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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

> Pretending like they have something for the future, which they don't.

I've been following some of their research with their VR/AR hardware, and it appears to me they definitely have something for the future. They're investing massive amounts of money, and they seem to be miles ahead of everyone else (well, it doesn't seem like there is anyone else). To me, they clearly do have something for the future, with what seems like a very natural progression of technology and interacting with computers, with something like the Metaverse being an eventual end goal, maxing out that technology.

Maybe Metaverse isn't what people want, but there's so much between the computers we use now and the Metaverse that they can dip their toes in, along the way.

I'll say it with naive confidence: AR/VR is the future of display technology/use.

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Something being the future isn’t very interesting if it’s always in the future. After playing the VR game Dactyl Nightmare in 1992 I figured VR was the future of video games. Thirty years later it’s still the future of gaming. By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error.

>By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error.

I think the big thing VR has going against it is just how antisocial it is. It's hard to have shared experiences around the technology unless enough people are already bought in.

I would say it's also hard to get buy in because you can't really describe/comprehend "presence" without experiencing it, and 2d videos or VR play don't do any favors at all.

The amount of times I've heard "I can't imagine the eyestrain from having a street that close to your face" convinced me that many people are very confused about all of this.

Hah! I had that game in my college town computer store. With my head full of Mondo2000 and Gibson, I was sure that VR was just around the corner. Little did I know it was our flying car.

>They're investing massive amounts of money, and they seem to be miles ahead of everyone else (well, it doesn't seem like there is anyone else).

Who are they ahead of? They have a standalone headset which has fairly limited performance, and FB Horizons which looks like something you could make in Unity in a few days. With things like VRChat, Neos, Cluster, and others available, they definitely aren't ahead and are lagging very far behind in my opinion. Their increasingly poor reputation will even limit what they can do in a VR/AR space.

Hybrid standalone/PCVR, wireless and beaconless, with superior resolution and enough performance, for only $300. That does put them ahead of everyone else.

> They have a standalone headset which has fairly limited performance, and FB Horizons which looks like something you could make in Unity in a few days.

I think judging their long term plan by looking at the limitations with the current hardware (and therefore software), is extremely (and literally) short sighted. Horizons has been "out" for three whole months, and needs to run on that limited hardware. I'm assuming there's real value /learnings for getting the architecture figured out, regardless of the clients GFLOPS.

For some positives, besides having the only viable standalone headset right now, their camera based tracking (position, hands, controller) is far better than anyone else's. There's nothing remotely comparable for their hand tracking. I think it would be hard to argue that camera/lidar based inside out tracking is not necessarily the future for small form factor devices.

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