidia were working on AI tooling and hardware for a decade before it really started to pay off big.
- paul7986 3y ago
  Just bought Meta's latest smart glasses and i use them almost daily because for taking pics and short videos they were almost perfectly and like most people I wear sunglasses almost daily. Im not sure they will win this race, but the glasses are solid for the two instances i mentioned. Other features aren't as solid like Hey Meta barely works.
3y ago

pyridines 3y ago

I'm shocked at how many bugs and UI issues I've encountered with the Quest 3 and the associated ecosystem (mostly the web store and android app). I can't help but think of Jonathan Blow's talk Preventing the Collapse of Civilization[1] when I use it. I tried listing all the issues I encountered, but gave up after 4 pages. The poor UX is a bizarre contrast to the foundational VR stuff, which is fantastic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

cwalv 3y ago
I've found the companion app to be pretty buggy with quest 3 too, but oddly haven't had a bad time with quest 2

calamari4065 3y ago

I write applications to run on the quest and it's miserable. Simply getting your apk onto the device is the most unnecessarily difficult things I've ever seen. In order to unlock developer mode, you have to have a Facebook account with your phone number associate with a Facebook developer group for your company which requires additional verification to set up. Then you are required to install the oculus app on your phone and link it into your Facebook account. If you're lucky, this will work the second or third time you try it. Even then, sideloaded apps are hidden away in a separate menu. Oh, and you think you can just use your quest tethered while you work in Unity? Good fucking luck. It's remarkably unreliable and unstable. Usually I get a black screen until I restart my headset, my computer, SteamVR, unity or a combination thereof. It's been over a year and I still don't know what the right incantation is. If you want to try air-link, you don't get hand tracking. Intentionally. It's not a technical limitation. Beyond that, it's mostly-standard Android, which is also painful to develop for, but in new and exciting ways. Conversely, targeting Valve Index and an ultraleap tracker is as easy as it gets. If your application runs on the PC where you're developing it, you're already done. It's plug and play almost every time. There's no extra layers of bullshit to wade through, you just open unity and hit play and that's it. Well, unless you count all the ways that PC development sucks. Development concerns aside, the quest is a low power phone with some cheap optics. Resolution is bad, frame rate is bad, battery is bad, it literally does not fit my face. I can't see anything because you only have three IPD choices and they're all wrong. Hand tracking is consistently worse than ultraleap, and with the latest update it's totally unusable for me. And I mean that I literally cannot select UI items. It nags me every 30 seconds about turning on my controllers. I also have this weird issue where different colors render at different depths. Red text floats above the surface and green is sunk below. It's really hideous. The Quest is worse than a PC HMD in every way except that it's cheap. That's it, that's all it has going for it. It's cheap and technically does run VR.

jayd16 3y ago
Is it really that hard? Make a meta account, make an org, use an app to enable dev mode, then just use the usual Android stack.
- 3y ago

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

> This is possible the biggest software development blunder in history I hate to be that guy, but please google "therac-25". There's been absolutely no loss of life, just software shittily written. Yes, it's a blunder, but the hyperbole is unwarranted here.

zimpenfish 3y ago
> I hate to be that guy, but please google "therac-25". Or "UK Post Office Fujitsu".
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  Beyond safety critical applications the Dutch automated welfare-fraud detection system (SyRI) also jumps to mind. Wrongful debt, convictions, children removed from their parents homes, and even suicides.
  - taneq 3y ago
    Australia's 'Robodebt' system likewise issued a whole lot of unjustified fines etc. and caused a lot of pain for a lot of people.
- multjoy 3y ago
  That was, at heart, a disclosure issue. The Post Office knew that their prosecution was unsafe but went ahead with it anyway - they had a duty to disclose to the defence any material in their possession that undermined the prosecution case or advanced the defence case. This is a statutory duty and a police investigation is ongoing into the prosecution.
taneq 3y ago
The Therac-25 issue apparently only caused six known incidents. If you want an example of software killing people, how about the 737 MAX MCAS issue, or the Toyota unintended acceleration issue?
- 3y ago

jayd16 3y ago

Qualcomm does all the ai models for spatial and hand tracking too or is it just the hardware?

virtualritz 3y ago

> This is possible the biggest software development blunder in history, [...] I would think Volkswagen's CARIOT is possibly a contender in that space too, soon. Caveat: I know a bunch of people who are or were in various roles, vertically well enough spread across that org, to form this opinion over the last years.