Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD
oculus.com
oculus.com
that said a cheap quest 2 second hand with virtual desktop makes for probably the best wireless experience / dollar you can have
The wireless streaming works great. There is no account setup whatsoever. Null, nada, nichts. You can just boot up the HMD and you're good to go.
Personally I think ByteDance (and TikTok in particular) is an even worse company than Facebook ever was. It's like they learned from Facebook and made it worse.
I'm no fan of their corporate parent either, but the value proposition on Quest 2 for general purpose PC VR gaming (especially prior to this price increase) was remarkable given size of subsidy Meta were prepared to make on price.
It's still a nice headset but it's showing it's age, the Quest 2 has higher resolution screens and the ability to stream PC VR wirelessly is a killer feature which the Index doesn't support.
I want standard joystick-based movement. I suppose too many get motion sickness, or that joysticks are ergonomically awkward to place onto motion controllers while maintaining the "pointing" and "picking up" metaphors.
VR's "aim and teleport" mechanic is the worst, though. It ruins the entire experience for me. I just want to walk in a direction - easy with a game controller. But instead you have to aim, judge distance, and click. It's so weird and feels gross.
Now, when omnidirectional treadmills become a thing so I can literally walk / run places in games, I'm onboard.
After like 3 playthroughs I've gotten the teleporting movement down and it's pretty much second nature. Outside of the game I found myself holding out my hand and flicking to try to pick things up IRL
HN is lousy with stories about people getting tagged by faulty "AI" in one Google program and getting blitzed out of all the others.
The risk is too high that Meta will follow suit one day soon.
The fact that it was made by Facebook was worrying - the fact that it required a Facebook account made it a non-starter.
For the same reason, while I do enjoy the occasional twitch stream - some of my favorite streamers have moved to FB... thus I have stopped watching them because I don't like making it easy for socials to track and broadcast my every waking moment.
"No way!"
"OK, then just let me hold everything that's in it."
PC Tower VR is a dead end where the complexity and hardware costs will never take it the customer base size that justifies developing non-indie content.
I don’t think Valve would have even bothered building Index without the Oculus threat.
Increasing difficult as most apps are on Meta's platform now.
Stuff like Beat Saber and VRChat which are the most succesful VR games, predate the Quest, and are probaby helped that beat saber only needs the motion controls part of VR - were it not for facebook using it to sell the Quest nowadays, we would have had a switch port by now I feel.
And VRchat doesn't even require VR, it also has a regular desktop client.
(From what I read, Second Life only runs on VR as a janky 3rd party hack, not an official release. But my info may be out of date).
Only one switch controller can do 6DoF tracking and I don't think it would be that accurate either.
As long as Facebook owns it, it may as well not be a thing to me. Facebook "saving" VR is a utterly pyrrhic victory. If facebook owns it then it wasn't worth saving.
It’s funny that the collective anti-Facebook sentiment is so strong that we managed to starve Oculus of content and possibly burnt through their budget for loss leader.
A headset with multiple cameras on it, connected to the internet, scanning my surroundings, and phoning home to Meta/Facebook. Hard for me to imagine a more dystopian future for VR than the one envisioned by Zuck. I'd rather VR not be a thing than for Meta/Facebook to dominate it.
I really don't think there's much room creatively for non-indie VR games that fit on a standalone headset.
I'm sure there's something, but you can already do so much with something like beatsaber or superhot that I don't feel myself yearning for all that much more.
If we could use (say) AI techniques to create VR versions of classic movies, that would be cool and I'd pay a pretty penny for it, or even VR-specific works that actually explore the implications of the medium (I could see tomorrow's equivalent of black mirror's bandersnatch doing this), but I don't feel like my VR headset is a wasted investment at the moment.
Even just for flight sims and simracing it's genuinely fantastic. I'm probably never going to race at Le Mans at night in the rain, I want to though, so my brain makes the rest up for me when I put the headset on.
I also don't think VR is good enough to be worth investing $1k+ into a VR headset like Vive. $300 seemed like a very high return on investment for what I got. Not sure about $400 since I already have one but I'd probably still do it.
I also made a fake, empty Facebook account to use the Oculus store, so I don't feel like it's a privacy invasion.
You're kidding yourself with that. You gave Facebook literal eyes into your home through an internet connected device. If you don't think Facebook know who you are I have some coins I'd like to sell you.
"One of the things I’m really excited about for future versions is getting eye tracking and face tracking in" - Mark Zuckerberg https://uploadvr.com/zuckerberg-quest-3-4-eye-face-tracking/
Here is their tech demo for full eye and face tracking for virtual avatars:
There's enough wrong with FB/Meta to not need to go into conspiracies
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/76d40aac-034e-4e0b-95eb-c5d34146f...
I did, and it says that they gave message access to users that authorized it to. Saying "Facebook is reckless with data" because of this makes as much sense as saying that google is "reckless" with your data because people are constantly downloading shady flashlight apps and granting them location permissions.
The information on when you are playing gives information on your job situation.
The kinds of games give insight into personality.
And so on, if you combine with data from other sources (what else happens on the IP address around the same time?) you can get quite a lot.
They definitely don’t see the VR devices as a gateway to another frontier on data collection. That’s why they paid billions for Oculus and then spent billions to sell the Quest devices at a loss.
Ignore the fact that one of basic features of the Quest is to scan your room and build a play area. Just give FB a burner account and you’re set they definitely won’t be able to tie that data together it’s not like they built their entire business around doing that.
Data, not video or pictures.
I just made a mental list of all of the items in my office room where I use Quest and the face I own a Macbook and some high end speakers/chair/desk/monitor and an iPhone is really not that interesting to anyone.
I'm way more concerned by my mobile phone or browser where I actual engage with personal information.
I use it maybe an hour or two a week now (used to be way higher) and when I'm not using it it sits in a case in a closet. I dont see any value of getting images of my office and audio of an empty room.
I'm really struggling to see how this affects my privacy. I dont even play multiplayer games where I'm ever talking.
- Star Wars Vader Immortal, is so good I can only compare it to a Disneyland ride.
- Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners
It's not all about graphics, it's about gameplay, cooperation, competition and good sportsmanship with some friendly ribbing. I've got more than 2K matches in and still play a couple times a week until the battery dies.
There is also Golf+ plus I am way more into table tennis.
• Biking/walking through interesting locations (museums, beautiful nature) together with my disabled wife is wonderful.
• Contemplating while visiting some beautiful locations such as Horseshoe bend from above is very nice.
• Biking through brightly-lit locations while actually being in the dark in my air-conditioned bedroom while my wife sleeps is nice.
• I don't play the games, but the best of them have enormous dedicated followings
• Viewing 3D pictures taken by users is often interesting.
• I find anything approaching porn very creepy, but imagine that the "virtual live sex doll" nature of it is very popular.
And I have a PC that can handle VR games (and you can use the Quest 1 or 2 as basically a PC VR headset if you want). But it’s just so much less hassle to use the native Quest.
The main use of the Quest is still to play beatsaber tho LOL.
The best ROI is bringing it to my sisters house to play with my nephew/niece. They always have a blast.
If this isn't your main account, then this is a violation of the ToS and Meta/FB can (and in many cases, have) ban you and remove access to everything you bought at the drop of a hat.
If it is your main account, then you should assume that they are linking all of your VR data in the backend with whatever shadow profiles they have generated for you from other sources.
Secondary FB accounts can be banned for not being the "real person" btw.
Can you use it as a virtual desktop, like Arcan Safespaces: https://arcan-fe.com/2018/03/29/safespaces-an-open-source-vr...
What about writing code in VR with unlimited virtual monitors/windows?
I purchased a streaming VR service and played games on Steam not available on Oculus store using my Quest 2. Greatly expanding the number of games you can play.
Around 10 years ago I gave up on VR and decided to wait for the VR game market to grow. It was a huge bummer to learn that nothing has changed after all this time.
I think it will take another decade or two for hardware power and costs to catch up to modern game engines.
For me, the only VR experience worth experiencing right now is probably a $1000 Valve Index with Half-Life Alyx running on my $4000 PC.
Golf+ -- fairly realistic Golf and also TopGolf setup.
Demeo -- like a really casual HeroQuest that you can jump into at any time (multiplayer, automatic).
Ancient Dungeon -- procedurally generated roguelike.
The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners -- really good zombie game
Which is to say, you can definitely still throw away your time and money on this fad without supporting Facebook/Meta :)
It felt a bit ironic that mini golf was one of the most fun multiplayer party games.
My wife was like "You should bring over your quest 2!" to our new house -- she already has an Index and some other high end headset. I asked "But why?" and we couldn't think of a good reason.
Maybe the epitome of VR is always going to be a bunch of friends sitting around watching one person play it, but it felt like there could be something more. Something like a Star Trek bridge experience or... something.
1. https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2215004568539258
It's a pretty fun party game, (though beginners get confused easily). I hope the concept gets expanded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Bridge_Crew
It's not great, but it exists and is a multi-player VR game. Fun with three other friends and I think it's cross platform (although do check).
But I do think there's a big hurdle, and that's our inner ear. Teleport-based controls are jank but it seems really difficult to prevent motion sickness when using any kind of movement that translates the camera in 3d space.
I tried to play Subnautica in VR, and literally only made it about 10 seconds before I had to pull the headset off and sit on the cool tile floor for a bit.
I figured - well, maybe I shouldn't be surprised a sea game gives me motion sickness. And it's not even built for VR anyway.
So I tried - I can't remember the name, but it's a game where you fly around building a base in space. Sounded like an awesome idea.
I forced myself to play for about 5-10 minutes despite feeling ill almost immediately, and regretted it immensely when I did finally bail out.
It seems like this happens to a decent number of people? And why teleport movement is so common?
FWIW I don't get particularly bad motion sickness in other, traditional settings. Being a passenger in a car on a windy road will definitely mess me up, but I don't get seasickness, for instance, and also don't mind roller coasters at all.
For the good of humanity, I plead with Meta, Valve, Neuralink and whoever it was that just beat Neualink, to join forces to defeat the scourge of mankind - motion sickness!
Please!
I've noticed newer games increasingly have free movement as an option, or no teleport at all, so I think for a lot of people it is possible to get used to it if you play enough. Some percentage will never get used to it though, which sucks.
(FYI, the way it works is you play until you start to feel a hint of nausea, and stop for an hour or more. If you try to fight through it, you'll just condition yourself to feel sick when you even look at/think about a VR headset)
> I’d rather go outside, thanks
It's not like VR isn't actually awesome once you get everything to work reasonably well. I can't just "go outside" and storm the beach of Normandy, or "go outside" and throw fireball/duel with swords in medieval settings. The appeal of VR is that it's something else entirely, it's not a video game replacement, I can't play Pavlov for more than 1-2 hours but when I do play it, after a while I forget that I'm in a game. I am under MG40 fire with my squad in Normandy and I hear the bullets fly right next to me I get the rush that I only get in paintball.
And I say all of that as someone who used their Quest 2 for about 45 minutes the day they received it and spent the next 24 hours feeling dizzy.
FWIW once I stopped riding around in cars much I started getting a ton of nausea riding in a passenger seat of the car, but I put up with it because society has a lot of car travel. VR also took a bit, but I like what I get out of it.
When I was little, I'd often attempt to read while in moving vehicles, which quickly and reliably brought on severe motion sickness. I can longer remember the last time that's happened. Cured by repeated exposure? Simply growing up? Maybe because of both at once, involving neuroplasticity somehow.
I've only experienced VR through brief tech demos, so I guess I'll get the datum when the time comes.
PS: A search for online anecdotes finds contradictory accounts from people reporting acquiring motion sickness in such situations as adults
Anecdotally it feels potentially related to caffeine intake or something else during the day. Because I noticed it tends to be fine in the morning and a problem in the afternoon. Or maybe it’s related to spending 8 hours a day staring at a screen for work.
Then again I've never got sick. If I got nausea when playing I doubt I would have bothered to invest time getting used to it - VR is good but not that good!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_vestibular_stimulatio...
Personally, I used to get instantly motion sick and now I can stomach games where I walk around freely, at least for half a hour or so. Actual flying or swimming wont ever be in the cards though, I fear.
So yeah, if you develop a game, you absolute need to offer teleport style controls or some people will not be able to play it. I guess this is also a hurdle with just adopting existing games/genre to VR as they often rely on fast dynamic movement which would make people puke in VR.
However, if I am moving through environment, I end up becoming motion sick very quickly. In some games like The Climb, I am actually okay with it. Because anytime I fall and forget to close my eyes, I will end up becoming motion sick. It sort of make me try harder to not make a mistake.
On other hand, I am tired of games that are rated comfortable but have too much motion. Like Until You Fall, love it but cannot play for too long no matter what settings I use.
Also another issue is far too many VR videos have camera pans, zooms, and other motions that make me sick. I have stopped watching VR videos because of this. Videos should have comfort ratings too.
Really wonder if people who get motion sick is minority or people who are making VR experiences are minority but they somehow don't experience any motion sickness. Hence, they are into VR.
That's my case at least. I was so thrilled that VR was finally becoming somewhat practical now and I wanted to get into VR dev. I got an Oculus Go when they came out as a cheap test, and discovered that I get sick when my viewpoint moves in VR. That pretty much killed my desire to invest more time or money into VR development.
Probably Space Engineers.
> I forced myself to play for about 5-10 minutes despite feeling ill almost immediately, and regretted it immensely when I did finally bail out.
I don't think that that is uncommon. I recently experienced a bit of that while playing Mechwarrior 5 without VR and not being too mindful of torso / walk centering while in first person and it got to me after a few missions.
The combination of a first person view without having the corresponding actual motion is what got to me.
As to its commonality and differences...
A comparative study of cybersickness during exposure to virtual reality and “classic” motion sickness: are they different? https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00338.2018
Interesting, I had the opposite experience. While browsing the Quest's store I kept feeling railroaded into multiplayer experiences. Huh.
One huge issue, however, is with local "multiplayer". If you've ever tried to observe someone playing Beat Saber on the Quest 2 you'll know what kind of letdown it is: the video stream is delayed, which completely destroys the ability to enjoy watching someone else play. It's impossible to get "pumped up" when someone is doing well. They reaaaally need to release some sort of dongle set to get low-latency observer streaming to the TV.
Additionally, watching someone else's VR POV on a standard flat TV can be pretty nauseating. It would be great if there was also a way to add motion stability to the TV feed.
Blade and Sorcery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_ZDQnOCTVI
If they open it up a bit as a base platform for creators to make their own mods/rpgs, wow.
Echo VR.
Their next headset, the Quest Pro, will have eye and face tracking cameras with the specific purpose to drive social avatars and make VR social more natural. Meta’s interest was always social and while the Quest might be great for gaming, that is not the addressable market they are going for.
And yeah, I realize that most people here are going to be a hard no on Meta owning their face data, but strategically this is what they are going for.
> Imagine where Uber would be today if they wanted to stop losing money so early in the game.
Well if they stopped they could have lost less money
There are no doubt huge changes made, but Quest 2 runs Android underneath.
They want users to continually be on their latest experience to achieve an eventual platform monopoly
It’s the first comment chain in this link
Given the stated focus of the company (to the point of renaming to highlight VR focus) I would imagine it's the supply side of the equation.
Also another callout is that I believe Quest 2's have been getting passive upgrades, with newer models having more base storage and other small enhancements.
Another callout is that its common wisdom that advertising is first to be cut during recession, so this might be pre-emptive belt tightening sense their projections show its not palatable anymore to take the same level of loss.
Where is this giant recession?
Equity prices are not representative of economic performance, and needed to be corrected anyway...
Projected famine.
Record breaking inflation.
Big increase in homelessness and crime.
Some countries absolutely falling apart.
Other countries just "too big to fail" (but not to big to threaten WWIII).
You and I live in parallel universes apparently.
FB shouldn't have to raise the price if they're making money selling games for the Quest. I guess they're not selling games.
Given the across-the-board inflation and supply chain havoc why would you expect this?
It's not Meta. It's Facebook. Meta feels like... an SNL skit or something.
The only people who I see consistently calling Zuckerberg's empire "Meta" are financial types that care about name of the company granting shares and on the stock ticker, and reporters who have to do copy editing.
Slightly tangential, but I still see news headlines use "Facebook" where it technically should be "Meta". I assume this is because only techies know what Meta is; everybody knows what Facebook is.
Facebook (company) is now called Meta (company) and continues work on Facebook (product).
"VR will have become mainstream when someone posts a VR-related link to HN and the resultant discussion is about the article itself rather than VR in general"
Maybe if you’re mildly autistic or remarkably introspective it works for you. For most people it’s a fundamentally alienating experience, like taking LSD but with none of the joy.
VR is fundamentally an industrial technology, good for training and other purposes. For entertainment or home use it’s purposeless. Ask anyone (non techy) who has one. They don’t use it.
The focus on VR is how I know Zuckerberg has no idea what he’s doing. VR is never going to work, not in its current incarnation. It just demonstrated that he has no idea how normal people work, and that he’s decided (for some reason) to completely ignore whatever data they have, which would show him that people just don’t use it.
I think you're overstating things but I agree to some extent. It's a niche product but there's more niches than just "industrial". There's still a lot of interest from the arts and creative sectors for example.
It’s mind boggling to me why or how Zuckerberg decided to invest so much on it. I wonder if it’s just a screen for the stock price not to collapse as he loses DAUs, and certainly young people, to TikTok and other apps. Because otherwise it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.
Meta wouldn’t have to spend billions jump starting something if it was a commercial success. No commercial success in history needed tens of billions for commercial success. It either sells or it doesn’t.
You obviously mean "there's no field fulfilling criteria X that I haven't spelled out".
VR predates Meta's acquisition and took far less than "tens of billions" to get to commercial readiness. Several small-ish companies have got products to market. Heck, even Google's half-hearted attempts resulted in a fairly decent 6DOF headset.
VR in its currently incarnation will not make a system that will sell 100 million units, which is the regular size market of the leading home console in a generation (both switch and PS4 sold this much).
I’m surprised they sold as much as they did tbh.
You should check out Half Life: Alyx to get a glimpse of what VR could be someday. It's a super-polished, super-fun game, and even just standing around in it doing nothing is mindblowing compared to any non-VR game
* There are some good multiplayer action games, but so far as I know they all require you to "get your VR legs" which is a non-starter for me
But XR will. It's clearly the future of general purpose display tech.
I know a bunch of people who use it daily. They are all using Immersed[0] for work (disclosure, I'm an investor, but I invested because of the love their early customers had for the platform). Basically, you get a bunch of virtual monitors in VR.
It's way cheaper and much more portable than dragging five massive screens around, and the isolation is the point -- you can focus better when you have the headset on and headphones in.
But you're right, that is a niche, and not the social product Meta is hoping for.
We all had fun and that's it. Nobody ever talked about it again nor did anybody purchase a VR device themselves. It was more like a one-time ride in a theme park. Mind you, these are tech people with a good income. If here the hit rate was zero, that's quite telling.
I think VR will at one point have a true mass appeal, and when it does, it will change everything. Personally, I hope that moment is far away. This "let's add even more options to never leave the house" trend is backfiring.
People who don't want to leave the house already have plenty of options.
People that love the outdoors or being sociable probably aren't going to swayed either.
I don't think VR will change much in either direction for most people. Personally I like a mix of things. I value staying indoors and experiencing media that is rewarding. I like getting out in nature when the climate permits. And I'm not a total hermit. I don't think VR change things for me or others. Digital crack already exists.
facebook and Zuckerberg may be unethical monopolistic robber barons, but unlike some of the other big players in the industry, they're not incompetent, and they never have been
I would guess that they believe the VR industry is awaiting a critical mass of adoption where, like computers, then the internet, then social media, it will suddenly go from being a techy niche to a viable alternative platform for society. presumably they're gambling that the negative anecdata you're reporting will reduce as the UX improves, and I personally think they're probably right
Flight sims aren't terribly mainstream, sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough of a crowd between flight and racing sims who are willing to spend small fortunes on peripherals to keep VR going at some scale.
For gaming generally, there's a lot of friction that'll have to be removed before mainstream success is a possibility, I think--reducing the weight of headsets, reducing the cost, solving motion sickness, improving the game selection, improving situational awareness with the real world, reducing the setup effort, etc.
A lot of current games aren't worth the effort of dealing with all that, at least not once the novelty of VR wears off.
When Nintendo sold the SNES it wasn’t one person here and another one there playing it. It sold millions and a good percentage of your friends had it.
Isn't there a middle ground?
Having worked in VR since 2015, I don’t know of a single person who uses it for their entertainment, period. Some folks here in the comments saying they use it for flight or racing sims, in which case Meta is sinking billions into an expensive peripheral for sim players, similar to a flight joystick.
Also, there's a lot of innovation happening in display tech for AR too which will be even better, since you'll just see the real world more or less directly.
For quest, you double tap anywhere on the headset (it detects the physical tap) to enable passthrough mode. The game goes away, but you can see. Some games let you see through, but that's limited to games where having something float in front of you in your real room makes sense, rather than being somewhere else.
Besides, it's really tiring after just a couple hours, I don't think there's any risk of getting "stuck in VR".
The hijacking of senses was a major concern for the Apple design group at the earliest stages of their headset design.
Reporting from The Information goes into some depth on Apple's headset external screen display (to show the current expression of the wearer) and what sounds like a uniquely high quality pass through of the environment so you can see and interact with people in the room.
It apparently also deals with occlusion problems that are unsolved in the pass-through experiences of in-market headsets.
It sounds all quite magic, and apparently the work is going in to create that sense. TI's reporting says accomplishing these goals is why the device has fallen behind.
"Grandpa, this is stupid".
Right now I can only tolerate it to enable playing table tennis but it is too uncomfortable for working.
Next Quest might change that.
The direction they are going in the next five years or so is truly comfortable goggles or even normal glasses that do augmented reality with high field of view.
So it will not restrict your vision of the normal world any more than you request.
There are also improvements coming in terms of eye tracking and realistic avatars as well as better room scanning and pose detection. This will mean that quite realistic virtual places start to become comfortable and easy to access.
Try to imagine that instead of going to a physical coffeeshop, workplace or friend's home, you will have the option of just putting on the glasses and get a representation that truly is close to the real thing. Eye contact and facial expression tracking and projection will be a big part of it.
You could even map this virtual coffee shop or what to a specific room in your house, or just one wall.
Or don't have a virtual place at all and just have a giant virtual monitor. Or four of them. Put it on a wall so it does not restrict your view of anything.
The bulky headsets are just a starting point.
I'm already grossed-out enough when I happen to catch a glimpse of myself using a normal computer (faces of people immersed in a computer screen look a bit disturbing, kinda slack and dead, and it's much worse when the face is your own)
I'm with you, it's too weird for now. I'll probably give in when they've got AR/VR combo glasses that you can toggle from one to the other, which I assume is the endgame for all this. By then I'll probably need it to talk to my grandkids or whatever anyway. The march of "progress".
Even though the hardware is somewhat aged and the platform still has bugs the overall quality, delivery and onboarding experience was good. The accessories to flesh out the kit were also inexpensive. The whole thing feels underpriced, however average people are definitely not ready to put on a headset.
This is MUCH different from the flip-phone to smartphone transition. Pricing has to be low because there's major adoption friction to overcome.
I've said it before, but I loathe facebook and can not support Meta or its aims until it splits off a company that can not and will not use data built from Facebook / Instagram or any other entity connected to FB.
The only thing that gave me solace in adding data to my shadow profile was that I knew the purchase was costing them much more than was sustainable.
It seems odd, like the "vision" is "VR Everything", but the reality is more "We bought Quest and don't know what else to do". Does anyone have any insight on how it feels inside the org?
The number of employees working in this pillar exceeds 10,000, I believe. For the past years Meta has been building the entire stack: chips, novel controllers like wrist neural interaction, a new operating system... But the ambition level has been somewhat reduced recently. The new OS project (XROS) was scrapped last winter, for example.
PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3
$299 -> $299 -> $499-$599
I don't recall ever seeing a price increase on the same hardware.
Did I get it right?
VR isn't a small improvement on something you already have. It's a whole new thing. I, for one, expect it to be as revolutionary as the WWW - which also lacked for content in the early days.
The proof is in the pudding - the Quest has sold a lot and there are many games in the store already.
My biggest problem with VR is I've never been able to use it. I've been to One Microsoft store about 3 years ago that had some VR setup, but they refused to let me try it out.
I don't understand why Meta doesn't have these to try out in stores. I'm not gonna buy something I can't see, touch, and try first.
I am early adopter, had Oculus for a long time... Very few things to do with it unfortunatelly.
Source: looking at a Best Buy listing right now for it (no sales or anything like that mentioned).
A year ago the Quest 2 was recalled for a minor issue with the foam inserts. Oculus used the temporary discontinuation to replace the 64GB with a 128GB model for the same $299 price when sales began again in August.
I use it daily for fitness. I really love it, it's changed my life, and the exercise I get from it really makes me feel good, particularly someone that spends most of my weeks inside and working at a computer.
I've not enjoyed any other form of exercise but I really love this when combined with some of the fitness options such as FitXR.
It's a real shame this has gone up so much, wow it's a large increase, not even a small one, however this was the price of the Quest 1, the Quest 2 featured a price drop due to some cutbacks they made with the hardware, but it's still disappointing to see them do this, particularly with it being such a large raise in price.
I'm hoping my headset holds out until the Q3 or perhaps other options start coming on the market, perhaps from Apple. I don't care about VR gaming without a fitness element at the moment, as the games are a bit boring / not so fun for me, but for fitness it has been great.
VR I'm skeptical of, but most of the sticking points I can imagine have been fixed. For $400 you can get a fully-featured plug-and-play headset. That's less than most iPads! That headset will have controllers, inside-out tracking, 6DOF, video passthrough, wireless/standalone capabilities... Meta/Facebook certainly isn't a saint, but the Quest is amazing from a hardware standpoint. Even with the new price bump, these devices still feel oddly undervalued. I bought my Quest 1 a few years ago for the same price, and don't regret it at all.
I do love my Quest 2.
I have a Quest 2, and it still seems very niche for me.
> BTW, I worked in the VR field about 25 years ago for SAIC and Disney.
Nice. I remember my first VR experience was about 30 years ago at the local kids science center.
Also the price. Before the Quest I'd have needed to buy a gaming PC and expensive headset like the Vive or Index. And it's wireless and doesn't need any sensor units placed around you. The tracking works great and it tells you when you're about to leave a safe area. It can even do hand tracking so you don't need controllers.
the metaverse isn't exactly achieving much success.
I've always been cold on the metaverse hype whilst at the same time remaining a big fan of VR.
However, I don't think VR is about to become mass market in the way some people hype it - and I don't think it needs to. It can remain a healthy niche and things would probably work out better that way.
Perhaps the math is not working out?
Bad sign for a company betting it all on "the metaverse".
Most new technologies fail. Except for some reason techies won't let VR just die.
Also bear in mind that Meta have been extremely aggressive in restricting access to the main store. Unless you're a big name dev, can show strong sales on other VR platforms or you have good contacts with someone inside Meta then it's very hard to get in.
How is this going to help them capture the market?
The runtime performance is garbage with frequent hitches in frame rate. The in-game resolution is poor with many games having extremely low texture quality and "jaggies" which could be solved with some sort of anti-aliasing.
There are also barely any games worth to play in VR, the ecosystem just isn't there yet to warrant a VR purchase, especially at this price.
VR experience is greatly improved if you can render it on your PC and stream it to a VR headset so you can get consistent frame rate and 120hz.
I play beat saber which the quest 2 cannot reliably render without performance drops. You can fix this if you render it on a PC though.
Now that the market rate went up, I will probably sell it to a pay pig. My graphics card is still up 200% over what I paid for it 4 years ago.
EDIT: You need to place the headset in some faraday box, as it will still stay on even when turned off sometimes. It maps your entire house to know exactly where the safe play zones are. It's incredibly creepy, but also convenient, since you don't need to redraw the play area.
But I do a fair bit of wireless streaming off of PC (but not Beat Saber), and one of the things that surprises me is that it seems like battery life is worse when streaming from PC than when the Quest 2 is doing its own rendering. In any case the battery life does leave a bit to be desired. I expect the Quest 3 to be not much faster, but to have a significantly more efficient processor so it lasts more than an hour or two.
My final note is that if you're going to stream wireless is the way to go. I was worried it would have noticeable latency or hitching but the experience has been basically perfect. You do need a fast modern 5Ghz WiFi router and the PC on Ethernet however. Dealing with cables that have fragile USB connectors on the end while you are blindly swinging your arms around is not worth it.