Palmer Luckey: “The Apple headset is so good.”

I believe external battery would be a pro.

It’s easy to add power banks to a belt or backpack while generally every added ounce on the head makes it less comfortable. Especially for longer times. The Quest Pro really bombed on that point.

Actually I’d go further and say the compute unit should also be external as it’d allow more compute. It should still be attachable to the person to allow freedom of movement.

The other big thing for me would be opening up SDKs for peripheral developers. The lack of 3rd party peripherals for Oculus has hindered people experimenting on ways to solve the last piece of full immersion. I wanted to make my own treadmill for walking in games, but theirs no real APIs for it on the Oculus. I’m unsure how Apple will do. They love dongles but also love control.

Apple Watch was not popular in its first or second iterations. And in fact in the early days its sales were so lack lustre it was borderline 50/50 as to whether the device would even continue to be sold.

It wasn't under years later when the performance improved and the cost came down that it started to gain traction amongst the mass market. I suspect the Apple Reality headset will do the same.

I don’t think calling Palmer a run-of-the-mill enthusiast does justice to his passion/obsession. Last I checked he had the largest HMD collection in the world. His passion (more than anduril) has been to bring VR/AR to the masses, and if he feels like the Apple headset is a step towards that then I’m inclined to accept his interpretation.

> He's an enthusiast, so frankly I don't trust his opinion.

To call Mr. Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, "an enthusiast" seems a bit diminutive. Do you not think the Rift was designed with the mass market as its target?

I share this view. Not to any hate on Palmer, but enthusiasts often have a very different product perspective and the products he's led are demonstrations of this. Again, not in a negative way, they just failed to capture public attention due to the tradeoffs.

The fact that it's Apple is what makes me less cynical about the hype. If Apple, a company predominantly focused on mass public adoption, is able to get an enthusiast hyped about one of their products... maybe they hit a good balance.

Yup, my take as well. "Oh, look, person who dedicated his life to VR glasses likes VR glasses." Oculus was also going to be a revolution but it stayed a niche. May these folks who explore alternate tech be blessed, but so far I see zero great uses of this tech, aside from simulation for training medics, military, police officers and so on. But those uses require much better latency, resolution & so on and there are already companies serving those niches with devices decidedly more expensive than any consumer can afford.

I actually just want it to be good. We can haggle about openness once this technology works.

Curious why you think he “has every reason to stick it to Zuck.” Zuck gave him an exit that never would have given him the notoriety he has now.

I was one of the first 200 to kickstart the Rift back in the day and there is a very real chance that Oculus would be dead now if not for the Facebook/Meta acquisition.

He got his money, which he rolled into a meme company and a defense technology company. Other than petty spite or ego, why does he feel the need to “stick it to Zuck” now?

[Edit: Just realized he was fired by Facebook. So I guess it’s just a petty personal vendetta.]