Meta Halts Plans for Portal, AR Glasses, and Other Hardware | Hacker News Reader

Meta Halts Plans for Portal, AR Glasses, and Other Hardware

wired.com

45 pointsBrajeshwar20 comments

I hated that it was a Facebook product but, the portal was invaluable for communicating with my mother who's speech and mobility had been compromised by a stroke. She couldn't reliably aim a tablet or smartphone camera and audio only was often insufficient to effectively communicate. The portal was incredibly helpful in preserving some of her independence and in giving her the ability to communicate with people not physically in the room.

Have you tried Amazon's version?

The portal is decent, but it hasn't gotten much love nor a vibrant ecosystem. If not for messenger, then I'd probably switch that out.

Too bad it was created by a company that couldn't care less about building sustainable, badly-needed technologies that meet actual human needs.

And instead cares only about ... we know, we know, we know.

I am a software engineer working at FB on Quest 2 etc. I go back and forth on this stuff in my head, but at this point I get the sense that it's basically a disaster. The incentives and management strategy at FB is not congruent to solving very difficult mobile hardware/software problem that they actually have.

The Quest 2 doesn't have the horsepower to drive a good experience and it still runs out of battery super fast. I think upper management expects this issue to be solved by incremental hardware improvements, but the fact is that mobile phones are pushing up against the same moore's law limits that are hitting the rest of the industry. They could maybe extract 1 order of magnitude better performance out of the package if they put together a great hardware team instead of licensing some crap out from Qualcomm. I think this is basically what Apple is doing, but I don't see it happening at FB.

The incentives at FB are more suitable for corporate climbers and constant schizophrenic over-sharing of ideas. You are never free from the next review cycle, and it has points baked in to basically evaluate your people skills. This seems fine at first, but the end result is that every single person ends up vying for a little piece of every one else's time, in order to demonstrate some "impact" in that sense. Every day is another hour of meetings with 20 different people. It's driving me crazy, and I think it will do the same thing to any passionate low-level engineer (either hardware or software). Everybody has to be a leader, very little real work is getting done.

There is also some kind of incentive to generate more features and crap for e.g. horizons. I understand they're trying to throw a bunch of things at the wall to find what sticks, but the content teams don't seem to understand the efficiency constraints, and with so many silly features it feels like death by a thousand cuts.

John Carmack is very vocal pointing at various actual problems that need to be solved, but at this point browsing his feed is starting to feel kind of sad and hopeless. The incentives will always create messes faster than they can be cleaned up. The software will get slower while it needs to be faster. The hardware won't provide significant compute upgrades we desperately need. I guess we'll wait for 1-2 more reorgs until they move away from the failing VR push.

I think we would be seeing a very different outcome right now if Oculus hadn't been bought by FB, but that ship has sailed. Most of the Oculus people either quit or were fired when they decided to kill desktop VR in favor of mobile (a decision that is now being re-evaluated). It's just one bad decision after another.

Sorry for such a negative post. Maybe I should try some of those mindfulness classes so I can calm down.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. In your experience, is this how most Reality Labs' teams operate?

I haven’t worked on most RL teams so I can’t say precisely, but I get the sense these problems are endemic of the whole company, not just RL.

I would add that I feel respect for my coworkers and managers, I think the problem is bad incentives and the games that they lead to.

Oh, that's disappointing that these seem to be org-level issues. If I were ever to apply to Meta, it would be to RL only, and they do have a few interesting openings. Thanks for replying, though!

I migrated from infra to FRL, saw the new name, and quit after a conversation with an executive (m team).

You can search post about the culture being execution driven rather than innovation based (assuming it is still up).

I was happy in infra, but FRL taught me about despair.

I am not sure what the difference between “execution based” vs “innovation based” is. I could easily of describe the situation right now as a lack of execution, due to oversharing and too many teams trying to “connect” themselves like the blue aliens in avatar. Unfortunately “X based vs Y based”, and other terminology like that doesn’t really capture anything specific and I think is moreso how technology-detached middle managers try to put their thoughts into words.

It was illuminating to hear other orgs might not be so miserable. I really think the company priorities are not well suited for what RL is trying to achieve.

The difference is how much risk one takes to do something new. A core critique of the culture is that it doesn't produce anything new, but copies from others with ruthless execution.

Sorry for such a negative post. Maybe I should try some of those mindfulness classes so I can calm down.

Your post wasn't negative in the slightest; it was highly positive for exposing the culture at Meta for what it is. We need more posts like this one.

It is your superiors at that company who need mindfulness classes, not you.

Hopefully some real competition from apple will give them a kick in the teeth and they’ll start worrying like their jobs are on the line.

Doesn't the metaverse depend on hardware, or am I misunderstanding the concept?

Maybe they are just focusing on virtual reality, augmented reality is very hard

3D TV and betamax were hard too.

Reasonably priced 3D TV is unsolved.

This morning there was an ad during Face the Nation for portal. It was very focused on business uses. Gone are the days of grandpa reading a book to his grandchild adorned with VR animal ears.

Having been on family zoom calls with some participants using Portal, I would love for the quality of the experience to come to everyday business use. It needs to be decoupled from Meta for me to advocate for that.

Is the good news or bad news for Magic Leap? /s

I hope this means they're discontinuing their GlaDOS project.

So, it's safe to keep shorting the stock. Sounds good to me.

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