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I agree with everything in your comment.

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.

>He wants to skip the gaming stages of the VR evolution

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.

But here's the thing: no group but gamers is excited enough about VR to even be a candidate for a market right now. The only people who want to strap goggles to their face are those looking for gaming experiences. Why try to dodge that reality?

There is massive interest in the business markets, and their size dwarfs gaming. The best selling gaming platform in history was playstation 2 with ~150M sold. Zoom has 300M users daily. Other business platforms add hundreds of millions more users. The business hardware for conference rooms stuff is massivley bigger than games. And all the players in this hardware, from Logitech, to Bose, are all working towards this too. Gaming is a small market compared to what companies are trying to do with this space.

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?

What’s your evidence for massive interest in business markets? I use a quest for gaming, but find the idea of interacting with colleagues for corporate stuff to be just hideous.

I listed one good place for evidence - Zuckerberg's interview. I also have done consulting on such projects for a few of the players. All the big players have extensive groups working on this. For example: Microsoft has bought AR and VR companies and rolled the tech into Teams, and their many AR/VR projects have been business (and military) directed for a long time. NVidia has the Omniverse for 3d content creation and sharing (among other projects).

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_augmented_reality

I'm not buying a $800 device to immersively Zoom. However, people pour hundreds into devices to play video games all the time.

VR is so far out of the norm for most people that you need a vehicle to introduce that into society. Gaming happens to fit that bill for VR.

I think in the Quest you can see Zuckerberg trying to create Meta's iPhone. Most of Apple's profit comes from selling hardware for more than it costs to make it. Sure there are other phones but most people would prefer an iphone, for various reasons. Branding is not the least of which.

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.

VR has a place. I don't know if Meta is capable of getting it there. Occulus is a great piece of tech, I own one and I enjoy it. My wife who does not game at all, also likes it. There are games like Beat Saber a few others that are good for getting the masses in. And games like Half Life Alyx that can get gamers in. But outside of that there is nothing that really makes it seem like an improvement to life, its still a novelty.

>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.

I'm bullish on the metaverse only because I see it as the only viable solution to one of the biggest problems in the world right now: loneliness.

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

How is loneliness fixed by putting on goggles? Why wasn’t it solved by phones?

Tiktok has demonstrated the upper levels of dissociation possible on a phone. The logical next step for the app purveyors of the world is a device that affixes itself to your face and keep reality out entirely.

I sat with my long distance gf to watch TV together, and genuinely forgot that we weren’t in the same room. It was magic. Taking the goggles off and instantly going back to being alone in my house was an eye opener; I realised that while VR is not as good as really being there, it’s so much better than a video chat for feeling close.

> Loneliness is a problem that needs to be fixed

I think this is fixed by going outside and talking to people.

of course. And everyone knows that. But people still don't do it for any number of reasons.

If it's not working out so we need to find new solutions

Was the Quest 2 cheap because the BOM was low, or because Facebook subsidized hundreds of dollars of each headset?

If VR is costing them 10s of billions of dollars yearly, where else could that much money have gone?