Meta plans to devote ~20% of overall costs to Reality Labs in 2023, up from 18%
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I've been an avid Quest 2 user. There is nothing else like it. I use it for portable workouts and it does the job pretty well. Meta is years ahead of anyone else in this field.
But will this ever reach mainstream adoption? I think Zuck and others need to understand that the ask of putting a headset on is a pretty big one and is one of the biggest impediments, even if the stuff inside that headset can be pretty cool! I just don't see a path to that ever becoming normalized in our society or workplace.
I feel Zuck is letting his personal bias inform his decisions because he is an avid early adopter and is perhaps super comfy with VR headsets. I mean he bought Oculus in the first place !
I personally think stuff like VR/AR doesn't become truly mainstream until we hit a contact lenses level form factor. I know that sounds way out there but I don't see any other way. Getting to a sunglasses form factor will be a big win but still won't be enough to go mainstream, perhaps 25% of the way. And even that is easily 10 years away if not more.
If I was part of their innovation team, I'd buy another smaller company like Nreal Air that's innovating in he sunglasses display/AR space quite well and then try to marry VR/AR with that. If they can achieve that, they will get a big jump in adoption. It will require an external computation box, perhaps a smartphone sized one, but that's still an easier ask than putting a whole headset on.
Light weight glasses is another option but it does limit the utility a lot in many scenarios.
Other famous ones are Supernatural, FitXR etc. But they all have subscription models and Les Mills doesn't.
I truly believe that there's like a 95% chance that Meta builds a great product but it hemorrhages money and will ultimately need to be gimped - but I'm really in it for the 5% chance that it is a home run on the financials.
What Zuck is doing represents everything I admire about Silicon Valley (and honestly it's a short list of things) and sure he's a strange personality and questionable past but his vision and persistence into this is something I would hope to see succeed and valued.
I hate meta
Why
Because they track me
Why do they do that
To show me things I might want
Why is that bad
Insert slippery slope
—
At some point you need to be objective and ask if a little of that hate is just herd mentality.
That’s an extraordinarily generous interpretation of Facebook’s motivation.
I'm not saying that Meta will definitely have a change in perception but that's what I'm betting on if they truly do have a competent Metaverse.
The best example of this change is Microsoft - it wasn't too long ago that it was the most hated tech company by the tech community and shareholders alike and now it's the ~least hated~ big tech out there.
Do you believe their bad reputation can be fixed in such short timeframe?
I would like to compare it to AWS' lead in cloud due to their head start but this is obviously a much larger gamble.
The situation is especially bad for Meta here compared to Google because even though most Google revenue comes from ads, Google still has a bunch of other product verticals like Google Workspace (G Suite), GCP, Android, Chromebooks, GPay, and numerous other products (including moonshot bets like Waymo). And Google doesn't need to rely on ad retargeting nearly as much, they can serve personalized ads just based off the text in search queries and gmail.
In the long term it is very important that Meta diversifies and finds new scalable sources of revenue. Even if you don't think VR has a high probability of success, it's one of their best shots at finding something that has the potential (if everything goes well) to eventually generate serious revenue and diversify their business. It's easy to throw stones but what else do people want from Meta? It's extremely dangerous for them to do nothing. Since they're printing money today they can afford to make these huge bets on their future, and without huge future bets their future looks pretty bleak.
Exactly. However, I think their AI play will need to come into fruition - AI as a service will need to be their second cash cow before anything Metaverse
The killer VR apps are all in creating a rated R type Metaverse that is seedy and dangerous. 80s Manhattan style, not safe for work or children.
That would be something wild and create a huge buzz. Instead, we have Horizon Worlds. Basically, Starbucks with fake coffee.
The only thing I like about Meta is trading the stock over the next few years as Wall Street goes into convolutions over the burn rate of Reality Labs at each earnings release.
I just don't see Zuck being the person to deliver "amazing VR tech". He doesn't inspire excitement the way Jobs did, and even then, Jobs was just selling expensive MP3 players. The vision for VR is a bit more grand than that.
But I can’t help but feel something dysfunctional happened internally since the Quest 2 launch.
The Quest Pro should not have been launched at $1500 with its current feature set/SoC and no depth sensor. And I find it difficult to accept the “enterprise market” claim as anything more than a cope when I go into BestBuy and see it being demoed to consumers and displayed prominently in an endcap.
Then you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert” had fewer attendees than an average Wendy’s and the performance was low res 2d video on a screen. Embarrassing stuff.
As far as gaming is concerned: Meta spent hundreds of millions acquiring some of the largest third party VR devs over the past couple years - and still not a single game has been announced.
It sure smells like rotten bureaucratic infighting combined with Zuck doggedly chasing where he thinks the puck is going and Carmack’s resignation letter certainly doesn’t disabuse me of the notion.
I see the quest pro as a similar product to the iphone pro. Technically better, but almost as much of a status symbol to ramp up profits long term as much as anything.
I suspect we'll see those two lanes continue to be developed with fairly fast releases on a similar schedule to iphones - with Mark's dream being that one day Meta will be the new Apple complete with the walled garden app store.
I think Zuck is impatient. He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution.
Yet VR must be a huge gaming success before something like a social network in VR can happen. Quest 2 and Rift before it is almost that, but still a large part of gaming fans remain unconvinced. But that is surely possible to solve.
We are at the Doom/Quake stage and he wants to skip WoW, Fortnite and get directly to what comes after that by building the equivalent of VRML or Second Life. Its too early.
Also AR is a distraction, not possible to do well with tech existing today, if ever.
You don't need a gaming stage to make it useful any more than you needed a gaming stage of face to face video conferencing to make FaceTime and Zoom and the like extremely useful.
The proper plan is to try to get many use cases working, and try to solve technical problems for each, until one of them meet in a useful product or solution. Claiming it has to be a certain way will miss quicker and possibly much more fruitful cases.
Disrupting the having to fly far for a meeting when one could get the same experience is such a bigger, likely easier to satisfy, market, makes gaming become an afterthought.
Or you can listen to the Zuckerberg interview with Lex Fridman where he states
Why try to dodge that reality?
As far bas as 2016 there were 200_ companies working in this space, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, MS, Sony - and they are not simply trying to make game goggles.
A simple google for this should make it clear to you that the game angle is a tiny slice of what is being pursued, since the game market is tiny compared to the broader uses.
There are already uses for telemedicine, virtual meetings, virtual site inspections, remote education, military, training, flight simulators, geography uses, dangerous environment uses, prototyping, broader healthcare, engineering, music and other events (concerts and other things have been held on various platforms). Digital twin creation and inspection are huge business use cases for all of industry and DoD, with billions a year currently being spent on development of the tech.
>but [I] find the idea of interacting with colleagues
Your experience is not what will drive the industry - and the entire point is to make it seamless. And the uses for AR/VR is so vastly larger than gaming or you in a business meeting that it should be clear that gaming is a tiny slice of the possibilities, and is demonstrably a tiny slice of all the major players working on VR/AR projects and products.
For a tiny intro, start here [1] and chase down links. Or simply look at any of the big companies I listed and search for their AR/VR work - the majority of work is not for gaming.
>when you look at the software side. Horizon is a horrible pile of ugly jank that no one uses. I gave it another shot for the first time in ages last week after seeing an advertising campaign for a deep faked Notorious BIG concert in Horizon. Long story short, the “live metaverse concert”
Why would I want to go to a low resolution hologram concert and sit in my house instead of being at a concert? That's not cool. People don't take photos of that, they don't talk about it at lunch the next day, they don't reminisce about that. Its divorced from people.
I think that the "Metaverse" is actually on the right track somewhere but doesn't have the vision of a product to get it finished. I would love the Metaverse as some kind of "tabletop" simulator. My vision of the metaverse after Zuck's announcement was that it would be cool if I could play rpgs in there, where I can customize my avatar, and a gm can build a dungeon out. Let me do fantastical otherworldly things, not just try and save myself a 20 minute drive.
That is where I think metaverse will win, unique experiences that I can only get in there. The problem is that the Metaverse is trying to see copies of real world experiences, but worse.
If VR is costing them 10s of billions of dollars yearly, where else could that much money have gone?
Sure, metaverse interactions are a distant second to real world interactions, but at this point, real-world doesn't work out for lonely people anymore, and I haven't seen any compelling real world solutions either.
Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed. You'd ideally fix it irl. But if you can't, at least giving people a virtual experience of togetherness might be worth it
I think this is fixed by going outside and talking to people.
If it's not working out so we need to find new solutions
I enjoy my Quest 2 overall once you get into a game but the OS is trash and FB's layer on top of Android is not well done. My friends and I spend way more time than we should just trying to get into a "Home" all together and launching a game from the OS is a crapshoot. The OS is completely full of papercuts from unresponsive UI to things like switching to passthrough kills party audio for a second or two. Staying in passthrough for more than a minute (sometimes less) will kick you from the game you are playing which is infuriating. Do they think that people don't need to step away to deal with kids/pets/drinks/bathroom/etc? I can't tell you how many gaming sessions have been ruined or screwed up because someone had to take a short break and the OS/Game just shit the bed.
I was excited for the Quest Pro and was ready to buy one if it was compelling... it was not. The specs are a minor bump over the Q2, the color passthrough camera feels very "beta", and from videos I've watched of it in action I'm glad I didn't get one. The (literal) bending of "reality" when using passthrough looks terrible and feels like it would really break immersion. The controllers did look interesting and I haven't heard anything really bad about them, they do seem like a big step up from the Q2 controllers. You can pair the QPro controllers with the Q2 so that might be something I look into though I'd prefer to never get Meta another dollar if I can help it. I'm looking forward to whatever Apple is working on.
Sidenote: Maybe it's an industry term that I just don't know/understand but "of overall costs" doesn't make sense to me. The Subtitle has "Company says 20% of spending to go toward Reality Labs" which makes a lot more sense.
Yes, the Touch Pro controllers are absolutely wonderful on both the Pro and the 2. Extremely cool that Meta added support on the 2 and, if not for the issue below, I’d happily recommend them to Quest 2 owners who have the $300 to blow.
Unfortunately, the Quest 2’s controllers are probably the worst in the industry for developing thumbstick drift. Worse than even the Switch.
Given that sort of unfortunate pedigree and the premium price of the Touch Pros, it’s baffling to see that they skimped on Hall effect sensors for the thumbsticks. It’s extremely hard to recommend spending hundreds of dollars on controllers that may very well need to be RMA’ed in a few months.
I believe what Zuckerberg is doing here is to publicly announce that he has funding ready to purchase whoever could be the next Oculus. Based on Carmack's complaint, I don't have high hopes of Meta building the metaverse in-house. But if I was considering working on metaverse technology, this might be a nudge for entrepreneurs and their investors to get started, because Zuckerberg just painted the map leading to a unicorn exit.
I like electronics and have AI + PCB experience. Anyone wanna start the next Oculus ;) ?
In order to have any sort of future growth story, Meta pretty much needs to create or somehow capture major economics from a new platform like they did for web2.0 and mobile web. Due to antitrust concerns IMO, they can't just acquire their way into more value by acquiring a company like Pinterest so their remaining options are moonshots like AR/VR to invest heavily for the next platform to become ubiquitous and then extract economics from it.
Slowly face into obsolescence as kids abandon Facebook and Google/apple use their monopolies to totally invalidate your ability to serve ads?
Serious question
Google's case is harder to make.
Meta horizons is a solution in search of a problem, and they refuse to recognize that. Meanwhile the rest of us are making money solving actual problems that actually exist today. I do industrial and cockpit simulations, things that are unsafe or expensive to train on IRL, which is basically an ideal use for VR.
Capitalism simulator VR 22 is not something that anyone wants. It doesn't fill a need or solve a problem other than "how do we extract more money from consumers?". People are starting to become resentful of their entire life being monetized, who wants to have their recreation monetized?
In Facebook's hands, they won't want to compete in the businesses where there are actual use cases today. Because of their size, they have the resources to try to invent a whole new market (walled garden), and only then find consumers for it.
With VR, the upside of VR for immersive experience such as flight simulators, is massive.
Having said that, your point maybe has some merit if we refer to people wanting to wear headsets for zoom meetings, which is a bit of what meta is aiming at.
AR glasses perhaps will work - less cumbersome and intrusive than a headset.
He has massive walled garden of data that no one else has. He had MetaAI folks who knows how to build LLMs. He has AppliedML team who knows how to productize AI. He now even has better reputation for saner policies and privacy, thanks to Twitter. He should be able to spin up AI based search engine in 6-12 months. He can produce AI based Office in similar time frame. All the stars are aligned for him if he has courage to course correct.
Credit to Zuckerberg for staying the course. I think that other products will soon come out from other companies over the next year or two that because extremely popular, and AR/VR WILL go mainstream, and practically no one will ever admit that he was right about it being a good overall direction to go in. And if they don't end up making a lot of money from these things it won't prove that it wasn't the right direction. It's hard to pull off and there is going to be a lot of competition.