Facebook's really big plans for virtual reality | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's really big plans for virtual reality

bloomberg.com

49 pointsspking36 comments

The Facebook Rift is DOA. It's lost the respect and admiration of early VR adopters and that market segment is key for tech.

It lost not only on the technical front (by a lot, the HTC Vive destroys it), but on the ethical front as well by introducing console paradigms in a PC ecosystem.

Good riddance! PC must remain an open platform.

As Mark Twain said "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

This battle has JUST begun.

Vive barely won first round because of the controllers.

But the battle will be on again when the controllers come out for the Rift. Oculus has deep pockets which are not to be underestimated in this business.

Oculus is still a seated experience, NOT room scale!

Even with Touch controllers, there's only a limited space to use it.

Plus you can't magically manufacture something you didn't plan to release - Especially not in a short time period.

> Oculus is still a seated experience, NOT room scale!

I don't see what the problem with this is. I want to sit down and play games. I don't want (or have room for) a room scale experience.

I've demoed both my Oculus and Rift to at least 20 people, everyone found the Rift to be boring and less engaging. The feeling of presence is completely different.

So did they prefer the Vive to the HTC?

Ops, i of course meant Rift and Vive.

Ask the XBox One how Microsoft's deep pockets helped it. ;)

I'd prefer to ask the Xbox 360 which needed over a billion dollars to fix red ringed consoles and change their process. Without those deep pockets, the Xbox platform would have died, including the xbox one.

The 360, like the PS4, won because it was significantly cheaper than the competition. Its politics and other factors play a role but I would argue they are far less significant than price for a mass market adoption consideration (especially when the market is as price sensitive as it is (kids)).

> It lost not only on the technical front (by a lot, the HTC Vive destroys it)

Seems a bit hyperbolic. The Oculus doesn't have a handset yet but as an owner of both headsets I've got to say that the Rift headset is way nicer than the Vive headset so it's not quite "Vive destroys..."

I was just at Bitsummit a couple of weeks ago and there were just as many Rifts as Vives by all developers. They all had the finger pads and so played basically the same except everyone said things looked better in the Rift.

The only minus was that two Rifts near each other end up interfering with each other where as two Vives don't which is a problem at trade shows.

"The only minus..."

Except the Vive doesn't require 3 USB 3.0 ports and a $2500+ computer...

The computer requirements are exactly the same, what, did you think the Vive came with a GPU onboard?

It's not ok to be ignorant...

Below are the minimum system requirements for the Vive:

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or better

CPU: Intel i5-4590, AMD FX 8350 equivalent or better

RAM: 4 GB or more

Video Output: HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2 or newer

USB Port: 1x USB 2.0 or better port

Operating System: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1 or later, Windows 10

_____

And the Oculus:

Video Card NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater

CPU Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater

Memory 8GB+ RAM

Video Output Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output

USB Ports 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port

OS Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer

_____

The occy needs 2x the RAM and 4x the USB ports.

So one needs a $2500 dollar computer and the other needs a $2475 computer?

It might not need a $2500+ computer, but from what I've read it still has some pretty hefty system requirements, doesn't it?

Why do you genuinely believe the Rift is DOA? They is, objectively, a huge amount of hype around it today.

When we're talking ethics, why is Facebook more objectionable than HTC or Samsung or Microsoft? They all have awfully checkered pasts.

Finally how is Facebook's ambition with the oculus on PCs any surgery than valves or Microsofts or anyone elses? It seems to me that everyone is out to own the digital experience and rightfully so

Lost on the technical front? It may not have hand tracked controllers yet but everyone I know who's used both prefers the rift as an HMD because of slightly higher perceived quality of image and greater comfort. While I acknowledge myself that it's pretty much a line call, saying the Vive destroys it on the technical front is disingenuous at the very least.

> It may not have hand tracked controllers yet

This is a huge technical difference. "VR" without being able to reach out and touch the thing in front of you is barely VR at all. The difference between roomscale + motion controls and just having a ~180* tracked HMD and a gamepad is almost as wide as the gap between VR and flat monitors themselves. Once Touch comes out the only substantial difference will be that Oculus doesn't encourage devs to use games that depend on 360* tracking over multiple square meters of space while Valve does, which is a little more grey, but at launch I'd very much agree that the Vive solidly beat out the Rift technically. It's not disingenuous to say it at all. You can artificially constrain your comparison to just the HMDs and then find basically no difference, but if you compare the entire Vive VR system to the entire Rift VR system at launch, the Vive is clearly technically superior.

Disclaimer: own a Vive, love it. I have tried both motion controlled/roomscale/seated/gamepad experiences pretty extensively on it, every time my reaction circles back to this.

It's a huge difference, but only for ~6 months and then Oculus will be at parity. Given there's not really that much content on either platform yet, it's pretty moot in terms of the long term consequences. It's a big deal for anyone who is trying to have a lot of VR experiences in those 6 months, but will be inconsequential when we look back at VR history a decade from now.

Oh sure, using a proper room set up with a Vive is something else entirely. I just wouldn't necessarily have thought of touch not being launched as a technical difference but rather one of availability. Tomahto Tomayto I guess.

Most people do give the rift the edge, but it's not a huge difference on either side, for example the rift fits some people extremely well but those with glasses or wider faces tend to prefer the Vive. Image quality on the other hand is about tradeoffs and their value really depends on the game.

Other issues such as room scale vs seated/180 is yet another set of considerations and frankly, the Vive has the clear edge there even if you disagree as to its utility.

The PC will be a blip in VR's history. Like the Atari. For the bulk of the world VR will be synonymous with mobile VR. PC VR will be almost entirely gamers, and the community will be continue in the tradition of gaming: exclusionary and culturally self-reinforcing. Only a tiny fraction of humans will ever own a 980-class PC. A billion will own a mobile VR headset.

A 980-class of this year is equal to the 930-class of 4-5 years from now. I wouldn't out PC VR.

EDIT: Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think the inherent differences between a phones requirements, and future state of the art VR are, specifically related to screensize and how that maps to FOV.

Sure, but 5 years from now current PC VR content will require an even faster rig. Some people will be content playing 5 year old content on their discount PC, but that's still not going to be a huge demographic outside of the obvious Steam VR set. Again, gamers only.

People will play current mobile VR content on their smartphones and dedicated mobile VR devices. Why look at old stuff on a less convenient platform? Yes higher fidelity.... I get it. But I really don't think that's going to be a big enough draw to get people to set up a PC VR rig. Especially when smartphones 5 years from now will rival 980s too. Or at least 960s. And will have lots of great content optimized for that level of performance.

A giant fluff piece really. The HTC Vive / Valve is beating them, and they want some decent PR before the launch of their consumer motion controls. Also justifying the purchase alongside their earnings report.

In a nutshell, yes. The fact that it came in Bloomberg(all major investors/traders heavily read) also kind of supports your observation.

The 360° video embedded on the top is amazing and Bloomberg is one of the few media companies who uses some serious visualizations.

I guess it's very difficult for FB to own VR since Vive is giving big time competition. Even as a platform, its tough to survive once Sony releases the PS VR platform. On the other hand, Google/Apple can extend their playstore/appstore to support VR content and release headsets which support the phones and get a great market share easily.

Just a nit. That's not a video, it's a real-time rendered WebGL scene (using three.js).

Neat, but confusing. You can apparently pan around, but clicking has no effect.

Wow "really big plans" that most be the reason to why they bought one of the the biggest VR companies on the market.

On a sidenote... Bloomberg is using Google's new display typeface Space Mono, not only for headings!

That's pretty cool how they coded up a interactive demo just for a article.

Who wrote this absolute waffle and was proud of it. fewer paragraphs on zucks eyes, "signature look" and admiration of rome would not have gone amiss

Wow, that monospace is so difficult to read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com