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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, who wants these VR systems? Have we evolved to the point where giant tech companies no longer require customers? Even the high end-VR games I've played in the mall aren't as convincing as a standard PC/Console game. From what I've seen a mere 260k VR units were sold in 2022. Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.

Where are the lines around the corner? where are the reports of sold out VR headsets? I haven't been able to buy a GPU for years, but I'm willing to bet I'll find a discounted quest if I go looking.

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I would love an answer to this. They look like bad mobile games because it has to run on mobile hardware. Interactions, latency etc. are all worse than on some average PC game.

You could just log into, I don't know, ARMA III server as a department and host your meeting there instead of this torture.

Even on the PC-connected headsets (Index, Vive, etc.) where the graphics are infinitely better, the games are still really meh. It feels like a solution in search of a problem. Once the novelty of "ooh, 3D and position tracking" wears off, the games themselves feel like tech demos... even the best VR games pale in comparison to your typical "very positive" rando indie game on Steam, of which there are hundreds.

You know how Nintendo sold a bazillion Wiis and Switches even though their hardware is pretty subpar? They had solid, fun games with charisma and charm.

The VR world, meanwhile, has... uh... disembodied techbros floating in a shrink's office with you? I really respect Carmack, but... what the hell, man?!? Any of his old indie or id software games were SOOOO much better than this Meta crap.

The whole thing feels like a sunken cost fallacy where some True Believers keep making new headsets, but they're not fundamentally getting better... still stuck in dorky-gimmick land.

> Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.

The bet isn't that the Quest or any extant VR headset _is_ the iPhone, the bet is that some successor of the Oculus could be the iPhone. Facebook is hoping they can either capitalize on it directly or hold the patents to skim the cream off of whomever does.

The current headsets are more like PalmOS -- pretty cool, but not yet cool enough. They're for geeks and enthusiasts. If my silly analogy holds, we're currently waiting for Nokia and Blackberry to show up and miss (but make a lot of progress along the way), and then we'll get an iPhone around ~2028, and the bet might pay off.

So Facebook drops billions per year to be palm pilot? What incentive does anyone have in this org to deliver an actual product/customer value? How do we know VR isn’t a bet for the 2030s?

If this was a small labs net spending a few million a year… then I’d buy this, but we’re looking at a bet the farm situation.

I will die on the hill that PalmOS was primarily a marketing failure. They were always primarily thought of basic personal organizer devices, but the Palm Tungsten and Zire lines (Starting around 2003) had very strong multimedia and gaming functionality.

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