Every business will can projects in their portfolio when belt tightening. VR and its multitude of derivative just isn't a core competency of M$. If anybody is to win this space then it'll be Apple IMO.
You think I'm exaggerating, but Apple has the best engineering talent in the world, a commitment to deliver revolutionary products, and first bite at the supply-chain, er, tomato. Betting against them is a fool's move, no one else will be able to even TOUCH them.
One could also argue for the M chips, which were absolutely game changing when they came out.
[1] As far as I remember there was only one telecom in US that was working with the iPhone. My memory on this is fuzzy, but I clearly remember telling that to my friend and his answer.
Everyone and their dog knew the iPhone was coming and what it was about.
People are now speculating that Apple will release VR gear. We won't know for sure until release.
and the reception is lackluster. the tech is still not quite mature enough for the average consumer, and the fear of meta's tracking/coercive social networking component in the hardware is all but the most of die hard fans to even participate.
Surely, meta knows this. So what's their end game?
Office is where the money is for Microsoft.
“We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall”
This type of commerce is all useless nonsense. If his measure of Metaverse success is hitting some mark for how much money he intends to extract from a user it's not a winning strategy.
And, whats with the amping up of avatars? It basically becomes a game like WoW.
And, why would anyone want to be in the metaverse, when a conference call suits well enough for most work?
What does having a virtual and augmented world bring to the table actually?
Their VR demos look awful, last report I heard was employees didn’t even want to use it or touch it, oculus has done basically nothing except burn customer goodwill.
It’s fun enough, sure, but it’s heavy, sweaty, weirdly isolating and far too expensive for what it is. There aren’t enough games or utilities, and none of them are amazingly compelling. The controls are still janky. The idea of multiplayer is basically a no-go, as it requires everyone to have them (see price) and then have a computer powerful enough to drive it (see cost of GPU’s). A good chunk of my friends don’t have amazing GPU’s, let alone VR-compatible GPU’a plus a headset.
Meanwhile we've got Apple coming along with thier extremely efficient in-house chip architecture thats about to release a lightweight headset with performance that blows away anything Meta has, not to mention an existing ecosystem that it will slot right into.
Outside of Meta everybody knows the 'Metaverse' (i.e in the form as 'Meta' themselves describe it) is a truely awful concept that clearly is not gaining popularity or any kind of desire from the general public.
Based on the leaks we pretty much know that Apples already cracked full body tracking, eye tracking, has a SIGNIFICANTLY lighter design and higher battery life. Hardware wise it'll make everything Metas produced look pretty archaic.
Then it comes to software and app ecosystem. I don't think theres even a debate to be had here. Meta vs Apple would be laughably one sided.
> Based on the leaks we pretty much know that Apples already cracked full body tracking, eye tracking ...
Based on the leaks we know that Apple has struggled to deliver a working product at all having repeatedly delayed then scaled back then canceled whole product areas. On the other hand, based on Meta's openly visible work at their labs (literally iniviting journalists to tour and try it out) we know they have cracked key areas that can potentially revolutionise the field in a few years.
I do think Apple's product is going to be enormously successful and state of the art. But the most likely outcome is what Zuckerberg is shooting for - a repeat of the iOS vs Android playbook but this time with him in control of the open OS but without being at the mercy of OEMs and without the horrific fragementation issues.