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Comment by didip | Hacker News Reader

If what you said were true then this is a fatal strategic error on Meta's side.

This entire time, they could have built a real OS, solidifying their first mover advantage.

Meta makes social media apps. Where as writing operating systems is Apple's core competency. Both companies are playing to their strengths.

The problem is that by doing that they’ve limited their device’s usefulness severely.

If some kind of killer AR app shows up on the Vision Pro, could it be put on the Quest? Let’s just assume it doesn’t need a level of processing power that the Quest can’t deliver. Would the software vendor just have to implement the entire interface from scratch or with Unity or something? Are there enough platform components on the Quest to be able to do the job?

I don’t know the answer. But I did see a number of developers mentioning online over the last year just how incredibly easy it was to get started with the Vision Pro compared to the quest. If you have a Mac you sign up for the Developer program for $99 and you get an IDE, compiler, simulator, performance monitoring, full UI library plus documentation. It’s early days for some of that stuff, but all the batteries are included. From what they said it was far far easier to get to “hello world” than on Meta’s platform.

The funny thing is that the social media app for Oculus (Horizon Worlds) is total dogshit. The third party VRChat is far more successful.

Apple leveraged their existing OSX OS stack, for Meta this would mean either heavily forking android OR starting their own OS. Both would take 5+ years to get meaningful traction. Remember google fuchsia, the code-repo was public in 2016, intial release was 2021, and it's still not anywhere near where it'd need to be for a VR headset.

I think that kind of under sells it. Yes Apple had all sorts of existing technology they could leverage. But they still built a completely new spatial UI paradigm for it.

And an entirely new interaction model that hasn’t been seen before. Using looking at something to replace a mouse isn’t new but taking that combined with using a pinch gesture to “click“ and some of the other things they’ve come up with is a unique combination that seems to work quite well. Thought there is certainly room for improvement.

Didn't oculus have pinch to click before Vision Pro came out?

I own one of each, and develop for the Vision Pro through my job, it's the very same story it's always been. Apple hasn't 'invented' much here, but the magic is in how it's assembled, even in its current state, using apps in a 3d space feels better than anything the quest has ever done. Even simple things like 'touching' a panel just feels more natural on the vision pro than the same experience on the quest, mostly because the quest does things like forcing the ghost hand to stop at the surface of the window, instead of continuing to track your hand through it and just using the intersection as the touch point. It's a small difference in the interaction that makes a world of difference in usability, which Apple is very good at.

VROS is already an Android fork.

VR needs performance..Android just cannot and will never deliver it.

To be fair, you probably don't have to build your own kernel like fuchsia. You can almost certainly start with a bare bones freebsd or Linux kernel or what ever. You're still making a custom gfx layer and lots of user land but you're get a lot for free too.

Every game console comes with its own operating system, even though Sony and Nintendo are not in the OS business.

Just take FreeBSD and add your own UI on top.

They started to, and then they gave up on it.

https://www.engadget.com/meta-dissolves-ar-vr-os-team-204708...

That operating system (a hard fork of Google Fuschia) was really designed for low-power AR wearables and made almost no considerations to supporting VR (or like, any existing software, which was one of the major drawbacks). Too many systems designed from scratch with no compatibility with traditional OS APIs. I don't think it would have been viable even with 5+ more years.

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