It did change on thing for me: it made me drop support for Oculus in my game dev project.
I still own an Oculus DevKit 2. But after wildly succeeding with his Kickstarter, the founder has done nothing but jerk moves. First he silently dropped Linux support, then he funded a pro-Trump troll army on Reddit and finally he sold his entire VR company to Facebook/Meta, which then did its own jerk move by rendering everyone’s hardware useless if they didn’t sign up to Facebook/Meta. My Oculus account was forcefully obliterated just a week ago.
What a complete nosedive that was.
They had the nicer tech (Oculus uses infrared LEDs around the headset that are filmed by special cameras to track your orientation, i.e. it’s steady state – HTC Vive / Valve Index have light-sensing diodes on the headset itself and their lighthouses swipe light curtains horizontally and vertically through the room, with an annoying whining noise and all the wear & tear from constantly rotating parts), for a while, Meta even had John Carmack polishing the system.
I still hope VR will not completely die. Half Life: Alyx was fun, some archery, zombie shooting and climbing games were highly enjoyable and I could well imagine getting into sculpting / 3D modelling that way if only the tools were better.
But if, as the HTC exec in the article says, Meta has defined the “market perception of what this technology should cost” (and they’re producing at a loss, too), then Meta has walled off most of the VR market to Facebook boomers (sorry, Meta boomers) and is hogging the more robust tracking tech for itself, too.
After doing some Meta/Facebook VR development in my job the lack of popularity made increasingly more sense. In brief, they’re both incredibly incompetent and transparently greedy.
I’m honestly baffled how they could spend so many tens of billions of dollars and have such bad software, it is completely bug ridden. You’ll hit a bug, research it, and find out it’s a major know bug for literal years they haven’t fixed. They care so little that they couldn’t bother to update the Oculus branding to Meta for over 3 years in various software tools and libraries.
Their greed might be more salient aspect preventing adoption, though. They transparently wanted to be the gatekeepers to everything “metaverse” related, a business model that is now explicitly illegal in the EU after years of being merely very sketchy. They are straight up hostile to anyone else trying to implement enterprise or business features. Concrete example: fleet management software, aka MDM. There are third party tools that are cheaper and much more featured than Meta’s solution, but in the last year they’ve pushed hard to kick those third parties out of the ecosystem.
I could go on, but in short nobody in their right mind would build a major business on their ecosystem. They’d rather let Meta burn billions in R&D and come back later. Besides, not even Meta is able to make money in the area now.
I’m beginning to worry that FB’s meta shit has retarded VR’s development (slowed, not pejorative yo) significantly. The stigma of FB in the dev community is substantial and real, and tons of talent that I could recruit for PC driven VR projects (both training work and game stuff) who simply would not touch oculus hardware. It took dwindling job opportunities to drag me into quest dev. HTC had a fantastic opportunity to be a bigger name with the vive but dropped the ball so many times that devs I know kinda shrugged and moved on.
I was hoping that Apple would knock this out of the park. In fact, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in so many ways it’s depressing.
VR will continue, this is not the end. Just a slowdown.
They made VR headsets more people can afford that also don’t suck major balls like the PSVR or Google Cardboard (the other affordable VR options). People just don’t want them because they’re Facebook/Meta. 😔
Still can’t believe Tech companies don’t realise: If you want the widest adoption, make something as open source, customisable, editable, codable, and anonymous as you can.
If you don’t want something to be wide spread, demand everyone’s data, make it a black box you can’t edit, customise, or be creative on, and you have to link to all your other profiles.
Meta would have been best off had logins been entirely optional, and they’re still trying to life that bad reputation three generations later.
That said the quest is a great product, and I use mine every day to stay fit.
I’m not even sure just how closed off a system it even is. Most of the things I run on it were installed through ADB from GitHub and not any official sources. I have access to the root system files. What’s stopping someone who knows what they’re doing from making a custom OS for 'em so you don’t need to associate with Meta once you have the hardware in your hands?
vr glasses also have controller buttons dont they. If the implied activity would give men carpal tunnel though I think we would all be miserable by now
They do; but you’re not crunching down the carpal tunnel with how they’re used. Your wrist is unimpeded and doesn’t have to be straight forward in front of you at all times, like a keyboard and mouse at a desk. Controllers themselves don’t cause carpal tunnel; it’s how you hold and move your wrists around. In fact, controllers can help alleviate carpal tunnel because you can use them in a variety of comfortable ways. You also don’t need them at all with some HMDs. The Vision Pro is all hand control, no buttons.
The motion sickness thing is totally real though. I’ve used VR for two years and I still sometimes have to stop and dry heave.
I don’t think many outside the tech-money bubble thought this would work. Instead people mourned the loss of Oculus as an innovator when it was bought up.
Look at it now - it has slowed the VR market right down by delivering a low price but low quality experience. That has discouraged other manufacturers from the market.
The high end of the market has been held back as a result - the Valve Index and their like give a better experience but content growth is slow as a result of slow growth. The quest is a decent product but their teams are solving the problems constantly constrained by the cheap price point rather than building the solution and iterating it to the price point.
I think the market will converge on a Vision Pro like device at an affordable price but I think Oculus/Meta has slowed that down as people experience their product and think that’s what VR is. Although in fairness there is also a tech problem - the vision pro shows how expensive it is at the moment to create something close to the ideal in terms of an untethered device without base stations and hand controllers. The realistic way for quality VR at present remains tethered to a PC.
We’ll get there in the end but I think it may have been sooner of Meta hadn’t thrown 100s of billions at buying market share with a lower quality version of what VR needs to be. The mobility is right, but the casual-gaming level of experience is way off, and it’s damaged expectations.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least). That would be technically difficult but offloading as much of the graphics and game/program processing as possible may make a lighter device and an added battery may last longer or be lighter. Essentially a halfway house between an Quest and Index - the quest mobility but the index quality (which is already achieved by offloading to the PC). However it may not be feasible due to lag and it’s still a compromise from the ultimate dream. But it’d probably be a good step on from full tethered if its doable.
That or economies of scale do make the Vision Pro or a future version of it affordable over the coming years. Doubt that will be Quest prices though - if people are paying £1k for phones then that seems more realistic for good quality VR imo.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least).
Don’t we already have that? The Quest 2 could manage it, although I think people have more luck with a third party app (Virtual Desktop maybe?) doing it rather than the official software.
It does need a good Wifi 6 router though, as it’s heavy on bandwidth.
Personally, I think VR needs to be able to have an HDMI input (or get rolled into the HDMI standard so controllers/head locations can be passed back through it), so people can at least use it as a large screen for non VR software, e.g. watching movies or just playing regular 2D games from any source.
What’s really holding VR back is every company wants to be the king of VR, and none of them can be.
Streaming feels like the way to go, I already have a computer so all I’d really want out of a headset is the interface part, it doesn’t need to be a self contained unit. And It’d be way easier to get into VR if the headsets were priced more like a monitor than a whole PC.
Some better software to stitch it together and some higher res cameras, the Quest 3 could do what the Vision Pro does. The Quest 2 was just enough that you could get around the room. The Quest 3 you can actually read a book or a screen through. It’s just a bit blurry and wonky from the panorama being stitched together and the fact the cameras aren’t as good.
I think people would sacrifice a little bit of quality for an affordable product that can literally do all the same stuff. Actually, the Quest can do a bit more considering the software library for the Vision fuckin sucks and doesn’t have much at all.
Then again, people also just want these things to be like putting on sunglasses and not strapping a literal computer to their face looking like a cyberpunk nightmare. And I don’t think we are anywhere close to Google Glass form factors with Apple Vision Pro quality picture.
They’ve literally had 2 of them. The Vive, built by HTC and sold by Valve on Steam and its sucessor The Valve Index. Anyone who would consider themselves even mildly interested in VR Gaming probably knows about at least one of them.
They’re damned good examples of VR, too: they shipped the vive with actual vr inputs! and the index’s Knuckles inputs are such a step up from 6dof inputs overall.
Zuck has never been an original ideas guy, every product Facebook has ever made they either copied or bought from somebody else (including Facebook), what he is good at is taking someone else’s idea and squeezing every bit of money out of them via ads.
So what happens when Facebook finally runs out of other people’s ideas to copy? Facebook and Instagram are both dying a slow death, because their core audience are leaving, and Tik Tok proved to be their toughest obstacle yet. Oculus was always meant to be a side project for Facebook, until suddenly it became the centerpiece of “Meta” out of the blue. It’s no wonder then Oculus became what it is today, because putting ads and collect data from everything is the only trick Facebook knows.
I tried the Oculus 2 and liked that it gave me a very physical way to game as opposed to sitting in a chair. Unfortunately the weight on my head and sweaty headpiece were ultimately a turnoff. The glasses style devices (XReal, Viture, etc) are a much better fit for me and mine has 3DOF motion tracking so it works as mouse view in most games without requiring VR support. It’s much lighter and I can wear them for hours without the strain and sweat. Newer glasses are coming with cameras for 6DOF, hand tracking and eye-tracking is not to far off as well.
These glasses are powered by a phone or a pc with USB DP alt mode. This gets the battery and processor off the head and makes for an un-tethered experience (with a phone).
This. Headsets are never going to take off. I’m somewhat surprised Apple launched the Vision Pro; I think Steve Jobs wouldn’t have settled for anything less than lightweight minimally invasive AR glasses.
Yeah, I’ve been debating getting one, but it’s a bit expensive for how much I’d actually use it (like once/month or so). I’m happy to throw $500 at a toy, but not $1k+.
Vive would be OK if you’re on a budget, you could probably get good deals on used stuff but if you wanted something new, it might be a good idea to wait a bit to see what Valve does.
I got a cv1 before Facebook bought them. It’s been downhill from there. Not to mention the lack of linux support which forced me to keep a windows partition just for it.
It’s in storage now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to reinstall it when I put my machine back together in a few months.
All in all it’s was a fine piece of kit killed by, I’m not even sure, greed probably.
Facebook (or Meta) sends me threatening emails every week about my Oculus account being deleted if I don’t bow down to Zuckerberg and link my Facebook account to it.
lol, no rules… it’s just a stupid word that sounds stupid and makes anyone who uses it look stupid…
Shakespeare invented tons of words, and they were all great, inventing new words is great. enshittification, in particular, is just lazy and dumb
p.s. love it when people do dumb shit and then defend the general category of what they’re doing as if that was the problem
Lol relax. No one is being “harassed” here, we’re discussing on a public forum. No one forced you to post your dumb opinion or triple-down on it. You still think you’re right? That’s totally fine, but you must realize people are not always going to agree with you…
depends on the context:
“exploitation”
“make it shitty”
“ruined”
“fucked it up”
if it was used way less, in non-pseudo-intellectual contexts, i wouldn’t care…
there is a term for companies buying companies and lowering the quality of the product while capitalizing on the brand reputation… i forget it though…
i mean, i barely care but people keep commenting on this so i feel like replying.
parentification is another one like that. just verbifying the noun and sticking “ification” on the end to have more syllables.
you could just write out, “children being forced into parenting roles” or something…
In large families, the eldest child has traditionally taken on more parent-like responsibilities… it’s not new and if it really needs it’s own word, it deserves a more thought out word structure than just:
“+ification and now let’s try to spread the word and get people to take me seriously!”
i know that, im not a child.
i’m talking about a particularly stupid word, not the evolution of language.
also, i don’t believe enshittjfication will stand the test of time, you jive turkey.
It’s just a wish. It’s a funny term and I like it, but not worth the effort of making a new account and subbing to all the same groups again. I’ve done it thrice already and it’s a pain in the ass. Maybe I’ll use it next time I sign up for something though.
i hate facebook as much as the next person but the products definitely aren’t worse, I just figure that iteration on VR tech is really hard. The quest 2 and quest 3 are, genuinely, kind of incredible devices from a technological perspective, they’re just hamstrung by faceook. that’s bad but I don’t think it’s fair to say the products are specifically worse when oculus was acquired so early on
i felt the same way but i was gifted one recently… it’s still pretty awesome, and it runs android so you can put it in developer mode and sideload whatever you want…
i expected it to be locked down like apple, but no it’s pretty sick.
see also: original NES Legend of Zelda ported to oculus…
I’m in a similar boat, however I was very disappointed to see that in order to enable developer mode you have to make/sign in with a Meta account and “register” as a developer with them.
My gut tells me to just make a completely new FB account with a proxy email exclusively for Quest devices, but I already have an oculus Go that ended up linked to my old FB account already, and I’m not sure if it’s actually worth the hassle or not.
I at least was able to recoup a few bucks when they forced fb accounts. A friend was interested in buying a headset anyway so we worked out a price for my account and just migrated it to his fb instead of mine. Bought an index and it’s pretty tight.
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