Facebook has 10k engineers working on AR/VR
makeuseof.com
makeuseof.com
If we go by ratio at similarly large FAANG companies, say 1/3 or 1/5 of the company's employees are engineers.
> At the start of 2021, according to Statista, the social network employed 58,604 people (a huge increase from the 18,000 people that Facebook employed back in 2017).
OK, so maybe 12,000 to 18,000 engineers max at the whole company?
> And of that number, according to a new report from The Information, about 10,000 engineers have been tasked with significant AR and VR development work.
"10,000 engineers" would indicate more than half its engineering workforce is working on AR/VR, not 20%! Something seems a bit off here, let's go to the original story from The Information to have a look. Luckily it's linked from the article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-people-with-powe...
> The seriousness of its ambitions is reflected in its headcount: Nearly 10,000 people are working in its group developing augmented and virtual reality devices, or nearly one-fifth of Facebook’s total global workforce.
Ok, phew, that's better! The Information says 10,000 people are working in it's group. Doesn't mean they're all engineers. And the ratio is closer to 1/6 or 16.66% assuming Facebook's latest headcount.
And if we go by the same FAANG engineer-to-workforce ratio, that would mean something like 2,000 to 3,000 engineers in Facebook at working on AR/VR.
It's not a small number, but seems more realistic.
Plus you have all the other HW and OS teams that other companies like Google and Apple would account for elsewhere, since Facebook has no other consumer hardware development teams.
5nm is already shipping (Apple M1) and 3nm is planned for the next year.
Facebook is betting on being the leader and the sole owner of the new class of human-computer interaction.
It's because ToS violations tend to be executed against the whole cloud account. Do something stupid in a Samsung VR game? The hypothetical Samsung headset is now a paperweight, but at least that's all that happened. Nobody uses their Samsung account for anything anyway.
Do the same on Quest, and you lose your Facebook account. Or, post something on Facebook that their automoderation doesn't like, and you lose your Quest.
Same stuff happens with Google all the time. My favorite example is how a lot of people lost their whole digital lives because they commented with emojis on a YouTube livestream[0], and got their Google accounts banned immediately by YouTube's spam detector. That means GMail, Google Docs, calendar, all gone.
That's the pragmatic POV. A little more future-oriented POV is to say hard no to all such cloud logins, because as implemented today, they're a stupid and exploitative idea. With the importance of digital SaaS to daily lives and businesses of so many people, we're allowing companies to create what's essentially a parallel system of legislation and national (fiefdom?) IDs.
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[0] - https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/dtyxn7/whats_... - TL;DR: a popular YouTuber asked the audience of his livestream to vote on some stuff live, using color emojis to distinguish between options.
If you violate any of the facebook rules, your oculus games are toast. If you spam the steam forums you get banned from the forums but not your games. The only way I know to get banned from the steam store is to make chargebacks.
The base stations plus the headset and controllers are over a thousand, unless someone can correct me.
With a modern wifi hub, it can also stream from your PC outrageously well - no cable needed. (Virtual Desktop + Sidequest).
Anyway, I recommend it.
Here's a through the lens comparing the Quest 2 and Vive. The Vive is absolutely obsolete, in terms of image quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTaYQNghAxI
Btw, anyone who lets FB that close to their eyeballs is a stone cold moron at this point. They couldn’t be trusted to run an online photo album, giving them the ability to actually control your sense of reality is nightmarishly awful.
I'm also hoping general population is slowly discovering the flip side of shared cloud logins for unrelated services. Connecting Facebook to your Quest doesn't just mean you can VR-chat with your Facebook friends now. It also means that if Facebook automoderator doesn't like you, your Quest will turn into an expensive paperweight. Or if you break Quest ToS, you may lose your whole Facebook account with it.
(What is sometimes called "digital feudalism" really does start feeling like one.)
So it's difficult to imagine a future where VR becomes a bigger part of Facebook's business than Facebook/IG/Whatsapp. I don't imagine I'm going to be visiting grandpa in the metaverse to look at family photos any time soon.
https://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-rec-room-2-3m-oculus-quest...
Estimates.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ShawnRecRoom/status/1357839404459...
This is a bizarre couple of sentences. I don't think you understand the technology _at all_.
Firstly, it doesn't really matter how close the screen is to your eyes. Try moving your phone closer to your face or do you trust the app that you're about to let your eyes get closer to?
Secondly, it doesn't have the ability to control your sense of reality. At least, not any more than seeing a movie in a cinema does.
The thing is, I actually agree with your second sentence but only in the context of their social media platforms i.e. silently building echo chambers around users, experiments with shaping of user's emotional state and political opinions, etc.
I'm taking the "close to your eyeballs" as a metaphor, but with AR you literally are trusting Facebook to mediate between you and the world. The ads you see, or don't see, on every flat surface, potentially. And that's just the start.
Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest there is a continuous relationship between trust and distance from the eyeballs :) The promise of AR and VR is that there is a quantum leap when your entire field of vision (or a very large fraction of it) is enveloped by the display though.
it doesn't have the ability to control your sense of reality
That's the entire premise of the products – the "R" in AR and VR is about inserting a shim between you and reality. That requires a level of trust I wouldn't be fully comfortable giving to myself, let alone other people, and never FB.
Facebook is assuming that users want their gaming social networks and IRL social networks to be the same. This is lunacy. My Steam friends and my Facebook friends have been largely-disjoint graphs for decades, and for good reason. Imagine friending someone in a VR game, and immediately getting blasted with their political posts/family photos on Facebook. Imagine friending someone in a VR game, and suddenly they know who you are IRL (forever). Via people-finder sites like Spokeo or YellowPages, it's trivial to connect this info to your home address, telephone number, employer, and so on. What happens when Internet stranger who knows where you live gets mad that you won the rare drop and they didn't?
Forced integration of Facebook and Oculus is a safety issue.
Our Research Department has determined that we can cover 57% of the screen with advertisements without causing seizures.It's funny, Tron was one of the most memorable movies of my childhood. Later I watched Star Trek with the Holodeck, read Neuromancer and Snow Crash, dabbled with VRML, played with the SGI CAVE at university. I ought to be hugely excited by the progress in VR. But... I'm just not. Because Facebook and friends are not doing it because it's cool or because it will be useful to humanity, to them it's just another siphon to hoover up and monetise your personal data by steering you into purchasing and voting decisions that benefit them, not you. After literally decades of anticipation, I doubt I will bother to participate in VR.
All the time, I see ideas and technologies that have huge unrealized potential - they could be so much more - but they aren't, because they're being purposefully crippled by the companies who develop them, patent the shit out of them[0], and proceed to milk people for all they're worth using that tech. Everything is exploitative. And what about all that potential? Companies see it, alright - they wax about it in their marketing materials. Then they make sure it doesn't happen.
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[0] - While intended to protect from other alike competitors, this has a side effect of shutting off anyone who would like to develop technologies up to their potential.
I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my life, and the more I know about technology, the more apprehensive I am about working with it. However, I do also believe that those of us who feel this way have something of a responsibility to fight back a little, in whatever way we can.
Hopefully we can continue to keep a little space cleared of the FAANG's, and open for L/OSS. Or at least a neutral ground, where we can be reasonably sure that there isn't any nonsense going on.
Employee ownership in companies has to get better. Direction has become so opaque, hidden, and now quite frankly tasteless and borderline tacky.
At least this means they’re taking us closer to that Cyberpunk dystopia.
I really hope Valve works on a mobile VR headset of their own. The Index is fantastic for PC VR, but mobile (with PC VR optional, via Virtual Desktop or USB cable) is clearly where the users are. Facebook's already sold millions of Quest headsets:
https://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-rec-room-2-3m-oculus-quest...
Still think it was a dumb move by some exec who is being judged by “FB platform interactions” or something equally dumb. It made no sense doing it this early.
We had a bunch of people in and out of the lab to be experiment subjects. And as lab techs, we were always "volunteered" as well. What I observed from watching this for a few years was that some people just can't use VR.
There was one person, I think a grad student, who had poor balance and underperformed at most tasks relative to the mean. Nobody cared, as it was only data collection, and he was still a data point. Until one day he came in with a cold and congested sinuses.
I'll never forget: the moment he put on the VR headset, he toppled backward like a chopped tree. First slowly, then all at once. No reflex or anything! He just started leaning over at the heels. He would have come crashing down onto thinly-carpeted concrete at full speed had my (neither young nor large) boss jumped up and caught him. That was his last time in the helmet.
We had a few more subjects through who performed similarly poorly. My guess—empirical, but still a guess— would be 15-20% of the population lacks some kind of proprioception that makes them vulnerable to falls and injury using VR.
Obviously VR is fun, and extremely engaging. I'm sure it won't be going away as the tech gets smaller and cheaper. But I don't think it will ever become a primary interface; how can it when 1/5 of the population can't use it safely?
[0] The custom drivers, used for the positioning sensors, reduced input latency by 40ms to 10.
Interestingly, I have a neuromuscular disease. I would guess this is part of the issue, even though I don't experience dizziness/lack of balance as a day-to-day issue.
A friend of mine has similar issues. She has chronic sinusitis, so I wonder if that is the cause.
Anyway, I have to agree with you here. It's going to be a bit difficult for VR to catch on if 1/5 of your friend group can't play/participate without injuring themselves.
The question is, how common is this really? And if it is common, would growing up with VR make the next generation less likely to have these issues? Or is it an immutable problem for people with certain brain structures or health issues?
Valve has a lot of data on user comfort while in VR, you should look it up if you're interested. Their figures put it around 20% of the population being uncomfortable with VR (at first), and continued usage can make things better for them. Definitely not just "locked out" of using VR entirely, as you suggest.
Valve was pretty firm on their requirement for 90 FPS, for example, because they insisted that anything lower left users feeling nauseous. Not to mention the rendering of virtual words is far better than what you could have offered in the 90s.
Speaking from experience, even 90fps is too low. I get a lot more with my current setup, so consumer electronics are better than you think.
VR has come a long way, and has a long way to go. These problems will be overcome as the tech gets better.
There was a competition to jailbreak the device to enable its use without handing your data to FB and it seems like there were several successful jailbreaks, but none of them were released to the public.
With a working jailbreak i would be very tempted to take advantage of the subsidized pricing of this device.
Hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars were 'the future'.
Much like with steam engines in ancient Rome, the technological and economical context at the turn of 20th century wasn't right for the mass adoption of electric cars. Technological environment stayed wrong until the turn of 21th century, and the economical environment stayed wrong until Tesla single-handedly dragged the market, kicking and screaming, into accepting electric cars as a viable product.
Similarly, we had VR since at least the 90s, but the technological environment was bad then. It's right now, and it's the Oculus Quest line that made a pivotal change in the market acceptance.
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Meh, by that same argument you could say VR is the past. The point of the discussion is that VR is now at a point were it will most likely get adopted, instead of just being a feat. Hence the comparison with electric vehicles.
And no, hydrogen fuel-cell for mobility won't be the future. A niche in some sectors for sure, but that's it. The efficiency is just as bad (~40%) as with combustion engines. And that's not even taking production and transport into account. Sure, it's cleaner, but the whole "hydrogen is the future for everyday use" is lobbyism from people who want to keep their current infrastructure (especially transport and production) running ...
VR is here, now. The Quest is it. It's the real deal. The combination of standalone wireless play, precise inside-out environment sensing and hand tracking, heightened graphics quality, a substantial software library, and an attractive price point have finally hit the sweet spot.
It's a shame that Facebook is the sole proprietor of this revolutionary device, but the device IS revolutionary. I've demoed VR for three non-technical friends in the last month who all promptly ran out and bought Quests of their own. I'm very excited for the future, and present, of this medium.
Cool. Can we stop calling it 'the future' then?
Most of them play online mobile games because that gets the rush quicker and easier.
Trying to sell an overly complex, bulky, expensive and high-investment video game system to the coming generations will be a very uphill battle.
(We saw this with TV; for the boomer generation TV was high technology, and getting on TV was the highest aspiration in life. Who even watches broadcast TV now?)
https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/m2t7jl/chil...
I'm saying that they don't care about chasing the purported innovation dragon and don't view video games as an elite and hip pastime.
For them it's just a guilty pleasure that they do while taking a break from actual life.
As such, they'll gravitate towards the local optima that get them the dopamine rush faster and easier. Betting on VR as the "next big thing" is the wrong bet.
Because I think VR is a non-starter for the above reasons. The tech difference between 1990 and 2020 is amazing — but I don't think tech is what dooms VR as it stands.
Is it the claustrophobia? Is it the unsettling detachment from your "actual" reality?
I just don't think it's going to become mainstream anymore than skydiving has become mainstream.
And sitting down looking forward in a vr goggle, and turning your character around with a mouse induces wild nausea for a number* of people.
*I’m unfamiliar with the exact ratio.
Video games are only a way to get a quick dopanine rush, and that's the local optimum that gets you your rush quickest and easiest.
VR is not needed.
The word "borrowed" stands out for me: I also tried a cutting edge VR headset loaned from a co-worker but did not then rush out and buy one. Because the experience felt like more of a "novelty", not a day-to-day thing that I would switch over to.
Not all games work well in VR. For example, I would not want to play World of Warcraft in VR. Your character has too many abilities that you couldn't possibly map them out on a VR controller, and even if you could, it'd be immersion breaking.
Games played from a top-down view like RTS or colony/base/city builders, or games that might involve looking at a lot of text, would probably not work well either.
> you couldn't possibly map them out on a VR controller
Hand tracking + 10 fingers, possibilities are endless! Like casting spells for real.
> Games played from a top-down view like RTS or colony/base/city builders
Fly over the map like some kind of a demigod and manipulate cities directly? Sign me up.
Gestures in general just might not work well, especially using the same gesture over and over. Have you played WoW? If you're a caster, you're casting a spell every 1-3 seconds, and targeting as a healer might not work well, not to mention seeing all the health bars.
Also, I don't know how it would work for melee abilities at all.
Sure, you could do an RPG with gestures and the like for spell casting, and make melee combat interesting, but it wouldn't be WoW.
> Fly over the map like some kind of a demigod and manipulate cities directly? Sign me up.
The problem is the UI. Graphical UIs in VR are very limited since motion controls are not nearly as precise as a mouse, so buttons have to be big. Cities: Skylines would certainly look cool in VR, but the actual gameplay would suffer.
Push comes to shove, I guess Facebook could launch their own mobile platform too? They already have their own Android phone - it's buried inside the Quest headset. But they probably don't need to, unless Apple/Google disallows the use of Facebook SDK by all the other apps in their app stores. Until then, the sweet sweet surveillance data will keep flowing.
Microsoft Research is a classic example - some of the smartest people in the world are being paid big salaries to do nothing much of anything at all. But then imagine what those same people could do had they worked at a startup or doing open source...