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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

You can really understand here that Zuckerberg really understands his business. He knew in 2015, that if Facebook didn't have a platform it controlled, it would suffer down the line. We are almost a decade out, but what he predicted has come to pass and Apple is now squeezing the juice out of Meta.

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.

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> If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.

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.

What does “EEE” mean in this context? End to end?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - the Microsoft strategy (per their internal documents) towards anything it didn't control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

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.

coughGITHUBcough

I'm terribly sorry, I could not resist.

eg Inter-repo forks existed prior to the acquisition though.

See: WSL

What's the EEE-strategy behind WSL?

yeah, i'm curious about this too. i've spoken to many high level folks in MSR (microsoft research) and they're all massive proponents of open-source software and unix and are as excited as i am about being able to open a 'native-ish' *nix terminal and do work.

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. :)

The challenge Microsoft faces now is that "embrace" is actually a great thing, but now some people will always assume an ulterior motive.

> 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 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".

>needing physical cables tethered to a separate console you need to buy

That's an opinion, yet you present it as a fact.

It is a fact that Sony's VR headset needs a cable tether. Where's the opinion here?

Clipped quote wrong. I was ment to include that part too: " is just a no-go in 2022 VR technology."

It is a no-go for VR consumers in 2022. How many do you know in the market for a cabled VR headset? It's a huge step back for VR tech.

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?

> Other players did go against Meta/Oculus and their VR products were abysmal in comparison.

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.

As a VR dev, the field would be barren in that future, but for entirely different reasons.

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.

> no other hardware platform has paved a way to a sustainable consumer ecosystem, from end to end: low priced hardware

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.

> 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.

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.

> The DK2 was a prototype wholly inadequate for and unscalable to the mass market.

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_...

[5] https://nitter.net/dshankar/status/1295825811748999173

The problem isn't the amount of money either. It's that their product is bad.

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.

you're looking at the wrong thing - it's the platform that meta wants, not the "product" they demonstrated (that looks childish from your POV).

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.

“ federated and compatible, and open.”

So - who’s doing it?

why is the internet federated, compatible (with all sorts of clients) and open? Who did it?

I didn’t ask rhetorically. I was hopeful. A open internet was the better option. With VR/AR, we might need a strong shove toward robust interconnectivity.

Academics funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) of the U.S. Department of Defense? UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, Doug Engelbart at SRI International, a non-profit scientific research institute..

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.

The internet was created my the us government to ensure that communication packets could be sent to receivers even if entire cities were destroyed by atomic weapons. This is the original purpose of ARPANet

Quest is just hardware though. I use mine almost exclusively to play SteamVR games. If they want to own the platform they need to be the VR marketplace.

For what it's worth, I think you're both partly wrong and partly right. From the letter:

> 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.

>it's the platform that meta wants, not the "product" they demonstrated (that looks childish from your POV).

you need the exceptional content to kickstart a platform. steam doesn't work without half life 2.

Battery life is terrible from what I've read, only a few hours of use?

That's not any different from the other Quest headsets or anything else for that matter. Show me a VR headset that can run 8 hours on a charge.

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 sometimes wonder if Zuck has ever read a novel or watched a movie because one way he is tone deaf is not understanding the possibilities of fiction.

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.

People still do play first person shooters (and other first person games) plenty. And in modern ones, you can generally look down and see your character's body etc.

The new Call of Duty game literally made 800M in one weekend

I think his point still stands though. I enjoy FPS games because the gameplay is fun, but not with any sense of being immersed by the first person view. VR may very well replace the FPS, but that’s just one type of game.

Thing is, if first-person VR is more immersive than everything else, you'll start seeing more first-person games in other genres, not just shooters.

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.

> I sometimes wonder if Zuck has ever read a novel or watched a movie because one way he is tone deaf is not understanding the possibilities of fiction.

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.

I personally hate first person view, but:

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

Wait you’re entire point is that people don’t like or play FPS? What?

No, I think 3rd person is much bigger.

You are clearly mistaking a personal preference for an objective statistic.

you can do 3rd person cams in VR too. they seem to work fine. they play much like regular non VR games but with some added depth.

A game whose popularity & longevity has become a cliché, Skyrim, is usually played in 1st person. Myst & Doom were both known for their ability to engage players in a flow state in their heyday. I take your point about narrative, but I think first-person games are giving players a different experience -- agency & flow -- compared to the identification you experience in a 3rd-person game.

I'm still very unconvinced that gaming is going to be the thing that drives VR adoption. I think primarily social apps will dominate VR in the future and secondarily experiences that you can't have anywhere else like experiencing a nuclear explosion https://youtu.be/pfTCHHy_ukY?t=85

> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.

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.

100% agree on Zuckerberg really understanding Facebook and where it needed to go.

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 is stopping him to acquire Unity now? everything is on sale at the moment: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U

The government, most likely. They’ve blocked other Meta acquisitions.

This may be the silver lining of the market cap evaporation for Meta. It is harder to argue that it is an all powerful monopoly now vs in 2021.

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.

It merged with ironsource this year (and closed a few days ago). Considering the Unity board rejected other offers (even one from an ironsource competitor that was offering a significant premium), I think this ship has sailed.

why couldn't they buy Unity?

I haven't heard anything publicly. We can't even know how hard they tried.

For years I have wondered why all the big names pushed Unity in favor of Unreal Engine. Even before UE5 and before Fortnite, UE4 had better tech. than Unity.

Fortnite is the Metaverse currently.

I've used Unity and I'm still working on a solodev VR game with it. Unity has a lot of areas where it could improve. Meta seriously could have developed their own engine. With truly passionate people they could've used their capital to elevate an ECS engine like Bevy

That is so true, I really wish they had just given Carmack a hardcore team of graphics programmers and an infinite supply of diet coke and pizza and told him to go nuts.

They certainly could have, and would have been better off for it! The strategy they laid out was to acqui-purchase one, and I guess having nothing to show for it is the risk they undertook.

Buying Unity would have been a huge mistake. They should keep their focus on their core competency which is handling lots of concurrent users and providing an identity system. Let people use whatever engine they want to develop VR apps.

He outlined why it wouldn't have been a big mistake, and I can't see any disagreement with any of his points on that matter. Without owning an on-road to their platform, they run the risk of developers losing access to it.

Could replace the laptop. If we can get unlimited virtual screens and accurate enough hand tracking to replace the keyboard, I could see people carrying the headset around instead.

I think thats what Mark is saying in this. VR/AR could eventually replace: Desktops, laptops, TV, AND cell phones. Thats a lot of stuff. Literally owning eyeballs.

Right but I'm saying that regardless of what he wants, the viable medium I see it replacing is the laptop. Not all of them, just one, the laptop.

Could totally see it replace tv. It’s just too compelling of a new format. Especially if it the hardware fits in your normal glasses.

Not replace but greatly boost. With AR, I used to love passing through the external environment and putting two tv screens up in the ceiling area with CNBC and a podcast, all while doing laundry and tidying up around the house; my net consumption bumped up quite significantly due to the ease and ubiquity of opportunities to consume content.

What device gave you watchable TV screens and still let you see your environment?

Just a quest. Watch the first 20 seconds of this [1] and you’ll see the concept. Note, pass through was low resolution and in black and white. Sufficient for doing laundry but annoying.

1. https://youtu.be/CqkhjL3WvWQ

If we can get proper 3d content for VR that would be incredible. One of the NBA Finals in like 2017 announced a VR viewing experience. Imagine my extreme disappointment when it was just the regular ESPN video on a virtual TV in a virtual room with a virtual couch. I would pay some pretty significant money for a sideline VR camera view at certain sports. Imagine being "at" the superbowl but also having access to your own bathroom and snacks.

eating snacks with a VR headset on sounds messy

This is what I want for watching NHL games. Imagine having a dozen camera views on demand. Of course, knowing how greedy all these companies are, I’m sure if they ever do it they’ll charge per camera view or something stupid that’ll make it cost prohibitive to the average person. I’ll end up sitting behind a pillar in VR. Lol.

ImmersedVR has/had keyboard pass through so you could peek which is helpful even if you touch type.

you basically hit the spot. He never realized the phone with it's size and fit factor in everyday life cannot be replaced by a headset that is so intrusive. It's good for games but anything else likely a hassle to the norm.

If I had to take a guess what will replace the iPhone it will likely be new sci-fi tech that makes the cell into a piece of see through slab of glass that is touch based. If this is possible to do in the future, I think people will start buying that. Until then iPhone will reign supreme!

Makes me think of The Expanse (tv version)

What does that solve for?

Here's a depiction of just that in a concept video[1] from Microsoft in 2017.

[1] https://youtu.be/wraF2DjALls?t=152

It will still be called iPhone.

Eventually the complexity of the iPhone will force them to multiply by -i.

What would that enable though? Aside from just a new “look” that’s more modern and makes your old phone look outdated?

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.

most consumer techs get popular from the "wow" factor and use cases are discovered later. Maybe the glass slab could be used to detect disease from your saliva. Who knows...

This is largely what every sci-fi film has predicted. Though, I don't really see the value of my cell phone being see-through, beside it looking cool.

iPhone was all about the cool factor. Touch based screens didn't add value to the initial consumer except for the "wow" factor. Actual value of touch based came much later. The tech needed the "wow" factor to start the chain reaction into something meaningful.

They were almost immediately useful, maybe not for the touch aspect but for the large screen that could actually browse the full web without being nearly as clunky as everything else on the market.

It's really hard to make electrical conductors transparent, though. Indium tin oxide is the only significant exception and you probably couldn't make a microchip out of it.

A lot of people said exactly this when cell phones were Zach Morris sized, but 3 decades later here we are.

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.

you can't shrink your head. The smallest version is a pair of glasses. There was a privacy concern when people started wearing Google glasses in public if I remember correctly. The norm has to be respected until the norm changes.

Why not a contact lens? Or a brain implant.

Facebook in my brain sounds like a nightmare.

worked great for Johnny mnemonic.

The problem with Google Glasses was that they looked basically like glasses (being AR), in many ways other than size - starting with the fact that they were transparent. A VR headset, even if it's equally compact, won't look like glasses - certainly not if the designers don't want it to.

But Zuck is surely talking about AR glasses here, right? Full VR isn’t going to be a ubiquitous platform like phones/laptops etc.

Have you seen the size of the latest batch of flagship phones? They're a heck of a lot bigger than my glasses.

it's intrusive today; ultimately they'll look like a pair of regular glasses. Just like cell phones went from clunky beasts you couldn't even fit in your purse much less pocket, to a watch.

I think he's limited by the technology of our times, but I'd still agree with him that this is _the future_ (not sure how soon), and they probably want to be at the forefront when that happens.

Cellphones used to be massive. VR headsets will eventually be tiny. Now is Motorola - the original cellphone pioneer the top producer of cellphones today? Fuck no.

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

There might be meta-dna and libraries though in that compAny.

The shrinkage of one technology platform in the past isn't enough to predict the shrinkage of another in the future. We're just so used to the idea of tech getting smaller and smaller, but I think we're reaching some limits that might make progress on VR or other immersive tech like that slower or even impossible.

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.

In Zuckerberg's defence, if they somehow create a wearable headset with the proportions of a pair of glasses, they'll absolutely dominate. A sizeable chunk of their spending spree is R&D. If their work results in VR/AR glasses which are cheap, ubiquitous, stylish, and functional, I will be first in line to say "good job."

I actually think that no matter how good their hardware is, their effort to completely control the software platform will sink them.

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.

>In Zuckerberg's defence, if they somehow create a wearable headset with the proportions of a pair of glasses, they'll absolutely dominate.

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.

There is a big mountain to climb, but I don't think we need to wait until the technology delivers everything we want all at once. Google Glasses were released in 2013 and while they don't possess that long list of features, they are functional in similar dimensions to regular glasses: https://www.google.com/glass/start/. I would wear these. The road to better AR/VR products will be in iterating on these; making the display better and better, and the hardware lighter and lighter.

That's more of a 20 year timeline goal for anyone. They can still dominate VR in the meantime by staying at the leading edge in hardware. If they want to secure their future they'll have to continue to invest a lot in developing the systems and apps that people want to use.

The fundamental problem with VR is the "VR illusion" which makes the eyes focus on objects apparently in the distance that are actually on a screen very close to the eyes. This gives users headaches thus making mass appeal impossible. Solving this, if it is solvable at all, is challenge #1.

As I understand it, due to lens setup this shouldn’t actually be the case. Iirc the view for say a Valve Index ends up at something like 60cm.

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.

Nonetheless, the #1 problem is still not giving users headaches for whatever reason :)

I believe vergence accomodation can still be a problem, even if the focus is fixed at 60cm (close to infinity). If an object is up close in the virtual world (say 20cm), it's still stuck at a focus of 60cm.

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.

I got a Quest to try out VR, connected it to the internet and took it off to let updates install, and instantly felt sick as soon as it was off. It lasted all day and I've never put it back on. It was super cool for the 3 minutes I spent connecting to wifi.

That first experience was the same for me, it heavily depends on the game you attempt too play wherever you're able to get used to it or just keep getting KO'd.

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

Empirically I would say this affects only a small minority of people. Maybe 5-10% at most. It's a barrier to certain types of adoption but not nearly the showstopper you are making out I think.

It depends on what you mean by "affect" (I'd be curious also where you're getting your empirical data from since there's not a lot of publicly published data from what I can find). While I agree it's not necessarily a showstopper, the negative results in the studies I've seen all point to VAC as being something that is a negative factor that is high on the list of things to solve for.

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.

Focal distance is dependent on the lenses used. Most VR headsets have a fixed focal distance of 1.3m or 2m. Those interested in the literature can use the keyword "vergence-accomodation conflict" (VAC) for more information on this.

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

> He knew in 2015, that if Facebook didn't have a platform it controlled, it would suffer down the line.

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.

I'm going to disagree here on Amazon. They did succeed in building/acquiring two hardware and OS level platforms. They were so successful you didn't even notice

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

> One is called Alexa and the other is called Ring.

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.

The Kindle too.

People can’t buy books on the kindle app. Fun.

Because Amazon chooses that to make a point.

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.

My understanding is that they don’t want to pay a 30% cut to apple on every subscription or booked purchased

The profitable part of Amazon is AWS, their platform. Retail is loosing money

> "VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways."

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!

I think you are looking around you not in front of you. The path now is to a thinner ski goggles looking form factor that supports AR through a passthrough video of where you are but with the ability to turn anything into an iphone or iwatch or 60" TV screen (try carrying that arround in your pocket). Wearing goggles will not be any more inconvenient or disconnecting than pulling out your phone at the table. One Apple leak hinted at an LED outward facing screen so people around you don't feel as strange including you in the conversation. The form factors will iterate towards human centered simplicity just like the possibility space of spatial computing enabled by these devices will iterate towards a more natural interface where information systems will conform to our world as it is in 3D rather than us being forced to deal with them through keyboards and mice and touch screens in our pocket.

But you have to also keep in mind that no one (except maybe Zuckerberg) wants to look stupid. Walking around with ski goggles would look so incredibly stupid to any normal human being, so you'd have to carry the goggles around in a case or a backpack. Even with a device the size of ski goggles (which none of the current tech can even come close to given battery sizes) AR/VR still won't displace cell phones or apple watches.

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.

But you have to also keep in mind that no one (except maybe Zuckerberg) wants to look stupid.

We're already there. We have people walking around with iDweebs in their ears, talking to themselves, while looking down at a phone screen.

Until recently, I worked with high schoolers. Many of them felt absolutely no social discomfort at wearing earbuds while having a face to face conversations. It wasn’t uncommon for a kid to very quietly listen to music during a conversation. This is AR in a different sense, and I expect the social discomfort of AR glasses/goggles will similarly be generational/cultural and fleeting.

agree. There's a tipping point in utility and then things flip very rapidly. We don't have to reach frameless spectacle level, anything that gets in range will get us to the point where it will suddenly flip.

I think there’s a real issue here, but it’s not looking stupid per se. Facebook and similar addictive products get very very large per-user engagement, and this works because people use their phones while being just enough present in the real world to walk places, ride public transit, drive (!), go to restaurants, go on dates, etc.

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.

"Stupid" and "normal" is something that changes over time, sometimes very rapidly.

My bet is that it'll be the little apple logo on AR gadgets that'll normalize them.

AirPods look stupid, but here we are.

I still find them mostly a gimmick. They're a very good identifier for yuppie-like people, though, which one could say that it adds to the "stupid-looking" thing.

I don't know how you can possibly believe that. Not only are they (or inspired-by-them products) almost ubiquitous in many areas, people love them and rave about 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.

Most probably because we live in different areas and are also part of distinct demographics. I live in Eastern Europe and I don't have that many IT people as close acquaintances and friends, in those circles of mine "always-available access to audio" sounds a little quaint.

"Always-available access to audio" is a fancy way of saying I can listen to Whatsapp messages or watch YouTube videos anytime I want without bother anyone. Not to mention listen to music or audiobooks.

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.

I remember a time where wearing earbuds or headphones was sorta stupid. Nowadays everybody does.

Were else are people having good conversation about this?

Its a good question and I don't have any handy answers other than a loose distribution of twitter accounts and subreddits although if you want a single source to plumb through there is an amazing store of knowledge in Voices of VR podcast by Kent Bye [1] run through his archives for a thoughtful discussion of almost any topic in this space.

[1] https://voicesofvr.com/

>A VR headset would have to be sunglasses size

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.

VR is too early to be the meta of the future because of the fact we would need something that is completely standalone , have the performances of the valve index including the computer that goes with it and the price of the Oculus Quest 2. If they instead attempted to only focus on software similar to how Google made Android it could have gone better but his strategy was too early to execute . Also, I think that it’s just that they don’t have a platform it’s also that they have basically everyone that could see an advertisement that has signed up with Facebook / WhatsApp and Instagram so they don’t have the ability to grow their advertisements. This is something he had to do which was to give internet to places that didn’t have it but you would have the ability to access Facebook for tree.

So what did he do in 7 years? Ideas are cheap. Maybe the company didn't execute so well due to the bloat and inertia, or maybe the brand itself had other vulnerabilities which are missing from this vision.

It's due to to technology like Newton from apple. There is nothing u can do about it

Recognizing the technology wasn't going to be available in 10 years in a 10-year plan seems important. But you can't expect that from somebody who might legitimately think building hardware was as easy as hacking software.

I agree that he is way too optimistic. And from what I heard from Meta's employee, their hardware org is just not that good and the high level direction is very lacking.

Someone on HN once said (perhaps fact check this), it took Steve Jobs 7 years from the iPod touch to the iphone. Time perception can be skewed.

The iPod Touch and iPhone were both introduced early in 2007. Perhaps you are thinking about the iPod which was released late in 2001.

Ah yes sorry.

It's the iPad concept that came first, in the early 2000s, and they had a prototype for multitouch display.

Then they decided to work on the first iPhone for several years after that.

It's pretty obvious to everyone so I wonder what really happened. Once people received this mail did they tell him to his face that he was partly wrong? Or decided to just support his vision? Because among tech people I talk to, there is no single person who believes VR is the future, unless a major breakthrough happens that would eliminate all heavy inconveniences that make it almost unusable for the majority of population for more than half an hour.

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.

> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.

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.

doesn't obsolete them, but they won't be made worse by putting them in VR and adding some depth and ability to look around.

Unless the problems with nausea are fixed, VR definitely makes most 1st person games worse.

I guess it varies from person to person, but normally what causes nausea is the motion. If you fix the camera and let the character roam around there should be minimal nausea. But then you're a little more limited in your gameplay.

It will never make gaming in current form obsolete. Not in 50 years. Just for the fact that you need to put something on your face..

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.

Wholly agree on the immersion: a decent VR game, even if janky, has a great advantage in immersion by actually feeling _present_ in whatever virtual world you're in.

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.

Once smart glasses are the same weight and experience as wearing regular glasses I believe like many they are the next iPhone. The amount of innovation that can happen with smart glasses will be so cool and useful. I was just at a zoo looking for the small animal blending into it's environment in their glass cage ... I wished I had smart glasses that pointed out where in the cage the animal was.

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.

> But instead of making Oculus the "XBox" of the future

I don't get dizzy or have to stand up and move around to "sit down and veg out" on Xbox/PS/etc.

God for you. I can't play majority of first person games on PC without getting dizzy.

Facebook Research has indeed made a prototype for a sunglasses-sized VR headset! https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Holograph...

The first time I saw VR in was in Lisbon at FIL 1994, people were trying to play Doom with the current technology of the day.

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.

The sheer cost of VR platforms would make it non-ubiquitous. People in developing countries use mobile because it is that versatile, and that is why mobile is the king currently. I don't see how AR/VR platforms will ever replace that in next 10-15 years.

I don't believe for a second that smartphones in their current black-mirror form is going to stay, maybe for the forseeable future, but I'll be surprised if we're still rubbing our greasy meat-sausages on glowing plates of glass 10 years from now.

For how much FB subsidized VR headsets, they should have double down on Android phones with their own appstore. At least they seem better positioned than Microsoft who had to get OS to comport with Windows and Amazon.

No one wants to wear a clunky device on their face for hours for entertainment.

I wear a headset for hours of gaming if the game is compelling enough. The experience for well done VR games is worth it.

Except for about 15 million people who bought Quest 2, and at least 5 million who got PSVR

Literally millions of people do that.

A lot of the big CEOs repeat a mantra that they are really on the edge of destruction. I've heard that from 2010s Google. It is just a motivating chant.

Given the high turnover of companies in the Fortune 500 - these big CEOs aren't wrong.

The changing of order is inevitable.

> A VR headset would have to be sunglasses size

We're getting very close with products like Nreal Air.

if Oculus stayed independent we'd all be dead because palmer luckey is crazy apparently

You are absolutely dead wrong about VR gaming and sales show this.

VR gaming is so bad. My bet is it instead takes off in business, social media/doomscrolling, and AR assisted technologies and productivity.

Some VR gaming experiences are very compelling like Saints and Sinners or Cosmodread.

i tried cosmodread on a friends quest 2 and it made me shit my pants oh my gosh

I dont think VR ever takes off. AR will once you can wear a headset that looks like sunglasses.

If I had a grand to blow I would absolutely get an Index.

What position did you infer about gaming from the post? That the poster says VR games are successful or unsuccessful?

> What position did you infer about gaming from the post?

> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.

Ah, thank you!

That statement is way too definitive. VR gaming and sales are low because content is low. It's plagued with the cold start problem of all new platforms where publishers won't target VR because it's a small market, and VR won't grow because the game selection is very limited. When a major publisher pushes something to VR, it's usually an half-assed port that fail to leverage the completely different user interface.

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.

VR gaming also suffers from having a stationary gamer. Sitting still and looking around only really works for certain game types. If I’m always looking forward, how is VR adding to the experience?

Beatsaber and other rhythm games are very dynamic. I think the problem is more that the things I would want to work well in VR don't always work well. (But there are probably lots of amazing dynamic things like Beatsaber I never would have thought of.)

In beat saber you don’t need to walk around the, the targets come to you. It’s very static in that sense.

Immersion. I know it doesn't sound like much, but the hindbrain doesn't care.

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).

90% of my VR gaming is standing up. Resist, Beat Saber, Pistol Whip, Walking Dead, Zombieland, Shadow point, Until You Fall, Racket NX, and Kingspray are all 'stand and move around' games for me.

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.

In my experience "dead wrong" is also wrong. I don't believe VR will ever obsolete some swaths of gaming, but there are certain VR experiences that leave the conventional-gaming alternative feeling utterly worthless by comparison. The feeling of "actually" jumping into the cockpit of my spaceship in Elite Dangerous during the COVID lockdowns was intense, joyful, and freeing in a way no picture on a monitor could ever replicate.

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.

Sales don't say everything. I'd buy a steam headset if I could afford it at the moment. The main blocker is my lack of space and lack of GPU power. I would buy the quest, but doing any kind of business with Facebook feels dirty to me, I'd rather wait and get something from a company I respect.

How many VR games are as good as Half-life Alyx? Adoption needs to reach a certain threshold before publishers sink money into AAA content

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