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Comment by uejfiweun | Hacker News Reader

Is Meta doing anything cool with hardware? I can't see their vision succeeding unless there are substantial hardware innovations. Specifically, they need to solve the walking problem, they need to get some sort of haptic feedback down, and they need to make the headset as small and simple as a pair of sunglasses. Without these, the Meta-verse will never reach the mainstream.

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"Anything cool"? They've made a standalone, wireless, battery powered VR headset with built-in inside-out tracking, and are selling it for about the price of a Nintendo Wii. It's an astonishing technical feat. Facebook have done more to bring VR to the masses than anyone else so far.

It is definitely neat, don't get me wrong, but there's really not that much of a difference between these new headsets and the Gen 1 HTC Vive. There's a lot more distance to cover before Meta reaches the "ready player one" vision.

Ready Player One didn't have ready player one tech. The movie was wildly inconsistent with how it worked, because there are numerous fundamental design problems with getting really good vr. Like hard technical interface problems that just didn't make sense.

Yeah, it was honestly a terrible book and movie (for someone who didn't grow up in the 1980s). The VR tech was the only part that I thought was cool, but as you said, there are many parts that are inconsistent. Like every scene where he is flying around in VR, or fighting. But I do think the walking problem needs to be solved for better VR, and an omni-treadmill could have some potential as a solution.

Nah. Treadmill is good if you want to play old school doom, but terrible if you want to move around in other ways. More importantly, a big problem with vr is that people just aren't very good. Even with complete brain transfer into the game world, people aren't competent enough to do the cool shit you see in ready player one.

It’s completely wireless and requires no additional hardware (neither extra sensors nor a $1500 PC). That’s leaps and bounds beyond the first-gen Vive.

I'm not saying that there hasn't been substantial innovation. Indeed, these things are major upgrades. But it's still "evolution", not "revolution" - these upgrades don't enable any fundamentally new experiences, it's still 2016 VR style experiences in a more sleek package. The cynic in me thinks that this style of VR is fundamentally flawed, and more major innovations are required in comfort, display, locomotion, and haptics to get VR to the point where we are ACTUALLY all spending most of our time in the Metaverse.

You don't think that making the system literally an order of magnitude cheaper is much of a difference?

I mean in terms of the experiences the hardware allows, no. Maybe this will allow them to keep future hardware costs down as well, which would be nice. But the lower price point alone isn't really a huge change in VR. The experiences are still the same ones you can play on the old headsets, and people still don't want to mess up their hair by strapping a headset to their face for hours.

I am just of the opinion that the current VR paradigm is fundamentally limited, and outside of a few niche applications, isn't going anywhere. It's telling that 6 years after the first headsets, there still isn't really a "killer app" for this tech. And I'm saying this as someone who has wanted true VR since my childhood. Admittedly I am pretty cynical and would love to be proven wrong.

What it allows is to have the experience at all, and that is a huge change. Before the Quest, VR was out of reach unless you had 4 figures to burn on a top of the range gaming PC and an entire room to dedicate to VR, not to mention the huge hassle of installing drivers, setting up sensors, etc. It was solidly in "enthusiast" territory because the experience, while novel, just wasn't worth the effort.

Now, though? You buy a cheap piece of hardware. You charge it. You put it on. Boom, you're teleported to another world. Saying that's no different from wading through making an HTC Vive work is like saying Dropbox is no different than rsync, except rsync also costs a thousand bucks.

The Ford Model T wasn't revolutionary tech either. The Quest (series) is the Model T of VR headsets. It's the one that everyone's gonna buy, just for fun, because it's finally worth it.

Hardware -and- software. It's a massive, massive challenge. One with questionable demand.

Meta doesn't really have a good track record here, either. But ten years is a long time...

The whole thing looks like a dead end to me.

Mind you I'm often wrong about this stuff, I thought the same about the Apple watch.

I'm with you, and I was right about the apple watch. This(vr in general) feels like a one-off of the next big thing, like the pda was to the smartphone.

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