Zuckerberg's leaked email on VR strategy (2015)
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I don't think Zuckerberg is wrong about VR at a certain level. I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways. But instead of making Oculus the "XBox" of the future, Mark decided that it was the "everything" of the future. A sort of wishful thinking that these headsets would replace the cellphone.
The cellphone fits in your pocket, watches fit on your wrist, and earbuds fit in your ears. A VR headset would have to be sunglasses size and even then they'd still be less ubiquitous than the Apple Watch.
The problem is not the vision, but the amount of money being spent. If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.
I think if you had something like google glass, but made my Apple, and looked like normal glasses, that could be big, but still not as useful as a smartphone because of the input limitation. It would be as useful as an Apple Watch at first, but with a bigger screen.
We can probably expect VR/AR to take about that long if not longer. So Mark might not be wrong, he just might be way early.
Sometime by 2035 a company will build light field display glasses than can translate language, operate industrial drones, and operate remote chat. It probably won't be meta
Well, fingers crossed that isn't the case. I for one am never strapping something anywhere near as large as current devices to my face as a replacement for sitting in front of a couple of monitors.
> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.
If we had 5 games with the polish of Half-life Alyx in VR the sales would probably be higher, but as it is we don't so everyone I know with a headset enjoyed that one game then promptly put their headset back in storage and only take it out for the occasional beat saber game.
There's an unofficial third-party mod for GTA 5 that adapts it into a VR game. Even though you still use keyboard and mouse to actually move around, and so gameplay-wise it's the same game, it feels much more intense. Oh, and the ability to actually aim down sights in a way that no screen can simulate is awesome (and I'm looking forward to games like Arma pushing this even further by accounting for focus distance etc).
I feel like your statement is reversed: flat-screen gaming suffers from having a stationary gamer. VR is freeing, assuming you have an area to move around in. Until You Fall is pretty wild when you have a 15x15 space to play in.
However VR is still an emerging and expensive medium; I'm very lucky to be able to afford the gaming rig, headset, controllers etc required to have that experience. As those barriers to entry lessen, VR will absolutely obsolete certain traditional gaming experiences as much as television murdered the ubiquitous living room radio.
From what I've gathered, this is the Meta AR target for the early 2030s. What we see now are intended to be the steps along that road.
The most interesting part of the email to me was seeing his support for aquiring Unity. Not being able to land that acquisition almost feels like the critical reason Meta doesn't have much to show today, after all this effort. And it doesn't look like the aquisition failed due to lack of trying! ironSource ended up doing a merger acqusition that finally closed just a few days ago.
What sweet irony it would be if the biased coverage by NYT, WaPo, etc allowed Meta to resume making large acquisitions and maintain their dominance for years to come.
Fortnite is the Metaverse currently.
The changing of order is inevitable.
I don't think the form-factor is something they can iteratively approach for too long, given the absurd amount of investment Meta is already throwing in to building the next generation of still insufficient AR/VR. Investor appetite will not last long enough to realize the pipe-dream.
We're already there. We have people walking around with iDweebs in their ears, talking to themselves, while looking down at a phone screen.
For this to work with a device like the Quest, users need to simultaneously be present in the real world and consume content in VR/AR. That could work in pure AR applications (albeit potentially quite awkwardly), but VR might have fairly fundamental issues such as losing the feeling of presence in VR and motion sickness.
VR is neat. AR is neat. Getting people to use VR for 10 hours a day while pretending to do something else may be a challenge.
My bet is that it'll be the little apple logo on AR gadgets that'll normalize them.
The Airpods (or at least, that product category) are probably the single greatest new product I've used in the last 10 years. And I use a lot of products. They have given me always-available access to audio, easily, whenever I want.
Not sure what sounds quaint about that, it sound to me like how most people I know use their phones. And while I have a lot of people I know in tech, it's by no means everyone I know.
Then they decided to work on the first iPhone for several years after that.
This VR enthusiast made a great video about the problems of VR games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZRvw7WTq8
My mother in law probably still thinks people play first person shooters but really the sense of characterization in modern games depends on the third person perspective. Bayonetta has legs and knows how to use them. The whole point of a Mario game is seeing Mario on the screen.
The third person view lets you experience a spectrum of identification with a character (I moe for Tamamo, I like Mario, I control Mario, I travel with Mario on his journey, I am Mario, ...) that you can't really experience from a first person view. Maybe you can put on the appearance of a character for other people's benefit in VR but you're going to have use your imagination (for better and worse) to put yourself into a character.
For now the VR game industry is driven by independents. Big game studios could make an AAA game but they won't because there aren't enough players with headsets to justify the investment.
I am betting on the first AAA VR game coming from a Chinese studio as they are taking big chances on new IP such as Genshin Impact from MiHoYo.
It's just like 2D - there was a time when that was the standard way to do games, then the time when it was merely prevalent (and 3D was that "cool thing" that you showed off to others)... and then 3D won, and most everybody went there. 2D is still around, of course, but it doesn't dominate the industry anymore.
Now, I don't know if VR has a chance to capture that much of the market; there are obviously some genres that are not very amenable to it. But it doesn't make sense to me to expect for it to continue being as niche as it is today.
He loves Ready Player One and has referenced it in interviews regarding the metaverse, but he's basically basing his business model after the main bad guy/group in the story.
Not really an answer to your second bit, but "Moss" is a lovely little game in VR that you play from third person (fixed camera). I wish more VR games did 3rd person, aside from Moss it seems exclusive to strategy games.
There are 3rd person games for VR.
Best selling videogame Minecraft is first person.
Currently top selling game on Steam is first person. Most played is first person
I havent tried the recent Quest Pro but based on reviews I assume it's pretty good. Not great, not sexy, but pretty good. Their flagship application however, Horizons, embarrasses meta every time a screenshot gets shared. It is so dorky and uninspired that nobody wants to admit they even tried it.
Who exactly are they targeting with that thing? Adults? Children? Their messaging and pricepoint around the Pro seems to suggest they're expecting office workers to use it for virtual conferencing. Who are they kidding with that?
The cost is part of the forward-looking vision. That part makes sense to me. It's the product that baffles me. It just stinks.
It's like saying, back in the early days of the internet, that showing an ugly, unstyled text with pictures on a webpage is worthless. The platform has grown to become a cornerstone of human civilization!
Facebook wants to own something akin to that. _If_ their bet works out, they will be so very powerful. I think as a netizen, it's my duty to make sure their bet doesn't go the way they want. Platforms should not be owned, but be federated and compatible, and open.
So - who’s doing it?
I imagine there's research into VR/AR funded by the government for military purposes. But somehow I doubt it'd be an open protocol and system like the Internet.
> I think you can divide the ecosystem into three major parts: apps / experiences, platform services and hardware / systems. In my vision of ubiquitous VR / AR, these are listed in order of importance...
> The key apps are what you'd expect: social communication and media consumption
While Mark believes that Apps > Systems > Hardware he also knows that the order has to be the other way around if you're building this industry from scratch. Meta has to stay ahead in hardware if they want to own the systems and apps that run on it. Horizons is their proving ground for the technologies they need to own social and identity. I think they're focusing more on building the systems for it while the graphical quality is getting left by the wayside. It makes it easy to laugh at if all you're judging it by are screenshots but if you have experience with social VR apps you'll know that being able to have a high server population is the killer feature that they're chasing. A one man team can throw together a multiplayer VR experience that looks great but as soon as you try to have more than 20 people in the same room it begins lagging so much that everyone will get pissed and quit immediately (you have to have experienced lag and jittery video in VR to know why this is). So making sure that the networking is solid and scalable is a wise decision, if that is what they're doing. If they can pull off large events with 100s of participants and no lag they will own the social VR space even if their graphics are still shit. That's a big if though.
As he mentioned in the letter, ubiquitous VR and AR will turn a lot of physical things into apps. He gave the examples of your TV and cellphone but as we've seen with the Quest Pro they also want to replace your monitors, whiteboard, and office. If they can solve the server population problem then here's a list of other things that will become apps:
- movie theatres - bars - dance clubs - house parties - non-contact sports - concerts - board game cafes - conferences - galleries - comedy clubs - stage performances of all kinds e.g bands, theatre troupes, karaoke
I could probably sit here for a while coming up with more examples but the point is this will be revolutionary for people who currently have limited access to these things. If you live in a major city you might be thinking "so what, I can do all of these things down the street" but you're forgetting about the rest of the world! Even if you have access to some of these things, you don't have access to all of them all the time or the specific ones you want right now.
you need the exceptional content to kickstart a platform. steam doesn't work without half life 2.
You can charge while using a Quest or you can buy an external battery pack if you need to use it for longer periods of time.
I agree with this. We would also have more competition because other players in the space wouldn't be as intimidated to go up against a business like Meta/Facebook.
I think a crucial miscalculation was trying to EEE the space. Zuck clearly states that he wanted Meta to "own the space" on every platform. Basically, he wanted to carve out a niche like Adobe managed to do with PDF, but on a scale that rivals full blown platforms like the Android ecosystem. Such an ambitious plan sounds great on paper, until you realize that you're trying to EEE the exact people who wrote the textbooks on EEE. When you sound a horn that loud, on a megaphone as big as the one Meta was using, you're only painting a target on your own back.
Another drawback to the path that Meta selected is they basically internalized the entire hardware industry that was just starting up. If Oculus had stayed independent I believe they would have had to partner with other hardware vendors to establish some sort of regulatory body for writing industry standard specifications. With one serious player in the field developing and harboring all the tech for themselves, this space could be barren for a long time if Meta folds. All the work by third parties that went into this proprietary technology and platform will basically be for nothing.
Adopt an open standard, add proprietary bits so that content worked best (or exclusively) on their own version, and force other players and competitors out.
I'm terribly sorry, I could not resist.
in fact, i've got my win10 box set up for dev, and it's nearly identical to my mac! it wasn't 100% straightforward, and to get windowed emacs working from the cli took a little twiddling, but overall in less than a few hours i had everything running flawlessly. :)
I completely disagree with this. Competition is what drives innovation, not the absence of it. Other players did go against Meta/Oculus and their VR products were abysmal in comparison. They just didn't get what makes a desirable VR headset for the average gamers/consumers. And it's not all an issue of money. Sony, Google, Microsoft, LG, Apple, Samsung and other tech giants had equally deep pockets and hardware expertise to compete with Meta/Oculus in this field if they wanted to and if they knew the market. But they didn't.
If Meta wouldn't exist in the VR space, it doesn't mean their competitors would magically have better tech now. Their products would still be crap or not even exist today. Same how other smartphone makers with equally deep pockets to Apple like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola went against the iPhone and failed. If the iPhone wouldn't have existed it doesn't mean all their competitors would now be making better phones. Quite the contrary, the competition the iPhone bought helped move the technology forward, same how Meta's Quest moved the VR tech forward.
Just look at Sony's recent VR headset for the PS5, needing physical cables tethered to a separate console you need to buy, is just a no-go in 2022 VR technology. Meta/Oculus moved the goalposts so much with their cordless, self contained Quest 2 headset, especially at the ~400$ price point, that going back to expensive headsets tethered with cables to separate PC/consoles is just not gonna be a VR sales success going forward.
Up until the recent Quest Pro failure, it seemed Meta/Oculus really nailed the base recipe for what makes a desirable VR gaming headset with the Quest 2. All they had to do was improve on that, instead of pivoting to "professionals".
That's an opinion, yet you present it as a fact.
Watch the sales and returns numbers in the future, they will reflect that and prove me right. You'll find the headsets on sale on craigslist or ebay for half a price after they gathered dust in people's homes for a few months.
Want to bet on it?
Not really. The original HTC Vive outsold the original Rift by a lot and was a vastly superior headset (full 6DOF headset/controller vs front-facing/Xbox controller), while also costing about the same. It took Facebook quite a while, the release of Touch and a lot of patches to catch up. And on top of that they had to cut the price in half to stay relevant.
Meanwhile PlaystationVR was outselling everything PCVR was doing combined by 5x.
> Their products would still be crap or not even exist today
The "not even exist today" might very well be true, the crap however not. Microsoft was the one pioneering 6DOF standalone and handtracking back in 2016. Google had one with the Lenovo Mirage a year before Facebook even entered that space. The issue is that they all left the market before the Quest was even out. They never tried to compete, they saw that VR wasn't selling and gave up prematurely. Which is a shame, as I really miss WMR, which was both substantially cheaper than a Quest2, as well as having really nice way to interact with 2D apps inside VR with WMR Portal.
Meanwhile Pico4 just entered the market in Europe and happens to be a substantially improvement over Quest2 while also costing less. Quest2 still has a bit of an edge on the software side, but the gap is quite small when taking into account how much money Facebook spend.
The strength of Facebook is simply endurance, they kept going despite miserable sales VR. And they did that long enough to reach the "good enough" point with Quest2. That said, they are really slacking on the software side now. There is no interesting first party content coming out, it's all just Horizon Worlds. High quality games (Lone Echo) or software (Quill, Medium) as we had in the early VR days is all gone, nothing interesting announced in years and Quill and Medium even got sold off.
> it seemed Meta/Oculus really nailed the base recipe for what makes a desirable VR gaming headset
But that's the thing, that was essentially an accident, not a grand strategy. Facebook doesn't care about gaming. They care about that "next computing platform" that VR is supposed to be, gaming is just a tiny part of that and they'll happily toss it aside in the hunt for bigger goals.
That's really the problem with Facebook, they are far more interesting in dominating a hypothetical future VR space, than they are interest in improving the VR we have today.
The "common" API to access VR does exist: OpenXR, and is not great and has remained that way for years. Oculus's APIs Just Work (tm) and SteamVR's are fairly usable and more open to accessories, if a bit jank at times. On top of that - a great deal of Meta's XR research has been/is released to the public. We could do better...but we could do worse too.
Low-hanging fruit such as controller offsets have been incorrectly specified and remained incorrectly specified for years. Input latency and prediction are unacceptably high and/or incorrectly implemented by at least one game engine, in a way that screws up certain motion vectors unless you take some very much unspecified guesses about implementation and filter them appropriately.
I pray for the Khronos groups and members who are party to OpenXR to improve their support going forward, but it's going to require some risky bets on the part of game developers to adopt the APIs, and a lot of legwork from all stakeholders to tune and improve their platforms to something converging on acceptable. And where is Apple in this? Absolutely nowhere - so the platform convergence is guaranteed huge future divergence anyways.
So that explains that although there exists a standard platform that multiple hardware manufacturers can target - and have targeted - it has not yet achieved mainstream acceptance. It's just not good enough (yet), it's a pain in the ass to work with, it requires engine updates, and there's a high risk it will be majorly disrupted.
Additionally, it must be emphasized that there would be no VR market if not for the Quest 2; no other hardware platform has paved a way to a sustainable consumer ecosystem, from end to end: low priced hardware, high baseline quality of developer experience for something this early in its lifecycle (it bootstrapped developer experience based on very polished developer workflows), consistent install base to target and optimize for.
Without Facebook we might have gotten a consumer version of the DK2 for $350, instead of the $600 CV1, and we might have spend two or three years doing VR with Xbox gamepad instead of having to spend an additional $200 on Touch controller.
Hard to say if that would have succeeded, as early not-quite-6DOF VR certainly had issues, but low cost and accessible VR is what the whole VR hype from 2012 onward was build on. The two year delay and the $600 announcement destroyed that hype and reduced VR to a few hardcore fans. Going all exclusive with their store and not allowing other headsets in also fractured the already tiny market completely without need.
Quest2 momentarily got the price back down (since then increased by $100), but it still struggles quite a lot in getting the excitement back, as there isn't anything interesting happening on the content side. We don't have movies in VR, games are still all low budget indie stuff and there isn't much in terms of events in VR either, even Meta themselves still struggles broadcasting their own conferences as a proper VR event.
I don't see how. The DK2 was a prototype wholly inadequate for and unscalable to the mass market. The CV1 was legitimately expensive for Oculus to manufacture; the only reason it became affordable to manufacture was because Facebook had the funds to hire people with experience in optimizing manufacturing processes and reducing Bill of Materials (BOM) cost for the parts. If memory serves, one of the people hired after acquisition was ex-Lenovo, with expertise in specifically that.
The exclusivity was also not solely Oculus's fault; the acquisition by Facebook stung Valve rather hard (much of their tech and many of their employees ended up going to Facebook) and I believe there was a bidirectional hesitation to engage. My recollection is that there was a willingness to offer compatibility, and some compatibility libraries implemented, but there didn't appear to be a serious commitment overall to invest further in cross-compatibility from either party than what was already available.
I think OpenXR was an evolution past that, but without much real-world usages of it, it kind of sucked for a long time.
> We don't have movies in VR
People watch movies in VR all the time. There's BigScreen, which is legit, and there's also movie worlds in VRChat, which fly under the radar but are really awesome for social co-watching experiences. Though I hear you and agree that the big companies are lagging a bit behind in exploring and implementing good VR experiences and producing VR content with mass appeal.
DK1 shipped 56'334 units[1], DK2 shipped 118'930[2], CV1 shipped an estimated 547'000. That's really not far apart and CV1 was on the market for longer. DK2, or a slightly improved iteration of it, would have been very much serviceable as a mass market VR headset.
> The CV1 was legitimately expensive for Oculus to manufacture;
The BOM for CV1 was only around $200[3]. They did some unnecessary stuff to make it more expensive (wrap it in fabric), but fundamentally the CV1 was not a very expensive device. Not sure how they arrived at that $600 price, but that looked like they vastly overestimated how popular VR would be and tried to milk it for profit.
Meanwhile for a modern example, Pico4 has a BOM of around $348[4], while it's sold at 429€. That seems way more reasonably priced to break into the VR market.
> The exclusivity was also not solely Oculus's fault
They never provided anything to allow third parties into their ecosystem. Meanwhile Valve wrote the SteamVR driver so that Oculus headsets can be use in SteamVR. And the SteamVR/OpenVR runtime was open enough that anybody could write their own drivers or plugins for the ecosystem.
This issue isn't even limited to headset from other manufacturers, a lot of the video content on the Oculus platform wasn't accessible with Oculus's own headset, but limited specifically to their mobile headsets only. Compatibility to Oculus Go and Quest1 was also reduced or killed after the release of Quest2, despite the actual software being compatible (e.g. manually transferring .apks to Quest1 to play Resident Evil 4 works).
> People watch movies in VR all the time.
Bigscreen and VRChat exist despite Facebook, not because of it[5]. Anyway, I don't just mean watching old movies in VR, I mean actual made-for-VR movies. They had that with Oculus Story Studio, but they killed it and nothing really has replaced it. There are no new upcoming movies for VR. We don't even get Avatar2 in VR. With the amount of money Facebook has been spending I'd expect at least a VR-remastered version of Avatar2 premiering in VR. But we don't get that, if a want to see the latest movie, I still have to do that in a real cinema, not in a Metaverse cinema.
[1] https://www.roadtovr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/dk1-sold...
[2] https://www.roadtovr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/dk2-sold...
[3] https://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/95167-oculus-rift-co...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AR_MR_XR/comments/xzkyop/pico_4_vs_...
I don't get dizzy or have to stand up and move around to "sit down and veg out" on Xbox/PS/etc.
While I was playing ping pong I wished I had smart glasses that kept score of the game.
Tons of ideas that many to millions will find very cool and useful! I can see why Zuckerberg is betting the farm on smart glasses! I don't think Meta will create the next iPhone/smart glasses, but good for him on trying.
We're getting very close with products like Nreal Air.
Here’s some actual problems that are harder:
* while your eyes remain accommodated to focus on that distance, it no longer corresponds with the way they track objects close or far away, by pointing closer together etc
* lack of correspondence between movement on screen and in the real world (usually translation, rather than rotation which tracks head position) for non-roomscale content (i.e. games where you move around larger scenes) causes motion sickness.
I believe Nvidia demoed a solution for this at SIGGRAPH ~4 years back. Liquid lenses were employed to change the lenses focal length based on the content and user gaze.
If you give it another try I'd suggest games such as SuperHot, beat saber and pistol whip, as youre only controlling your camera perspective, which makes it much more tolerable.
But yeah, one frame drop and it's gonna feel like someone bashed your face in without leaving a bruise. My worst experience had me feeling unwell for several days after, just thinking about putting the headset on gave me a bad feeling.
I feel like this current version of VR is just a proof of concept, but i don't think it's going mainstream for gaming, ever. Controls are clunky at best compared to what you can do on a regular display, as everything else makes you nauseous
Shibata, Takashi, Joohwan Kim, David M. Hoffman, and Martin S. Banks. “Visual Discomfort with Stereo Displays: Effects of Viewing Distance and Direction of Vergence-Accommodation Conflict.” Proceedings of SPIE 7863 (February 15, 2011): 78630P-1-78630P – 9. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.872347.
Daniel, François, and Zoï Kapoula. “Induced Vergence-Accommodation Conflict Reduces Cognitive Performance in the Stroop Test.” Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (February 4, 2019): 1247. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37778-y.
Batmaz, Anil Ufuk, Mayra Donaji Barrera Machuca, Junwei Sun, and Wolfgang Stuerzlinger. “The Effect of the Vergence-Accommodation Conflict on Virtual Hand Pointing in Immersive Displays.” In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. CHI ’22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502067.
This is a well known problem, and there are quite a few potential solutions - Doug Lanman, the lead of Display Systems Research @ FRL made a bunch of nice presentations on a variety of different approaches a couple years ago (all on YouTube, well worth watching one [1] for anyone with a passing interest in the really cool developments going on).
While I think varifocal is going to be the near-term solution, I do have a soft spot for the various light field displays I've seen.
[1] EI 2020 Plenary: Quality Screen Time: Leveraging Computational Displays for Spatial Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwMAl9bGNY
Far from it. VR is just a new type of game. Regular display technology is too good now. From ultrawide to laser projection, to high density mobile screens, to folding screens... ALL getting better and cheaper. Above all, the friction and ergonomic shift of VR is too great to expect obsolescence to come knocking on regular gaming's door.
His idea for the mobile phone to be replaced with VR/AR is crazy. Phones are little hubs in our hands, with amazing cameras and nice screens for flicking through information with your finger. Agreeable ergonomics for our brains to absorb "chunks" of content or information, about the size of a phone up to tablet/A4 paper size. Something in our brains likes the compartmental properties of a page. Like since humans started reading and writing. The "size" of a virtual bubble or layered world floating in front of our faces, isn't tangible or agreeable enough for daily driving brain activity IMHO. Great for after hours fun though!
People say this but Amazon is doing just fine in the retail space.
In fact for Facebook and Amazon, their biggest follies are trying to own the platform (Metaverse and Fire Phone).
We have seen that owning a platform doesn’t mean owning everything and yet, perfectly good businesses waste a ton of time and money assuming that is the case.
One is called Alexa and the other is called Ring. At the same time Amazon is a website that doesn't rely as heavily on your phones privacy setting (which Apple is currently using to mine your data btw!)
Within the next 5 years I expect folks to be able to order things from their doorbells and Ring home security drones
What share of Amazon GMV do you think is purchased on either? We’ve had Alexa for a decade now, and forcing a user to walk to their porch isn’t going to be the thing that makes voice ordering work.
Notice how it's totally fine to buy goods in the Amazon app? You think that Amazon couldn't have used their leverage to make the same case for Kindle if they thought it was worth it?
I'm not saying there is no value to owning a platform, it's just not as extreme as people make it out to be.
If this was ever going to happen it would have already happened in the last (or is it still 'current'?) VR hype cycle. Maybe in the next cycle 15..20 years down the road or after some massive gaming crash it's worth another shot.
Maybe some people will use a VR set instead of a Wii U for activity / family games but thats it.
What VR is doing is it makes some genre of games a lot more attractive: Sim-racing and flight-sims. The cockpit games in VR are really immersive. Combine it with some good hardware (rig, stick, wheel, etc) and you feel like you're really in the car or plane.
Two examples I'd add: VTOL VR, somewhere closer to the Sim genre but simplified for VR controllers. I've played a few flight (combat) games before, but the combat is heart-pumping unlike anything else. Another more popular one is VRChat and similar, where there are desktop versions but you definitely feel like you're missing something without the VR aspect. Emoting, gesturing, and actually "touching" others in VR is easy. If you're in desktop mode, you're mostly limited to standing nearby and talking.
My best hope is that Facebook develops a lot of neat tech and then fumbles and fails, and finally exits the space, and in the vacuum companies like Samsung and others drop more general purpose platforms that allow freedom on the software side.
How would they do that though? The technology to pack the VR processing power of ~4k display per eye @ 90-120 Hz, cooling, power efficiency and big enough battery plus lens technology into a regular frame of glasses that doesn't look weird, is some Sci-Fi, Iron Man level technology, that just isn't here yet and it won't be for many years to come, if not decades, considering the slow down of Moore's law, and when it will be here, it will be prohibitively expensive.
Imagine the challenges of having to cram an RTX 4090 into a pair of Raybans and being able to run for hours on the battery of a smartwatch. We're very, very far away from that, probably decades of optics, semiconductor fabrication and battery chemistry advancements are needed before this reaches consumer tech and pricing.
Once Meta goes down and takes Oculus with it, we'll probably see another VR winter, until the tech improvements reach a level that makes it desirable again.
Every couple of the years we get lighter headesets, the marketing cycle that now the adopting is finally going to take off, and then crickets.
Until we get something like Star Treck's Holodeck, the cycle will continue.
AR is a vastly different beast as you need to move in the real world and receive sensory input from your device. People have been using Google Glass for over a decade and already have a feeling of what this entangles if you take just vision into account. To eliminate all awkwardness you'd basically need an advanced implant that wouldn't stand out - but I'm not sure anyone would want such a thing.
No, I don't think it does; if you look at history, VR has been around for a long time in different forms, think also Sony and Microsoft's console AR solutions. If you look at today, VR is available everywhere at console prices, but it's only a niche to the gaming market, an extra.
The BIG change in gaming in the past 10, 15 years, which Facebook has been partially responsible for, was actually scaling DOWN - think mobile games, simpler games like farmville on FB, etc. Nowadays, the hierarchy is mobile gaming > cynical live service games (lootboxes) > regular video games & consoles > indie games > VR (my opinion / take, I don't have sources because I'm too lazy to look them up).
But you're right about the other things, he definitely overestimated VR's impact on the world. 2015 was a year or two after Google Glass, which was the first major party to try AR as envisioned by Zucc - and it didn't work out for various reasons. A big one was social, but I can imagine the big tech companies figured that society needs a bit more time, like they did with mobile and later smartphones.
I can't see always-on HUD work just yet, society doesn't want that. Nobody wants to have a conversation with someone only for their eyes to go elsewhere because a notification is coming in. Although on the other hand, people will probably talk to someone and see them looking at their phone / watch while talking to them.
You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses. It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. And, he is correct, it needs to have apps so compelling that people find hard to participate in society without one.
It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035.
One potential play is a joint venture with Apple, unpalatable yes, but they are the only other large scale consumer electronics company with the EEs and hardware talent needed to execute this. I doubt even the military and government research labs can do a better job.
20 years of mobile phone development gave us things that we could barely have imagined back in 2000 or so.
I'd argue that there are many, many puzzle pieces still needed to begin imagining an AR future. While the Newton showed an incomplete vision of its future, it begged all the right questions. My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
This feels like the similar kind of problems of understanding how to accommodate the human into the platform. Early mobile platforms were just "desktop, but smaller". You were expected to interact with the device using a stylus. Small checkboxes and UI elements were common. The device needed to regularly tether to a desktop.
Lots of VR games still allow you to move/rotate using thumbsticks. Part of it is that these games are ports of desktop experiences that wouldn't work any other way. Over time developers will better understand what works and what doesn't, and will design games/apps that don't make you nauseous.
There's also likely a bunch of vision problems that still need to be worked through. I have no expertise in VR but with my limited usage it feels quite close, and I think these problems are not insurmountable.
From the top of my head I can think of GURPS, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk all imagining very thoroughly things that both Mobile and VR gave or can give us, just to mention games that have been highly influential to the generation of people working on these technologies.
There are also loads of books, Asimov’s works have probably been the most influential, almost prophetically, in the creation of today’s Information era.
All we had to do is keep putting different stuff in the box.
What if we changed the rules altogether? Suppose we demanded a phone that was a slab of glass. Literally. A rectangle of glass that you could see through. No visible antennae, no visible battery, no visible circuitry. when you activated it, you saw the same hi res and bright screen you see today on your ios or android device. Now the battery has to be clear. The antennae have to be clear. All the circuitry have to be clear.
Could we get that in the 20 years from 2002 to 2022? Probably not.
And AR glasses would represent a leap that goes even further than that. I'm not saying it can't be done by 2035. I'm saying they would have to get extraordinarily lucky with battery chemistry and display tech to have any chance of making an AR glasses product that did not have serious drawbacks by that date. They'd have to get so lucky that I would feel comfortable betting against it.
I'd argue most enabling changes exclusive to mobile have come from video, which was already a concept, location, which was already a concept, real-time status (which is mainly Twitter and Twitter-likes) and bandwidth. The 'killer feature' at the outset being syncing music and a web browser with sufficient adoption to make saying no to IE 6's vision of the web, and Flash, viable.
But I'm keen to know what was barely imagined back in 2000. Is it shift to mobile devices for a consumption?
Cramming a Raspberry Pi worth of computing power and battery into the glasses frame doesn't seem nuts for 20 years of development.
I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003. By 2009 I had a device in my pocket that could almost replace my PC at both work and home and didn't spy on everything I did. In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device that constantly sends data back to the mothership.
While unlikely it is certainly possible that hardware will advance to meet the need but the problem lies in how we do consumer software now. Because the hardware isn't the real product anymore predicting how it will develop gets much sketchier.
Either way, imagining that one change means another is possible or likely is silly.
> I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003
For all intents and purposes, the first ‘smartphone’ didn’t exist until the iPhone existed. How do I know? Because essentially every smartphone on the market today looks like an iPhone.
> In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device
This is what millions (billions?) of people want even if it’s not what you want.
Unlike-in-quality is the same thing, only better. It rarely changes the world, because it's not an infinite value proposition.
Unlike-in-capability, on the other hand, is offering something that literally didn't exist before. It approaches infinite value, because it has the capability to reshape the world into one that requires its existence.
Mobile internet was unlike-in-capability.
I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality.
Maybe the only thing that gets me there is persistence, but the rub of that is that its requirements all require bulky physical configuration and/or isolation.
At its worst, earliest form, a brick cell phone was still portable, and didn't isolate the user from the world around them.
I just think that making the hardware is the toughest challenge. Zuck might be underestimating hardware progress.
If he is right, godspeed, future would be amazing. If not, we'll have net positive experiment out of this and it will accelerate AR/VR hardware dev.
Have you actually tried it? VR in particular demos poorly for people where most of their experience with VR is Google Cardboard. Even VR systems from 5 years ago are dated. You have to try it, especially some notable non-gaming apps
--Carl Sagan
I could see criticizing Mark for betting the entire farm on it.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of other issues for every day wear. (I wear contacts for vision correction because I find glasses very annoying).
It also has to be impossible for failure of the hinges to lead to damage of the electronic components. I've lost multiple laptops to hinges twisting in ways that they shouldn't have and fracturing the motherboard or keyboard, and that's in a form factor that gets much less abuse than glasses.
citation needed. For me, it's the scratches and the surface issues. Even though I have no problem taking care of my regular glasses for years, most of my sunglasses become unusable and hard to see through from deteriorating surface and scratches after 6-10 months. No matter if I get $30 or $300 ones.
With regard to AR glasses, I would put the expensive part in my pocket like a phone, and the glasses would be just like the wireless earbuds, easily disposable / replaceable.
If they had some tint and UV protection and I would consider using them as shades.
update: I talked myself in looking at the hardware store website and my next sunglasses will be be some 3M safety glasses with a dark tint and uv. And less than $20.
edit To be clear, I don't think we're anywhere near having cheap AR glasses that can just delegate all the work - rather I think there's so much compute that's necessary, we need the combination of what we can fit onboard the glasses and in our phones to make a compelling product.
This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are...
In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
This is a side project. Something to make sure FB has a foot in the game for when the technologies make "it all" (whatever that is) possible.
Part of me wonders if this is a decoy - look over here! While I do something useful elsewhere.
Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.
I want this meeting to have higher immersion representations of the rest of the people in the meeting than boxes on a screen. I want to be able to shift my view to focus more on individuals. I want to be able to have a meeting with 40 people where I could still focus on a single person and see them with high-fidelity, instead of just having 20 of the boxes at low-res in front of me, with the rest off-screen. I want less eyestrain because I'm not just staring at a flat wall but my eyes are moving and shifting and re-focusing more. I want to have depth to things. I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody. All things I could do in the real world, but would be very hard to make seamless without a real-world interaction model.
Again, we clearly aren't there yet. But it's easy to imagine something better than what we have today.
>I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody.
None of this requires VR and is available in, for example, Jitsi video chats.
> How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
My best guess of what this would look like would be much closer to glasses than a full headset (no "sticking" to the face) with very good ultra-wide cameras + image processing to capture your face and upper body language at the same time. Maybe toss in a desktop-mounted webcam too. Not 100% immersed/blackout, but quite possibly good enough to be better than a flat monitor with also isn't 100% of your FOV.
Besides the fact that only 50 people are in the Metaverse right now? Literally nobody is using VR for meetings and work and stuff. Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions. At least with a video call I can see your face and you can see mine. VR? it's just voice chat with a stupid headset.
> There is no reason they cannot be solved.
Explain?
How many people visit the metaverse multiple times per day?
What percent of the population spends hours per day in a VR headset?
The answer to those questions needs to be much better than "miniscule" for this project to be any sort of success.
I think you're wrong.
From this[1] great essay about mainframes:
> Ultimately, there are only two natural kinds of computers: embedded systems and mainframes.
And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
Of course, not all tasks are suitable to be done on a phone or a watch. But one way to think of VR is a desk setup with huge monitors that happens to be extremely portable. Of course the promise of VR is much greater than that, but that is a pretty important use case - a use case that would obviate the need for laptops and desktops for many if not most tasks.
---
1. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
2. This isn't to say that the shift has been complete at all. Many people, including me, continue to use a desktop setup. And laptop use is still quite strong. But the derivative is ultimately what matters.
Pretty big problems - I don't really have any argument either way on how solvable they are in 5-10 years, but I really think the implication that people dislike the concept of working in VR itself is misguided.
Have you ever tried to work in VR? It's not amazing at all, my Quest 2 (which has reasonably high resolution per modern headset standard) just can't render clearly enough for me to use VSCode. I tried it and it was just not there yet. Double the pixel density and you would have something I would consider using.
I'm not necessarily convinced that we'll do all of our meetings in VR ever, but it's reasonable to say that tech still has a way to go before I'd call it as "VR is the issue".
For sale to consumer VR headsets have been available commercially for about 35 years. Is it really reasonable to call a consumer tech product category that's been around for 35 years "early" or "nascent"? Look at something like the EyePhone (yes, that was its name). How is that not the very same product category as a modern VR HMD? Of course a modern HMD is better, but not fundamentally a new category of device. This shit is ancient by tech standards. It's had almost 4 decades to evolve since its consumer debut.
One of these shifts is not like the other. The laptop can, in principle, do everything the desktop can. The speakers and mousepad are kind of limited, but peripherals erase this barrier too. A phone simply doesn't have the text input rate of a keyboard, which I'm feeling intimately right now as I tap out this comment with my right thumb. Strap a keyboard to the phone, now the screen is too far away. It might as well be a laptop.
You can run a business on laptops. Currently, businesses still use desktops mostly because they're still significantly cheaper at equivalent performance (and maybe harder to steal). But on phones? That's nowhere near practical. The keyboard has yet to be disrupted; voice input is antisocial unless you have your own office.
You lose so many cues, tells and deep interactions that you get with a physical presence via video call. I have seen VR start to solve some of these and I think it will be pretty big if we get to the point where the cartoony graphics are ditched.
The quest pro just added expression tracking as well so now you have body language and normal emotional expressions. Wayyyyyyy more natural feeling than video chats, even if I'm seeing an avatar of someone and not their actual face.
Why? You don't have to transport VR. VR is the complement to mobile phones: mobile phones are used when you leave home, VR is used when you don't leave home.
The big question is: Are people going to leave home or are they going to stay home?
My guess is that it depends on how much energy is available. If there is no infrastructure worth visiting for billions of people, then VR will become a success.
>It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one.
If work happens in VR, then employer will finance the hardware for their employees.
Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!)
And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform.
Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Oculus.
I will only reluctantly try again a VR headset; this is unfortunately not the kind of sickness you forget.
I think the hope was that some combination of hardware and software would solve the problem.
I am skeptical we can get hardware fast enough such that these systems don't trigger a false positive for all people.
Having said that I'd agree network effects for personal uptake are killed by "Just spend 3x as much on the headset and peripherals and have a computer that cost 4x as much and you can use it in a dedicated room you've set up your tracking lighthouses in".
You raise excellent points and it’s plain to see that John’s work has put him at the fore of violent masculine tropes as entertainment. The whole idea of endless slaughter of “evil” humanoids feels a bit more wrong than it used to, and certainly wouldn’t be the mark I want to leave in the world. I’m not calling him an infamous misogynist, but he’s no infamous feminist either. I hope that people keep holding people to account, and I hope for their sakes they don’t intend on leaving behind 15%+ of their market simply due to malicious or incidental ignorance. I hope a lot of things for them though lol.
I did some brief fact checking for this and came across an ancient 4chan screenshot. I debated sharing it but I think it’s good evidence that these discussion has been in the public conscience for a long time:
Research confirms your concern:
https://venturebeat.com/games/a-survey-about-vr-sickness-and...
If some make decision maker forced an organization to adopt VR and it’s women found it unusable, I would think that ADA would be a route through which there should be grounds for protections and accomplishments.
Frankly, it’s not fully fixed, and it might not be fixable. Our bodies are far more clever than the gods of gaming have presumed. We do proprioception with our toes and ears and sense our surroundings with the tiny hairs on our arms. As long as VR creates dissonance for processing info from the nervous system the more the cerebellum starts to get cranky, and tipsy.
First of all, Wolfenstein 3D, which used Carmack's engine, predated Doom by a year, but even Wolf3D wasn't the first 3D game or 3D engine. Activision's 1991 Hunter and Mindscapes's 1988 Colony both had very similar graphics and play as Wolf3D. 3D gaming and FPS goes back at least to Atari's 1980 BattleZone, but most place FPS origin with Maze in 1973.[1]
Second of all, by my count, Carmack developed (or also worked on) six distinct 3D game engines. There are an awful lot of 3D game engines now, well over 100 listed here.[3] I think by "shockingly large percentage," you must have instead meant, "small percentage." Maybe Carmack holds the world record for most 3D engines developed by one individual, but it could never be a "shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines," even with id's OSS releases and subsequent variants.
You're quite right, especially relative to what I had stated. Its just that the impact of John's decision to GPL Doom and Quake engines gave rise to a tremendous ecosystem that many people don't realize. For instance, GoldSrc which forked Quake is the foundation for the Source and Source 2 engines which power at least 60% of all hours played on Valve in the last 30 days. https://steamcharts.com/top
His patterns have been wildly studied and reused. The word I did use carefully is progenitor. Id engine's direct impact is relatively small, but its legacy is vast.
- size
- weight
- battery life
- heat
- network reliability
- cost
These were all eventually overcome, incrementally. However, it did take about 30 years for that to happen, so 10 may have been a bit optimistic.
The first AR glasses will be close to dummy terminals. For them to become feasible, wireless networking infrastructure has to become low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput – but not necessarily ubiquitous. There's no need to have powerful compute in a small form-factor if that can be outsourced to nearby servers, and this is something that could be possible in the confines of a major city, and the hardware would be rolled out much like another mobile carrier.
However, this email on strategy is an example of something I haven't seen in any startup I have ever worked at. Usually the information is available in pieces in various places, PRD's, value statements, mission statements, whatever.
The pessimist in me also believes that most of the people I have worked with wouldn't even take the time to read such an email.
Anyway, all of this to say, I appreciate that it leaked and learned that there are people communicating in a way I wish companies I had worked for communicated.
Where is the end user? Where’s is the joy? Where is the reason why people are going to love this technology? Where is the practical example?
Instead it’s all business, but that business is worthless if you don’t start with the reason people want to use, embrace and even love your product or service.
What problems does VR/AR solve that would want to make one wear an AR headset all of the time? Why do I want to wear one while changing my daughters diaper, or walking my dog after work? I see no problems that it solves.
Edit: In addtiton it's amazing how early he identified his business weaknesses (platforms dependency and lack of innovation) yet decided to solve them in such a strange if not wrong, at least very risky way. How all those investments in AR/VR would improve innovation problems in the core business? Apple is able to innovate in his core business so it's not a company size or age problem. Instagram, whatsapp, snap and tiktok are all proofs that there's room for innovation in facebook family of apps. Moreover if you already struggle with innovation and your growth comes from the network effect of your platforms is it really a good idea to bet on such ambitious projects?
Ask yourself where you were in 2015 and see if you can get their take on VR or AR. For me it felt like magic. Like using an iPhone for the first time. Yes, VR and AR is absolutely the future. But social communication and media communication is just a myopic view on what the possibilities are! Interactive consumption is / was where it is at. A hybrid of games + educational experience was for me the quintessential experience a la Assassin’s Creed meets walking simulator.
I would love to just learn about places where I go passively with AR. I’d love to meet people and have fun stories shared via AR (as I proof read this, I’m not so sure about this but there’s potential).
Facebook absolutely should have built the platform first and if they did that developers would have come to build the apps. I’m surprised with 40k to 80k on staff they weren’t able make much headway into this until the past year.
Somewhat relatedly, did Zuck really write these emails in 2015? The color of the text for the date is highlighted weird. I’m surprised that the chat bot effort happened after this email. Perhaps, he figured chat bots would be a gateway to AR?
I think Zuck was focused too much on the control Apple and Google have on the average person’s eyeballs / pocket and on Facebook itself. The Facebook phone was an obvious attempt at trying to pry loose but they should have just kept at it. They could have built a Google Daydream like experience around their own Facebook phone.
All for the best I guess. I’m glad Facebook is failing. They have harmed more relationships with their algorithms imo than helped keep them together. The world might have been a better place if Facebook’s feed wasn’t trying to be so “engaging”.
It won't go down this way. Wikipedia for AR will never happen. More likely it'll be thousands of ads and other crap.
The previous two computing revolutions "personal computers" and "apps/websites" were enabled by the openness of the OS and the openness of TCP/IP and browser vendors, respectively. If the next "AR/VR" revolution depends on complex vision models, there's no guarantee they'll be open for independent devs. And judging by the last few years, it's highly likely they won't be.
BTW I think there's good reason they don't release GPT-3 or DALL-E or PaLM or whatever. That shit is dangerous.
Edit: ok you can hack the hardware to let you run the models or make the necessary network calls to run them. That's still way different than Wikipedia which is a first class webapp where you don't have to hack anything to use it.
Thompson was high up on the Microsoft / Meta VR deal.
IMO Zuck has a great grasp of the trajectory of VR/AR in 2015. Meta is singlehandedly trying to will it into a common place. To some extent, they had succeeded way more than a lot of other commenters give them credits for. VR is way far prevalent than it was 2-3 years ago.
Oculus Quest 2 certainly wasn't driving the instant paradigm shift like the introduction of an iPhone in 2007 (15 or so years ago). Though you'd argue that precursors to iPhones were WAP phones, Blackberry's. They laid the ground work (Blackberry was also an enterprise-first adoption). As an interface, handheld devices are much closer to our familiarity with PC so the jump wasn't huge. Plus it has a killer use case -- everyone needs a phone.
I am very impressed by the clear vision in 2015 that we're still seeing it play out in front of our eyes in the VR/AR/Mixed Reality space. What hasn't happened or wasn't mentioned the killer use case -- the utility why people would need to be in VR/AR/XR mode.
The web and smartphone landscape in 50 years might very well look quite similar to what we have today. VR will remain a niche and most people will carry around a smartphone with even more capabilities.
I'm dubious that VR will ever be much more than a game platform. Certainly not a substitute for physical life.
Things you can't do in VR:
- have a normal tactile response to objects
- feel the acceleration of a vehicle
- feel the warmth of a fire
- eat a good meal
- eat a good meal with friends
- buy a coffee and get a buzz
- enjoy the smell of caramelizing onions
- get a lifesaving surgery
- have sex
- feel a comforting arm on your shoulder
- do something intricate with your hands and fingers, like carving something into a piece of wood with a nail; even picking up the nail in VR will be hard, let alone the subtle movements, grips and holds, and tactile feedback we take for granted
- experience nature, animals, ecosystems, and interact with them (as they really are, not cutesy programmed versions)
Let's be honest, they're totally gonna make AR glasses that deep-fakes your wife into your favorite waifu while you have sex.
This is wrong, I know of a project where you sit in the backseat of a car, put a VR headset on that's connected to the car. There is a driver and you are on a special track in real life. Acceleration is real, but on the VR thingy you are elsewhere. Not sure if it was ever released.
I would think our brains trying to maintain a virtual and physical reality at once for any length of time must get quite stressful. The virtual environment will be first to go (yes even augmented reality).
People want to still be connected to 'reality' and Mark's virtual goals create too much friction with reality for the sake of his geeky wet dream, at least to meet his scale for success.
In a really well executed dystopian future, the AR glasses and headphones should not even exist and the thoughts should directly be injected in your brain.
You implant yourself a chip like Neuralink and Neuralink sends you electric impulses that gives you answers.
And then, Facebook and Google can directly read your mind and inject you ads.
Of course, they are going to respect your privacy "your thoughts never leave your local device" (except in the case of terrorism, and other related thoughts).
You are hungry, Google knows it, and suggests you a place to eat.
What a lovely future.
People spend hours and hours playing world of warcraft. A better version of that would be even more popular.
I don't want to dismiss this possibility based on these still very early days, but look at how the current early-adopter implementation of the Metaverse has been perceived so far - "influencers" have no mercy on it, due to the sheer amount of bugs and weirdness of e.g. having to pay to applaud someone virtually..
I think perhaps WoW would fail in the same way with VR, where people start to realise the time spent in it really is more like work after a point.
Here is the biggest flaw in my opinion: VR/AR is presented as the future of computing without questions.
This is so obvious that this assumption should be questioned from many angles.
Aside from this, in my opinion, such a large company should NEVER show a product that is not convincing. Keep it in the labs until it's good or at least cool enough for a demo like Boston Dynamics is doing.
It has...
Nonetheless, it's quite eye opening to read the strategy so openly laid out. And in some ways quite a testimony to Zuckerberg that other than obviously failing to acquire Unity (why?) they have essentially executed on all the other elements of that plan consistently now for 7 years straight.
Most people have reached their mental connection quota today, and doesn't want more. It could be fancy, seamless, and at the same time nobody cares.
It's not 20 years ago where I'd read a shampoo bottle out of boredom.
I totally forgot about this, but damn I did that regularly as well.
I wonder why Unity didn't agree to be acquired. Say what you want about Meta they were pretty good at acquiring companies.
this thinking is colossally misguided. People bought more laptops than desktops because they are less intrusive with real life. They bought even more phones because they are even less intrusive. A VR set is 100% obstructive , so it doesnt fit this category. it is something you use when you can "depart from real life". If something like that is the goal, the nearest thing was something like google glasses. it would have to be very useful for people to tolerate wearing glasses practically all the time (You wouldnt want to be carrying the glasses on hand).
The form factor of a phone is that of a book or notebook, and that has been favored by people for thousands of years because our hands are expressive. glasses are generally a nuissance that is tolerated because of vision issues. If the goal is really immersion with real life, it seems that neural interfaces a more likely candidate and that s the direction they should be going (or at least make something more mobile than mobile)
Frankly, it is the only wristwatch i need
I can't understand why you wouldn't want to be able to wear a perfectly normal pair of glasses that have the additional feature that you can pull up your phone screen at any moment without actually getting it out of your pocket.
The key insight is that the device will be off most of the time.
I love traveling, and I'm fully WFH, so I can technically travel 365 days of the year, but the lack of a monitor basically makes it impossible to get anything done. My 15" macbook simply isn't enough.
It's kinda gotten to the point where I only do roadtrips around California so I can throw a monitor in the back of my car. If instead of dragging around a monitor with me, I can throw a headset that is as good (resolution, battery life, latency, etc), this would be something I'd be willing to easily pay thousands for.
I have a quest 2, so i know how far we are from this in terms of resolution, latency, comfort, battery life, but, figured I'd throw this comment in.
it supports both that he's a crazy zealot driving Facebook off a cliff, but also that he's a visionary because exactly the things he was worried about and foretold are coming true. Ironically, the worse Facebook does financially the more vindicated he is. Which version you choose to believe is probably highly dependent on your own prior subjective opinions, as both are plausible.
He’s going on and on about immersive AR/VR experiences. But TikTok wrecked that vision by proving people wanted freedom FROM choice. They wanted and want LESS social - just send content to me that you know I want.
Zuck missed it and now he’s playing catch-up because he smartly bought Instagram but couldn’t buy his destroyer.
You’re also missing that TikTok’s parent company also has a VR headset that is very similar to meta’s headset
I'd really love to know what "other physical objects" Zuckerberg has in mind here.
The idea of a large, shared environment as a platform for heterogeneous development seems to have never occurred to him. No vision.
There’s also work that was publically discussed about getting real “AR in your glasses” by Meta. The technology is just more far out.
Private conversations with people only you know. And everyone else in the room is having theirs at the same time.
I can be making a table in my woodshop. I can have three friends watching from a half world away, giving me feedback or even safety tips. They're my closest circle. They're my family. We're always there. Wake up, first thought is "who's awake? keep me company while I get coffee".
What happens to what we call families right now, when they are further away than the ones living in our thoughts?
Could this be a kintsugi moment for social networking? That the lonely amongst us can find a tribe of real humans, to quash the qualm, to salve the screaming silence? Or does it dig deeper the divide?
The army has a 40 foot dome that they project images onto to train soldiers to use Stinger missiles. Some friends of mine did an art project where you go into a "time blender" which directs you into six different rooms with different experiences, the "time blender" they built wasn't up to the standard of the rooms so I am thinking of how to make a mini version of that dome.
I have been talking for a year about projecting a video game character as a Pepper's Ghost and doing a sketch comedy routine with it, I really have to get off my ass and do it (maybe make a little pepper's ghost fairy) even if it's almost impossible for a schizoid like me to be consistently funny.
Edicts and objectives come down from on high, but how does the top of mount meta, brain that it aspires to be, detect what the tips of the fingers are touching? A lattice of KPI's, gantt charts, and managers sewn together into a ghoulish nervous system, each link holding a knife to the throat of the next. None of this apparatus has many tools evaluating the quality and intensity that someone is curiously relaxed.
If you force the tools to try and perform this task, you end up sending daily emails asking people to report their current level of relation and curiosity, but in a way that obfuscates what you're asking. This is so you can stack rank them based on how relaxed and curious they are. So when you fire those who are the least relaxed and curious the aggregate measure bubbles up and you can be an industry leader at these things.
The fuel for the fire extinguishes it.
I don't think VR would improve on this use case, especially for the mass market of "casual" FB users. AR could be useful however, for more of a "contextual" help while actually doing RL.
In any event, I may be too old but the failing of VR in my mind is that it further isolates us from nature, from reality. The successfully future tech should be tech that disappears, allowing us to once again reconvene with nature. I don't want the Matrix or the Holodeck all day long.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/11/23397251/meta-microsoft-...
I think that strategy would have had a better chance of success.
The real metaverse is action MMO and that can run on a 5W Raspberry 4 at low resolutions.
Nope. You don't know anything about it, and have no experience with manufacturing. The truth is, you should get the money you can out of your firm and wind it down.
You could try to buy a refrigerator business of course, but would you be a competent owner? What you know is shipping ice.
None of the executives at Facebook knew anything about making a good VR social experience. They seem to have created an expensive failure, and that isn't a surprising result. They do know a lot about content moderation, and from what I can tell, that part was extremely well thought out.
This email had me somewhat upset until I remembered that Meta is floundering and failing badly. It seems self-evident to Zuckerberg that broadly-adopted AR/VR would be an automatic positive for humanity. I can't imagine a world in which AR/VR is a positive. I don't see any reason for VR/AR to be seen a positive development.
During the pandemic, VRChat let me reconnect with friends that I hadn't seen in person for 1-2 years. Combined with body tracking modules (so you can walk around fluidly), the experience can be extremely immersive, like you're in the same room with someone.
When I upgraded to a Valve Index and gave my older headset to my roommate, he later mentioned that VRChat and the social experiences he had on there saved him from a deep depression brought on by isolation during the pandemic.
I'd consider that an extremely positive experience.
And more broadly, the majority of the world population uses some kind of internet communication and many of them would probably use a higher-fidelity version if it became available. To give an example from a more mature technology, the share of internet communication happening over video increases each year (this trend predates the pandemic).
Personally, I’ve found that VR takes away a lot of the awkward downsides of Zoom socializing. I’m pretty optimistic it’ll be popular when it matures.
AR on the other hand, could become more ubiquitous in that sense, if it can be worn casually and be looking "cool" enough to not warrant weird/dorky looks. But time will tell, I guess.
even without the issues around biometric data and privacy, sitting inside with lights strapped to your eyeballs is not healthier than doing something with people in real life.
there will be specific applications where VR makes new things possible and better, but as a household entertainment device i think it'll be terrible.
Unfortunately, teens would be the most vulnerable to adopting this though. But I can't imagine this being anything but another "temporarily popular" thing that will get boring quickly.
i talk with friends in other states daily on discord and it doesnt hold a candle to how much more fun we have when we get together.
i see value in brief moments for VR experience but beyond those it just seems half asses and tacky
With that said, even the iPad was sort of a goofy device that everyone dismissed initially (iirc). It's hard to imagine the same thing with AR/VR communication though, given the currently known tech limitations and just the sheer dorkiness and/or cumbersomeness of wearing an external device that doesn't look like regular glasses (which are also already perceived as dorky).
In addition, for VR there's always this question of "where do we use it?" I stopped using mine because (despite having a sufficiently large space) I kept hitting my furniture or barely missing the TV. I don't think this problem is solvable with technology, and not many people can afford large enough spaces to address this. AR is a different story though.
I think they should follow the approach of beachhead markets if they want to prove it could be useful. If it can't be widely adopted even by a niche audience atm, then there's little hope for mass adoption/usefulness. Microsoft is a good example of that - they are/were trying to position the AR headset as a workplace device first and foremost, and even that seems yet to be widely adopted within its market. But figuring out the right initial market takes time.
If we’re looking at the big picture, mature VR/AR will help suppress social unrest. It will help with other issues like the scarcity of physical space.
- Treat photosensitive epilepsy by filtering incoming visual stimuli
- Improve vision for cases not treatable with typical lenses
- Use eye-tracking to assist with communication for people with various disabilities
- Teleoperate robots in dangerous conditions
- Perform live translation with AR subtitles
- Learn everything there is to know about anything you look at - plants, animals, places, things
- Block ads/brands in real life
- Enhance learning of instrument/sport/activity
- Record and re-experience major life events in 3d space
- Communicate with true telepresence
For a positive example, I’d like to meet or chat with coworkers and management full-VR/AR when they are in the other office or city. Because text is still a pretty low-bandwidth medium for many people and/or topics.
Anticiating the next question, yes, I find in-person bandwidth (usually, as in popular software) superior to webcam.
^ This could be done in non-VR apps too, but convincing IMs to make UI for that is even less real than creating VR glasses.
- It could provide first responders with live HUDs analyzing the environment
- The hard-of-hearing could use it to literally provide subtitles for real life. Live translations in general can break down language barriers.
- It can provide useful context about objects around you, or even magnify them in real life.
Is this a side effect of the control structure he wields over the organization, therefore he doesn't actually need to build consensus towards a common goal? It seems to fall into a weird in-between communication style - not quite elevator pitch, not quite status update.
I'm honestly confused why/how a major CEO communicates in this way.
Like... okay? There's nothing particularly strategically interesting there.
Is it a work of art? No. But he got his point across to me rather clearly.
For context, I have a degree in mathematics. It certainly mirrors the informal-but-precise language you see in the field. Maybe that's why it was effective for me.