I tried the new PS5 VR2. It’s definitely better than Oculus Quest.
Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR when Sony is able to produce a better product with a fraction of the investment.
Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR when Sony is able to produce a better product with a fraction of the investment.
Sony = decades of experience on gaming hardware and games (and everything else)
Meta = decades of experience running a/b tests on a website and copying features to sell ads (and acquiring few mobile apps to run more a/b tests)
I have pretty extensive experience in the embedded Android space and have worked on products everyone here knows, Meta reached out to me very excitedly, and when I let the recruiter know I don't do Leetcode they assured me the coding phone screen was a merely a formality and I'd do great.
It took all my willpower not to leave the moment the interviewer dropped some generic LC merge sorted lists problem, though I don't think I did was that much better their eyes (poked at it for about all of 5 minutes, called it, and asked them some questions)
They actually tried to set me up with a second phone screen but I declined, even on the principle of it, I don't like working at places that filter by LC. In cutting edge stuff like wearables especially, I'm sure you'll find a ton of people with no time for jumping through LC circus. I'm sure I could take a few months and grind out those problems in my sleep (or rather I've been told that), but I'd rather work on interesting and novel things.
I’m not suggesting OP is dumb, but if someone is setting hiring criteria and thinks they need X skillset judged by Y, I think there’s a good chance they’re directionally correct.
I get it, I’ve bombed interviews I was excited about and rationalized it anywhere and everywhere. Once I started hiring folks, my opinions evolved significantly.
How else do you hire someone out of a pool of people that are all knowledgeable and likable? A bad hire, even if they’re super smart and just the wrong fit, is worse than not hiring anyone at all.
If you climb the management ladder, you’ll likely be graded on your org’s hiring outcomes. If 10 people all seemed qualified, I’m going to burn down the risk as much as possible. If I’m wrong 1 time for this, but it not obviously wrong 9 others, I’ll call it a win.
For context: this is coming from tiny startups to billion dollar companies and different things in between.
That's for after you get the job though. During the interview you'll need to be a bit smarter and more practiced with algorithms.
So I asked "is a naive implementation fine"? The answer was a quizzical "... well I guess we could start there? But we're probably going to need at least <insert Big O notation for time> and preferably get to <Big O notation for time and space>", so I wrote out a completely naive implementation and switched to questions.
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But you're right, I can't program. Not memorizing elaborate cache-unfriendly vectorization-unfriendly algorithms has made me unhirable.
There was a reason they were excited to talk to me, and I thought it was an impressive career of programming to solve hard problems that started from writing assembly games for calculators in middle school... but who knows, maybe it was my charming smile?
Luckily my smile got me hired by a company that's paying me a FAANG salary but hasn't had to lay off thousands (knock on wood)
I hold myself to the standard of knowing enough the problem space before I interview people that I can open an editor and come up with domain specific problems that anyone who's doing what they claim they're doing daily can work through (crazy bar I know...)
> Outside of FAANGs I've routinely interacted with fairly senior engineers who just could not code, period, full stop
My first thought was "You must be joking if you think there are no L5s in FAANG who can't write code",but then I realized you actually think of writing code as literally being able to write statements in a given order... but that's such an insanely low bar that people regularly meet it by repeating problems over and over for a few months.
My bar for writing code at past a junior level is to be able to solve a problem with production grade code. LC almost precludes that between the time constraints and rigid solution set so people settle for "they wrote a guard statement against an empty list".
I just want to know that a new hire isn't going to ignore things like cache locality or not know what a memory mapped file is and try to load gigabytes of data into memory and parse the whole thing just to run their O(N) solution across 4kb of data.
And according to Levels.FYI I'm making more than the average person with a comparable title at Meta, maybe because the same things that made Meta excited made me attractive to other employers without the random cargo cult filters...
But hey, maybe I'm just trying to convince that recruiter who definitely wasn't laid off.
And given how terrible Sony has been with software, it was not surprising that they skipped the wireless option.
I think there are two strategic errors worth considering here:
- wireless vs. tethered. Was it really worth it going wireless or was there viability in being tethered?
- the hype around PSVR2 is around the Horizon game, which seems like a legitimately great, full-length game that's both a gameplay and technical achievement. What if Meta had spent their $$$ on funding and shipping titles like it? Beat Saber is the only title of note for them and it's getting very old.
One gets the feeling that Meta only begrudgingly services the gaming applications of Quest, even though it's the only application right now. This is understandable as the console market as a whole is far to small for Meta to be interested in long-term, but one can convincingly argue that the status quo doesn't serve them either: they have a product that doesn't have non-gaming PMF but also are visibly annoyed at being in the gaming market at all.
Their existing customers have no confidence in the platform and have reasonable expectations to be jettisoned the moment they become inconvenient, while the company has no line of sight to another market.
There's a lot of execution here that feels like it puts the cart before the horse. Of course you want a bigger-than-console-gaming market, but you have to excel in your space before you can convincingly lay claim to another. Finding viability (both product and financial) in your current market gives you freedom to pivot later.
The step away from Quest Pro feels incoherent. You don't really see yourself and your product as a gaming product, so you pivot towards MR/productivity use cases... and now you're... pivoting back to gaming? What? Yeah, ok, the Quest Pro was definitely underbaked, but it suggests that the company has no confidence in its own strategy. If you believe in the MR/productivity path, double down and fix the problems with a follow-up. If you believe in VR gaming, then act like it!
Perhaps there is some future in industrial assistance but not clear if that translates to the next generation platform to subvert a teenage girl's self esteem.
They could never make a convincing MR/productivity headset because there is absolutely no consumer demand for an inferior experience.
Tethered to what? Sony has a much better answer to that question than Meta.
But this would mean investing heavily in tools and SDKs, 1P titles, and publishing deals, neither of which is a world that Meta is very familiar with, and - given the track record - doesn't seem very excited about.
The launch of Meta Quest Pro was abysmal (my comments here at the time [1]), but unfortunately things haven't improved much since then, other than the price reduction. I ended getting the Pro at the launch day, but returned after a few weeks, given the underwhelming experience. It was disappointing, because I wanted to love the device, but it just doesn't deliver.
I received the PSVR2 last week, but didn't have time to unbox yet. Really hoping it gives Meta a run for their money, and sets the bar high (despite being tethered).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166291&p=3#33170171
I really feel like what you need is omni-directional treadmills. I really like VR rhythm games, but for most other games beyond that feel like you really need some more natural way of moving around. The only exception to that would be things where you'd naturally be playing sitting (in a cockpit, in a car, etc).
> The launch of Meta Quest Pro was abysmal
As far as Meta being out of touch goes, the Quest Pro not shipping with a total light blocker seems pretty indicative. i.e. you need to spend 50USD on https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/quest-pro-full-light-... if you really want to properly game on it, on top of the $$$ you already need to fork out for the headset.
> I received the PSVR2 last week, but didn't have time to unbox yet. Really hoping it gives Meta a run for their money, and sets the bar high (despite being tethered).
If I compare the PC, Quest, and PS versions of a game like Beat Saber the PC version is moddable and a vastly better game for it with loads of custom contents, the Quest version is semi-moddable but cranky about it, and the PS version AFAIK isn't moddable. Even for games with official custom song support (e.g. Synth Riders), the PS version doesn't support any of those.
Even if technically superior in some ways I'd consider PSVR2 mostly an expensive paperweight unless they were to release PC drivers for it (which they won't). Only seemingly decent piece of exclusive content for it seems to be Horizon: Call of the Mountain, but that's only 10 hours or so.
Gaming platforms (and games) that require dedicated hardware are a very tough sell.
Gaming platforms (and games) that require a gaming rig that probably costs >$1k, that is really big (2m x 2m, from what I see) and that weighs 200kgs are close to impossible to sell, I'd imagine.
2m x 2m is probably an overestimate (https://omni.virtuix.com/ is selling the Omni One which seems to require 4ft x 4ft), but even then this is still much larger than existing gaming gear requires. That said, people do buy things like treadmills, exercise bikes, and ellipticals - but still I think it'd be extremely tough to make these mass-market.
They did, e.g. Resident Evil 4. However the highest-selling games on the store are Beat Saber (by a large margin), sports games and social games. That's what people want to play with the Quest. Going wireless/low-spec was absolutely the right decision and that has been proven by the sales figures.
Best thing is you don't have to compromise. Want high specs? Use Air Link with your PC, it works really well. Sensitive to latency? Plug in an extra long USB-C cable. Granted it's not quite as frictionless as the PSVR, but tethering is a deal breaker for me personally.
> The step away from Quest Pro feels incoherent.
Agreed. As far as I know the intention was always to make money in the MR/productivity space, with the Quest 1/2 being a sort of trial run (evidenced by all the 'experiments' and new functionality they added over time). Perhaps the Quest 1/2 are doing better than they expected and now they don't have a strong direction.
Patents.
When AR/VR Renaissance happens in like 10 years, Facebook will be to it what nokia was to the smartphone wave. That's the best case scenario, the worst case scenario is they'll milk some patents with industrial applications.
I'm not sure what your point is when the PS VR2's optics are not as good as Facebook's. The PS VR2 while OLED suffers from mura and brightness issues. The amount of mura is inconsistent and can be pretty bad on some headsets. Since the panels can not get bright enough Sony is leaving the displays on longer which trades off increased brightness for more motion blur. The display is also using a pentile subpixel arrangement which is not as good as compared to a RGB stripe one. The peak pixels per degree of the optics is less than all competing devices on the market and is releasing with Fresnel optics in 2023. The PS VR2 doesn't stand out as being bleeding edge to me, unless by bleeding edge you mean the technology isn't mature enough to be ready yet to meet consumer exceptions. It just looks to be marketed as a better and updated version of the PS VR headset. No other headset is competing in the segment of the market that is powered by consoles.
I haven't tried the vr2, but everybody I've seen that tried it said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2.
>said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2.
The Quest 2's optics are much better than the index, both in PPD and in that there is less god rays. There are likely more factors than the optics being considered. Or the OLED black levels are being over valued. How much a person likes the optics is pretty subjective so people are fine to prefer whatever they want.
Any kind of roomscale type of game or shared spaces type of game is going to be a nightmare being tethered.
Something like that will be impossible altogether
https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/11iht0l/do_...
It's not though. It's essentially an Oculus 1 with better resolution. Mobile untethered is the only real future for VR, and Meta is solving the hard problems there. Carmack knew this, and it's why he drove Quest to be fully self contained. Things like PSVR will only ever be niche toys for gamers.
Hardware isn't there yet for cheap, good looking standalone vr. Meta investing in that was a mistake. Instead of people being in awe when experiencing something like the PS5 VR, the "meta verse" (horizon worlds) became literally a meme because of the atrocious graphics.
There are better looking quest games than horizon worlds, but still.