You can really understand here that Zuckerberg really understands his business. He knew in 2015, that if Facebook didn't have a platform it controlled, it would suffer down the line. We are almost a decade out, but what he predicted has come to pass and Apple is now squeezing the juice out of Meta.
I don't think Zuckerberg is wrong about VR at a certain level. I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways. But instead of making Oculus the "XBox" of the future, Mark decided that it was the "everything" of the future. A sort of wishful thinking that these headsets would replace the cellphone.
The cellphone fits in your pocket, watches fit on your wrist, and earbuds fit in your ears. A VR headset would have to be sunglasses size and even then they'd still be less ubiquitous than the Apple Watch.
The problem is not the vision, but the amount of money being spent. If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.
> If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.
I agree with this. We would also have more competition because other players in the space wouldn't be as intimidated to go up against a business like Meta/Facebook.
I think a crucial miscalculation was trying to EEE the space. Zuck clearly states that he wanted Meta to "own the space" on every platform. Basically, he wanted to carve out a niche like Adobe managed to do with PDF, but on a scale that rivals full blown platforms like the Android ecosystem. Such an ambitious plan sounds great on paper, until you realize that you're trying to EEE the exact people who wrote the textbooks on EEE. When you sound a horn that loud, on a megaphone as big as the one Meta was using, you're only painting a target on your own back.
Another drawback to the path that Meta selected is they basically internalized the entire hardware industry that was just starting up. If Oculus had stayed independent I believe they would have had to partner with other hardware vendors to establish some sort of regulatory body for writing industry standard specifications. With one serious player in the field developing and harboring all the tech for themselves, this space could be barren for a long time if Meta folds. All the work by third parties that went into this proprietary technology and platform will basically be for nothing.
As a VR dev, the field would be barren in that future, but for entirely different reasons.
The "common" API to access VR does exist: OpenXR, and is not great and has remained that way for years. Oculus's APIs Just Work (tm) and SteamVR's are fairly usable and more open to accessories, if a bit jank at times. On top of that - a great deal of Meta's XR research has been/is released to the public. We could do better...but we could do worse too.
Low-hanging fruit such as controller offsets have been incorrectly specified and remained incorrectly specified for years. Input latency and prediction are unacceptably high and/or incorrectly implemented by at least one game engine, in a way that screws up certain motion vectors unless you take some very much unspecified guesses about implementation and filter them appropriately.
I pray for the Khronos groups and members who are party to OpenXR to improve their support going forward, but it's going to require some risky bets on the part of game developers to adopt the APIs, and a lot of legwork from all stakeholders to tune and improve their platforms to something converging on acceptable. And where is Apple in this? Absolutely nowhere - so the platform convergence is guaranteed huge future divergence anyways.
So that explains that although there exists a standard platform that multiple hardware manufacturers can target - and have targeted - it has not yet achieved mainstream acceptance. It's just not good enough (yet), it's a pain in the ass to work with, it requires engine updates, and there's a high risk it will be majorly disrupted.
Additionally, it must be emphasized that there would be no VR market if not for the Quest 2; no other hardware platform has paved a way to a sustainable consumer ecosystem, from end to end: low priced hardware, high baseline quality of developer experience for something this early in its lifecycle (it bootstrapped developer experience based on very polished developer workflows), consistent install base to target and optimize for.
> no other hardware platform has paved a way to a sustainable consumer ecosystem, from end to end: low priced hardware
Without Facebook we might have gotten a consumer version of the DK2 for $350, instead of the $600 CV1, and we might have spend two or three years doing VR with Xbox gamepad instead of having to spend an additional $200 on Touch controller.
Hard to say if that would have succeeded, as early not-quite-6DOF VR certainly had issues, but low cost and accessible VR is what the whole VR hype from 2012 onward was build on. The two year delay and the $600 announcement destroyed that hype and reduced VR to a few hardcore fans. Going all exclusive with their store and not allowing other headsets in also fractured the already tiny market completely without need.
Quest2 momentarily got the price back down (since then increased by $100), but it still struggles quite a lot in getting the excitement back, as there isn't anything interesting happening on the content side. We don't have movies in VR, games are still all low budget indie stuff and there isn't much in terms of events in VR either, even Meta themselves still struggles broadcasting their own conferences as a proper VR event.
> Without Facebook we might have gotten a consumer version of the DK2 for $350, instead of the $600 CV1, and we might have spend two or three years doing VR with Xbox gamepad instead of having to spend an additional $200 on Touch controller.
I don't see how. The DK2 was a prototype wholly inadequate for and unscalable to the mass market. The CV1 was legitimately expensive for Oculus to manufacture; the only reason it became affordable to manufacture was because Facebook had the funds to hire people with experience in optimizing manufacturing processes and reducing Bill of Materials (BOM) cost for the parts. If memory serves, one of the people hired after acquisition was ex-Lenovo, with expertise in specifically that.
The exclusivity was also not solely Oculus's fault; the acquisition by Facebook stung Valve rather hard (much of their tech and many of their employees ended up going to Facebook) and I believe there was a bidirectional hesitation to engage. My recollection is that there was a willingness to offer compatibility, and some compatibility libraries implemented, but there didn't appear to be a serious commitment overall to invest further in cross-compatibility from either party than what was already available.
I think OpenXR was an evolution past that, but without much real-world usages of it, it kind of sucked for a long time.
> We don't have movies in VR
People watch movies in VR all the time. There's BigScreen, which is legit, and there's also movie worlds in VRChat, which fly under the radar but are really awesome for social co-watching experiences. Though I hear you and agree that the big companies are lagging a bit behind in exploring and implementing good VR experiences and producing VR content with mass appeal.
> The DK2 was a prototype wholly inadequate for and unscalable to the mass market.
DK1 shipped 56'334 units[1], DK2 shipped 118'930[2], CV1 shipped an estimated 547'000. That's really not far apart and CV1 was on the market for longer. DK2, or a slightly improved iteration of it, would have been very much serviceable as a mass market VR headset.
> The CV1 was legitimately expensive for Oculus to manufacture;
The BOM for CV1 was only around $200[3]. They did some unnecessary stuff to make it more expensive (wrap it in fabric), but fundamentally the CV1 was not a very expensive device. Not sure how they arrived at that $600 price, but that looked like they vastly overestimated how popular VR would be and tried to milk it for profit.
Meanwhile for a modern example, Pico4 has a BOM of around $348[4], while it's sold at 429€. That seems way more reasonably priced to break into the VR market.
> The exclusivity was also not solely Oculus's fault
They never provided anything to allow third parties into their ecosystem. Meanwhile Valve wrote the SteamVR driver so that Oculus headsets can be use in SteamVR. And the SteamVR/OpenVR runtime was open enough that anybody could write their own drivers or plugins for the ecosystem.
This issue isn't even limited to headset from other manufacturers, a lot of the video content on the Oculus platform wasn't accessible with Oculus's own headset, but limited specifically to their mobile headsets only. Compatibility to Oculus Go and Quest1 was also reduced or killed after the release of Quest2, despite the actual software being compatible (e.g. manually transferring .apks to Quest1 to play Resident Evil 4 works).
> People watch movies in VR all the time.
Bigscreen and VRChat exist despite Facebook, not because of it[5]. Anyway, I don't just mean watching old movies in VR, I mean actual made-for-VR movies. They had that with Oculus Story Studio, but they killed it and nothing really has replaced it. There are no new upcoming movies for VR. We don't even get Avatar2 in VR. With the amount of money Facebook has been spending I'd expect at least a VR-remastered version of Avatar2 premiering in VR. But we don't get that, if a want to see the latest movie, I still have to do that in a real cinema, not in a Metaverse cinema.
Adopt an open standard, add proprietary bits so that content worked best (or exclusively) on their own version, and force other players and competitors out.
yeah, i'm curious about this too. i've spoken to many high level folks in MSR (microsoft research) and they're all massive proponents of open-source software and unix and are as excited as i am about being able to open a 'native-ish' *nix terminal and do work.
in fact, i've got my win10 box set up for dev, and it's nearly identical to my mac! it wasn't 100% straightforward, and to get windowed emacs working from the cli took a little twiddling, but overall in less than a few hours i had everything running flawlessly. :)
And then expecting the guillotine as “justice”, it’s a downward spiral. But this is just business. Leaders make miscalculations all the time. In this case, Zuck’s business problem is replacing the growth story of a maturing product that is the Facebook app and really making social media an entire industry.
Meta and VR is a potential new industry. The only thing that will replace the SM growth is creating/owning an industry again. He liked the VR world because he could own it for a while. It would be more difficult to disrupt than what keeps happening with SM. TikTok is the latest rival but there have been many. And there’s now as ad revenue pressures. It’s a recipe for a massive layoff. Since it’s a business, that is the most appropriate action. I don’t think anyone expected how difficult and expensive it would be. I assume the layoffs will slow this down further and it’s effectively a loss or a solution without a problem.
> I don’t think anyone expected how difficult and expensive it would be
I agree with the rest of your post, but this might be more of an "anyone inside of Meta" scenario. There's plenty of skeptics around short-term VR (myself included). Getting a non-technical audience into it is going to require a set of massive technological innovations, imho, both in software and hardware.
Even then, having your vision be completely blocked to the outside world is not something casual users are going to enjoy for any extended amount of time or frequency.
If I'm writing a post and my kid or dog or friend needs my attention, I can set the phone down for a second. If I'm in VR, the best I can hope for is a button that makes the screen transparent so that my eyes can see (and be seen!) again short of reaching up to my face, taking my head gear off, then putting it back on. Even then, the immersion is completely broken.
> We would also have more competition because other players in the space wouldn't be as intimidated to go up against a business like Meta/Facebook
I completely disagree with this. Competition is what drives innovation, not the absence of it. Other players did go against Meta/Oculus and their VR products were abysmal in comparison. They just didn't get what makes a desirable VR headset for the average gamers/consumers. And it's not all an issue of money. Sony, Google, Microsoft, LG, Apple, Samsung and other tech giants had equally deep pockets and hardware expertise to compete with Meta/Oculus in this field if they wanted to and if they knew the market. But they didn't.
If Meta wouldn't exist in the VR space, it doesn't mean their competitors would magically have better tech now. Their products would still be crap or not even exist today. Same how other smartphone makers with equally deep pockets to Apple like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola went against the iPhone and failed. If the iPhone wouldn't have existed it doesn't mean all their competitors would now be making better phones. Quite the contrary, the competition the iPhone bought helped move the technology forward, same how Meta's Quest moved the VR tech forward.
Just look at Sony's recent VR headset for the PS5, needing physical cables tethered to a separate console you need to buy, is just a no-go in 2022 VR technology. Meta/Oculus moved the goalposts so much with their cordless, self contained Quest 2 headset, especially at the ~400$ price point, that going back to expensive headsets tethered with cables to separate PC/consoles is just not gonna be a VR sales success going forward.
Up until the recent Quest Pro failure, it seemed Meta/Oculus really nailed the base recipe for what makes a desirable VR gaming headset with the Quest 2. All they had to do was improve on that, instead of pivoting to "professionals".
> Other players did go against Meta/Oculus and their VR products were abysmal in comparison.
Not really. The original HTC Vive outsold the original Rift by a lot and was a vastly superior headset (full 6DOF headset/controller vs front-facing/Xbox controller), while also costing about the same. It took Facebook quite a while, the release of Touch and a lot of patches to catch up. And on top of that they had to cut the price in half to stay relevant.
Meanwhile PlaystationVR was outselling everything PCVR was doing combined by 5x.
> Their products would still be crap or not even exist today
The "not even exist today" might very well be true, the crap however not. Microsoft was the one pioneering 6DOF standalone and handtracking back in 2016. Google had one with the Lenovo Mirage a year before Facebook even entered that space. The issue is that they all left the market before the Quest was even out. They never tried to compete, they saw that VR wasn't selling and gave up prematurely. Which is a shame, as I really miss WMR, which was both substantially cheaper than a Quest2, as well as having really nice way to interact with 2D apps inside VR with WMR Portal.
Meanwhile Pico4 just entered the market in Europe and happens to be a substantially improvement over Quest2 while also costing less. Quest2 still has a bit of an edge on the software side, but the gap is quite small when taking into account how much money Facebook spend.
The strength of Facebook is simply endurance, they kept going despite miserable sales VR. And they did that long enough to reach the "good enough" point with Quest2. That said, they are really slacking on the software side now. There is no interesting first party content coming out, it's all just Horizon Worlds. High quality games (Lone Echo) or software (Quill, Medium) as we had in the early VR days is all gone, nothing interesting announced in years and Quill and Medium even got sold off.
> it seemed Meta/Oculus really nailed the base recipe for what makes a desirable VR gaming headset
But that's the thing, that was essentially an accident, not a grand strategy. Facebook doesn't care about gaming. They care about that "next computing platform" that VR is supposed to be, gaming is just a tiny part of that and they'll happily toss it aside in the hunt for bigger goals.
That's really the problem with Facebook, they are far more interesting in dominating a hypothetical future VR space, than they are interest in improving the VR we have today.
It is a no-go for VR consumers in 2022. How many do you know in the market for a cabled VR headset? It's a huge step back for VR tech.
Watch the sales and returns numbers in the future, they will reflect that and prove me right. You'll find the headsets on sale on craigslist or ebay for half a price after they gathered dust in people's homes for a few months.
The problem isn't the amount of money either. It's that their product is bad.
I havent tried the recent Quest Pro but based on reviews I assume it's pretty good. Not great, not sexy, but pretty good. Their flagship application however, Horizons, embarrasses meta every time a screenshot gets shared. It is so dorky and uninspired that nobody wants to admit they even tried it.
Who exactly are they targeting with that thing? Adults? Children? Their messaging and pricepoint around the Pro seems to suggest they're expecting office workers to use it for virtual conferencing. Who are they kidding with that?
The cost is part of the forward-looking vision. That part makes sense to me. It's the product that baffles me. It just stinks.
you're looking at the wrong thing - it's the platform that meta wants, not the "product" they demonstrated (that looks childish from your POV).
It's like saying, back in the early days of the internet, that showing an ugly, unstyled text with pictures on a webpage is worthless. The platform has grown to become a cornerstone of human civilization!
Facebook wants to own something akin to that. _If_ their bet works out, they will be so very powerful. I think as a netizen, it's my duty to make sure their bet doesn't go the way they want. Platforms should not be owned, but be federated and compatible, and open.
For what it's worth, I think you're both partly wrong and partly right. From the letter:
> I think you can divide the ecosystem into three major parts: apps / experiences, platform services and hardware / systems. In my vision of ubiquitous VR / AR, these are listed in order of importance...
> The key apps are what you'd expect: social communication and media consumption
While Mark believes that Apps > Systems > Hardware he also knows that the order has to be the other way around if you're building this industry from scratch. Meta has to stay ahead in hardware if they want to own the systems and apps that run on it. Horizons is their proving ground for the technologies they need to own social and identity. I think they're focusing more on building the systems for it while the graphical quality is getting left by the wayside. It makes it easy to laugh at if all you're judging it by are screenshots but if you have experience with social VR apps you'll know that being able to have a high server population is the killer feature that they're chasing. A one man team can throw together a multiplayer VR experience that looks great but as soon as you try to have more than 20 people in the same room it begins lagging so much that everyone will get pissed and quit immediately (you have to have experienced lag and jittery video in VR to know why this is). So making sure that the networking is solid and scalable is a wise decision, if that is what they're doing. If they can pull off large events with 100s of participants and no lag they will own the social VR space even if their graphics are still shit. That's a big if though.
As he mentioned in the letter, ubiquitous VR and AR will turn a lot of physical things into apps. He gave the examples of your TV and cellphone but as we've seen with the Quest Pro they also want to replace your monitors, whiteboard, and office. If they can solve the server population problem then here's a list of other things that will become apps:
- movie theatres
- bars
- dance clubs
- house parties
- non-contact sports
- concerts
- board game cafes
- conferences
- galleries
- comedy clubs
- stage performances of all kinds e.g bands, theatre troupes, karaoke
I could probably sit here for a while coming up with more examples but the point is this will be revolutionary for people who currently have limited access to these things. If you live in a major city you might be thinking "so what, I can do all of these things down the street" but you're forgetting about the rest of the world! Even if you have access to some of these things, you don't have access to all of them all the time or the specific ones you want right now.
Quest is just hardware though. I use mine almost exclusively to play SteamVR games. If they want to own the platform they need to be the VR marketplace.
Academics funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) of the U.S. Department of Defense? UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, Doug Engelbart at SRI International, a non-profit scientific research institute..
I imagine there's research into VR/AR funded by the government for military purposes. But somehow I doubt it'd be an open protocol and system like the Internet.
The internet was created my the us government to ensure that communication packets could be sent to receivers even if entire cities were destroyed by atomic weapons. This is the original purpose of ARPANet
I didn’t ask rhetorically. I was hopeful. A open internet was the better option. With VR/AR, we might need a strong shove toward robust interconnectivity.
My mother in law probably still thinks people play first person shooters but really the sense of characterization in modern games depends on the third person perspective. Bayonetta has legs and knows how to use them. The whole point of a Mario game is seeing Mario on the screen.
The third person view lets you experience a spectrum of identification with a character (I moe for Tamamo, I like Mario, I control Mario, I travel with Mario on his journey, I am Mario, ...) that you can't really experience from a first person view. Maybe you can put on the appearance of a character for other people's benefit in VR but you're going to have use your imagination (for better and worse) to put yourself into a character.
For now the VR game industry is driven by independents. Big game studios could make an AAA game but they won't because there aren't enough players with headsets to justify the investment.
I am betting on the first AAA VR game coming from a Chinese studio as they are taking big chances on new IP such as Genshin Impact from MiHoYo.
> I sometimes wonder if Zuck has ever read a novel or watched a movie because one way he is tone deaf is not understanding the possibilities of fiction.
He loves Ready Player One and has referenced it in interviews regarding the metaverse, but he's basically basing his business model after the main bad guy/group in the story.
Not really an answer to your second bit, but "Moss" is a lovely little game in VR that you play from third person (fixed camera). I wish more VR games did 3rd person, aside from Moss it seems exclusive to strategy games.
People still do play first person shooters (and other first person games) plenty. And in modern ones, you can generally look down and see your character's body etc.
I think his point still stands though. I enjoy FPS games because the gameplay is fun, but not with any sense of being immersed by the first person view. VR may very well replace the FPS, but that’s just one type of game.
Thing is, if first-person VR is more immersive than everything else, you'll start seeing more first-person games in other genres, not just shooters.
It's just like 2D - there was a time when that was the standard way to do games, then the time when it was merely prevalent (and 3D was that "cool thing" that you showed off to others)... and then 3D won, and most everybody went there. 2D is still around, of course, but it doesn't dominate the industry anymore.
Now, I don't know if VR has a chance to capture that much of the market; there are obviously some genres that are not very amenable to it. But it doesn't make sense to me to expect for it to continue being as niche as it is today.
A game whose popularity & longevity has become a cliché, Skyrim, is usually played in 1st person. Myst & Doom were both known for their ability to engage players in a flow state in their heyday.
I take your point about narrative, but I think first-person games are giving players a different experience -- agency & flow -- compared to the identification you experience in a 3rd-person game.
I'm still very unconvinced that gaming is going to be the thing that drives VR adoption. I think primarily social apps will dominate VR in the future and secondarily experiences that you can't have anywhere else like experiencing a nuclear explosion https://youtu.be/pfTCHHy_ukY?t=85
> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.
No, I don't think it does; if you look at history, VR has been around for a long time in different forms, think also Sony and Microsoft's console AR solutions. If you look at today, VR is available everywhere at console prices, but it's only a niche to the gaming market, an extra.
The BIG change in gaming in the past 10, 15 years, which Facebook has been partially responsible for, was actually scaling DOWN - think mobile games, simpler games like farmville on FB, etc. Nowadays, the hierarchy is mobile gaming > cynical live service games (lootboxes) > regular video games & consoles > indie games > VR (my opinion / take, I don't have sources because I'm too lazy to look them up).
But you're right about the other things, he definitely overestimated VR's impact on the world. 2015 was a year or two after Google Glass, which was the first major party to try AR as envisioned by Zucc - and it didn't work out for various reasons. A big one was social, but I can imagine the big tech companies figured that society needs a bit more time, like they did with mobile and later smartphones.
I can't see always-on HUD work just yet, society doesn't want that. Nobody wants to have a conversation with someone only for their eyes to go elsewhere because a notification is coming in. Although on the other hand, people will probably talk to someone and see them looking at their phone / watch while talking to them.
100% agree on Zuckerberg really understanding Facebook and where it needed to go.
The most interesting part of the email to me was seeing his support for aquiring Unity. Not being able to land that acquisition almost feels like the critical reason Meta doesn't have much to show today, after all this effort. And it doesn't look like the aquisition failed due to lack of trying! ironSource ended up doing a merger acqusition that finally closed just a few days ago.
For years I have wondered why all the big names pushed Unity in favor of Unreal Engine. Even before UE5 and before Fortnite, UE4 had better tech. than Unity.
I've used Unity and I'm still working on a solodev VR game with it. Unity has a lot of areas where it could improve. Meta seriously could have developed their own engine. With truly passionate people they could've used their capital to elevate an ECS engine like Bevy
That is so true, I really wish they had just given Carmack a hardcore team of graphics programmers and an infinite supply of diet coke and pizza and told him to go nuts.
They certainly could have, and would have been better off for it! The strategy they laid out was to acqui-purchase one, and I guess having nothing to show for it is the risk they undertook.
Buying Unity would have been a huge mistake. They should keep their focus on their core competency which is handling lots of concurrent users and providing an identity system. Let people use whatever engine they want to develop VR apps.
He outlined why it wouldn't have been a big mistake, and I can't see any disagreement with any of his points on that matter. Without owning an on-road to their platform, they run the risk of developers losing access to it.
This may be the silver lining of the market cap evaporation for Meta. It is harder to argue that it is an all powerful monopoly now vs in 2021.
What sweet irony it would be if the biased coverage by NYT, WaPo, etc allowed Meta to resume making
large acquisitions and maintain their dominance for years to come.
It merged with ironsource this year (and closed a few days ago). Considering the Unity board rejected other offers (even one from an ironsource competitor that was offering a significant premium), I think this ship has sailed.
Could replace the laptop. If we can get unlimited virtual screens and accurate enough hand tracking to replace the keyboard, I could see people carrying the headset around instead.
I think thats what Mark is saying in this. VR/AR could eventually replace: Desktops, laptops, TV, AND cell phones. Thats a lot of stuff. Literally owning eyeballs.
Not replace but greatly boost. With AR, I used to love passing through the external environment and putting two tv screens up in the ceiling area with CNBC and a podcast, all while doing laundry and tidying up around the house; my net consumption bumped up quite significantly due to the ease and ubiquity of opportunities to consume content.
Just a quest. Watch the first 20 seconds of this [1] and you’ll see the concept. Note, pass through was low resolution and in black and white. Sufficient for doing laundry but annoying.
If we can get proper 3d content for VR that would be incredible. One of the NBA Finals in like 2017 announced a VR viewing experience. Imagine my extreme disappointment when it was just the regular ESPN video on a virtual TV in a virtual room with a virtual couch. I would pay some pretty significant money for a sideline VR camera view at certain sports. Imagine being "at" the superbowl but also having access to your own bathroom and snacks.
This is what I want for watching NHL games. Imagine having a dozen camera views on demand. Of course, knowing how greedy all these companies are, I’m sure if they ever do it they’ll charge per camera view or something stupid that’ll make it cost prohibitive to the average person. I’ll end up sitting behind a pillar in VR. Lol.
you basically hit the spot. He never realized the phone with it's size and fit factor in everyday life cannot be replaced by a headset that is so intrusive. It's good for games but anything else likely a hassle to the norm.
you can't shrink your head. The smallest version is a pair of glasses. There was a privacy concern when people started wearing Google glasses in public if I remember correctly. The norm has to be respected until the norm changes.
The problem with Google Glasses was that they looked basically like glasses (being AR), in many ways other than size - starting with the fact that they were transparent. A VR headset, even if it's equally compact, won't look like glasses - certainly not if the designers don't want it to.
Cellphones used to be massive. VR headsets will eventually be tiny. Now is Motorola - the original cellphone pioneer the top producer of cellphones today? Fuck no.
Sometime by 2035 a company will build light field display glasses than can translate language, operate industrial drones, and operate remote chat. It probably won't be meta
The shrinkage of one technology platform in the past isn't enough to predict the shrinkage of another in the future. We're just so used to the idea of tech getting smaller and smaller, but I think we're reaching some limits that might make progress on VR or other immersive tech like that slower or even impossible.
Well, fingers crossed that isn't the case. I for one am never strapping something anywhere near as large as current devices to my face as a replacement for sitting in front of a couple of monitors.
I think he's limited by the technology of our times, but I'd still agree with him that this is _the future_ (not sure how soon), and they probably want to be at the forefront when that happens.
it's intrusive today; ultimately they'll look like a pair of regular glasses. Just like cell phones went from clunky beasts you couldn't even fit in your purse much less pocket, to a watch.
If I had to take a guess what will replace the iPhone it will likely be new sci-fi tech that makes the cell into a piece of see through slab of glass that is touch based. If this is possible to do in the future, I think people will start buying that. Until then iPhone will reign supreme!
What would that enable though? Aside from just a new “look” that’s more modern and makes your old phone look outdated?
I think if you had something like google glass, but made my Apple, and looked like normal glasses, that could be big, but still not as useful as a smartphone because of the input limitation. It would be as useful as an Apple Watch at first, but with a bigger screen.
most consumer techs get popular from the "wow" factor and use cases are discovered later. Maybe the glass slab could be used to detect disease from your saliva. Who knows...
iPhone was all about the cool factor. Touch based screens didn't add value to the initial consumer except for the "wow" factor. Actual value of touch based came much later. The tech needed the "wow" factor to start the chain reaction into something meaningful.
They were almost immediately useful, maybe not for the touch aspect but for the large screen that could actually browse the full web without being nearly as clunky as everything else on the market.
It's really hard to make electrical conductors transparent, though. Indium tin oxide is the only significant exception and you probably couldn't make a microchip out of it.
In Zuckerberg's defence, if they somehow create a wearable headset with the proportions of a pair of glasses, they'll absolutely dominate. A sizeable chunk of their spending spree is R&D. If their work results in VR/AR glasses which are cheap, ubiquitous, stylish, and functional, I will be first in line to say "good job."
I actually think that no matter how good their hardware is, their effort to completely control the software platform will sink them.
My best hope is that Facebook develops a lot of neat tech and then fumbles and fails, and finally exits the space, and in the vacuum companies like Samsung and others drop more general purpose platforms that allow freedom on the software side.
>In Zuckerberg's defence, if they somehow create a wearable headset with the proportions of a pair of glasses, they'll absolutely dominate.
How would they do that though? The technology to pack the VR processing power of ~4k display per eye @ 90-120 Hz, cooling, power efficiency and big enough battery plus lens technology into a regular frame of glasses that doesn't look weird, is some Sci-Fi, Iron Man level technology, that just isn't here yet and it won't be for many years to come, if not decades, considering the slow down of Moore's law, and when it will be here, it will be prohibitively expensive.
Imagine the challenges of having to cram an RTX 4090 into a pair of Raybans and being able to run for hours on the battery of a smartwatch. We're very, very far away from that, probably decades of optics, semiconductor fabrication and battery chemistry advancements are needed before this reaches consumer tech and pricing.
Once Meta goes down and takes Oculus with it, we'll probably see another VR winter, until the tech improvements reach a level that makes it desirable again.
There is a big mountain to climb, but I don't think we need to wait until the technology delivers everything we want all at once. Google Glasses were released in 2013 and while they don't possess that long list of features, they are functional in similar dimensions to regular glasses: https://www.google.com/glass/start/. I would wear these. The road to better AR/VR products will be in iterating on these; making the display better and better, and the hardware lighter and lighter.
That's more of a 20 year timeline goal for anyone. They can still dominate VR in the meantime by staying at the leading edge in hardware. If they want to secure their future they'll have to continue to invest a lot in developing the systems and apps that people want to use.
The fundamental problem with VR is the "VR illusion" which makes the eyes focus on objects apparently in the distance that are actually on a screen very close to the eyes. This gives users headaches thus making mass appeal impossible. Solving this, if it is solvable at all, is challenge #1.
Focal distance is dependent on the lenses used. Most VR headsets have a fixed focal distance of 1.3m or 2m. Those interested in the literature can use the keyword "vergence-accomodation conflict" (VAC) for more information on this.
This is a well known problem, and there are quite a few potential solutions - Doug Lanman, the lead of Display Systems Research @ FRL made a bunch of nice presentations on a variety of different approaches a couple years ago (all on YouTube, well worth watching one [1] for anyone with a passing interest in the really cool developments going on).
While I think varifocal is going to be the near-term solution, I do have a soft spot for the various light field displays I've seen.
As I understand it, due to lens setup this shouldn’t actually be the case. Iirc the view for say a Valve Index ends up at something like 60cm.
Here’s some actual problems that are harder:
* while your eyes remain accommodated to focus on that distance, it no longer corresponds with the way they track objects close or far away, by pointing closer together etc
* lack of correspondence between movement on screen and in the real world (usually translation, rather than rotation which tracks head position) for non-roomscale content (i.e. games where you move around larger scenes) causes motion sickness.
I believe vergence accomodation can still be a problem, even if the focus is fixed at 60cm (close to infinity). If an object is up close in the virtual world (say 20cm), it's still stuck at a focus of 60cm.
I believe Nvidia demoed a solution for this at SIGGRAPH ~4 years back. Liquid lenses were employed to change the lenses focal length based on the content and user gaze.
I got a Quest to try out VR, connected it to the internet and took it off to let updates install, and instantly felt sick as soon as it was off. It lasted all day and I've never put it back on. It was super cool for the 3 minutes I spent connecting to wifi.
That first experience was the same for me, it heavily depends on the game you attempt too play wherever you're able to get used to it or just keep getting KO'd.
If you give it another try I'd suggest games such as SuperHot, beat saber and pistol whip, as youre only controlling your camera perspective, which makes it much more tolerable.
But yeah, one frame drop and it's gonna feel like someone bashed your face in without leaving a bruise.
My worst experience had me feeling unwell for several days after, just thinking about putting the headset on gave me a bad feeling.
I feel like this current version of VR is just a proof of concept, but i don't think it's going mainstream for gaming, ever.
Controls are clunky at best compared to what you can do on a regular display, as everything else makes you nauseous
Empirically I would say this affects only a small minority of people. Maybe 5-10% at most. It's a barrier to certain types of adoption but not nearly the showstopper you are making out I think.
It depends on what you mean by "affect" (I'd be curious also where you're getting your empirical data from since there's not a lot of publicly published data from what I can find). While I agree it's not necessarily a showstopper, the negative results in the studies I've seen all point to VAC as being something that is a negative factor that is high on the list of things to solve for.
Shibata, Takashi, Joohwan Kim, David M. Hoffman, and Martin S. Banks. “Visual Discomfort with Stereo Displays: Effects of Viewing Distance and Direction of Vergence-Accommodation Conflict.” Proceedings of SPIE 7863 (February 15, 2011): 78630P-1-78630P – 9. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.872347.
Daniel, François, and Zoï Kapoula. “Induced Vergence-Accommodation Conflict Reduces Cognitive Performance in the Stroop Test.” Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (February 4, 2019): 1247. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37778-y.
Batmaz, Anil Ufuk, Mayra Donaji Barrera Machuca, Junwei Sun, and Wolfgang Stuerzlinger. “The Effect of the Vergence-Accommodation Conflict on Virtual Hand Pointing in Immersive Displays.” In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. CHI ’22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502067.
> He knew in 2015, that if Facebook didn't have a platform it controlled, it would suffer down the line.
People say this but Amazon is doing just fine in the retail
space.
In fact for Facebook and Amazon, their biggest follies are trying to own the platform (Metaverse and Fire Phone).
We have seen that owning a platform doesn’t mean owning everything and yet, perfectly good businesses waste a ton of time and money assuming that is the case.
I'm going to disagree here on Amazon. They did succeed in building/acquiring two hardware and OS level platforms. They were so successful you didn't even notice
One is called Alexa and the other is called Ring. At the same time Amazon is a website that doesn't rely as heavily on your phones privacy setting (which Apple is currently using to mine your data btw!)
Within the next 5 years I expect folks to be able to order things from their doorbells and Ring home security drones
> One is called Alexa and the other is called Ring.
What share of Amazon GMV do you think is purchased on either? We’ve had Alexa for a decade now, and forcing a user to walk to their porch isn’t going to be the thing that makes voice ordering work.
Notice how it's totally fine to buy goods in the Amazon app? You think that Amazon couldn't have used their leverage to make the same case for Kindle if they thought it was worth it?
I'm not saying there is no value to owning a platform, it's just not as extreme as people make it out to be.
> "VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways."
Far from it. VR is just a new type of game. Regular display technology is too good now. From ultrawide to laser projection, to high density mobile screens, to folding screens... ALL getting better and cheaper. Above all, the friction and ergonomic shift of VR is too great to expect obsolescence to come knocking on regular gaming's door.
His idea for the mobile phone to be replaced with VR/AR is crazy. Phones are little hubs in our hands, with amazing cameras and nice screens for flicking through information with your finger. Agreeable ergonomics for our brains to absorb "chunks" of content or information, about the size of a phone up to tablet/A4 paper size. Something in our brains likes the compartmental properties of a page. Like since humans started reading and writing. The "size" of a virtual bubble or layered world floating in front of our faces, isn't tangible or agreeable enough for daily driving brain activity IMHO. Great for after hours fun though!
I think you are looking around you not in front of you. The path now is to a thinner ski goggles looking form factor that supports AR through a passthrough video of where you are but with the ability to turn anything into an iphone or iwatch or 60" TV screen (try carrying that arround in your pocket). Wearing goggles will not be any more inconvenient or disconnecting than pulling out your phone at the table. One Apple leak hinted at an LED outward facing screen so people around you don't feel as strange including you in the conversation. The form factors will iterate towards human centered simplicity just like the possibility space of spatial computing enabled by these devices will iterate towards a more natural interface where information systems will conform to our world as it is in 3D rather than us being forced to deal with them through keyboards and mice and touch screens in our pocket.
But you have to also keep in mind that no one (except maybe Zuckerberg) wants to look stupid. Walking around with ski goggles would look so incredibly stupid to any normal human being, so you'd have to carry the goggles around in a case or a backpack. Even with a device the size of ski goggles (which none of the current tech can even come close to given battery sizes) AR/VR still won't displace cell phones or apple watches.
I don't think the form-factor is something they can iteratively approach for too long, given the absurd amount of investment Meta is already throwing in to building the next generation of still insufficient AR/VR. Investor appetite will not last long enough to realize the pipe-dream.
I think there’s a real issue here, but it’s not looking stupid per se. Facebook and similar addictive products get very very large per-user engagement, and this works because people use their phones while being just enough present in the real world to walk places, ride public transit, drive (!), go to restaurants, go on dates, etc.
For this to work with a device like the Quest, users need to simultaneously be present in the real world and consume content in VR/AR. That could work in pure AR applications (albeit potentially quite awkwardly), but VR might have fairly fundamental issues such as losing the feeling of presence in VR and motion sickness.
VR is neat. AR is neat. Getting people to use VR for 10 hours a day while pretending to do something else may be a challenge.
I still find them mostly a gimmick. They're a very good identifier for yuppie-like people, though, which one could say that it adds to the "stupid-looking" thing.
I don't know how you can possibly believe that. Not only are they (or inspired-by-them products) almost ubiquitous in many areas, people love them and rave about them.
The Airpods (or at least, that product category) are probably the single greatest new product I've used in the last 10 years. And I use a lot of products. They have given me always-available access to audio, easily, whenever I want.
Most probably because we live in different areas and are also part of distinct demographics. I live in Eastern Europe and I don't have that many IT people as close acquaintances and friends, in those circles of mine "always-available access to audio" sounds a little quaint.
"Always-available access to audio" is a fancy way of saying I can listen to Whatsapp messages or watch YouTube videos anytime I want without bother anyone. Not to mention listen to music or audiobooks.
Not sure what sounds quaint about that, it sound to me like how most people I know use their phones. And while I have a lot of people I know in tech, it's by no means everyone I know.
Until recently, I worked with high schoolers. Many of them felt absolutely no social discomfort at wearing earbuds while having a face to face conversations. It wasn’t uncommon for a kid to very quietly listen to music during a conversation. This is AR in a different sense, and I expect the social discomfort of AR glasses/goggles will similarly be generational/cultural and fleeting.
agree. There's a tipping point in utility and then things flip very rapidly. We don't have to reach frameless spectacle level, anything that gets in range will get us to the point where it will suddenly flip.
Its a good question and I don't have any handy answers other than a loose distribution of twitter accounts and subreddits although if you want a single source to plumb through there is an amazing store of knowledge in Voices of VR podcast by Kent Bye [1] run through his archives for a thoughtful discussion of almost any topic in this space.
VR is too early to be the meta of the future because of the fact we would need something that is completely standalone , have the performances of the valve index including the computer that goes with it and the price of the Oculus Quest 2. If they instead attempted to only focus on software similar to how Google made Android it could have gone better but his strategy was too early to execute . Also, I think that it’s just that they don’t have a platform it’s also that they have basically everyone that could see an advertisement that has signed up with Facebook / WhatsApp and Instagram so they don’t have the ability to grow their advertisements. This is something he had to do which was to give internet to places that didn’t have it but you would have the ability to access Facebook for tree.
So what did he do in 7 years? Ideas are cheap. Maybe the company didn't execute so well due to the bloat and inertia, or maybe the brand itself had other vulnerabilities which are missing from this vision.
Recognizing the technology wasn't going to be available in 10 years in a 10-year plan seems important. But you can't expect that from somebody who might legitimately think building hardware was as easy as hacking software.
I agree that he is way too optimistic. And from what I heard from Meta's employee, their hardware org is just not that good and the high level direction is very lacking.
It's pretty obvious to everyone so I wonder what really happened. Once people received this mail did they tell him to his face that he was partly wrong? Or decided to just support his vision? Because among tech people I talk to, there is no single person who believes VR is the future, unless a major breakthrough happens that would eliminate all heavy inconveniences that make it almost unusable for the majority of population for more than half an hour.
AR is a vastly different beast as you need to move in the real world and receive sensory input from your device. People have been using Google Glass for over a decade and already have a feeling of what this entangles if you take just vision into account. To eliminate all awkwardness you'd basically need an advanced implant that wouldn't stand out - but I'm not sure anyone would want such a thing.
> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.
If this was ever going to happen it would have already happened in the last (or is it still 'current'?) VR hype cycle. Maybe in the next cycle 15..20 years down the road or after some massive gaming crash it's worth another shot.
It will never make gaming in current form obsolete. Not in 50 years. Just for the fact that you need to put something on your face..
Maybe some people will use a VR set instead of a Wii U for activity / family games but thats it.
What VR is doing is it makes some genre of games a lot more attractive: Sim-racing and flight-sims. The cockpit games in VR are really immersive. Combine it with some good hardware (rig, stick, wheel, etc) and you feel like you're really in the car or plane.
Wholly agree on the immersion: a decent VR game, even if janky, has a great advantage in immersion by actually feeling _present_ in whatever virtual world you're in.
Two examples I'd add: VTOL VR, somewhere closer to the Sim genre but simplified for VR controllers.
I've played a few flight (combat) games before, but the combat is heart-pumping unlike anything else.
Another more popular one is VRChat and similar, where there are desktop versions but you definitely feel like you're missing something without the VR aspect. Emoting, gesturing, and actually "touching" others in VR is easy. If you're in desktop mode, you're mostly limited to standing nearby and talking.
I guess it varies from person to person, but normally what causes nausea is the motion. If you fix the camera and let the character roam around there should be minimal nausea. But then you're a little more limited in your gameplay.
Once smart glasses are the same weight and experience as wearing regular glasses I believe like many they are the next iPhone. The amount of innovation that can happen with smart glasses will be so cool and useful. I was just at a zoo looking for the small animal blending into it's environment in their glass cage ... I wished I had smart glasses that pointed out where in the cage the animal was.
While I was playing ping pong I wished I had smart glasses that kept score of the game.
Tons of ideas that many to millions will find very cool and useful! I can see why Zuckerberg is betting the farm on smart glasses! I don't think Meta will create the next iPhone/smart glasses, but good for him on trying.
The sheer cost of VR platforms would make it non-ubiquitous. People in developing countries use mobile because it is that versatile, and that is why mobile is the king currently. I don't see how AR/VR platforms will ever replace that in next 10-15 years.
I don't believe for a second that smartphones in their current black-mirror form is going to stay, maybe for the forseeable future, but I'll be surprised if we're still rubbing our greasy meat-sausages on glowing plates of glass 10 years from now.
For how much FB subsidized VR headsets, they should have double down on Android phones with their own appstore. At least they seem better positioned than Microsoft who had to get OS to comport with Windows and Amazon.
A lot of the big CEOs repeat a mantra that they are really on the edge of destruction. I've heard that from 2010s Google. It is just a motivating chant.
In my experience "dead wrong" is also wrong. I don't believe VR will ever obsolete some swaths of gaming, but there are certain VR experiences that leave the conventional-gaming alternative feeling utterly worthless by comparison. The feeling of "actually" jumping into the cockpit of my spaceship in Elite Dangerous during the COVID lockdowns was intense, joyful, and freeing in a way no picture on a monitor could ever replicate.
However VR is still an emerging and expensive medium; I'm very lucky to be able to afford the gaming rig, headset, controllers etc required to have that experience. As those barriers to entry lessen, VR will absolutely obsolete certain traditional gaming experiences as much as television murdered the ubiquitous living room radio.
That statement is way too definitive. VR gaming and sales are low because content is low. It's plagued with the cold start problem of all new platforms where publishers won't target VR because it's a small market, and VR won't grow because the game selection is very limited. When a major publisher pushes something to VR, it's usually an half-assed port that fail to leverage the completely different user interface.
If we had 5 games with the polish of Half-life Alyx in VR the sales would probably be higher, but as it is we don't so everyone I know with a headset enjoyed that one game then promptly put their headset back in storage and only take it out for the occasional beat saber game.
VR gaming also suffers from having a stationary gamer. Sitting still and looking around only really works for certain game types. If I’m always looking forward, how is VR adding to the experience?
Beatsaber and other rhythm games are very dynamic. I think the problem is more that the things I would want to work well in VR don't always work well. (But there are probably lots of amazing dynamic things like Beatsaber I never would have thought of.)
Immersion. I know it doesn't sound like much, but the hindbrain doesn't care.
There's an unofficial third-party mod for GTA 5 that adapts it into a VR game. Even though you still use keyboard and mouse to actually move around, and so gameplay-wise it's the same game, it feels much more intense. Oh, and the ability to actually aim down sights in a way that no screen can simulate is awesome (and I'm looking forward to games like Arma pushing this even further by accounting for focus distance etc).
90% of my VR gaming is standing up. Resist, Beat Saber, Pistol Whip, Walking Dead, Zombieland, Shadow point, Until You Fall, Racket NX, and Kingspray are all 'stand and move around' games for me.
I feel like your statement is reversed: flat-screen gaming suffers from having a stationary gamer. VR is freeing, assuming you have an area to move around in. Until You Fall is pretty wild when you have a 15x15 space to play in.
Sales don't say everything. I'd buy a steam headset if I could afford it at the moment. The main blocker is my lack of space and lack of GPU power.
I would buy the quest, but doing any kind of business with Facebook feels dirty to me, I'd rather wait and get something from a company I respect.
Not really the worst strategy. You can totally see where he was coming from. He just vastly overestimated how far VR could go in even 10 years of heavy investment, if ever. No amount of heavy investment, even for 10+ years, is going to make AR or VR as ubiquitous as mobile.
You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses. It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. And, he is correct, it needs to have apps so compelling that people find hard to participate in society without one.
It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035.
Another requirement that seems to get ignored is that you need to have the overwhelming majority of the public not feel sick when you use it. I recently had a friend bring a VR headset to a party for people to try out. About 15% of the people who tried it felt dizzy or nauseous after using it. (I did not try it because I know from experience I'll have a headache and be dizzy for hours afterward.)
Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!)
And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform.
Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.
Most of the VR software I've tried have anti-nausea features like teleportation and unmoving frames of reference, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that no one's talking about it.
I think the hope was that some combination of hardware and software would solve the problem.
My understanding of what causes the nausea is the render latency. The brain thinks its been poisoned due to our vision and the vestibular system misaligned, and so it triggers nausea to expel the poison.
I am skeptical we can get hardware fast enough such that these systems don't trigger a false positive for all people.
I haven't suffered from this but anecdotally proper calibration as well as better tracking and frame rate do have a significant effect on whether people suffer such side effects. The Quest series (which if it was bought to a party is my guess on what was used) are great value for money and are competent VR devices (and leading in some ways) but they make compromises to achieve this and I wouldn't rule out the ability to comfortably use VR based on a bad experience with such a device.
Having said that I'd agree network effects for personal uptake are killed by "Just spend 3x as much on the headset and peripherals and have a computer that cost 4x as much and you can use it in a dedicated room you've set up your tracking lighthouses in".
I agree. I get motion sickness from playing FPS games. The symptoms improve, but it takes a while to adjust. Some people have no problem with it, whereas for some it is completely impossible to overcome. It's hard for me to see broad adoption of VR with the current technology.
Nausea is definitely in the spotlight for John Carmack who’s the progenitor of a shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines, starting with Doom. He’s a performance tuning genius and nausea has been one of the biggest engineering issues he and his team have tackled. A brilliant CTO cannot make a hard problem go away, but he and his team have been able to move it to a far better place than where it was back when I tried the DK1.
You raise excellent points and it’s plain to see that John’s work has put him at the fore of violent masculine tropes as entertainment. The whole idea of endless slaughter of “evil” humanoids feels a bit more wrong than it used to, and certainly wouldn’t be the mark I want to leave in the world. I’m not calling him an infamous misogynist, but he’s no infamous feminist either. I hope that people keep holding people to account, and I hope for their sakes they don’t intend on leaving behind 15%+ of their market simply due to malicious or incidental ignorance. I hope a lot of things for them though lol.
I did some brief fact checking for this and came across an ancient 4chan screenshot. I debated sharing it but I think it’s good evidence that these discussion has been in the public conscience for a long time:
If some make decision maker forced an organization to adopt VR and it’s women found it unusable, I would think that ADA would be a route through which there should be grounds for protections and accomplishments.
Frankly, it’s not fully fixed, and it might not be fixable. Our bodies are far more clever than the gods of gaming have presumed. We do proprioception with our toes and ears and sense our surroundings with the tiny hairs on our arms. As long as VR creates dissonance for processing info from the nervous system the more the cerebellum starts to get cranky, and tipsy.
> for John Carmack who’s the progenitor of a shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines, starting with Doom.
First of all, Wolfenstein 3D, which used Carmack's engine, predated Doom by a year, but even Wolf3D wasn't the first 3D game or 3D engine. Activision's 1991 Hunter and Mindscapes's 1988 Colony both had very similar graphics and play as Wolf3D. 3D gaming and FPS goes back at least to Atari's 1980 BattleZone, but most place FPS origin with Maze in 1973.[1]
Second of all, by my count, Carmack developed (or also worked on) six distinct 3D game engines. There are an awful lot of 3D game engines now, well over 100 listed here.[3] I think by "shockingly large percentage," you must have instead meant, "small percentage." Maybe Carmack holds the world record for most 3D engines developed by one individual, but it could never be a "shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines," even with id's OSS releases and subsequent variants.
I should have been far more specific: FPS, and not quite _3D_ at the outset...
You're quite right, especially relative to what I had stated. Its just that the impact of John's decision to GPL Doom and Quake engines gave rise to a tremendous ecosystem that many people don't realize. For instance, GoldSrc which forked Quake is the foundation for the Source and Source 2 engines which power at least 60% of all hours played on Valve in the last 30 days. https://steamcharts.com/top
His patterns have been wildly studied and reused. The word I did use carefully is progenitor. Id engine's direct impact is relatively small, but its legacy is vast.
Quest/Quest 2 specifically? Rift S? Rift CV1? Or the original Rift? I ask because the software and hardware has improved drastically. I'd be pretty surprised if you get sick from a Quest.
Additionally, as someone with very small pupillary distance, none of the existing headsets on the market are applicable to me. At this point I've written off VR entirely as I don't think any company will ever design for someone like me.
We had a VR excitement 'bubble' in the 90s. Loads of headsets came out, games supporting them, etc. It all died out within a few years. I guess people like Mark thought the reason for the die out was that the tech wasn't there yet. But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset. But that seems to be what Mark is working towards. He's thinking people will choose to work together via VR rather than just plain old video conferencing.
> But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset.
I think you're wrong.
From this[1] great essay about mainframes:
> Ultimately, there are only two natural kinds of computers: embedded systems and mainframes.
And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
Of course, not all tasks are suitable to be done on a phone or a watch. But one way to think of VR is a desk setup with huge monitors that happens to be extremely portable. Of course the promise of VR is much greater than that, but that is a pretty important use case - a use case that would obviate the need for laptops and desktops for many if not most tasks.
2. This isn't to say that the shift has been complete at all. Many people, including me, continue to use a desktop setup. And laptop use is still quite strong. But the derivative is ultimately what matters.
It's been 20 years and NOBODY is doing business in VR even though the tech is amazing right now. What's missing? At what point do you think normal people will prefer VR over just using video conferencing for work meetings? I don't see it and I'm willing to bet money that we won't have amazing Meta VR with 100 million users in the next 5 years.
Have you ever tried to work in VR? It's not amazing at all, my Quest 2 (which has reasonably high resolution per modern headset standard) just can't render clearly enough for me to use VSCode. I tried it and it was just not there yet. Double the pixel density and you would have something I would consider using.
I'm not necessarily convinced that we'll do all of our meetings in VR ever, but it's reasonable to say that tech still has a way to go before I'd call it as "VR is the issue".
I think Meta would disagree would disagree with the assertion "the tech is amazing right now." The two easiest problems to point to are a) resolution on most consumer headsets is far too low to read text effectively, and b) the ergonomics just aren't there in terms of weight and size.
Pretty big problems - I don't really have any argument either way on how solvable they are in 5-10 years, but I really think the implication that people dislike the concept of working in VR itself is misguided.
Size and weight has been going up over time: https://i.imgur.com/2fOAFqI.png
There's no evidence we will reach the mythical lightweight glasses any time soon. I believe that is needed for VR to be accepted on a scale similar to cellphones.
The tech is amazing for us VR enthusiasts, but I don't think it's really at the point where it can impress the average person beyond a short whale demo or beatsaber game. You're either tethered to a wire, or a 3 hour battery life (Which degrades pretty quickly). Resolution still isn't good enough for reading text at a reasonable scale. Narrow field of view. Hot to wear. The fact that they are fixed-focus creates some weird depth perception issues in many people for up to 48 hours after use until you get your "vr legs".
The tech is super early stage, having worked in VR for 6 hours a day for a month I can tell you it's very barebones. This tech is nascent, hell the oculus quest only came out in 2019.
With reference to the 90s VR boom, the grandparent was calling out this very comment as demonstrably false, well before you had even posted it. What magic is that?!
For sale to consumer VR headsets have been available commercially for about 35 years. Is it really reasonable to call a consumer tech product category that's been around for 35 years "early" or "nascent"? Look at something like the EyePhone (yes, that was its name). How is that not the very same product category as a modern VR HMD? Of course a modern HMD is better, but not fundamentally a new category of device. This shit is ancient by tech standards. It's had almost 4 decades to evolve since its consumer debut.
I mean we had smartphones in the late 90's and early 2000's and they didn't take off until 2010 so yes. That's where I'd put this, now we're waiting for VR's iPhone moment.
>And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
One of these shifts is not like the other. The laptop can, in principle, do everything the desktop can. The speakers and mousepad are kind of limited, but peripherals erase this barrier too. A phone simply doesn't have the text input rate of a keyboard, which I'm feeling intimately right now as I tap out this comment with my right thumb. Strap a keyboard to the phone, now the screen is too far away. It might as well be a laptop.
You can run a business on laptops. Currently, businesses still use desktops mostly because they're still significantly cheaper at equivalent performance (and maybe harder to steal). But on phones? That's nowhere near practical. The keyboard has yet to be disrupted; voice input is antisocial unless you have your own office.
> But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset.
This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are...
In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
Besides the fact that only 50 people are in the Metaverse right now? Literally nobody is using VR for meetings and work and stuff. Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions. At least with a video call I can see your face and you can see mine. VR? it's just voice chat with a stupid headset.
Absolutely. After covid, people are craving physical contact and outdoor activities. Travel and tourism is trending up. This idea that people want to put on a headset and stay indoors, netflix and chill or whatever is not happening. Maybe the niche hackernews/reddit crowd might prefer to avoid social contact and put on a VR headset, but I'm not seeing that in the local restaurants, bars, shopping malls, concerts, and theatres. They are crowded.
A few 10s of billions of dollars along with a bunch of super smart people haven't made much of a dent, so I don't think vague assurances are going to cut it. Nobody can predict what technology will be like in a few decades, but I don't see any reason to be particularly bullish on VR. At this rate, even if it does happen at some point, Meta likely won't be around to see it.
The goal is for VR to become a dominant platform and their progress has been far from massive. Some technical advancements along the way are nice, but won't matter without large numbers of users.
How many people visit the metaverse multiple times per day?
What percent of the population spends hours per day in a VR headset?
The answer to those questions needs to be much better than "miniscule" for this project to be any sort of success.
The goal is not to replace human interaction, it is to replace phone calls and video chat. To make the experience better than those things is not an insurmountable task.
That would be great if Meta was a VC fund placing hundreds of bets in the hopes of a moonshot paying off. But a (formerly) trillion dollar company placing such a big bet on such a small market is very surprising.
Using a Quest we're clearly not there yet but we're also clearly far closer than a VirtualBoy.
Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.
Joining a meeting right now is as easy as clicking on 'join' on your phone or laptop. I can then see everyone in the meeting and they can see my facial expressions etc. VR doesn't add anything useful and removes a lot of social cues visible on video (or in person). I don't see why I'd accept employees joining a meeting using an avatar instead of showing up 'in person' (on video).
You're arguing about the experience today, not what it could be. I definitely don't want avatars.
I want this meeting to have higher immersion representations of the rest of the people in the meeting than boxes on a screen. I want to be able to shift my view to focus more on individuals. I want to be able to have a meeting with 40 people where I could still focus on a single person and see them with high-fidelity, instead of just having 20 of the boxes at low-res in front of me, with the rest off-screen. I want less eyestrain because I'm not just staring at a flat wall but my eyes are moving and shifting and re-focusing more. I want to have depth to things. I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody. All things I could do in the real world, but would be very hard to make seamless without a real-world interaction model.
Again, we clearly aren't there yet. But it's easy to imagine something better than what we have today.
How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
>I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody.
None of this requires VR and is available in, for example, Jitsi video chats.
My standard for the future (10+ years out) is "if i have to hit the keyboard or click the mouse it's failed." In that case I'll definitely still want to go back to in-person collaboration.
> How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
My best guess of what this would look like would be much closer to glasses than a full headset (no "sticking" to the face) with very good ultra-wide cameras + image processing to capture your face and upper body language at the same time. Maybe toss in a desktop-mounted webcam too. Not 100% immersed/blackout, but quite possibly good enough to be better than a flat monitor with also isn't 100% of your FOV.
Video chats drop body language, natural speaking cues, reduces the quality of group conversations and more. VR even with some of the tech today restores a bit of that and gives the feeling of presence. I'm excited to see where we're at with it in 10 years, I agree that today we're not there.
Video conferencing sucks. It's so much worse than a conversation with physical or simulated physical presence. I'd much rather have that sense of presence and having experienced that in VR I can say if the tech improves people will likely go for it.
You lose so many cues, tells and deep interactions that you get with a physical presence via video call. I have seen VR start to solve some of these and I think it will be pretty big if we get to the point where the cartoony graphics are ditched.
Body language is the most obvious. You don't even need very expressive avatars before certain things we naturally do in person become useful tells. I've had multiple conversations in VR, they flow much more naturally than video chats based on the sense of presence.
The quest pro just added expression tracking as well so now you have body language and normal emotional expressions. Wayyyyyyy more natural feeling than video chats, even if I'm seeing an avatar of someone and not their actual face.
Clearly you've never tried it. You do recognize you get no body language at all with current video chats right? One of the many reasons I think current teleconferencing is terrible. Like you just get a head 95% of the time.
It's interesting that you have identified exactly the same shortcomings that mobile had when the first commercial mobile phones came to market in the 80s:
- size
- weight
- battery life
- heat
- network reliability
- cost
These were all eventually overcome, incrementally. However, it did take about 30 years for that to happen, so 10 may have been a bit optimistic.
Another required quality that might be surprisingly tricky to get right is durability. Sunglasses are notoriously brittle, and I can't for the life of me keep sunglasses in good shape for more than a few months. I don't know if there is any great solution besides fundamentally altering the form.
The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges. So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of other issues for every day wear. (I wear contacts for vision correction because I find glasses very annoying).
> So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable.
It also has to be impossible for failure of the hinges to lead to damage of the electronic components. I've lost multiple laptops to hinges twisting in ways that they shouldn't have and fracturing the motherboard or keyboard, and that's in a form factor that gets much less abuse than glasses.
> The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges
citation needed. For me, it's the scratches and the surface issues. Even though I have no problem taking care of my regular glasses for years, most of my sunglasses become unusable and hard to see through from deteriorating surface and scratches after 6-10 months. No matter if I get $30 or $300 ones.
Isn't that just sunglasses manufacturers simply cheaping out on lens materials and coatings? I don't see what would be stopping VR/AR manufacturers from making quality lenses.
If you wanted to you could make a pair of sturdy sunglasses, I think they are designed to break right now.
With regard to AR glasses, I would put the expensive part in my pocket like a phone, and the glasses would be just like the wireless earbuds, easily disposable / replaceable.
I'm really surprised I haven't heard this more often, because it seems like a given. AR glasses should be trying to offload as much work as they can to the supercomputers we carry around in our pockets. They have a much larger form factor that can support more compute, more battery, a better antenna, etc.
edit To be clear, I don't think we're anywhere near having cheap AR glasses that can just delegate all the work - rather I think there's so much compute that's necessary, we need the combination of what we can fit onboard the glasses and in our phones to make a compelling product.
They're not designed to break, they're simply picking the trade-off point that tends towards the "lightweight enough to wear all day" end of the continuum.
I don't believe it. I have this pair of safety glasses I bought from the hardware store for $5 and they are super light weight and rock solid. I could wear them all day and not even notice. Sometimes I even forget I am wearing them and wear them around inside for a while when I'm finished my work.
If they had some tint and UV protection and I would consider using them as shades.
update: I talked myself in looking at the hardware store website and my next sunglasses will be be some 3M safety glasses with a dark tint and uv. And less than $20.
The counter argument is that they have sank billions into this with top tier optoelectronic engineers working on realizing the vision. It is about as good an effort as you can reasonably get. If they want to go further, they will have to start building out their own exotic semiconductor basic research labs. Perhaps their only mistake is not scaling up the hardware R and D earlier.
One potential play is a joint venture with Apple, unpalatable yes, but they are the only other large scale consumer electronics company with the EEs
and hardware talent needed to execute this. I doubt even the military and government research labs can do a better job.
If there was something like a join venture between Apple & FB, it would be incredibly compelling as a software engineer interested in AR/VR to go work for them on it.
I don't think that's true. We were imagining them, and even trying to build them -- the hardware just wasn't capable of it. Newton, Palm and Handspring showed us the way, and those platforms died on the journey there. Apple arguably only added capacitive multitouch to the mix, apparently the last big piece of the puzzle to make mobile devices natural and fluid (OK, wireless networks weren't quite there when the original iPhone came out).
I'd argue that there are many, many puzzle pieces still needed to begin imagining an AR future. While the Newton showed an incomplete vision of its future, it begged all the right questions. My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
> My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
This feels like the similar kind of problems of understanding how to accommodate the human into the platform. Early mobile platforms were just "desktop, but smaller". You were expected to interact with the device using a stylus. Small checkboxes and UI elements were common. The device needed to regularly tether to a desktop.
Lots of VR games still allow you to move/rotate using thumbsticks. Part of it is that these games are ports of desktop experiences that wouldn't work any other way. Over time developers will better understand what works and what doesn't, and will design games/apps that don't make you nauseous.
There's also likely a bunch of vision problems that still need to be worked through. I have no expertise in VR but with my limited usage it feels quite close, and I think these problems are not insurmountable.
That's because the form factor of an iPhone is not fundamentally different from a 1998 Jornada.
All we had to do is keep putting different stuff in the box.
What if we changed the rules altogether? Suppose we demanded a phone that was a slab of glass. Literally. A rectangle of glass that you could see through. No visible antennae, no visible battery, no visible circuitry. when you activated it, you saw the same hi res and bright screen you see today on your ios or android device. Now the battery has to be clear. The antennae have to be clear. All the circuitry have to be clear.
Could we get that in the 20 years from 2002 to 2022? Probably not.
And AR glasses would represent a leap that goes even further than that. I'm not saying it can't be done by 2035. I'm saying they would have to get extraordinarily lucky with battery chemistry and display tech to have any chance of making an AR glasses product that did not have serious drawbacks by that date. They'd have to get so lucky that I would feel comfortable betting against it.
That’s a little bit of an overstatement don’t you think?
From the top of my head I can think of GURPS, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk all imagining very thoroughly things that both Mobile and VR gave or can give us, just to mention games that have been highly influential to the generation of people working on these technologies.
There are also loads of books, Asimov’s works have probably been the most influential, almost prophetically, in the creation of today’s Information era.
I'd argue 20 years of mobile development has given us a more powerful Palm with a SIM card and apps including ICQ with encryption, Skype but viable on a handheld device, email with office apps on a small screen, networked games instead of single player, maps, destruction of privacy from use of spyware on apps reporting every swipe, view of contact one has.
I'd argue most enabling changes exclusive to mobile have come from video, which was already a concept, location, which was already a concept, real-time status (which is mainly Twitter and Twitter-likes) and bandwidth. The 'killer feature' at the outset being syncing music and a web browser with sufficient adoption to make saying no to IE 6's vision of the web, and Flash, viable.
But I'm keen to know what was barely imagined back in 2000. Is it shift to mobile devices for a consumption?
Everyone have a look at the NReal Air demo videos and tell me this isn't possible in 20 years of development. It's a bit rough, but it's a product you can buy today, and not at all vaporware.
Cramming a Raspberry Pi worth of computing power and battery into the glasses frame doesn't seem nuts for 20 years of development.
That's an unrealistic expectation based on a faulty view of recent history.
I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003. By 2009 I had a device in my pocket that could almost replace my PC at both work and home and didn't spy on everything I did. In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device that constantly sends data back to the mothership.
While unlikely it is certainly possible that hardware will advance to meet the need but the problem lies in how we do consumer software now. Because the hardware isn't the real product anymore predicting how it will develop gets much sketchier.
Either way, imagining that one change means another is possible or likely is silly.
I tend to disagree more with your view of history than the view of history taken from the comment you’re replying to.
> I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003
For all intents and purposes, the first ‘smartphone’ didn’t exist until the iPhone existed. How do I know? Because essentially every smartphone on the market today looks like an iPhone.
> In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device
This is what millions (billions?) of people want even if it’s not what you want.
In 2000, Moore's law was still going strong and had been for the past 40 years (Dennard scaling not ending until around 2005). At that time it was actually more difficult for people to imagine a future that did not include practically unlimited computing capability. I'm not just talking about the unwashed masses, even many experts and leaders in the silicon industry did not see what was coming - Intel released the Pentium 4 in 2000 and was saying it would scale to 10GHz+ in a few years (https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6).
This reminds me of how the public viewed computers before Windows 95, or when the iPhone just came out. The flaws are many and severe, but you’d be shortsighted if you couldn’t see the potential
There's a quip somewhere about how the essence of futurist misprediction has been confusing unlike-in-quality and unlike-in-capability.
Unlike-in-quality is the same thing, only better. It rarely changes the world, because it's not an infinite value proposition.
Unlike-in-capability, on the other hand, is offering something that literally didn't exist before. It approaches infinite value, because it has the capability to reshape the world into one that requires its existence.
Mobile internet was unlike-in-capability.
I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality.
Maybe the only thing that gets me there is persistence, but the rub of that is that its requirements all require bulky physical configuration and/or isolation.
At its worst, earliest form, a brick cell phone was still portable, and didn't isolate the user from the world around them.
VR/AR is more unlike-in-capability than phones. If the hardware becomes a pair of glasses that have no friction in putting on, then it can engulf capabilities of TV, phone, PC, anything that has a screen. And unlike-in-quality part would be to project stuff on real world, be completely in a virtual world, etc. There is nothing like it.
I just think that making the hardware is the toughest challenge. Zuck might be underestimating hardware progress.
If he is right, godspeed, future would be amazing. If not, we'll have net positive experiment out of this and it will accelerate AR/VR hardware dev.
> I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality.
Have you actually tried it? VR in particular demos poorly for people where most of their experience with VR is Google Cardboard. Even VR systems from 5 years ago are dated. You have to try it, especially some notable non-gaming apps
The current VR headsets seem more akin to the car phones or those huge brick mobile phones of the 70s/80s rather than smartphones. Lots of people saw its potential. But it was not ready for the masses.
Even with 'perfect' glasses, batteries, networking and tracking, you're still faced with the problem that the virtual world is populated by intangible apparitions while real-world obstacles remain very tangible. And conceptually, none of the solutions to those problems are ever going to become cheap or convenient, because they're problems with basic physics.
> It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission.
The first AR glasses will be close to dummy terminals. For them to become feasible, wireless networking infrastructure has to become low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput – but not necessarily ubiquitous. There's no need to have powerful compute in a small form-factor if that can be outsourced to nearby servers, and this is something that could be possible in the confines of a major city, and the hardware would be rolled out much like another mobile carrier.
>You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses
Why? You don't have to transport VR. VR is the complement to mobile phones: mobile phones are used when you leave home, VR is used when you don't leave home.
The big question is: Are people going to leave home or are they going to stay home?
My guess is that it depends on how much energy is available. If there is no infrastructure worth visiting for billions of people, then VR will become a success.
>It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one.
If work happens in VR, then employer will finance the hardware for their employees.
Maybe. I thought we'd have more accessible shitty AR sooner. But VR has a lot of hard problems that don't seem solveable with a good hour of reflection in order to get it to the VR people see in movies.
With Apple allegedly joining the space in less than 2 months, and multiple sunglasses-sized devices out there already (nreal, rokid, etc), I think we'll know very soon whether XR has a chance of going mainstream this decade
I don't think Zuckerberg is wrong about VR at a certain level. I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways. But instead of making Oculus the "XBox" of the future, Mark decided that it was the "everything" of the future. A sort of wishful thinking that these headsets would replace the cellphone.
The cellphone fits in your pocket, watches fit on your wrist, and earbuds fit in your ears. A VR headset would have to be sunglasses size and even then they'd still be less ubiquitous than the Apple Watch.
The problem is not the vision, but the amount of money being spent. If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.