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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

if Meta ends up being the owners of "Android of VR" by this investment and VR ends up being as big as mobile Zuck will show everyone why they did this. I'm optimistic that Meta's plan is going to work and AR/VR will be a huge market. Gaming and work meeting apps are the core of the VR experience and I'm convinced that many people would want those experiences

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Most people don't bother to turn on webcam on work meetings. Vast majority of people don't bother with video calls either and just use old good voice if not text. Why would those crowds bother with VR?

I hate turning on my webcam but I love meeting with people in VR. It's pretty obvious why when you've tried both.

(I) you don't need those crowds to have a high value product. Vast majority of people don't own a games console or a gambling account or buy many books either. (II) many of the same people that don't bother turning on webcam at work meetings do care about it when talking to their family or spend hours immersed in MMORPGs or exploring other people's world's through video and being seen to follow all the right trends on social media.

Sure, mainstream VR has been "just around the corner" since before the average person had access to the internet and I think there are still technical and fashion questions about how mass market-ready the tech is and whether Meta is remotely the right company to market its Android, but if we judged the long term potential of a tech by people's enthusiasm for being observed by their boss even the internet would have been written off...

Agreed - once the tech is there AR/VR make sense in so many applications and meta wants too be the first company to win in that space. Yeah tens of billions in losses doesn’t look good now, but in 7 years when they’re potentially the winner it will be worth the hundreds of billions in revenue.

Or they’ll have wasted all the money because later they’ll realize their strategy and/or products were flawed. It’s obviously a huge gamble.

Exactly and this is looking very likely as I said before: [0].

Again, we are slowly realizing why Meta is spending billions on XR headsets and Apple's move to spatial computing just validates the spending.

I expect the Vision Pro to under perform in sales, but it is the next generation of Vision products (2nd and 3rd) that is going to be extremely competitive and cheaper against Meta Quest.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36223235

If anything the last couple of years has shown that people don't want VR gaming or work experiences.

In my opinion we just haven't reached the tipping point yet. Very few cared about "smart" phones with touch screens until Apple came out with the iPhone. Other manufacturers like Nokia or HTC had devices with similar capabilities for years but consumers shunned them. The experience needs to be good enough for people to consider these devices - again Apple's headset could be the first to really establish the category.

The modern VR fad is over 10 years old. Early smartphones to widespread adoption was lighting fast compared.

I'm not sure I agree. There were proto-smartphones in the early 90s, but they couldnt become widespread until the tech was there to deliver the necessary baseline experience.

I think we're only just getting to that level of tech now. Nobody wants to cart around a gaming computer with cabled to a headset, especially in an era of smartphones etc. You need a headset that can deliver a solid experience, untethered by cables at minimum, to arrive at the Palm Pilot PDA equivalent point in the XR => widespread adoption timeline.

There were proto-smartphones in the early 90s

Which phones are you thinking of? I would consider either the Nokia Communicator in 1996 or the Ericsson R380 from 1999, as the first proto-smartphones. Or are you counting things like Apple Newton as a proto-smartphone?

I guess your question is the gist of my point. The Apple Newton is a great touchpoint as it points in a particular direction, but it was 1) the wrong form factor, 2) too expensive, 3) emphasized the wrong features. Still, it pointed a clear direction.

From Newton to iPhone is 15+ years, but it's not totally unreasonable to consider the Osborne 1 with an acoustic coupler to be the real starting line, given its popularity as a portable comms computer, and really iPhone 3G/3GS is probably a better "we've arrived" point than the first iPhone.

Of course, VR tech could be "started" much earlier than the current fad. However, I think DK1 was Osborne 1 in terms of the technology meeting the needs of the medium, maybe Newton-level on the timeline if you're already a VR enthusiast and have enthusiast blinders on. That was 2013, only 10 years ago. Theres still underlying tech that isn't totally "there" in terms of supporting the "right" VR experience, but most people who have tried any modern headset can feel the potential. It's like using a Windows Mobile from 2003; it feels like a glimpse of an inevitable future, even though you can simultaneously recognize that it's time has not yet come.

The biggest problem of XR is the vision-blocking headset, not the tethering. And since all current XR technologies require a fully vision blocking headset, they have a fundamental problem that building a better vision blocking headset can't really solve.

And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough. Having something strapped over your eyes for a long period of time (say, an hour) is just fundamentally unpleasant. Even normal glasses are uncomfortable and people avoid them as much as they can.

That's a very good point. Thank you for the reality check.

> And since all current XR technologies require a fully vision blocking headset, they have a fundamental problem that building a better vision blocking headset can't really solve.

That's not necessarily true. There are several optical passthrough AR glasses today - they're not as light as one would like, they require external compute, and they need quite a lot of UX work - but they exist today. The most recent example is the Xreal Air 2 [0].

> And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough.

I think that's fine as a solution, if

> And adding cameras to project the lost vision is not good enough. Having something strapped over your eyes for a long period of time (say, an hour) is just fundamentally unpleasant. Even normal glasses are uncomfortable and people avoid them as much as they can.

we can resolve this. The headsets are getting smaller, and the AR glasses are getting more powerful. Meta are working this from both angles with the headsets and their glasses. The glasses seem to be doing alright (more time required) [1], and lighter headsets are possible [2].

My suspicion is that people are willing to tolerate some degree of discomfort - discomfort that will get smaller over time - if it's a sufficient value-add to their life. We're at the very start of that; check back in a year from now when developers have had plenty of time with the Quest 3 and the Vision Pro demonstrating Apple's vision for UX and software.

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xreal-air-2

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/23922425/ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses...

[2]: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/

And VR is from the 60s if we are doing it like that.

VR from 10 years ago was not "smartphone" level if we take that to mean an independent platform with an app marketplace and essential UI features.

Honestly I want it as a work experience, but the resolution wasn't high enough to be useable when I tried it, and it required too much GPU. I haven't tried the newer generation, but the Vision Pro looks pretty c

lose to what I want from VR. If it can be used with my Steam library, too, it'll be an automatic purchase. Even without, I'm interested, if only to have the nice super-portable multi-monitor display. Not sure I'm $3k interested, but I might be.

If you have the extra money, pick up a Quest 3. The resolution is fine for reading and writing text and it doesn't require you to use a gaming computer. There are limits to how small you can make the font but I find it to be a comfortable size for both viewing and productivity. Try Immersed since it is free, featureful and designed for productivity but keep in mind there are other options. It works with both Mac and Windows and has good QoL features like an AR portal so you can see where your keyboard and mouse are at when you're in a VR environment. Quest 3 works with SteamVR but you have to make sure you have a good router and an ethernet connection to the computer hosting your Steam library. Be warned that the headstrap that comes with the Quest can be uncomfortable for some people and you will probably want to spend the money on a better after market one. Prescription lenses are also available if you wear glasses.

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