> they don't care about VR per se.
correct. Everything is a stepping stone towards AR. In their view VR is limited, where as AR is killer platform that will let them run their own platform, with users finally paying directly for services.
> Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard.
Facebook realised a long time ago that they are reliant on either apple or google's platform. this means two things: They are vulnerable to any policy change on those platforms AND they are not getting a cut of the profit from the hardware sales and apps store.
> that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems
Facebook are dumping _billions_ into developing AR. not millions, actual billions. Mapping, dense reconstruction, semantic scene understanding, actual fucking holograms. All of these are nowhere near solved, and facebook are gambling big that they can not only solve these, but fit them into a set of glasses that are practical.
> If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
If its such a risk with such a tiny reward why do sony, microsoft & nintendo still bother making consoles?
> Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
The problem with all of this discourse is that it misses the fundamental argument thats at the heart of VR and later AR: privacy. It doesn't matter if facebook fails, the problems still exist.
AR is a fundamental threat to privacy regardless of who makes it. For AR to work you need always on hyper accurate location service.
They will also need always on cameras. They will have detection, segmentation and reconstruction systems that have to be capable of understanding the context of a street, shop, work and front room.
Even if we ignore the AI bit, the threat of an omni-recording head mounted camera is massive. (all password are recorded, every sound, every person you meed.)
finally 6dof centimetre accurate glocal positioning, with facial recognition, you basically have a system that can locate any face within 50m of a wearer of one of these glasses.
In conclusion: stop using facebook as a foil, and start to actually interrogate the technology.