6 ms·

All the VR/AR/XR demos are so insanely trivial and yet still manage to be much more difficult than current methods of doing things. Like, really, cooking? Norm

All the VR/AR/XR demos are so insanely trivial and yet still manage to be much more difficult than current methods of doing things. Like, really, cooking? Normal method: * Search for a recipe * Leave my phone on a stand and glance at it if I forget a step Meta glasses: * Put glasses on (there's a reason I got lasek, it's because wearing glasses sucks) * Talk into the void, trying to figure out how to describe my problem as well as the format that I want the LLM to structure the response * Correct it when it misreads one of my ingredients * Hope that the rng gods give me a decent recipe Or basically any of the things shown off for Apple's headset. Strap on a giant headset just so I can... browse photos? or take a video call where the other person can't even see my face?

SchemaLoad 1y ago
These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just went all in on gaming it would be a much better product than trying to push AI slop cooking help.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals. I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.
  - ubb_server 1y ago
    I agree that VR gaming is a niche, but I think it could be explosively improved if we had the kind of all-in idealism that the previous commenter referred to. I think because VR gaming IS niche, we haven't yet delved into what VR/AR could do in non-gaming. An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      We should re-watch Dennou Coil every few years to be reminded of what we’re working towards :)
    - jdprgm 1y ago
      I remain convinced VR gaming is niche because despite these companies being willing to drop boatloads of money on all kinds of things they for some reason never decided to just allocate a few billion to create a handful of true AAA games and jumpstart the industry. I think even just 3 proper games with several hundred mil budgets and VR gaming might be in an entirely different space than it is now.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        I think this is extremely doubtful. The reality remains that it's impossible to make a first person or even third person VR game with free movement, because of fundamental limitations in how human brains process movement. Having your eyes tell you are moving but your muscles and inner ear tell you that you are not makes you extremely sick very quickly, and technology can't actually fix this. The better and more immersive the visual illusion of movement, the worse the movement sickness you'll experience. And without free movement, you can't build any of the mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work. Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't play your 70-80 dollar game.
        xdfgh1112 1y ago
        Those games literally exist now. Almost all new VR games use free movement not teleportation. It is frustrating that you seem to be talking confidently when your knowledge is 5 years out of date.
        1y ago
- bayarearefugee 1y ago
  As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games either. Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero. If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.
  - swalsh 1y ago
    I LOVED VR gaming, but after playing the same 2 games for 10 years, it never really evolved. They stopped innovating and went all in on AR.
    - SchemaLoad 1y ago
      I had a HTC Vive and I really loved playing VR games, particularly a shooter called Pavlov. Felt pretty social with a ton of absurd custom maps where the actual game was almost secondary to experiencing the immersive and strange maps. But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems pretty distasteful now.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      I think you're very much in the minority. Also, VR games didn't really evolve because it can't really evolve - the fundamental thing that makes it attractive (immersion in a digital space) can't work well because of motion sickness. So, the only way to make an immersive VR game is to have an extremely tiny game world or an on-rails experience, and that drastically reduces the appeal. Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a display strapped to your head.
      - 1y ago
- intrasight 1y ago
  > the only ones VR actually works well for I had really expected a different "only one"
- thepryz 1y ago
  In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools. I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.
- tempodox 1y ago
  Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the facebook company.
- numpad0 1y ago
  No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me, maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of social media. [1]: Most played VR games Rank Name Curr 24h pk All-time 1. VRChat 33,032 46,652 66,824 2. War Thunder 26,388 65,589 121,318 3. PAYDAY 2 23,513 31,619 247,709 4. No Man's Sky 22,509 46,010 212,613 5. OBS Studio 11,434 22,388 27,334 6. Phasmophobia 7,716 22,789 112,717 7. Forza Hz 5 4,940 13,617 81,096 8. Assetto Corsa 3,885 13,598 19,796 9. OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030 4,299 6,418 10. Tabletop Sim. 2,902 7,755 37,198 1: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978 https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978
  - croes 1y ago
    To me the chart shows that VR is mainly used for games. And the steam chart don't include the games played directly on the Quest headsets.
    - numpad0 1y ago
      That's certainly one useful spin, but the red flag here is that these don't correlate well with games known as best VR games to VR communities. What I believe to be a more accurate interpretation is, there's nothing but VRChat in VR, and gaming demand in VR can be ~10x smaller per title relative to it.
- jayd16 1y ago
  Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
hdjrudni 1y ago
I dunno, if these worked perfectly I don't think it'd be awful to be able to open my fridge and say "what can I make with this" and it could rattle of some suggestions based on my known preferences and even show me images in their new display. Hands-free while cooking (not having to touch my phone with messy hands) is not a bad thing either.
- vasco 1y ago
  I touch my phone with messy hands all the time. They are water resistant now, just wash it after
  - mewpmewp2 1y ago
    I think more so I feel like after touching the phone I should really wash my hands before touching the food or doing anything food related etc.
    - vasco 1y ago
      Yeah but I already live by the 5 second rule anyway so I'm more careless, you do have a point though, it's less hygienic for sure.
      - mewpmewp2 1y ago
        Yeah, I care less myself, and I'd probably believe I was training my immune system, but my partner would kill me though.
- hattmall 1y ago
  It sucks now, no idea why, but a few years ago, with the Google Home mini, I could just yell out all kinds of cooking related questions with "Hey Google" and it would always give me a good answer, was great for doing stuff hands free when cooking, like when I just don't want to get raw chicken or whatever on my phone. But yeah, it doesn't give me good answeres any more, usually trys to start an unrelated YouTube video or email me something about Youtube plus or w/e
dyauspitr 1y ago
I wear my glasses all the time. If I could just talk to the void and get help with things I’m directly seeing reliably that would be a game changer. I’ve used Gemini’s video mode and we’re not all that far away.
twalichiewicz 1y ago
Watching the announcement, every feature felt like something my phone already does—better. With glasses, you have to aim your head at whatever you want the AI to see. With a phone, you just point the camera while your hands stay free. Even in Meta’s demo, the presenter had to look back down at the counter because the AI couldn’t see the ingredients. It feels like the same dead end we saw with Rabbit and the Humane pin—clever hardware that solves nothing the phone doesn’t already do. Maybe there’s a niche if you already wear glasses every day, but beyond that it’s hard to see the case.
- 01100011 1y ago
  I'm oldish, so maybe I'm biased, but this sort of product seems like something no one will want, outside a few technophiles, but that industry desperately needs you to want. It's like 3d TV, a solution in search of a problem because the mfgs need to make the next big thing with the associated high margins. To me the phone is a pretty good form factor. Convenient enough(especially with voice control), unobtrusive, socially acceptable, and I need to own one anyway because it's a phone. I'm a geek so I think this tech is cool, but I see zero chance I would use one, even if it were a few steps better than it is.
- Gareth321 1y ago
  If executed well I think this could reduce a lot of friction in the process. I can definitely unlock my phone and hold it with one hand while I prepare and cook, but that's annoying. If my glasses could monitor progress and tell me what to do with what while I'm doing it, that's far more convenient. It's clearly not there yet, but in a few years I have no doubt it will be. And this is just the start. With the screens they'll be able to offer AR. Imagine working on electronics or a car and the instructions are overlaid on the screen while the AI is providing verbal instructions.
jackbrookes 1y ago
This reads a bit like like a pre-PC take: "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?" Imagine it’s 1992: Cookbook: Open book, follow steps. PC: Turn on tower, wait for DOS, fiddle with floppies, pray the printer works, hope the shareware recipe isn’t weird. Not saying you're wrong but its easy to miss the big picture
- aembleton 1y ago
  > "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?" I still feel that way. I have cookbooks because I find the UX better than searching for recipes.
  - wpm 1y ago
    So I can read the 20,000 story about how the author was told this recipe by their brothers husbands step-grandmother while vacationing at the lake house with their golden retriever named Max before I can get to the recipe.
    - atrus 1y ago
      While this joke is never mentioned and is hilarious every time, you'd be hard pressed to find a recipe site that didn't have either a "print" or "go to recipe" button at the top.
- endymion-light 1y ago
  honestly cookbooks genuinely are better i got the art of italian cooking recently and it's genuinely far easier to get a recipe than trying to scroll through a 50 page monologue about the intracicies of someones childhood before even listing the ingredients
  - rhetocj23 1y ago
    Indeed. There is an element of trust with an actual cookbook - it signals quality. The internet over time has been riddled with junk, especially since the cost of production of information is just your opportunity cost of time. Even that is going away with the use of LLMs....
rhetocj23 1y ago
People dont realise how amazingly efficient touch interfaces already are. THere is no need for these stupid glasses. Some refuse to accept it - especially Zuckerberg who relies on folks like Apple to make his money. Thats really whats driving this project if you tear away all the BS.
jayd16 1y ago
Voice input is just too annoying but with the display and wristband I think the dream is there. Your hands are deep in messy food prep, you have a recipe up, you can still pause your music or take a call with the wristband and without stopping to wash up or getting oil or batter on everything.
hombre_fatal 1y ago
On the other hand, having to constantly consult a recipe on my phone while I cook is the main quality of life aspect of home cooking that could be improved. You're missing the part where I'm reminded that my phone autolocks so I have to go into the settings in the middle of cooking to make it never autolock (or be lazy and unlock it every time I need it). And then I have to find a clean knuckle to scroll the ingredient list and the recipe steps every time I'm trying to remember what step I'm at. You could do some killer recipe UX with a HUD on some glasses.

SchemaLoad 1y ago

These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just went all in on gaming it would be a much better product than trying to push AI slop cooking help.

bee_rider 1y ago
VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals. I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.
- ubb_server 1y ago
  I agree that VR gaming is a niche, but I think it could be explosively improved if we had the kind of all-in idealism that the previous commenter referred to. I think because VR gaming IS niche, we haven't yet delved into what VR/AR could do in non-gaming. An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    We should re-watch Dennou Coil every few years to be reminded of what we’re working towards :)
  - jdprgm 1y ago
    I remain convinced VR gaming is niche because despite these companies being willing to drop boatloads of money on all kinds of things they for some reason never decided to just allocate a few billion to create a handful of true AAA games and jumpstart the industry. I think even just 3 proper games with several hundred mil budgets and VR gaming might be in an entirely different space than it is now.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      I think this is extremely doubtful. The reality remains that it's impossible to make a first person or even third person VR game with free movement, because of fundamental limitations in how human brains process movement. Having your eyes tell you are moving but your muscles and inner ear tell you that you are not makes you extremely sick very quickly, and technology can't actually fix this. The better and more immersive the visual illusion of movement, the worse the movement sickness you'll experience. And without free movement, you can't build any of the mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work. Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't play your 70-80 dollar game.
      - xdfgh1112 1y ago
        Those games literally exist now. Almost all new VR games use free movement not teleportation. It is frustrating that you seem to be talking confidently when your knowledge is 5 years out of date.
        1y ago
bayarearefugee 1y ago
As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games either. Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero. If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.
- swalsh 1y ago
  I LOVED VR gaming, but after playing the same 2 games for 10 years, it never really evolved. They stopped innovating and went all in on AR.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    I had a HTC Vive and I really loved playing VR games, particularly a shooter called Pavlov. Felt pretty social with a ton of absurd custom maps where the actual game was almost secondary to experiencing the immersive and strange maps. But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems pretty distasteful now.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    I think you're very much in the minority. Also, VR games didn't really evolve because it can't really evolve - the fundamental thing that makes it attractive (immersion in a digital space) can't work well because of motion sickness. So, the only way to make an immersive VR game is to have an extremely tiny game world or an on-rails experience, and that drastically reduces the appeal. Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a display strapped to your head.
    - 1y ago
intrasight 1y ago
> the only ones VR actually works well for I had really expected a different "only one"
thepryz 1y ago
In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools. I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.
tempodox 1y ago
Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the facebook company.
numpad0 1y ago
No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me, maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of social media. [1]: Most played VR games Rank Name Curr 24h pk All-time 1. VRChat 33,032 46,652 66,824 2. War Thunder 26,388 65,589 121,318 3. PAYDAY 2 23,513 31,619 247,709 4. No Man's Sky 22,509 46,010 212,613 5. OBS Studio 11,434 22,388 27,334 6. Phasmophobia 7,716 22,789 112,717 7. Forza Hz 5 4,940 13,617 81,096 8. Assetto Corsa 3,885 13,598 19,796 9. OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030 4,299 6,418 10. Tabletop Sim. 2,902 7,755 37,198 1: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978 https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978
- croes 1y ago
  To me the chart shows that VR is mainly used for games. And the steam chart don't include the games played directly on the Quest headsets.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    That's certainly one useful spin, but the red flag here is that these don't correlate well with games known as best VR games to VR communities. What I believe to be a more accurate interpretation is, there's nothing but VRChat in VR, and gaming demand in VR can be ~10x smaller per title relative to it.
jayd16 1y ago
Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

hdjrudni 1y ago

I dunno, if these worked perfectly I don't think it'd be awful to be able to open my fridge and say "what can I make with this" and it could rattle of some suggestions based on my known preferences and even show me images in their new display. Hands-free while cooking (not having to touch my phone with messy hands) is not a bad thing either.

vasco 1y ago
I touch my phone with messy hands all the time. They are water resistant now, just wash it after
- mewpmewp2 1y ago
  I think more so I feel like after touching the phone I should really wash my hands before touching the food or doing anything food related etc.
  - vasco 1y ago
    Yeah but I already live by the 5 second rule anyway so I'm more careless, you do have a point though, it's less hygienic for sure.
    - mewpmewp2 1y ago
      Yeah, I care less myself, and I'd probably believe I was training my immune system, but my partner would kill me though.
hattmall 1y ago
It sucks now, no idea why, but a few years ago, with the Google Home mini, I could just yell out all kinds of cooking related questions with "Hey Google" and it would always give me a good answer, was great for doing stuff hands free when cooking, like when I just don't want to get raw chicken or whatever on my phone. But yeah, it doesn't give me good answeres any more, usually trys to start an unrelated YouTube video or email me something about Youtube plus or w/e

dyauspitr 1y ago

I wear my glasses all the time. If I could just talk to the void and get help with things I’m directly seeing reliably that would be a game changer. I’ve used Gemini’s video mode and we’re not all that far away.

twalichiewicz 1y ago

Watching the announcement, every feature felt like something my phone already does—better. With glasses, you have to aim your head at whatever you want the AI to see. With a phone, you just point the camera while your hands stay free. Even in Meta’s demo, the presenter had to look back down at the counter because the AI couldn’t see the ingredients. It feels like the same dead end we saw with Rabbit and the Humane pin—clever hardware that solves nothing the phone doesn’t already do. Maybe there’s a niche if you already wear glasses every day, but beyond that it’s hard to see the case.

01100011 1y ago
I'm oldish, so maybe I'm biased, but this sort of product seems like something no one will want, outside a few technophiles, but that industry desperately needs you to want. It's like 3d TV, a solution in search of a problem because the mfgs need to make the next big thing with the associated high margins. To me the phone is a pretty good form factor. Convenient enough(especially with voice control), unobtrusive, socially acceptable, and I need to own one anyway because it's a phone. I'm a geek so I think this tech is cool, but I see zero chance I would use one, even if it were a few steps better than it is.
Gareth321 1y ago
If executed well I think this could reduce a lot of friction in the process. I can definitely unlock my phone and hold it with one hand while I prepare and cook, but that's annoying. If my glasses could monitor progress and tell me what to do with what while I'm doing it, that's far more convenient. It's clearly not there yet, but in a few years I have no doubt it will be. And this is just the start. With the screens they'll be able to offer AR. Imagine working on electronics or a car and the instructions are overlaid on the screen while the AI is providing verbal instructions.

jackbrookes 1y ago

This reads a bit like like a pre-PC take: "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?" Imagine it’s 1992: Cookbook: Open book, follow steps. PC: Turn on tower, wait for DOS, fiddle with floppies, pray the printer works, hope the shareware recipe isn’t weird. Not saying you're wrong but its easy to miss the big picture

aembleton 1y ago
> "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?" I still feel that way. I have cookbooks because I find the UX better than searching for recipes.
- wpm 1y ago
  So I can read the 20,000 story about how the author was told this recipe by their brothers husbands step-grandmother while vacationing at the lake house with their golden retriever named Max before I can get to the recipe.
  - atrus 1y ago
    While this joke is never mentioned and is hilarious every time, you'd be hard pressed to find a recipe site that didn't have either a "print" or "go to recipe" button at the top.
endymion-light 1y ago
honestly cookbooks genuinely are better i got the art of italian cooking recently and it's genuinely far easier to get a recipe than trying to scroll through a 50 page monologue about the intracicies of someones childhood before even listing the ingredients
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  Indeed. There is an element of trust with an actual cookbook - it signals quality. The internet over time has been riddled with junk, especially since the cost of production of information is just your opportunity cost of time. Even that is going away with the use of LLMs....

rhetocj23 1y ago

People dont realise how amazingly efficient touch interfaces already are. THere is no need for these stupid glasses. Some refuse to accept it - especially Zuckerberg who relies on folks like Apple to make his money. Thats really whats driving this project if you tear away all the BS.

jayd16 1y ago

Voice input is just too annoying but with the display and wristband I think the dream is there. Your hands are deep in messy food prep, you have a recipe up, you can still pause your music or take a call with the wristband and without stopping to wash up or getting oil or batter on everything.

hombre_fatal 1y ago

On the other hand, having to constantly consult a recipe on my phone while I cook is the main quality of life aspect of home cooking that could be improved. You're missing the part where I'm reminded that my phone autolocks so I have to go into the settings in the middle of cooking to make it never autolock (or be lazy and unlock it every time I need it). And then I have to find a clean knuckle to scroll the ingredient list and the recipe steps every time I'm trying to remember what step I'm at. You could do some killer recipe UX with a HUD on some glasses.