Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

it may be true, as David Karpf wrote in Wired, that historically, “metaverse” technologies like VR have been “the rich white kid of technology”—continually failing and yet being granted opportunity after opportunity to succeed. Same, to a lesser extent, with AR, which Google famously tried to make happen with its Glass and was laughed out of the room 10 years ago. Snapchat’s glasses barely made a blip, and the dustbin of technology past is littered with failed VR headsets.

One thing the author is leaving out is that Oculus headsets ARE successful and the industry is iterating quite nicely. Quest 2 does NOT have a competitor with its feature set at its price point, I wish it did because Id buy it in a heartbeat; but it doesnt. You can argue that its not ubiquitous enough yet but it is growing, the headsets are getting more comfortable and coming out with more features. Since I got the quest new features have been continuously released through software updates, including a bump from 90hz to 120hz refresh rate, and native desktop PCVR wireless streaming that made tethering obsolete. I can play AAA titles like Flight Simulator 2020 and Half Life Alyx wirelessly, do some moderately intense cardio with boxing and fitness apps, and work comfortably for an hour or two with giant virtual desktop screens. It's certainly not a stagnant field, just not mainstream yet.

VR is a very small niche market, and even though I am a regular PC gamer, I don't see myself buying into VR any time soon. I have played multiple games, including HL Alyx in VR on different headsets and after about an hour I just want to take that thing off and do something else. It is not exciting or very engaging. It could be used as a tool for training or something like that, but I don't see it becoming mainstream, at least not in the state it is in currently.

Who knows, maybe at some point some big company comes around with a fresh look at it and manages to make this thing cool, but I doubt it will be Facebook/Meta.

> Who knows, maybe at some point some big company comes around with a fresh look at it and manages to make this thing cool

I doubt it will eliminate the inherent problems, even if they make the headset very light. It is still something that you will want to take off your head after some time. Heck, even my headphones (that are very comfortable!) make me uneasy after on hour or so. Plus many people experience slight dizziness that is probably tolerable but not exactly a nice thing to have for entertaining.

What they can do is to make a series of continues improvements, not just to hardware but also software - Beat Saber is absolutely amazing, and they are some other nice games, but it still feels like far below expectations.

Speaking of headphones, I know what you mean. But I have been using open back, over-ear headphones (Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro) for a few years now and I can wear them for hours without any fatigue.

Quest 2 isn't successful the way Meta wants it to be. There's been like what, 2 million units sold? Facebook has nearly 2 billion MAU. 2 million is nothing.

Let's compare to other electronics that are arguably "mainstream":

Nintendo Wii - 101 million

Nintendo DS - 154 million

Sony PS4 - 116 million

Apple iPhone 12 - 100 million

Apple AirPods - over 100 million in 2021

Comparing hardware, with a fixed cost of about $300 to a free online service isn't exactly a valid comparison.

$600 million from 2 million customers (not including $ spent on games). How much money does FB make from 2 million FB users?

Facebook almost certainly gets a higher margin from ads compared to selling hardware.

Answering your question is difficult because the kind of people who buy a Quest have more money to spend and therefore advertisers' click-through rate might be different.

How much money does Facebook make from selling headsets? The answer is <= 0, as they sell at or above cost.

I'm confused. If they sell above cost, surely they make money?

Ah yes, I meant to write below cost. That's what baby induced insomnia does to an adult brain.

Are you sure you didn't mean">=0"?.

>Comparing hardware, with a fixed cost of about $300 to a free online service isn't exactly a valid comparison.

Zuckerberg has previously said that he wants Facebook to "effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.” So while I definitely see where you're coming from, the intent here seems to be, in the longer term, to transition FB users from mobile/desktop use and into an AR/VR environment in one form or another. With that in mind, it's valid to acknowledge Oculus sales numbers relative to FB MAU numbers.

I believe Quest 2 has passed 5 million units.

For a company that wants to "effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company", 5 million still really pales in comparison to FB's MAU count.

off-topic: Why does 'white' increasingly get used as a pejorative?

because its woke. racism and sexism are so hot right now </mugatu>

The real problem is class. Always has been.

And class has nothing to do with race?

It has in the US, in the sense that a small minority of white people ruled the majority of white and black people. Just like a small percent of males perpetrate the majority of crimes whose victims are men and women. But people prefer oversimplification, so somehow they transform the above into "white = bad", "male = bad" etc.

Only in the sense that the concept of race was deployed to serve the ruling class. There is a wonderful book called Racecraft by Karen and Barbara Fields which lays out how this was achieved and how we got to where we are today. Highly recommend.

It is class, but the wealthy know this is a good distraction.

Racism.

Because some journalists, who tend to be white people from affluent backgrounds, like to continuously perform racial self-loathing to signal that they are not the "wrong kind" of affluent white person.

Actually, that's more of a side benefit. The real reason they do it is because they enjoy racial stereotyping (cf. Avenue Q's "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"). White-bashing is a safe outlet for that urge. If it were still socially acceptable to stereotype Asians as soulless, interchangeable technicians, they'd do that too.

White-bashing is also the socially sanctioned way to signal that you're racially conscious. This qualifies you for elite white people jobs like the Harvard admissions committee, where it's important that everyone have the mindset needed to limit the representation of the racial groups considered undesirable.

(Note that Harvard does not consider white a racial or ethnic group; only non-whites are racial/ethnic. You can see this from their yearly report of admissions by race, where whites are not mentioned and the racial percentages mysteriously add up to only about 55%: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics)

Bingo. Refreshing to come across this level of social awareness on Hacker News, which is not to put down Hacker News. I love it here. I just don’t expect to come across comments like this on here.

I don't see VR getting to the point of being a mainstream product for gamers as it doesn't add a significant novelty that can be enjoyed easily. Like early radio was a hobby interest but once vacuum tube technology made audio amplification a reality more people (even those who weren't technically inclined) were able to enjoy radio programming and thus the audience exploded. VR needs to be as easy as closing your eyes and going to sleep to enjoy properly in my opinion. And that sort of interface is probably a century away at best.

I’ve played with wireless to my PC with a Quest 1 and dedicated WiFi interface, and it was good-not-great…what’s your GPU and network setup?

I don't know if the Quest 1 really had the hardware to support wifi game streaming. I thought it really required a cable to tether to a PC.

I have a Quest 1, but don't have a PC to have ever tested tethering... so I've only used it to play games on the device itself.

I have the cable, and it works great with Alyx and Flight simulator and the like...it's just cabled. Lower requirement stuff like Youtube work wirelessly well enough with the GTX1070

Dumb question: what's so hard about putting a screen inside a head-shaped box and connecting it to wi-fi?

Is it the shape of the screen?

1) the screens are really close to your eyes, which is an issue for your eyes to focus on 2) the screens need a high field of view 3) the headset need to provide 6D pose feedback to the computer 4) battery

This is a good summary, to which I shall add heat removal.

mostly latency. If the user rotates their head and you need more than a few ms to update the screen, they will feel sick / dizzy / headache.

Resolution. VR screens don't yet have small enough pixels to use them for typical tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, and code development. It's hard to cram 4000 horizontal pixels into a 1" wide screen.

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