> 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.
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.