Comment by WhatIsDukkha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhatIsDukkha | Hacker News Reader

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Yes its still the underlying software thats terrible.

It's an almost straight port of normal android into the headset which is at least familiar but they've really not made any progress in making it more VR and comfortable over time. Lots of small tweaking of whats probably not a great overall fit for VR.

For a direct example look at the room boundary system and setup.

Even with the new depth sensor and the color passthrough, it fails to figure out whether a table is a surface or a pillow of polygons, it fails to set reasonable wall boundaries (and then the ui is awful for addressing that) and then it nags and irritates people with those failures and misunderstandings.

Last I checked, the room software still only stores one room in your house. If you go to your kitchen for your coffee... remake the room boundary over again.

This is very fundamental for any AR to be built on and its terrible and unreliable.

Edit- also, last I checked, if you turn off boundary nagging with the devtools you cannot use the passthrough mode whatsoever.

This is the head of AR software that's stepping down, as well, which doesn't even do SLAM or DFS afaik. They just chucked the custom silicon team out in September. I wonder if we'll ever see their mostly functional AR headset vs. Raybans with cameras.

It's flawed, but have you tried the competition?

Yeah, the Quest's boundary setup process astounded me at how polished and user-friendly it is compared to the Vive and Index's room setup process.

Anyone saying that the Quest's software is obviously terrible lives on a different planet than me. The Quest is so simple and works so well, especially compared to other VR headsets+software I've used. I really like the Index too which I use a lot and think does some small things better, but I find it hard to deny the Quest is much more approachable and polished.

Quest 3 is my first and only VR device so I'm obviously not in the know in these matters, though I have to say I don't see what is so terrible about Quest's flavor of Android either.

For a regular user, most everything seems to work well. Setup was easy, UI is polished and simple enough to get out of your way, and I personally haven't encountered any show-stopping bugs with it. Maybe I don't expect much out of it, as I see it more of an entry-point to actual VR applications I want to use, rather than something I'm more invested in.

If anything, I was surprised how well it worked for a product still so early in its lifecycle.

It makes more sense when you realize some people have an extreme distaste for anything made by Facebook. If you want to dislike something bad enough, it's not hard to find/make up reasons to do so

What is the connection between Android and the user-level app code around something like your "store multiple rooms" complaint? Seems pretty far away from the kernel and runtime there.

Multiple rooms works fine on my quest 2 and quest pro.

You should check again. Most of this is out of date.

What constitutes accurate wall boundaries is a matter of opinion but it works well for me. I've never seen the nagging you're talking about, unless you mean when it loses tracking entirely?

> It's an almost straight port of normal android into the headset which is at least familiar but they've really not made any progress in making it more VR

Congratulations to Meta VR teams. You've created a system perceptually more transparent than a thin sheet of glass.

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