Hardware is just hardware. Apple builds hardware that then becomes an ecosystem. Reality Labs was trying to build the hardware AND the ecosystem AND the apps.
This on top of an unworkable concept for Human Computer Interaction - Virtual Reality - which consumers have already rejected over and over again. There will be no consumer market VR headset because the concept is fundamentally alienating.
I suspect there are a lot of people on the spectrum in IT who seem convinced that somehow this is a tech problem. IT IS NOT, nor will it ever be. Getting in a VR headset and being in a reality where no one else is ever there, nor will they ever be (in the next 10-20 years, there is no tech that reliably emulates full body capture, not to mention touch and smell, two key parts of the human experience) is fundamentally unpleasant for the general public, because the general public, quite correctly, places a very high level of reward to being around other people, co regulating emotions, reading body language, and kissing and having sex.
Since none of that is mapped into VR, the concept of a general use VR OS with a consumer market is fundamentally dystopian and perhaps even physiologically and psychologically unsafe.
Having said that - I have worked in VR since 2014 and anyone in their right mind will tell you that Reality Labs was a dumb idea. There is not, and there won’t be for a very long time, any mass consumer market for VR (billions of units) because VR is anti human, anti connective and is most likely bad for people if they use it for long hours.
Check out this podcast[0] between Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg where they meet remotely via the metaverse.
Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity.
Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
What I’m proposing is you’d just have a “floating head” type call with someone else. The environment around you would be the real one that’s already there.
puts hand up
VRChat, even in its nascent, unrefined, laggy phase, is still much more engaging than any video call I've been on. Sharing the same space with someone improves the experience of communication immeasurably. It's hard to explain, but they no longer feel like a face on a screen, and that enables a much stronger bond.
> Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity.
Yes, this is true at present. However, they're actively working on reducing the requirements for the scan; this is them demonstrating what's possible at the high-end. This is a similar strategy to what Apple's doing with the Vision Pro: they're setting the benchmark before trying to shrink the cost.
Speaking of, you can already see a potential future towards low-cost scanning in Apple's Personas. They're obviously much lower in quality, but they're quick and easy to scan. The future is trending towards that kind of experience, not getting imaged by a dedicated rig.
> Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
Both are good! You're not wrong about the potential of AR teleconferencing. VR teleconferencing lets you set the scene and share an environment with the users, though, which has its own benefits. (Especially when it comes to spatial arrangement; it's much easier / less mind-bendy to have a single shared environment than to have everyone have their own view of the proceedings. Curious to see how Apple will deal with this, though.)
I believe every single word of what you said about enjoying VRchat, and that product has been out for ages. What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.
My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.
AR is, like you said, soon entering its infancy thanks to Apple doing a PARC and releasing a high cost developer prototype.
Without a doubt, yeah.
> What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.
Just above 90,000 [0]. Yes, a far cry from the billions of existing social networks. But I think that's because of a couple of factors, owing to...
> My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.
this. I believe the rejection of consumer VR is not primarily because of the alienation factor - it's because the experience has sucked and costs a lot more than people are willing to spend on a new experience.
I'm a long-time believer in VR; I've been paying attention to it from its 2012 resurgence. However, in that decade, I've seen a few fundamental reasons for why people either don't bother trying it out, or give up shortly afterwards:
- Cost. A good PCVR experience can easily cost thousands of dollars. For VRChat, you really do want that experience (you can only access a subset of content on standalone), and it does not come cheap.
- Comfort. The headsets are not comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
- Isolation. You can't see outside of your space, and other people can't see what you're doing.
- UX. The companies progressing VR have historically not been very good at UX - it's very easy to have a subpar experience with the software.
- Software. There's some high-quality content, but there's not enough of it to sustain interest.
The reason I still believe in it as a medium, despite these problems, is that they're not fundamentally insurmountable blockers. Despite all of these very annoying problems, the strength of the medium still shines through to those who can tolerate it.
There are paths forward for each of these problems; the cost of hardware will be driven down, headsets will get lighter and smaller, there are solutions to let reality in and to let others into your reality, and software troubles can be fixed with iteration and concerted effort from companies who can be bothered.
My existence proof of these things are the existence of the Quest lineup, the Bigscreen Beyond, and the Vision Pro. They all solve parts of the problem - with the Vision Pro being the strongest showing to date - and it's not too hard to envision a future in which one ecosystem has a solution to all of them. It will just take time and effort.
At present, I see the ecosystem being not unlike pre-iPhone smartphones; they exist, they work, but they're lacking the fundamental polish and comforts that a wider audience requires. And like the iPhone, there will come a moment where those things come together, and it will become accessible to the wider consumer market.
I don't think that's happening soon - the Vision Pro is three thousand dollars more and a few hundred grams more than it needs to be - but there's a path forward.
I also don't consider AR to be a separate technology; it's a part of the wider spectrum of XR. Improvements in AR will feed into VR, and vice versa. The Vision Pro is a VR headset masquerading as an AR headset, after all.
[0]: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...
They could also just pretend to buy into the first mover assumption, if a large enough fraction of the stock market does, that will be good enough.
Yes, I agree that that the AI-generated virtual worlds are getting better each day, but Mark & Co are making a pretty massive assumption that people (a) want to spend large amounts of time in a virtual world and (b) his virtual world.
We'll see very soon from the uptake of the Apple Vision Pro how many people want that (virtual) reality. ;-)
The problem is the users largely don't give a shit about any of that. What VR adoption there is among the public is exclusively gaming, apart from the weird crypto-web 3 adjacent real estate scams going on in this second life clones. Which, while they have a lot of big numbers to throw around, most of it has been a massive [insert fart noise] in terms of generating anything tangible like new technologies or better performing systems. It's just a crypto sub-culture that includes some (notably bad) VR games bolted to their sides.
Like I have just never seen any evidence at all that regular people are interested in the lightest in participating in any of these metaverse spaces. Video conferencing has purposes, and we saw that demonstrated well during the pandemic, but like, doing what is basically video conferencing with shitty graphics and bland visuals with everyone running around as corporate-art-styled avatars just... sucks ass. It really tremendously sucks and offers no real benefits over standard Zoom calls which we already have numerous profitable services offering. That, combined with collaboration spaces like Slack and Teams and good old telephones has basically all business communication covered, and none of it is made better in the slightest with the stupid metaverse proposed by Facebook.
And for the public, I mean, what can you even say is better? Wandering around a crappy 3D mall to shop for products is infinitely more work for a customer than just opening Amazon. We've already learned this lesson! For a while there we had websites that emulated traditional storefronts with image mapped jpegs representing products on offer and just like... no. The market spoke deafeningly loud: It was WAY EASIER to shop from a list of things to buy instead, and it was way, WAY easier for businesses to maintain those lists rather than building what amounts to a custom videogame to sell their products within.
VR is really cool tech. The metaverse is a dud and Facebook doesn't have enough money, nor really does anyone, to force it the way it would have to be to see wide adoption.
Anyways, all this is to say: don't let yourself get blindsided by a new paradigm while you're resting on the laurels of the last revolution.
Well yes but the difference there is the Internet for all it's flaws is a new form of communication that improves upon it's predecessors. Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications; magazines became e-zines, newsletters became... newsletters I suppose, directories went online, newspapers became RSS feeds/websites. Basically any print media you wanted could incredibly easily become a website that was then infinitely updatable and didn't require sending a physical slice of paper to get the same information across. The trade-off was of course the technical competence required to use the Internet, but people adapted quickly(ish) to that once they understood it and computers were more widely available. There is a cost, but the benefits are clear as day, and the adoption/simplification trend with the migration to platforms combined with the ubiquity of devices with Internet access has only accelerated all of that.
Now I grant, this is with the benefit of hindsight, but still, I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping experience that is directly translatable in this way. VR shopping is slower, it requires an investment in niche technology, the experience itself is far from universally improved with many users having serious motion sickness issues with it, and the medium of text which remains an essential part of the shopping experience (prices, descriptions, dimensions) is uniquely difficult to convey in the VR format, you essentially need to create either popups which are obnoxious, or floating text that is difficult to read.
The ONE aspect I can see is you could visually inspect the item you're looking to purchase in 3D, and while that's neat and useful, it's just as easily accomplished with AR which has been available and quite useful in the Amazon and Wayfair apps for years at this point, and lets you see, for example, a piece of furniture in your given room by just looking at where you'd put it through your phone camera, which doesn't require a headset, motion sensors, and the visualization is better because it collaborates with your existing lighting and decor instead of existing in a void. And, the benefit of in-person shopping which allows the tangible examination of a product is entirely unconveyable in VR because while vibration motors in the hands allow you to experience a proxy of touch, your hands still go straight through it, and the vibration features quickly run up against a wall of limitations with regard to like, simulating the touch and feel of different materials which is basically all you'd want to inspect in this regard.
> The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities.
Right, and this is the problem for Facebook. Because the product we're all unable to look inside just... isn't very compelling and doesn't show any signs of being it. Being able to communicate with people all over the world about niche or even mainstream interests has obvious appeal, that was the entire reason for the rise of social media later, and internet forums before. I struggle to conceive of this same level of appeal for metaverse content because it's... the same thing, but worse in basically every respect: it's costly to engage with, the density of interaction is significantly lower, the content you can experience is much more vast if that content is 3D models, but vastly REDUCED in the same way if it is not that. If you watch, for example, a 4K video in a VR headset on a massive screen, you miss out on a TON of the fidelity of that footage, and even if you're wanting a social aspect to that, basically every major streaming platform has co-watching abilities already designed that use a much less cumbersome and much less costly device to accomplish the same task. Add to it, the only headset I believe that could even get CLOSE to showing a 4K video on a massive screen that would preserve that fidelity is the Apple Vision Pro, which is THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Edit: Sorry that's $3,500!!!
And yes I'm sure the headsets will get cheaper as they do with everything (though I have doubts about how much given the niche community around them about the speed of that) but again, if you wanted to watch a movie with friends... there are theaters, there's your living room, there are simul-stream services and webcams, there's discord with streaming functionality and video chat in the same app, there are just options upon options to accomplish this goal that don't require a thousand dollar bespoke video hardware device that amounts to a few pounds of electronics strapped to your dome.
Don't misunderstand, VR is incredibly cool and I really enjoy it! For games. And that's it. As a full remote worker the thought of having to gear up for my weekly standup meetings and doing code reviews in a shitty metaverse meeting room is just... shudder
I think I know where the disconnect is. You're comparing to the wrong historical period, granted they were rather short. I think this is a common mistake, for the metaverse it isn't 2002 when Amazon started selling clothing, it's not even 1995 when CNN launched their website, I don't even think it's 1991 since we haven't settled on a protocol that would allow the equivalent of websites which would be something like the worlds you see in VRChat but not limited to a single app. It's going to happen soon though, it seems like USD might be the HTML of the metaverse[0] and once that gets hammered out things will really take off.
Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web.
> metaverse content because it's... the same thing but worse
You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. You can have flat content in it if you want but it's not the reason people go to VR. The term used most often for the things people seek out in VR are "experiences" those can be interactive games, social gatherings or just passive full immersion. It's similar to what people seek out in the real world, novelty, surprise, laughter, connection. The best way to get across why this is better than just leaving your house is to imagine you live in a small town, without VR your options are pretty limited but with VR you have (or will eventually have as more content becomes available) any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home. That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation.
Coming back to the flat content. Low resolution doesn't really matter that much when you're watching a movie on a theatre sized screen with a bunch of other people from around the world. What matters is being able to turn to the person beside you and say "omg this is my favorite part!" or whispering back and forth about the film or getting up and acting out the scene with friends and laughing about it. No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want.
The best parts of social VR or "the metaverse" aren't browsing web pages, looking at pictures or watching movies. They're sitting around a room talking to people, wandering through a crowded world like you're at a party and taking in all the conversations, dancing, trying out different worlds and games with friends for the first time, going to a live show or any of the other varied experiences on offer.
It's about being with people not about consuming content.
[0] https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-usd-html-metaverse-foundatio...
With all due respect I think this is a highly optimistic view that isn't borne out by any of the current trends. Current headsets have interoperability but we're already seeing a number of manufacturers walling off their hardware from the larger market, by name, Apple and Facebook, one more aggressively than the other. The Internet exploded both because it was built upon a set of open shared standards, and because it was, as said previously, a natural progression of communication technology: print, but faster. VR is not faster than... I mean really, anything. It's slower for basically all forms of communication, not because of the hardware or whatever but because of what it is, because of the physical footprint of the devices. The most convenient one you can point to is the Vision Pro, and it's also (I believe) the most expensive by a solid margin, and it's still almost 2 pounds of stuff strapped to your head.
> Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web.
I mean, I think that's utlimately where we agree. I think because of that, it's overall adoption will remain niche. I think the web's ability to engage people in commerce is one of the big reasons that it has exploded the way it has.
> You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. ... any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home.
Right, absolutely agree. But again, the vast, vast, vast majority of content is flat content. Text, pictures, video, and even the vast majority of videogames are 100% flat. And, it isn't just that the majority is flat; the production expense to create content that is not flat introduces exponentially greater cost to the entity creating it. You say "once we have all these experiences it'll be better" and hey, I want that, I'm in this and I love VR. But VR content is harder to make, harder to test, the hardware is more involved, there are safety concerns to go over that are just not a thing in other media, on and on. Anyone can write press releases and with newer tech, just about anyone can make videos, and even podcasts are still pretty dead simple. But VR content is in a completely different league, you're in for four or even five figures just to begin.
> That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation.
Because the people on the terminal were the fellow weirdos like you who had a similar terminal, being on the early internet you already probably had a LOT in common with all those people right off the bat, solely on the basis that you were both the kind of people who had access to the internet at all.
> Coming back to the flat content. ... No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want.
I mean, it's less a concern for the video and far more for text. And you can say all day "well it isn't for text" and yeah, I get that, but you're missing that text is still the predominant form of communication in technology. If you can't do text effectively, huge aspects of your social media product have problems.
> The best parts of social VR or "the metaverse" aren't browsing web pages, looking at pictures or watching movies. They're sitting around a room talking to people, wandering through a crowded world like you're at a party and taking in all the conversations, dancing, trying out different worlds and games with friends for the first time, going to a live show or any of the other varied experiences on offer. > > It's about being with people not about consuming content.
I mean, then how do you explain a company like Facebook betting so hard on it? Facebook is all about getting you to consume content. That's all they do and I have a strong feeling that's exactly what their metaverse will be.
Metaverse is old. It's literally the dream of the 90s and 00s. Linen labs, second life, every animated live in a village game ever. There is no log term play for the "metaverse". There is for VR computing platforms. Unfortunately, Meta has missed that boat trying to take on the Wii and Wii U lobby.
As a concept, virtual universes are actually popular, when you take away the requirement of VR headsets. The barrier of entry is about the cost of an indy game or maybe, a A game title. My kids spend more time playing in the Animal Crossing and Minecraft universe than on the oculus by a mile. Check that, they spend more time in the Goat Simulator or Deeeeer universe.
They had to spin it into the "metaverse" which is this mythical thing that might be big enough theoretically to make "real" money for them.
If this was not the case, you would see lots of Facebook restaurants or cleaners or hair salons etc. since these are all easy to make profitable.
And when they are, it's usually <5% margin.
If gaming is profitable but the ads business is more profitable and less capital intensive, you would be advised to stick to ads. Particularly when it's expensive to borrow.
Reality Labs have spent $20bn already. How much does the return on that capital have to be to convince the stock market that it was a good idea?
Given that we will spend all our days in VR in 10 years or so, who will own that space?
The company that designs future products today and only needs to sit on it for a decade until the technology and human society have caught up?
Or the company that goes all in on VR gaming, a technology that exists today, and completely owns that space until the technology is mature enough to branch out beyond gaming?
Is there any reason to assume that VR will be anything other than a niche of a niche in rich countries in such a short time frame?
With that, though: the access to the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, thanks to no small amount by Meta's subsidies [0].
If it does take a pivotal role in our technological future (which I believe it will, but I'm not expecting you to), I would imagine it'd end up being like the smartphone: many vendors will sprout up and drive costs down, especially for low-income markets.
[0]: https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/meta-q...
Maybe, but in practice they tried to force a low quality immature tech, to the already skeptical general public, way too soon.
They should have kept it brewing in their basement and release it gradually years in the future when it would be more mature.