Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by MikusR | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

MikusR

So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing. It happened with Mobile phones, browsers, tablets, AI.

View on HN

> So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing.

I don't see VR/AR growing. Quite the opposite.

E.g.: https://mixed-news.com/en/steamvr-february-2023/

Some contrast to this comment: this is steamVR data which is not only specific to steam (which as pointed out in the article, is not representative of the entire market) but also mostly biased towards gaming. Now I will concede that VR has mostly been “successful” with that demographic (gaming), in fact, oculus (now quest) is mostly making money solely on that sort of content… some people at Meta while I was there would even argue that this product should limit its ambition to be the “Nintendo switch of VR”. Apple on the contrary has been setting expectations much more clearly that gaming is not in the forefront (but not excluded). Whether it will be successful is another story, but we should still welcome new challengers in an industry / product category. What happened to the excitement in tech everyone :-)

oculus always wanted the walled garden approach, but steamvr had so much more content that users were unhappy that their vr display device wouldn't play steamvr games even though it technically was possible (in fact people hacked it in before it was officially enabled).

Now that oculus has made the device cheaper so more non pc gamers are playing I'm sure they're selling more software themselves. Valve also hasn't launched a headset in a while and wasn't targeting low budget headsets at all.

I'm not sure 6 million MAU is really "successful" when game consoles are approaching 400 million MAU and they're still mostly nerd boxes. Let's reserve "successful" for products that break 10 million MAU or perhaps 100 million MAU. A few hundred thousand devices, as Apple will sell this year, or a few million devices, as Meta has deployed successfully over the last decade, that's just not mainstream and not even close to any other Apple release in terms of sales or fashion factor (AVP is actually anti-fashion, a real departure for Apple.)

These statistics are complicated. They're looking at the evolution in percentage relative to a Steam's total numbers.

For instance if Steam had a sudden influx of new comers because of some standard popular franchise's game, the total VR usage could slowly grow yet still be declining in percentage relative to Steam as a whole.

Then users not relying on Steam (someone playing recrooms through Oculus Link for instance) also won't be counted. I have no idea how many people that would be, but VR is not that mainstream, so people doing that kind of stuff feels par for the course

The author speculates that PCVR users are switching to the PSVR2. It seems much more likely that they are switching to the standalone Quest headsets, which have far higher sales numbers and exclusive AAA games like Asgard's Wrath 2. The graphics aren't as good as on PC or PS5, but not everything is about polygons.

PSVR2 is an excellent headset, I’m not buying PCVR until those headsets are on the level of PSVR2. OLED or micro LED is a must, and foveated rendering is good for performance on pixel dense displays. Plus, inside out tracking instead of extra boxes to mount. The main problem is you can’t use it except on PS5.

It's probably subsidized by Sony, otherwise it is hard to explain how they ship it at $550.

Quest 3 (500 USD), from Meta, is definitely subsidized, given that their hardware bill alone is almost as high as the end price of the product [1] without any inclusion of development cost, and considering that the latest losses of Meta's Reality Labs exceed 4 billion USD [2].

So I don't think there will be anything soon in that price range that can compete with the headsets above. The Quest 3 seems the best deal currently, given that it has a lot of games and doesn't require a PS5 or even gaming PC.

[1] https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-3-bill-of-materials-ana...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/01/metas-reality-labs-loses...

Also with a quest you get the best from both worlds. If you're coming from pcvr you already have a suitable pc and can even play wirelessly. With the native games to boot. It's a really nice combo.

Your link is from 2023.. Current numbers:

Steam users with VR Headsets: 2.24% (vs 2.07% last feb)

See https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey (VR section)

Vs 1.84% the prior month. This is an example of noise of a flat trend over the last year, not something just starting to grow.

OP was arguing that it was decreasing. Steam is a bad source of info for a lot of reasons. Meta is the largest platform and they don't release numbers. My personal feeling (Apple Vision Pro hype not withstanding) as a VR developer is that the industry is in the slow growth phase and will continue to grow as real usecases are found and hardware continues to improve year over year.

Sure, the source isn't perfect but May 2021 still being higher than this peak is no more an argument it's actually growing in absence of other actual data nearly 10 years into the current cycle. Particularly since this is for the much more popular overall VR market, not just AR. That could always change in the future, but there is nothing beyond hopes and feelings suggesting it's already changing at the moment (not that those can't ever turn out to be right).

I'm surprised there'd be that much noise in the Steam Hardware Survey.

Typically anything in ${latest-steam-survey} is more unreliable than ${not-latest-steam-survey}. People often get hyped up on a big month change in e.g. Linux that ends up being a detection issue or the like.

occulus headsets are outselling xboxes.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/oculus/quest-2-meta-sales-xbox-seri...

PSVR2 is outselling both.

Quest is outselling PSVR2 https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-psvr-2-unit-sales-holiday-202...

thnx, there is "aces of thunder" dropping for PSVR2 in a quarter or two which should get that moving again, either way great to see the trend only accelerating.

However, the Xbox is profitable and Metas VR division is still spending $6 billion for every $1 billion they make.

It's relatively easy to move a lot of devices if you don't care about making any money on them.

I wonder if that's still true now that Xbox has more software and the supply crunch is resolved.

Apparently Xbox is just doing horribly bad this console generation. No real major reason I can see for it, however, the Xbox does Xbox things.

For what it’s worth, my VR usage is greatly down because I used it for iRacing but grew frustrated with windows and switched to Linux where I can’t use it anymore for the time being. Blame anticheat.

The only thing I want PCVR for is simracing; I don’t particularly enjoy other games. I have a PSVR2 from when I planned to just use a console but now I use an IR head tracker in iRacing, which is like a poor man’s VR.

Too bad they won’t get anti cheat working in Linux, I really hate Windows too.

I use my WMR for sim racing as well as Elite: Dangerous, with a wheel and pedals for one and HOTAS for the other. It definitely was "good enough" for that purpose, and my IPD is within the spec to use it, it I really don't use it often enough to warrant upgrading anything.

They've been in the process of pulling out since before the Vision Pro was announced; HP was the canary in the coal mine, firing or moving around everyone they had working on WMR devices a year or two ago. When HP pulls out of a Microsoft initiative, it's over.

Yeah that. They enter every single market, deliver a half-assed broken product with dubious gains and expect to pick up business and when it doesn't they shelve it, even if the market is heading in that direction. At the same time they compromise their core business with the fads they pick up because attention is diverted. Can you imagine what it's going to be like getting all the unused AI crap out of windows and office when the inevitable incoming AI winter hits.

Dear MS, can you please just concentrate on your core business. We know it's dreary but we just want Windows, Office and AD that doesn't suck balls.

As it starts growing? Is there any indication that mixed reality in Windows 11 has ever grown?

They meant "Mixed Reality" in general. The Apple Vision Pro has just launched. You can debate whether it will be succesful or not (please - do that in another discussion thread as it a topic I grow weary of) but the timing is worthy of note.

So the entire opinion of "Microsoft leaving as a field starts growing" rests on the Vision Pro coming out and therefore VR growing, but we should not question the fact that Vision Pro is unquestionable proof VR is growing in this thread...

No. VR is not growing. Apple was supposed to put out Vision Pro in 2021 when everyone was aboard the VR hypetrain, and AI was not in the public's mindset. Vision Pro is not the VR industry growing, it's an echo from yet another dead VR hypecycle.

> but we should not question the fact that Vision Pro is unquestionable proof VR is growing in this thread...

I was simply asking that we don't recycle the same metadiscussion yet again.

Well the metadiscussion upends the whole discussion.

Microsoft should've wrapped up their HoloLens research and offered a nice low-volume product for researches, engineers, and designers. We need such products, and it's a shame they abandoned it.

But they keep trying to find the "next big thing". And VR is absolutely not the "next big thing". So if they only see value in that, they were right to cut losses and move on to focus their resources on other things like AI.

I rather agree than chasing mass-market VR (with "mass" defined as "the new smartphone") is a huge part of the problem.

However I do think VR potentially has a large niche to fill amoung consumers, hobbyists and various semi-professional roles. Something bigger than you're suggesting but smaller than say - consoles or smartphones.

Whether this is a niche big enough for Microsoft, I genuinely don't know. I think it probably is - but it would require aggregating several quite diverse market segments.

I could be wrong , I think the notes say "This deprecation does not impact HoloLens.".

I'm pretty sure that laying off the HoloLens team last year impacts the future of HoloLens.

This software update though, i'm reading the linked article.

They were outcompeted in mobile and tablets. They had the most popular web browser for a good decade in the late 90s and early 00s, until they were outcompeted there too.

But how are they abandoning AI? They're a major part of the leading AI company.

They're not abandoning AI yet. They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They also have little to no profitability model around it and the development is operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon advancements and user count down the line.

The thing is 99% of the people I know either played with their proposition and found it irritating or don't give a shit. They literally just want to be left alone and for people not to keep changing things. The machine is a means to an end and that end is well defined for them already. Only the tech and investment industries are gushing all over this and the latter are only riding the hype.

Typical MS this. Give it 5 years and read this comment again...

It's hard not to see it from the perspective of "for the person with a hammer, everything is a nail", Azure and already having the capability to build data centers is their hammer and the nail is a compute-heavy task. There's an element of speculation if whether it will be a lasting wave of the future people will pay for, but they have the levers to pull in case it is. It wouldn't be the first time they or any other company has made a bet so they don't get left out, time will tell if AI becomes a part of the furniture commodity or doesn't prove broadly valuable and fades away after a change of direction.

The interesting thing for me is the push for AI hardware as a baseline in consumer chips, right now I'd assume training and inference is done on their servers, but as it moves from a development/exploration phase to regular operations and scales up they want to offload inference to save costs, and probably provide a better experience running a model locally.

Well they failed miserably at that first thing. Azure's only leverage is really AD, InTune, O365 etc for corporates and then shovel everything else in there around the edges. Even in the MS house I work in, other than AD, all the product stuff is in AWS.

And the Azure hardware situation is so crap they had to buy in capacity from Oracle!

Source: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-cloud-infras...

> They are however compromising it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better. They also have little to no profitability model around it and the development is operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon advancements and user count down the line.

You've just described every AI company. AI is not even their core business, but MS is certainly in the best position out of any of the Big Tech companies to deliver a successful consumer product. Whether someone else will step in and steal their lunch, or they just fumble the product, only time will tell, but none of this is an indication that they're "abandoning AI" as GP mentioned. Quite the contrary―they're heavily invested in it.

The rest of your post is pure speculation, but I'll set a reminder for 5 years from now in case your crystal ball is legit.

Not every AI company. There are two approaches to solving problems. One is finding problems you didn't have to solve with the latest hammer. The other is having existing problems and solving them with the latest hammer. The subtle difference tends to bisect product outcomes accurately and thus can drive investment decisions. My crystal ball is mostly fairly well proven heuristics and financial modelling (used to be the day job). I could be wrong but the chance of a favourable outcome is less than one I'd put money on.

> ... overblown claims about how it's going to make people's lives better.

That sounds exactly like how they did Cortana too -> "It'll be GREAT!!!". Fast forward a few years and they're ripping it out of everything as it's actually not useful.

They finished killing Cortana some time before starting from scratch with Copilot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com