On the contrary, if Meta didn't acquire Oculus which hadn't poached Valve staff maybe the Steam Frame would have been out years ago.

It wouldn't have been touted at the "metaverse" and a revolution of having business meeting in a virtual room... looking like a boring office and maybe it would "just" be millions of gamers, but to stay we are in a better state because of Meta is questionable.

They did invest a ton and their products (if one can manage to make abstraction why they even exist in the first place) are actually well done but the line their brought on the entire industry created unrealistic expectation.

Is it good, is it bad, I'm not actually sure but I'm rather confident to say it's not obvious.

Meta burned all that money because Zuckerberg had just read something related to Snow Crash, not because he had a good idea for how to develop the sector.

I think for now games are the best use of VR, and Valve actually care about games, and Zuckerberg moving on to the next shiny thing leaves room for Valve to join Sony and Microsoft for the next PlayStation/XBox alternative.

If anything, when the Oculus Quest became the Meta Quest, it started feeling like regression rather than progress, with the games going from "wow!" to "did they port a phone game?".

I am not so sure about that. When it felt like Meta was abandoning the space we saw some resurgence of smaller projects that tried to innovate, but if you have a big player sucking out all the oxygen you can't build smaller scale projects

Worst thing that happened to humanity is the birth of Anduril thanks to Meta buying Occulus.. making that one slightly chipped person go think: "What to do with my Occulus exit.. hmm killing people isn't efficient, let me fix that."

Counterpoint: there are plenty of companies making VR hardware but they all remain niche and struggle because they can’t subsidize their hardware by taking both losses and user data as part of the price. Meta are better at killing competition more than they are at innovating.

So much to dissect in this post. By “N64 level” content I’m assuming that you refer to low poly geometry with low res textures and baked lights, correct? Well, I don’t know which VR games you are playing because even something as basic as Beat Saber would have been impossible to execute in the N64 era. I also find it interesting that you mention Apple being a VR company when they’ve only released one headset a few years ago and have not announced any major updates or successors in the last two WWDC. Meanwhile you ignore VALVe altogether who are about to release their second VR headset (third if you take the OG HTC Vive into account. And who developed and published what is perhaps one of the most immersive experiences on the medium: Half-Life Alyx. There’s nothing N64 about this game as they really pushed the technology as far as you could possibly do with the hardware limits of that time. No, you are not going to get GTA VI running on an untethered headset anytime soon and perhaps for good reason.

I have a different take on this: I bought a Quest 2 several years ago, spent some money and bought about 10 experiences/games/etc. for it, and it is good enough that I continue using it with no real desire to buy a newer model. My wife was watching me use it last week and she commented “isn’t there an upgrade for that?”

Wonderful toy, even though I only use it about 90 minutes a month it is worthwhile for me to own.

The nice thing for me is I was able to pick up a brand new meta quest 3 still with receipt and warranty for €200 second hand (buyers remorse I guess, there wasn't much they could do with it), and I was able to do all that stuff you mentioned with my beefy pc.

VR has been around for decades, and its always been a really niche nerdy thing, for the same type of people who will build a mock cockpit of a plane in their house for flight sims. I dont think that's gonna change no matter how much cash mega-corps pump into it, it will always be a niche nerdy hobby thing imo.

Wow I disagree with this. Even with Quest 2 the hardware was powerful enough to create interesting VR experiences. I think a bigger limiting factor is the comfort of the headsets and the quality of the source material (in the case of streaming).

Driving sims may not be peak running on a Quest, but I think that is a different realm from what I am talking about. There is plenty to do and see without photorealistic 3D graphics.

Standalone wireless headsets are great for fitness. Almost every game is a cardio workout. You won’t need to have a separate workout from playing video games.

Also the visuals got a big improvement with Quest 3. I’m sure that Steam Frame will also have decent visuals.

I have 5 programs open right now - Firefox, Visual Studio, Word, Photoshop and a terminal.

Out of these 5, only Firefox loads faster than it did on a 512MB Windows XP machine 20 years ago, the other 4 are at least a few times slower.

VR is at the intersection of low latency, high throughput, high compute, flexibility and affordable prices.

Embedded systems are often not flexible. They are often designed to do just one thing, like driving an engine, and may run the exact same software for their entire life, which may be decades. They are often limited in term of general computing requirements too.

I don't know HST, but it seems to be similar to embedded: single, highly constrained application, maybe more compute, and I would guess that affordability isn't even on the menu.

Meta VR is consumer software, running on consumer hardware, it runs third party apps, with all the flexibility that is asked of PCs. You can't just put your own realtime OS and claim the entire system for your own specific application.

It has progressed. The tech is just expensive and heavy and... all sorts of tradeoffs. Meta had a prototype (Boba) with a 180 horizontal and 120 vertical FoV

But it of course is large and heavy like the quest pro and expensive most likely. Things that when you market to consumers don't pan out.

So they are optimizing on the other dimension (weight) which of course trades of many other dimensions.

Pancake optics are really cool, very clear and lightweight without some of the light distortions you get from traditional optics. They are worth the tradeoff. But they don't work out beyond 100-ish degrees. I think the Steam Frame is really pushing the maximum the industry seems to be able to get out of them.

More niche manufacturers like Pimax have accomplished much higher FOVs but people keep returning them because they're expensive, heavy and uncomfortable (I think they're popular among people who lie down in cockpit rigs).

> surely by this point headsets would be standardizing on a baseline of like 140+

They would be if they had gotten popular and competition had ramped up. But that didn't happen.

e.g. who's Meta competing with via these VR Glasses?

> I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year

That didn’t happen because you would need market demand for that. Only Gen Alpha likes VR as a demographic.

It's not a headset, it's glasses.

So, xreal competitor?

Microsoft has a patent on a super cheap and easy way to improve FOV, but they cancelled Windows Mixed Reality so this solution will just sit in a vault forever.

TLDR, put LEDs all around the lens. They extend the scene even though they have zero resolution, you perceive the environment as extending to the full angular width you can see.

Yes, not too bad for a question the moderator didn't really ask. She's really good at diverting the topic to a less uncomfortable field. No wonder she's in charge of a platform with 3.07 billion monthly active users. Also note the tone and condescending attitude.

When you buy an iPhone that was made in sweatshop, you contribute to it. There are alternatives but most people really don’t mind having slave labor build their iPhone.

Same for kids wasting their life on screen, most parents don’t mind as long as it keep them busy and it’s one less thing to care about.

Correct, but that's also whataboutism. I know apathy can easily take over, but when you get laughed in the face just like that it feels really hopeless. No, it's not my first day on the internet and no, it's not the first time I see companies act like this, but something about this feels very wrong.

Strange complaint. 100 grams is extremely light compared to every other VR headset.

Maybe users will develop a distinctive posture.

Xreal style glasses use forms of "birdbath" optics with screens up top reflected through prisms. This likely use the regular concentric pancake optics used in many other VR headsets.

But yeah, the angles are to obscure thickness. It's not going to be as thin as it appear from a distance.