Meta Horizon OS
meta.com
meta.com
There’s an important difference though: Apple made all their money on Mac hardware margins which the nimble clone vendors could undercut. Whereas for Meta, the Quest hardware has always been sold at breakeven or even as a loss leader (a few years ago they actually raised the price of the Quest 2 to cut further losses).
So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either.
Certainly more open (edited) than the Apple ecosystem, but still controlled by one (big) player, with a little bit of flexibility but not a whole lot.
You may have forgotten about China: Huawei smartphones are doing very well on an AOSP-based OS.
Edit: Google was concerned about a Chinese fork of Android flourishing, they wrote to congress at the time the tech-transfer ban was being condidered
In any case, the Play store can be sideloaded on every Android device even if it isn't officially supported.
Not much headway? Pretty much all Android phones used in China do not come with GMS.
It is not "a bit more open" than iOS, it is a completely different approach to OS development that enables wildly different results.
> While theoretically open, the real useful stuff on top of Android
That stuff is by no means necessary; I've run Android without Google services for years and it just feels like a normal tablet OS. Again, it is not "theoretically open" but in fact practically usable without any first-party services, unlike iOS.
Have you ever used a Mac? It's a great example of what the iPhone will look like, in a few years. You boot it up, log in, and open up the App Store... and it's only junk. Freemium apps with monthly microtransactions, paid trial versions of professional software you have to buy from the web, iPhone games that are barely anything more than a casino with flashy graphics... these are the developers that choose to stay with Apple when they get the choice. They'll be your only bedfellows if you're dumb enough to use an iPhone that only Apple curates.
Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?
The people who want to buy a Honda aren't the same people who want to buy an Acura, even though it's (essentially) the same parts.
Let's say that, tomorrow, Gucci or Dolce and Gabanna (or however you spell that) want to make a VR headset (why? who knows?). They don't have the tech acumen to compete with Facebook on experience, but they have the brand to compete on "people who want to be seen in Gucci."
Is there a market for that? I don't know. But this opens Facebook up to the possibility of making that deal.
Why would they want to sell at/below cost forever? The reason they do this now is to make the platform viable.
The only reason they are focusing on cheaper devices now is to build the platform and try to get more users, to in turn get more data on what the killer usecases will be.
Think of this as a play like Android. Google doesn’t care what goes on in the commodified end of the spectrum, as long as there is one. Google does ship flagship phones (in competition with eg Samsung) and that is fine.
It may be that there are more places to compete in the VR Headset Market that people on HN don't know about.
Like you said, this is probably something like an Android play. Everyone was talking about the Apple Vision Pro as the VR Market's "iPhone moment" when it came out - maybe Meta Vision OS (or whatever they're calling it) is Facebook's Android moment.
And yeah, Facebook would probably be ok with others taking the low end of the market if they do it well. Right now, Facebook is the only company willing to take a loss on their own platform. So they do.
Particular Mac users who happen to particularly like the physical and mental ergonomics, and locational and furniture freedom, of arrangeable virtual screens and a beautiful visual isolation chamber on demand.
(And in my case, who have dramatically customized the light shield and straps to be super comfortable for long periods.
I would buy the next version at twice the price if it came out tomorrow. And give up a lot to do it.
But that is a VERY niche market. There are only three of us happy campers, after the return wave. It is definitely not an iPhone - yet.
Personally, I think they should lean into it as a MacBook Pro killer. Make it a first class pro computing device. That is a good rationale for keeping around a high end spec, high priced version.
Then have Air versions when it becomes possible to ship a cheap enough iOS-computing level version for the masses.
As long as VR is limited to facehuggers the market will remain niche. VR glasses are a good few years (decades?) off.
In the meantime Apple will eat the high end and probably some of the low end.
So where does that leave Meta?
It doesn't help that Meta is more of an annoyance than brand. I'm not sure anyone actually likes Meta or Meta's products. While they're tolerated to some extent, they're perceived as fundamentally boring or irritating in a way that is deadly for brands.
I would also buy another AVP immediately, if I broke this, or if a better one came out,
But that is… extremely niche. The OS is as bad as iOS 1.0 was — but without the obvious utility to a huge number of people. I’m not sure Apple can pull this off.
But, I have all the Meta headsets, too, and have used them for this purpose. That gives me the perspective to understand that, while on one hand it is indeed “just another VR headset”, there has never been one actually usable for this before. Apple has the lead along a dew different axes. The question is, do they have the stomach to lose money on it for 10 years like Meta has>
(Even if they don’t literally sell it below cost, like Meta, it won’t work out if they don’t keep iterating as hard as they can on the software side. Like the first iPhone, it is simultaneously amazing, unprecedented, and objectively awful in many ways.)
P.S. I do easy work in here on the gym machines, too. Not just HN-reading. ;-)
The normal dictation feature is so bad it is unusable for more than a sentence fragment. The one enabled via Accessibility is incredibly good, aside from a bit more latency than I’d like (but easy to get used to that), and enables mixed voice dictation and keyboard-typing, without switching modes.
Is this a command or an opinion that left out the subject of the sentence?
I put the pan on the stove.
Put the pan on the stove.
I talk to your brother.
Talk to your brother.
Leaving out the "I" changes the meaning of the sentence here. "I disagree with x" means something else entirely than "Disagree with x."
* https://www.scribd.com/document/399594551/2015-06-22-MARK-S-...
It would help if Meta said something about that. Ideally for potential third party hardware manufacturers, they’d promise to leave the hardware market once a vibrant ecosystem exists.
Defining “vibrant” then would be hard to impossible, though. The edge cases are easy, but uninteresting. If none of the others are making money on hardware there is no vibrant system. If multiple other parties are making money, they probably wouldn’t care much whether Meta makes some money, too.
For in-between cases, where third parties make some money, Meta will have to choose between staying in the market because others don’t sell enough and Meta leaving the market so that others get more room to sell and thus become profitable.
* https://www.scribd.com/document/399594551/2015-06-22-MARK-S-...
The only thing that I can imagine that would be more privacy invasive would be a device that directly reads your brain waves while you are exposed to different stimuli.
And on that note I can’t wait to see Meta’s answer to Neuralink!
For example, if you're selling VR headsets for the purposes of industrial training, you may not want the consumer-grade hardware Meta is selling. You may need weather-sealing to allow outdoor operation. You may need vastly higher-resolution screens for industrial applications. The list of specializations goes on.
The specialized businesses tend to have wider moats and bigger margins. The TAM is smaller - too small for a mega-cap company like Meta to care about, but nonetheless can contribute to the health of the ecosystem.
This play gives influence over these niche, specialized uses of AR/VR without having to commit the entire company to it.
For example think of a medical instruments company that trains on VR headsets. Their choices right now are to use consumer-grade hardware which may not hit all of their needs, or become a full-on AR/VR company with all the requisite R&D that involves.
This allows these companies to exist in the middle ground - having the core R&D being done by another party, but having sufficient control to ship specialized hardware.
Now, Hondas and Acuras are different products. You can say "oh, they're essentially the same" and if you truly believe that, I'll sell you a Core i3 processor for the price of a Core i7. Yea, they're essentially the same, but it's the differences that make one better than the other. The point is that the high end isn't about branding. The high end is about capability. Apple has shown that their iPhone will outsell any luxury-branded Android phone to rich people because some things are about capability, not a logo. Samsung's flagships will way outsell some luxury logo smartphone too. The high end here is really about devices with better capabilities and it allows companies with good hardware businesses (like ASUS and Lenovo) to build something in the Meta VR ecosystem.
It's also possibly a way for Meta to stop dumping Quest devices. They'd rather just own the ecosystem rather than doing the hardware. If they can get ASUS, Lenovo, and others to do the low-margin hardware work and pick up the tab for a lot of the marketing, that's a win for Meta. Maybe Meta simply backs out of hardware over the next 5 years if a nice third party hardware ecosystem arises.
But I think this is going to be tough with VR. When you're trying to make an immersive experience, you need a baseline of hardware. It's also easier when you know the hardware you're trying to target. Android development can be frustrating because there's so much variance in speed and capabilities. One of the reason gaming consoles exist is that targeting a small set of hardware/capabilities makes things easier. That's not to say that PC gaming doesn't exist, but it can be hard because gamers need to spend a lot of money on hardware and there's a variance in capabilities that you need to account for - and who you might simply exclude. With a phone, it's less of an immersive experience for most apps which are just displaying something. They might display it slower, the UX might be laggier, etc. but it works. VR can't be laggy.
In some ways, it feels like Meta is trying to become a game console company without having to subsidize the console. That would be big if they can pull it off. I guess in many ways this is what Steam pulled off on the PC - taking a 30% cut without having to subsidize any hardware. We'll see if Meta can do the same for VR.
Porsche, or whatever, have a great and meaningful brand when it comes to cars, but that doesn’t translate to smartphones. So when you see a phone with the Porsche logo the brand isn’t really gonna do much for you.
How have they shown this?
Nit, but as an Acura driver (chooser), I can tell you that they are definitely not essentially the same parts. The irrelevant parts are the same, but everything that matters to the driver (suspension/drivetrain, interior materials, technology, etc.) all all different and better in the Acura. I get what you're trying to say, but that was not a good metaphor.
Anyway, I also get what you're trying to say.
Heck, I've got a Civic intake manifold in the room with me to replace the Acura one, haha. (The generation of K series after mine has better airflow and it's an easy enough swap.)
The Acura brand doesn't even exist outside of the US- if a car is sold in Europe or Japan the parts are Honda.
Can't go into high-end because for a device to make sense either an existing ecosystem around it or high confidence in one appearing. If you tell me that I can buy a 3k dollar vr headset that can run current quest library, I would pretend you're joking.
Mid-end is where we're at right now has/had very small margins because despite it being mid-end - you still have to use high-end components due to lack of options.
I can see someone like Porsche Design making a "high-end" headset (in terms of price, components would be the same). The only option for low-end is to use components previously used in mid-end that would need to compete with used previous gens since they would be nearly identical on the hardware level.
Regardless of whether they can sell the hardware at a loss forever, they probably won't need to.
Third-party hardware is engineering labor that Meta doesn't have to pay for. In fact, it's engineering labor that will pay Meta through royalties. Cost-cutting measures developed by those third parties can easily be copied by Meta's own product, reducing the cost of future versions of the hardware. Cheaper options in the marketplace also help Meta gain market penetration without their own hardware developing a reputation for poor quality.
After a couple generations, vendor lock-in will start to set in, and they'll be able to charge more without losing customers. The aforementioned cost-cutting techniques start to pile up, too.
Which leaves a huge opportunity for professionals and businesses.
To put this very concretely, look at Pimax. Their Crystal headset allegedly has standalone capability. All the hardware is there for it, they make this thing, they sell it -- but they don't have a standalone platform, and have no hope whatsoever of being able to develop one.
For PCVR, they just use regular standard SteamVR and OpenXR, but for standalone usage, they suddenly have to be an amazing software company and they definitely are not. Using Horizon makes a ton of sense, and makes their product more attractive and better than it is without it.
Because you want to expand your market.
Let's say you are Pimax or Bigscreen Beyond and want to target users who don't have large gaming PC's - this is an obvious option for them.
Google makes medium and high cost devices, but actually doesn't compete too much on margins.
If the OS catches up, meta will do the same move, allowing other vendors to proliferate.
How does Meta make its money? Advertising. Licensees bring actual eyeballs to the table and eat the hardware costs fighting amongst themselves selling commodity hardware and Meta re-position Quest as a 'premium' product that they might actually make a little money on.
Indeed, and that means they'll seek a return on their investment from continued invasive surveillance, emotional manipulation, and cramming ads everywhere.
Short video from Zuckerberg: https://twitter.com/NathieVR/status/1782436898654273981
This is an interesting move and feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But this isn't open source. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the store. Maybe there's an app revenue share involved?
Wait, at the end of the video he says "We're also as part of this going to be opening up our store to give you even more options to use whatever experiences you want. So whether they're on Steam, Xbox Cloud Gaming, our own App Lab, or even Google Play, if they're up for it." The blog post doesn't mention Steam or Google Play. It's not really clear what that means. Will they allow Steam to sell native Quest apps?
Edit: There's a better blog post that has more detail. https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/meta-horizon-os-open-hardwar... This one seems to suggest that being "open" to Steam just means allowing game streaming which they already do, while being "open" to Google Play means that they would allow Google to install the actual Play Store app on the headset, for 2D apps only. But Google doesn't want to. In any case it seems like they would specifically not be open to alternative app stores selling native 3D apps directly on the headset itself.
At the very least, this could lead to more high-end standalone headsets being available. Not every 3rd party headset has to be competing with the Quest line of headsets, so the lack of revenue from the store might not matter to some companies.
I don't think that's a given long term. Even already the chip in the Quest 3 is rated at the same GPU grunt as an nVidia 1060, the minimum supported chipset originally for PCVR. The next gen is already announced and is significantly more powerful again, able to power 4k displays. I would project in 3 years from now we have something that can actually be considered at least moderately high end in stand alone form factor from Qualcomm.
Or if Meta doesn't become strong enough to be considered a monopoly, you always have the choice to go with their competitors (as is currently the case). I can still install anything I want on my Pico 4.
The use-cases for AR are so awful. The last thing I want is to consume already a passive medium with my family wearing goggles. Such an anti-social platform.
I don't get excited about new OSs unless they're FOSS. It sounds like an ideological take, but it's not: When an OS is not FOSS, they either succumb to the wrong incentives and lack of care (Windows) or just become a walled garden (MacOS). From what I've seen from, say, Visual Studio Code (FOSS version), or Chromium, or other such projects, is that a large company open-sourcing the core of their product can only yield positives over the alternative (fully closed) solution.
Fully FOSS would be sick, partially would be useful. Closed and ad-ridden, driven by wrong incentives and run by a company with zero sense for privacy (see their Facebook product) and a love for hype (see their AI and Metaverse products that just about nobody wanted?), I don't see this becoming very popular.
(for the sake of non-native English speakers)
AFAIK, the whole point of the free software movement and the key idea in all Stallman's essays is that free software brings actual, practical benefits to users, long-term. It's not a religion.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-moral-and-the-legal.html [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html
https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/native/android/mo...
if your goal is to make some sort of `spatial computing` tool, well there nothing here you can use. each app is it's own little silo that has little room for interaction. I'd love to be able to write my own custom apps that can exist in the home screen/environment and that can interact with each other in non trivial ways. it would make it feel more like a personal space rather than a 3D slideshow that I can use to launch games.
I say this as a joke, yet: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-unity-webgl
Simply rendering your Unity Application within your React Application is just the beginning! The Unity Context exposes a lot more fun functions and properties to play around with such as two way communication or requesting fullscreen or a pointerlock. The possibilities are endless, what's next is up to you!
Lowering the bar of participation greatly increases the amount of shit that is created, but also increases the amount of exceptional examples which can come from a domain. If 80% of everything created is almost complete garbage, then lowering the bar of entry for participating will exponentially increase the amount of shit out there. But it will also enable a few really great apps which wouldn't have existed otherwise. I think we need better filtering than to raise the bar so only true experts can participate.
As a language for new developers is terrible: 100 different ways to do anything, most of them a muddle of paradigms that's inexplicable to anyone without 2 decades of experience, and so on.
Imagine a new developer using ChatGPT to generate: python, C, go, etc. vs. generating javascript. Most of the generated js is incomphrensible to newbies, but for the others generally obvious.
But applets were doing a lot more in the 90's and Flash dominated into the 2010s. However you feel about JS today, it's difficult to say it was all "first-mover advantage".
And Java applets with their loading times and dependence on the visitor having Java installed ... nah, not really a competitor.
I truly don't get it.
https://reactnative.dev/blog/2021/08/26/many-platform-vision
> The biggest innovation with Vision Pro is visionOS. visionOS provides native app frameworks, so developers can build apps for it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, and yet its something Meta have failed to offer for years. Every app on Quest has to reinvent how buttons work, how a scroll view works, how far away from the user the content should be etc.. and every app works differently. On visionOS, all of this is handled by Apple, and every app looks and feels the same.
Meta does have standardized utilities for translating movement to touch/drag/etc. interactions on arbitrary virtual surfaces:
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/11/22/buildin...
https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-isdk-...
But it doesn't seem (AFAIK) to answer the other side of this, which is the UI design system so apps have a consistent look and feel. Which is perhaps more common coming from a game development perspective, but ever since the Mac OS shareware days, Apple's understood that it's empowering to a certain kind of developer if you make it easy/the default path for them to build experiences that match a standardized look and feel. I'm honestly surprised that Meta didn't at least make an optional SDK for this.
I didn't even know what "mixed reality operating system" was so that made me hopeful. May include some nifty quantum processing.
Alas, it is just stuff built on top of Android, which is built on top of the Linux kernel.
Perhaps "Meta Horizon SDK for Android" would be a better label?`
Yes, the same as Android SDK for Linux. But it became just Android.
Look into HarmonyOS, Fuchsia, LionsOS, Managarm, Haiku and Genode.
Refer to Makatea[0] for Qubes reimagined on a less flawed architecture.
One that isn’t just a vehicle to push ads and subscriptions to <blank>-as-a-service or otherwise act as a siphon to send telemetry up to the mothership.
Yes, I know *nix exists but it’s so fractured and every little variant has its own quirks making it difficult to be a general purpose OS that the masses could adopt, IMO.
Yes, but to be clear: the main hurdle for adoption is fragmentation across GUIs/installs/package management across distros, which is out of scope (for better or worse) from the POV of Linux. Linux is a technological marvel, and if “they” could sort out these issues it would be the shortest path to mainstream appeal, by far. I’m certain this is technically feasible but also extremely challenging to pull off from a leadership perspective. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a solution the majority would embrace. There is a ton of flame wars to overcome, hills people will die on.
Unless your operating system happened to be superior to all the existing solutions in all aspects with no tradeoffs.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/
Does that mean it’s truly ripe? I don’t know.
Let's pretend Fuchsia is just as easy to deploy on (I'm 99% sure it won't be).
Does Fuchsia buy me any cool stuff long-term that isn't possible on Linux?
Like, what's my excuse for going with Fuchsia other than "(handwaves) it'll be more secure"? (to be clear, im teasing myself and my understanding of Fuchsia, not your explanation)
To stress this beyond a doubt: don’t do this unless you’re willing to become an early-masochistic-martyr adopter. My knowledge is outdated by years though. I don’t know how far you’d get today.
> Does Fuchsia buy me any cool stuff long-term that isn't possible on Linux?
I don’t think so. Fuchsia shines with capability-based multitenancy, and basically anywhere you would have different processes from different vendors communicating together (like a mobile OS with multiple partially trusted apps that may need to talk to one another). If you own/audit all code on your device, especially in a single app, you don’t gain anything from that.
Some auxiliary stuff like content addressable file system and OTA deployments may be attractive, but I have no idea if those things are actually supported or even around these days.
Oh, one thing that may be worth tracking in your domain is how fuchsia is progressing in terms of power management. If you’re on arm and battery power, and they prioritize it, it may beat Linux & android in terms of low power devices. But that’s pure speculation.
This isn't saying Linux is bad, its great at what it does and being modular but how can something like MacOS spell check where it works on any text field coherently across any app work in a modular world like that.
Windows just feels like bad decisions made decades ago hold it back, it can't even open a folder of 20 thumbnails without choking, MacOS can handle 10,000 like a knife through butter. Can't even find a file opened yesterday when you search for it in the start menu by exact name, MacOS manages in a fraction of a second. Maybe the right team could rewrite all the things causing this jank but you'd essentially have to replace so much of the company that caused it anyway that it doesn't seem feasible.
Still use all 3 for different tasks but MacOS is the only one that feels like an operating system should feel in 2024.
While we're at it they might do a bit of dabbling in reversing entropy and solving the halting problem - it's only impossible in flat space-time after all.
Why though? What necessitates our move away from what we have?
I've been dwelling in some nostalgia recently and miss some of the earlier days when everything wasn't so homogenous. This is all rose-colored glasses though, as I don't miss when everything was also extremely incompatible. And slow. And expensive.
You are not alone in this. I see announcements like this one from Meta and others like Oxide - companies out there having a swing in a different direction and it makes me glad that there are people out there thinking outside the monoculture that computing feels like it's become sometimes.
Sure, standardisation has been good in some respects, but I feel like the incentive to really innovate (as opposed to incrementally improve) in the operating system and compute space has really dried up.
For starters it is what Microsoft has failed to do with Longhorn, because contrary to having internal sabotage from the kernel team, the Android team doubled down on their efforts to make a managed userspace actually work in a mainstream product.
Dalvik sucked balls against Sony and Nokia J2ME implementations, with its DEX interpreter, yet they managed to create ART with quite cool mix of JIT/AOT/PGO, and a very modern GC.
Then it follows up, that for all the praise Plan 9 gets on hacker circles, Android's approach to user space closely follows on Inferno with Limbo, Plan 9's successor that many of its praisers tend to forget.
Followed by being able to encapsulate Linux kernel into a micro-kernel like stack, where most drivers are process based using Android IPC to talk to the kernel, and can be written in a mix of Java, C++, and now Rust.
If only they handn't screw Sun, and stepped away when the ship went down, maybe they could have saved themselves some headaches, however Google isn't really a language designer company, so maybe that was for the greater good nontheless.
Ah, and using AIDL is so much better developer experience than dealing with the primitive COM tooling on Windows.
This is a threat to Apple: if Apple doesn't relent on advertising/privacy in VisionOS, then Meta will do to VR what Google did for smartphone's: sell the market to maintain advertising access.
Meta doesn't care about money or mindshare on VR. They just want ad access.
Both are advertising companies with a history of working to undermine pro-privacy initiatives.
In what world?
In terms of privacy, Apple has more trust, yes, but the daily stream of zero days on iPhones hurt it by a good margin. I won't even start talking about Google's privacy issues...
Idk/idc about the "daily 0 days" that you referenced, I do care about being able to know with absolute certainty that my photos will be there 20 years from now.
However, just buy an apple device and try to use it. You cannot use it without apple allowing it. You must connect to apple and activate your device. And as part of activation, you get a chance to read apple's privacy policy. Literally thousands of pages of privacy policy without the ability to DO anything, like say "No". And everything in the os phones home, continuously.
If you are a european and disable location services, and use a european vpn, apple still won't let you use the european app store because the phone knows your location. sigh.
The national app store you get to use (the region of your iphone) is based on your billing address + card details (which obviously are validated when you enter them), not your phone location.
They don't want to be locked out of freedom to do what they want, and that's a primary motivation here it's true. But the obsessive focus on ad revenue that people assume they have is pretty far from their thoughts in the VR/AR space at this point. They have complete faith that being the dominant owner of the dominant platform that they think the future of computing will revolve around (I'm not arguing this, but I'm satisfied it's what Zuckerberg believes) will yield sufficient value to be worthwhile and they aren't worried about how it happens at this point.
It sounds like they are specifically not open to third party app stores selling native AR/VR ("3D") apps. I can see why Google might not want to participate if they're not allowed to compete.
This feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But they aren't open sourcing the OS. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the exclusive store for native AR/VR apps. Maybe there's an app revenue share to sweeten the deal for hardware partners?
The Play store is full of flat apps, designed for phones and tablets. There are a gajillion of them, and FB wants them in their headsets.
It's not about not wanting competition - it's about wanting people to have more than 100 apps available when they use a Meta headset.
On future headsets with higher resolution and better comfort, because it would be a legitimately better experience in many cases.
A mobile app, not so much.
- Watch YouTube as I do something else
- Listen to music and have control over the player
I can see myself wearing a headset playing TFT, watching YouTube and have a build guide open in a browser. I can currently do it on an iPad and Vision Pro - https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1akjfpj/le... (different game, but you get the idea).
Meta wants to have their cake and eat it too. If it's their intention to allow third party stores to sell native Quest AR/VR apps on the headset in competition with their own store, they should state that explicitly because what's written here pretty carefully doesn't imply that. I don't think we can just assume what isn't stated here.
I'm not sure many people would want to do that, but if Apple thinks it's a good idea, blah blah blah.
It will quickly become table stakes.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
bold of you to assume your hdmi cable won't naturally form some hoops.
I don't think anyone is currently making an all-purpose VR headset which can also do HDMI mirroring though.
Technically you can just remote desktop into a computer from your VR headset, but that won't work in every scenario.
Maybe you could convert the HDMI input into MIPI and feed that into the SoCs camera interface, but I think headsets like the Quest are already pretty much maxing out the SoCs camera capabilities just to read in all the actual cameras used for inside-out tracking. There's no bandwidth left to shove an extra HD video feed in as well.
tl;dr HDMI input that turns the device into a dumb PCVR headset: easy. HDMI input that mirrors arbitrary video: hard.
XREAL as well as some drone FPV goggles support non-/partially-head-tracked HDMI input, albeit with much smaller FOV for comfort reasons.
https://goovis.net/products/g3max
(This particular one uses USB-C for video input, but they also sell an HDMI adapter for it.)
Of course, in practice it's just a display and can be used for any purpose. I do appreciate the fact that you don't have to mess around with all the usual VR setup chores with these - it's really very plug and play.
(xreal is also in this category imo but at least its a bit cheaper)
And yeah, $1K is quite a lot, but the 65 degree FOV and 2560x1440 (per eye) OLED that you get for it really does look amazing - I haven't regretted that purchase in the slightest. It's rather bulky, though, although still nowhere near as heavy as VR headsets. Still, not something I'd want to carry on the go.
I hope we'll get 4K per eye some day with this tech. Whichever brand does it first for reasonable $$$, it'll completely replace my primary display.
The second part needs some explaining. One undocumented feature of Quest 3 is that it supports (some) USB-C Ethernet adapters. There isn't really any UI for it that I know of; things just work so long as DHCP is there. This then gives you a direct wired 1GBps link to the PC, which Steam Link will happily utilize.
PS: I have a barely used Meta Quest Pro for sale. ;)
Churning through so many VR brands. The app that used to be called Oculus and is now called Meta Quest will soon be called Meta Horizon.
If Meta really believes in the Metaverse, why do they need the Horizon brand? Why not just the Meta OS?
Perhaps for the same reason why Apple OS, Google OS or Microsoft OS don't exist as customer OSes - each OS is scoped to a specific function/device-class, and maybe superceded in the future.
There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because they don't have anything else? Quest OS is neither a best in class user experience (it's still full of bugs, frictions and is a very inconsistent UI), and it's clearly not a good dev experience at all.
So your hardware now inherit all of Meta's tech and UX debts, and you don't even have a guarantee of daily recurring usage or of a killer application user will flock to. Is that the great win for their hardware that they think it is?
Of course, as several of us predicted when the number of Vision Pro apps quickly surpassed Quest Store Apps, Meta is now forced to react and change their weird two-tier approach: they are opening a (small) marketing presence for App Lab apps and are creating a "brand new" spatial app framework, to start and get out of the Unity/Unreal game engine third-party pipeline trap.
That they only now see that giving developers a native app UI kit is a basic of any OS is… not promising from a supposedly now long term OS owner.
I had been put off porting anything to Quest since I'd need to get official Meta blessing to actually get store presence to have enough users to pay for such an effort, but now if you can publish in App Lab and actually get some in-store promotion, it starts to sound way more compelling.
I do agree with their initial approach to keep the perceived quality of the first apps high. But reality is that people want to play what they find fun/funny, even if less polished, and this change might open up some store promotion for such apps that solo devs like me are more likely to be able to make.
The IBM Personal Computer released in 1981. By 1989... yeah.
iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
Advanced phones with proper os, apps, camera had been around for years, and personal digital assistants before that. Tablets, too. iPhone got the form factor and ui exactly right and triggered an explosion, but it was far from the first. We might still be in the "smartphone, pre-iPhone" years.
1. Feature/smart 'Phones' were around before the iPhone *and* were already pretty much ubiquitous. VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (either in people's houses or in distribution centres not being sold).
2. VR has arguably existed in some ways before the Quest, Nintendo Virtual Boy was from the mid-90s.
Maybe the iPhone comparison isn't right, but if we're decades into developing this technology and still very early in development I think we should assume we're a LONG way off these things becoming mainstream consumer devices and we should be wary of any company that brings them to the consumer market.
Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million. Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players.
If you allow for some overlap, that's roughly ten million monthly users, and in sales VR is already more successful than a lot of computer platforms of the past.
I find it really hard to believe that 3 million people put on PSVR2 every month. That thing gets basically no content.
There is no way that those numbers are right.
EDIT: Yeah, Steam has 120 million active users per month. And the 6+ million users for Quest is from 2022, during the pandemic and metaverse bubble. Would be curious to know the trends for 2023 and 2024 thought.
- lighter/more comfortable
- faster to get started when you put the headset on
- more social experiences and event organized in VR
- shorter time from headset on to hanging out with your friends in VR
A number of years ago I convinced a bunch of my friends to buy the Quest after being blown away by board games in VR, but turns out Catan only worked for the Go and it was a lot of work to do something together in VR.
IMO there needs to be some sort of lobby that does not take you away from hanging out with your friends when you’re in between games. I should be able to easily join a lobby or pause a game to go to a lobby and wave at my friend who’s playing to pause and join me in the lobby
It's this and one other point: Games that people aren't bored of in an hour.
To me, very few games have come out for VR that don't feel like gimmicky experiences. Even Half Life Alyx, as advanced as it was, kinda felt like a theme park ride after a while. I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously.
It's hard to justify strapping a TV to my face and feeling uncomfortable for one-off experiences. Even if there was a game with some depth and replayability, I would be even more annoyed to play it on such an uncomfortable headset.
Almost everyone I know is not using their VR headset anymore. I'm not sure it will ever move past that phase, because people want it to be smaller and, simultaneously, more technically immersive. So we're in some weird in between zone where it's neither.
The "technical" reason for it is very very very simple: Nearly no video games are actually improved by "increased immersion" to an extreme. Chess won't be more fun because you have to physically move digital chess pieces around a virtual board, people playing Call of Duty do not want to physically move their arms around to aim, and don't want to jump around to move, and if you aren't doing those things you don't want the downsides that are inherent to a VR system, like extreme seclusion of wearing a headset, physical ability being an inherent filter, clunky UI, nausea etc.
The TWO areas where VR is useful, flight simulators and driving simulators, haven't even fully adopted VR simply because it's too much hassle.
VR is only a gimmick unless you can benefit from that extra immersion, and most things cannot.
The Wii sold gangbusters because everyone and their grandma could understand "swing remote to swing tennis racket", but you couldn't actually build a hyperaccurate tennis sim off of that because a Wiimote is NOT a tennis racket and you cannot get beyond that. VR is the same way. Everyone can experience the "Oh VR is soooo coool" gimmick but very few genres inherently benefit from what VR provides.
But for some reason there's practically no uptake on any of this outside of sims. I would love to see a first-person shooter that is fully VR enabled while still allowing me to use WASD + mouse. In fact, I already kinda sorta do that by using 2D theater mode with games like Insurgency: Sandstorm, but that doesn't give you the actually useful VR stuff like the ability to turn your head to look around etc. If somebody were to make an FPS that did all that, they'd have my money in a heartbeat.
I see this come up, over and over again. It's so obviously wrong based on even a basic reading of the market. The Quest is unambiguously the most popular VR headset and it's store has barely any cockpit simulators at all.
As for tennis, one of the perks of Quest is that you can take it anywhere, including a real tennis court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atuIRf59hzc
At a smaller scale, Eleven Table Tennis is an extremely accurate VR Table Tennis game that supports paddle attachments. It is extremely close to the real thing, professionals use it for practice.
Couldn’t disagree more. Experiences in VR are insanely immersive and this is why there’s so much love for VR.
Also, I played Catan (a board game) in VR and it was the most social experience I’ve ever had in a video game.
The amount of sensors we have on controllers now means, it can pick your slight wrist movements for top spin, side spin and more accurately measure bat speed. The physics engine on these games are so close to being realistic.
Now, let's compare it to IRL and since I played college level cricket, I'll tell you the difference. When I practiced as an amateur, I was able to face at the most 25-30 pitches per day. Of them, only 1 or 2 were what I can remotely call "quality" pitches and I'd have to spend 3 hours per day.
In the Metaverse, in 3 hours, I'd have faced 750 quality pitches including 95mph pitches (The highest I ever faced in IRL was 70mph) including extremely difficult curve balls, deception etc.
All this for a marginal cost of $0 and the physics and simulation will only get better
I tried beat saber for like 10 minutes and never bothered with anything else. The headset’s just too big a hassle, and blocking out the world sucks a lot.
Plus I can’t help but think of the VR headset guy from the Pearl Jam video “Do the Evolution” when I look at the damn things.
Kinda like how I think of the dad from Serial Experiments Lain any time one of my kids walks in and I’m in front of a glowing screen.
Gross.
I have access to a Vive headset for school project right now and do not find it very fun to use, Beat saber remains the only VR game that is at least on the same tier of replayability as osu.
- App sharing / libraries doesn't work properly yet. (The owner has to secretly log in to each individual app themselves, before anyone else can use it on the device. There is no documentation informing anyone of this requirement)
- Add/ons or DLC also don't work properly yet. (You have to 're-unlock' each individual DLC, for it to share to anyone else on device in something like Beat Saber, for example)
- Child permissions don't work properly yet. (The notification does work, but a parent is not allowed to approve an app from that notification, the child has to entirely shut down and restart the whole device, before an approval takes effect)
- Screen sharing doesn't work, at all. (If you have a child, you just can't ever mirror their view onto a TV or Tablet -- full stop, no exceptions. Which also means, there's no way to help a child who is wearing a headset -- ever). Note that "taking the headset off" triggers a state reset, so a child can't hand the headset over to their parent for help, since the face sensor will kill state the second a face is removed.
- Windowing UI doesn't really work yet. (You can have windows, but only three, and only side-by-side, and only for a select few apps) -- it's more usability-restricted than even stage manager on an iPad. You can tell the Quest is designed around the expectation that you will be in one-and-only-one full-screen game, pretty much the entire time your wearing the headset.
- Online sharing is app-dependent, a bunch don't work. Many more don't work at first, you have to spend 30 to 60 minutes "unlocking" the right to match-make. (making the online/networking more seemless is critical because of the nature of the device -- you can't both look at it the way you might with a TV or PC or Laptop or Tablet, since it's a worn device)
None of this is dealbreaking stuff, none if it needs any kind of "new invention" or anything to fix. But as a product, friction is still really high here, and I can see why it's not necessarily super popular outside of techie/gaming scenes yet.
This is definitely not true. The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.
Also not sure what state reset you're talking about. I've definitely grabbed the headset from another person and continued with the game.
You don’t have your kid on a child account, you have your kid using an adult account. Child accounts can’t screen share —- it’s acknowledged in the Quest FAQ - https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experiences/o... “only the primary account can cast”
> Not sure what state reset you’re talking about.
Setup a child account. Let your kid login. Have the kid take the headset off. Congrats, everything just got killed, and it’s now PIN-locked to the adult account. When the adult types in a PIN, it trashes the child’s session, and starts an Adult session.
(We work around this by gently holding the face sensor with a finger while moving the headset around between people, to trick the headset into thinking it’s still being worn -— but this is ridiculously broken, no one should have to do that just to get it to work)
VR makes a ton of sense for video games, but I just don't see how it could enhance the rest of my day-to-day life. I don't see it becoming a good general purpose computing platform that most people use all day. I see it being useful for specific niche tasks like CAD, but I'll never put on a headset just to send an email, file my taxes, or browse the internet.
Came away very impressed with the technology, but really didn't like having the damn thing strapped to my head for 15-20 minutes.
it reminds me of getting the original 3ds that could do some cool AR stuff, and could do 3d without glasses, but ultimately was an impressive tech demo that I mostly didnt use.
I already spend too much of my day in front of phones and monitors, I'm not sure if the answer is moving the screens closer to our eyes and shutting out more of the world.
industrial applications for sure can have a niche with this, but as a mass market device I think there's a long way to go, even if the experience looks good.
Coincidentally, someone I interacted with mentioned "I never thought I'd get rid of my Blackberry" in passing, which reminded me of the term once popular term "Crackberry".
I find it incredible there's still only 1 actual "serious" VR game - lots of people then recommended Skyrim VR, a game from 2011.
Is VR gaming in an absolute standstill?
If you're dead set on only AAA games then yeah, it's not a useful purchase, but that doesn't mean it's "standing still".
0: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...
In 1989 market was still fragmented and PCs were weak (286, amiga, mac + old 8bits like atari and commodore).
Meta/Facebook really has trouble with focus, I hope they can pick 1 vision for VR.
They’re trying to build a platform to build VR experiences on. That’s clearly their goal. Horizon Worlds is “just an app” to show that off. It’s a “hero use case”.
The big problem is you cannot import images, textures, 3-d models and such from ordinary tools. You have something like constructive solid geometry to work with but only so much and there is a slider you can use to set the number of players and the more players the less geometry you can use.
I want to make worlds based on photographs (particularly pano and stereo) and art. McDonalds needs to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup. Either way it is a non-starter.
HW supports collaboration (more than one person shares the world) but https://aframe.io/ lets me make the content I want. If I have to choose one or the other I am going to pick the second.
My take on Meta Quest is that it seems highly successful as a gaming environment based on an app store but is skews towards single-player experiences. Like a lot of AAA games, the excellent Asgard’s Wrath 2 has some multiplayer tacked on but it is all meaningless like leaderboards and the occasional ghost that shows up in a procedurally generated dungeon.
Of course, Meta wants to make multiplayer experiences but somehow they just can’t do it.
It makes sense that expensive AAA experiences like Asgard's Wrath are single player since that's a fairly dominant model in gaming. The Quest doesn't have the player base to support a AAA multiplayer model at this point.
To say nothing about your data, which is Facebook's primary revenue driver.
I'm not keen on more headsets having a Meta data vacuum built-in, but this isn't the opposite of putting the metaverse stuff to pasture.
They're just shifting from an Apple strategy of full-control vertical integration to a Android/Windows strategy of platform ubiquity.
Which would be weird cause the hardware (Quest 3/Quest Pro) is top notch, while Metas software for it is garbage. Everything good is provided by 3rd party companies.
Making flagship/reference hardware on the Oculus legacy is a much better strategy for Meta and lets them focus on platform vision and data collection, which is exactly the company they spent the last 15+ years building.
Ironically Google Daydream was also very polished and now Google is starting again but with a gigantic dent in their credibility.
2. I’m pretty sure a lot of the cost quoted for their “Metaverse” stuff included their CapEx for a ton of GPUs which probably have a lot of other uses within the company.
Eventually their desire for whats in the trap overcomes their caution and they put their head in.
Watch out, the VR mafia is gonna get ya!
Seriously though, any well informed and level headed person could see this coming a mile away. Apparently, such people are in short supply at Meta.
At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better.
Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.
And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast?
Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).
While in many cases folks are overpaid in big tech, some of them are insanely talented people who can do things others simply cannot.
Probably because of this:
> How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?
John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.
That's not what he said though. What he said is that Meta is basically incompetent.
That's equivalent to the amount of labor it took to build some of the minor Egyptian pyramids.
They realized they have an asset, and they made some money by licensing it. Sales department did their job, story at 11. But it would've been a boring non-story, so a copywriter used the corporate brandbook - and "open" is the buzzword of the last few years when it comes to the technology.
Someone need to make an LLM SaaS to de-bulshittify the news.
Hopefully they stick to a proper license model with AOSP as a cornerstone.
I feel like these days some would even call something an "OS" if it's running in a docker container, without providing any kernel at all. Which is to say the meaning of the term is expanding.
An Operating System is the collection of software that allows you to operate a computer, so that means kernel, program loader, simple text editor, simple disk management, etc.
As computer users became more savvy, and hardware became more powerful, more and more functionality was included in the OS (graphical interfaces, utility apps, etc.).
I don't think many people would have trouble calling Android an operating system, and that's just the Linux kernel with utility apps, loader, and app libraries, yet very different from something like Redhat.
I don't think it's a stretch in the least to call Horizon an OS.
I definitely heard it used to literally mean only the kernel. Circa 20 years ago and earlier.
For example, if we look at "Operating system" on Wikipedia from 2006:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Operating_system&...
> Most current usage of the term "operating system" today, by both popular and professional sources, refers to all the software that is required in order for the user to manage the system and to run third-party application software for that system.
Note it says "most current usage". That is because the usage was changing at that time, or had only recently changed. (I picked 2006 because I remember it changing around then.) If we go back another 2 years:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Operating_system&...
> In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations ...
Sure sounds like that doesn't include userland. Definitions which include userland are marked as "colloquial".
Famously in the 1990s, Microsoft tried to argue in court that an OS included a web browser, and that discussion is cited in these old articles... Many reasonable people at the time thought that position was bullshit.
You're correct that people have been conflating the kernel and the operating system as the same thing for a long time, but it's not technically correct to call "Linux", for example, an operating system. Stallman would appreciate that people stop doing that ;)
You may have, but it was a nonstandard usage. Even your 2004 Wikipedia article distinguishes between OS and kernel. Userland is certainly part of it.
AmigaDOS, 1991, manual p22: "Each AmigaDOS process represents a particular process of the operating system— for example, the filing system [...] AmigaDOS provides a process that you can use, called a Command Line Interface or Shell. (https://archive.org/details/1991-baker-jesup-et-al-the-amiga...)
MS-DOS 6.22 (1994) concise user's guide consistently refers to the entire thing including command.com as the operating system (the kernel here is named msdos.sys.) (https://ia801204.us.archive.org/33/items/msdos_manual_622/ms...)
Hell, the whole Linux vs GNU/Linux thing, which has been around since 1992 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy), was explicitly about the fact that "Linux" is just the name of the kernel.
Which gives some context to the calls for Google to bring the play store content library to Horizon.
They made the weird business decision to drop the products they had third party cooperation and an enthusiastic userbase for, in favor of an experimental product (Hololens) that ended up only being affordable to businesses and which afaik has never really taken off in the same way as WMR had been.
This is a hard problem to solve and from what I understand it is similar to issues that are screened for in specialties. For example - fighter pilots and astronauts are screened for all kinds of fundamental things:
- Vision
- Tolerance to motion sickness
- Tolerance to Gs
- Tolerance to claustrophobia (for flight suits, tight cockpits, etc)
If you don't have 20/20 vision (or better), puke all the time in sims, and freak out when put in a flight suit you're just not a fighter pilot, astronaut, etc. Once you make that cut then you train on improving what you fundamentally have and even then wash-out rates are high.
With the Hololens project the goal was to strap a Hololens on pretty much any random soldier. If some fairly large portion of the population just can't make it work the utility and value of the project drops to zero. Imagine standardizing on a gun sight or other key technology that just won't work for even 1/10 of your (already limited recruits), potentially even for otherwise elite soldiers.
I think they realized they will have similar fundamental issues in the enterprise - the utility of a Teams meeting with everyone in Hololens drops pretty significantly when a non-zero portion of employees get sick after a few minutes.
I'm not sure how these issues with the technology can be overcome. Sure, if some gamers can make it work that's cool but that doesn't provide the overall value to the technology MS was hoping for.
[0] - https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-hololens-fails-us-army-te...
Imagine a catalog of proper real life skills you can actually train reasonable good:
- cooking - soldering - welding - Tons of woodworking things - ...
You could also go to a lot of makers of tools and offer them to digitalize their products for them so someone can actually exercise with a cheap to super high end machine like specific CNCs or table saws etc.
When I think of truly learnable cooking videos the first thing that comes to mind is Kenji’s POV cooking videos / streams. Seems like something that could be relatively adaptable to a AR / MR format in a way that would differentiate it from other (still valid) content like the relatively educational food porn from Alex / @FrenchGuyCooking.
I would also be interested in a Chef Jean Pierre simulator, where you learn classic French recipes in a subtly deranged metaverse with a butter-based economy.
If its good enough, you can train cutting a 1000 onions without cutting 1000 onions.
With complex machines, you can learn how to control them and than focus on actually using them instead of first learning were all the buttons are.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/588030/Derail_Valley/
But I agree with the sentiment. Sim games are the killer app of VR and I just want more sims. Where's my Das Boot simulator?
https://www.lincolnelectric.com/en/education/training-progra...
https://www.fronius.com/en/welding-technology/our-expertise/...
I would love to see all of this in a free/paid marketplace and with a basic learning progress framework behind it.
It ended up looking like a simulated workbench with low-detail models of CAD parts that needed to be assembled - it was pretty cool. Engineering companies are very ready for this technology.
Did they get told to shove it by Google when they asked through back channels? To even come out and essentially say publicly "they can still get their 30% cut" is just wild to me.
Also of note, they don't mention any license. Is the hope they can avoid the Google antitrust concerns Google is running into that Apple is somehow avoiding?
Google then went on a PR offensive accusing Meta of fragmenting the VR/AR ecosystem.
Meta is including this in the announcement to head off criticism by Google aimed at creating pressure on Meta to consolidate on AndroidXR.
https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-google-android-xr-quest-reject...
I was pretty excited about VR (enough to drop a couple hundred on what was then a top of the line headset) but overall this experience killed all interest for me.
Maybe good open source options will come out in a couple years.
Hoping that this is an oversight and that they will open-source the core platform in the next few months/years. It would be so awesome to hack/build on this platform
Why not just call it Horizon OS?
The biggest test is how much current partners (Asus, Lenovo, etc) will sell. This will verdict the future of this idea.
As a user you can already sideload android APKs, I've tried it works great, but you also need to install apps that manage android permissions since you can't grant them through the quest settings.
having the android store there + integrations where android app devs can make the app VR ready would be a big plus. But, the blocker is that google still has ambitions of making some sort of big comeback on the android VR space and therefore are in direct competition with meta.
Meta likely has the most apps and most users of any one VR platform. Sure everyone needs apps, but they needs apps the least, especially from Play Store.
Unless you see using phone apps as 90" virtual screens as a killer feature at least.
(Android was like a year later)
Same fate can happen to metaverse - someone can make a better VR platform.
Doesnt help them that what they have is shit.
In fact it is you who has tied their identity to feeling superior to others. Other guy doesn’t sound like it’s his identity at all.
If anything, not using VR makes you much more "alive".
A real misapplication of this metaphor.
Part of what makes me so skeptical is how "cheap" the Quest 3 is. There's no way they're not loosing [literally billions](https://fortune.com/2023/10/27/mark-zuckerberg-net-worth-met...) of dollars developing VR tech and, given their track record, only have one way they know to make that money back.
Coming? I'd say it's already full on. Apple's malicious compliance with the DMA is one part of it, for instance. Of course others try to imitate.
Talk to Siri and then talk to ChatGPT if you are feeling that clueless.
The technology is the technology, the application of it is the magic.
But why is virtual reality associated with small screens and head tracking? Why wasn't Everquest on a CRT "virtual reality"? A lot of software calculates probabilities over some distribution, why isn't all that "artificial intelligence"? Why isn't my Subaru's cruise control and lane keeping technology "autopilot" or "self driving"? Why isn't the elevator controller an "agent"? Why aren't my own servers "clouds"?
I don't need the terminology explained, I'm just tired of it. And I do think in many cases it's meant to be dazzling and marketable rather than mean anything.
...because that's what it is? surely you understand that the difference between 3D, near-eye displays and traditional 2D screens warrants a different label
Because this improves the quality of VR.
> Why wasn't Everquest on a CRT "virtual reality"?
It is an extremely limited form of VR.
> why isn't all that "artificial intelligence"?
It is an extremely limited form of AI.
> Why isn't my Subaru's cruise control and lane keeping technology "autopilot" or "self driving"?
It is an extremely limited form of "self driving". (To be more precise, it's Level 1 self autonomy.)
> Why isn't the elevator controller an "agent"
It is an extremely limited form of an agent.
> Why aren't my own servers "clouds"?
They are extremely limited forms of a cloud. (Though I would argue that a cloud needs to be provided by a third party.)
> I don't need the terminology explained, I'm just tired of it.
It sounds like you are refusing to understand how experiences fall somewhere on a spectrum. Is me and my friend tossing a ball around in my backyard "baseball"? What if we get 7 more friends and stand on a diamond and run around the bases? If I come back afterwards and say "we played baseball", even though it wasn't an MLB-regulated official game adjudicated by umpires, are you going to get really upset at me and say that I'm lying and I didn't really play "baseball"? The same principle applies to everything else you've listed here.
So, I don’t think they are misunderstanding you. It is almost like calling your bluff.
It is an interesting convention.
I don’t dislike these kinds of questions normally. But they do typically lead to a little bit of back and forth. On this site, most interactions are typically only 2-3 posts long. So I think it is better to just state your opinions directly.
Because it's supposed to simulate reality -- and it does a great job of it. Everquest on a CRT doesn't simulate reality; it's nothing like reality. As the capability of something increases it becomes something else. Cruise control on a car that is sufficiently able to drive a car eventually becomes autopilot. Your own server isn't a cloud but put a large enough of them acting together in a way where each individual machine is entirely redundant and replaceable is a cloud. These words describe actual things. You are a person but why isn't any random clump of cells a person?
Digital computer technologies aren't continuously differentiable so made up terms for grouping each distinct tech stacks is unavoidable. AI is linear algebra but grouping up all AI/ML/RL/perceptron into "electronic linear algebra technology" is not helpful.
*-reality interfaces are "immersive", they don't alter or recreate reality.
What artificial intelligence is is (statistical) "inference".
The cloud are various *-providers, "hosting providers", "storage services", etc. In aggregate, "external" or "3rd party" or "outsourced" (computing) infrastructure.
I said it elsewhere -- what frustrates me is that the rest is marketing, but some engineers are willing to accept and even reproduce it for some reason. When Facebook says they're releasing a new reality development platform for the metaverse though, we should roll our eyes, even if the technology is exciting.
They are two quite different experiences and use cases. Once both are common it would make sense to call both augmented reality but I haven’t heard any better terms for describing the difference to people yet.
My question is why avoid the terms overlay, superposition, display and even vision? Why instead purport to have altered reality?
Traditionally in aviation and the military they said "heads up display", because they can't afford to be obtuse. The display allows the pilot literally to keep their head up, instead of pointed down at their instruments. And I'm sure there was no truck for anyone who would have called it mixed or augmented reality.
x = real world y = virtual world
Best I can tell, mixed reality is augmented reality, but with mixed interaction. You hit the fake ball with a real bat in mixed reality and it bounces off the real wall. Maybe you even feel it hit.
My point is this -- by allusion to some concept with which an inventor wishes to form an association in the consumer's mind, their products are to be thought of as something different than they are, something too grand for plain language. This doesn't serve anyone but the inventor.
The "Internet with head-mounted display" is actually pretty cool technology, I'm not against it. My concern is that it shouldn't be sold or even referred to as an alternate form of reality. For the benefit of product sales, or else the egos of certain technologists, language becomes muddied and the very idea about what makes someone "a person" is bastardized. I think this is wrong and very short sighted.
It's like describing snow to someone who has never seen it. No matter what they allusions they have about snow before they see it, once they've seen it, they know that is snow. And everyone they talk to will have the same meaning.
Same with Augmented reality, mixed reality, whatever. Once it becomes mainstream one of these terms will stick and that's just what it will be. Or it'll be so ingrained in the experience that we no longer even use a separate term to describe it.
It's not like I'm against fun, and if there is more emphasis in the "metaverse" on meaningful social connection, that's good. Games and activities that get you moving around are also a very positive development. Wii was one of my favorite consoles (but was hardly immersive).
My brother is a former pilot and sprung for a full setup so he could play aviation sims. I haven't done a movie yet.
As I said I have nothing against headsets or immersive digital experiences. I do think in this day and age it's worth being more protective of the word "reality", compared to the 90s. Not just in a political sense. The core business of Facebook is advertising and data brokering. I know I might sound like a quack but they really do want to control perception of reality and for us to stare at their screen for as long as possible. Partly because there are ads there, and partly because as we do they stare back at us and take measurements. So that's why I don't accept their "Reality Lab", "The Metaverse", etc. marketing language, and to the extent they control VR it is not VR. They don't want to build the metaverse a la Snow Crash, it will be more like the social -> news feed -> analytica history, plus raking app developers.
Just use words to describe technology? Every time I want to say "cloud computing" do I have to say "a service where you use the internet to access software, storage, and processing power that's run on a bunch of server located far away in data center that are owned and managed by a company that specializes in providing these services" instead?
Time-sharing and remote job entry were also reasonable back in the day. You bought time on a computer to run workloads. I don't think they fit so well with the "cloud computing" model in a modern sense technically, but I do envy them for being descriptive, logical terms that describe what is going on. We got the cloud from Google CEO Eric Schmidt who said to a conference in 2006
> What’s interesting is that there is an emergent new model. I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing — they should be in a “cloud” somewhere. . . . And so what's interesting is that the two – "cloud computing and advertising – go hand-in-hand. There is a new business model that's funding all of the software innovation to allow people to have platform choice, client choice, data architectures that are interesting, solutions that are new – and that's being driven by advertising.
- https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html
It's strange to me that as engineers we accept and even promote marketing language such as this.
Was the OS a limiting factor in any of this, though? I've only used a Vive and my Oculus 2 and 3 so I'm not sure what other HMDs use, I assumed some Android distro that just connects to steamvr/openxr/whatever.
Are Asus, Lenovo and Xbox really trying to get into the vr/ar ecosystem? Are they going to be Oculus clones? Their own r&d? Is this all a pipedream?
The details here seem a little thin. Partner agreements to produce something rather than a concrete thing.
Hopefully we will see prototypes, but right now the skeptic in me sees this as a trial balloon for investors more than anything.
I have yet to use any VR device that made me want to purchase it, its all felt insanely gimmicky, so far the only time a headset seems nice is on a plane ride.
I can see the potential, still seems a long way off imo.
Cricket, TT and Golf have none of the subscription bullshit.
Like porting my whole android app + spatial features or...?
Google Horizon Post master drama or watch the TV series.
I'm sure there's a lot of internal code name collisions.
Actually, it looks like Apple also licensed the iPhone trademark from Cisco too!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#:~:text=In%20June%202010%2....
Horizon is synonymous with a computing scandal involving buggy IT code.
Besides android being gigantic huge, you still have google maps, chrome, gmail, pixel phones, passkey, yubikeypush/2fa, the new cookie aproach, YouTube!!1 etc.
Why would Google need a 'recent' success to be able to win ar snail?
First of all, Google Search has maintained dominance and relevance for decades. That’s no easy feat. They have news, patents, books, LLMs all added into it.
Google has a hugely popular cloud service. Especially if you include Google Workspace.
Obviously YouTube is huge and regularly gets new features. There is a YouTube app for almost every piece of hardware with a screen.
They have a pretty impressive mapping product suite. Everything from Google maps to Google earth and all their GIS products and tools (eg solar panels location SaaS).
The play store is huge. AND They have a huge variety of extremely popular consumer apps like Photos, Music, Home, etc.
>YouTube TV has piloted past a new milestone: The internet pay-TV service now has more than 8 million subscribers, according to the video giant. That means YouTube TV, available only in the U.S. starting at $72.99 per month, is far and away the biggest internet-streaming subscription TV service in the country.
-Feb 6, 2024
VR is being gatekept by Valve and Meta.
How likely is Valve to use Android?
Not likely, unless they make a headset which doesn't do much of anything by itself and is just meant for streaming from a PC. To make a standalone headset which can draw on the Steam catalog they would almost certainly want to use a variant of their SteamOS Linux distro.
As I understood it, this was basically a massively expensive failed experiment so far. No-one is using it for reals (yet?).
Who's the market for developing apps for it?
There's not a big enough market for this to sustain itself because VR is a flying car category that no one needs.
In terms of Vision vs Quest - I wonder if there will be a "React Native" parallel that allows developers to write React for both Vision and Quest apps. A lot of the developer market comes down to languages: Python for AI/ML, Obj-C (Swift) for iOS, Java (Kotlin) for Android - but JavaScript always seems to weasle its way into these native platforms and a lot of companies end up just writing React for anything front-end.
I probably would have never built for iOS if I had to use Xcode and their entire ecosystem, luckily in RN you usually just need to install their command line tools and never open the software.
I eventually ran into some limitations (accessing Camera Roll back then, also in-app purchases back then) that forced me to have to use more native stuff. I bet it's come a long way though since then.
> This is a full fork of [React Native] with changes needed to support visionOS.
Awesome.
What VR needs is a VR OpenBSD.
If the Internet started on today's proprietary app stores and nailed-shut operating systems it would've never innovated this quickly. This is what AOL/MSN desperately attempted, but it all failed (thank god).
Meta's dream of the metaverse is nothing but laughable, hold back by nothing but terrible software.
But yeah, the Tesla Airpod people who talk to themselves all loud outside will no doubt have a full UI of the world 24/7, gesturing like maniacs in the middle of stores, in crosswalks - just a news and stock ticker streaming across the top of their field of vision at all times. And there will of course be junkies in the streets, with - instead of smartphones - goggles on their faces, crumbled up in a brick corner just like the dystopian art showed us.
For Pareto's 20%, it's an Apple Watch, or Airpods++.
I still think that watching movies/TV should be a social experience and not akin to scrolling on social media. My neck can be a bit less comfortable for that :D
It's not altruism of course. It's a strategy. But it's a different strategy from the closed pure walled garden strategy they have executed previously.
I wonder what types of telemetry garbage is embedded into the OS.
What I read is "we reached out to a bunch of vendors who dabbled in VR/AR/XR/whateveryounameit but failed to produce anything outstanding, so we made a deal of licensing them some software so maybe they'll fare better". Meta did the right thing in a sense that they made some sales, but I wouldn't hold my breath as a end-consumer.
And I think just generally they're more likely to try random things than Meta are to get hype around some unique feature. Take the Asus Zenbook Duo as an example, it's not necessarily a great product but it's interesting and some people will buy it for that. Plus industry learns something from experiments like this.
Either way, it's a good move for Meta and it's good for the industry that there is a fully-featured OS available for hardware manufacturers.
If they really want to be the dominant VR winner, then release it all under GPLv3+ and let us all get to innovate together.
Facebook is THE biggest actor who works non-stop against the open web and is the biggest closed-off silo of data on the web.
Community guidelines that can change at any moment at any time and are enforced by random people who can make mistakes.
A Facebook OS as a daily driver is an idea that is vomitive in every way.
Imagine ads that track you eyes and that you cannot look away from. Ads that track your face muscles so they know exactly how you react to them. Like being connected to a lie detector 24/7.
This is pure evil, everyone should reject this.
At the same time, important to recognise here that this is still to some extent "open washing" what is a totally controlled OS. This is not like AOSP where you can go download the source code and compile it yourself. So far it is not even like Windows where you can download an installer and run it on a computer yourself. A manufacturer will have to form a business partnership with Meta to even get access to this "open" OS - I assume. But since I keep under estimating Zuckerberg maybe he will exceed my expectations on that front too.
Nonetheless, this is a huge step forward and a genuine challenge now for Google/Samsung. The bar is now very very high for them to deliver something compelling enough that manufacturers will jump on board instead of building on Horizon OS with an existing install base of 25M+ users and thousands of apps.
All up, this is pretty exciting news in the XR space and really sets the stage for an epic battle in the next couple of years as these platforms go head to head.
They just had to stick that 2D in there. Yes, poke the bear.
Additionally, Horizon is generally a terrible operating system. Useless and intrusive "social" features out the wazoo, laden with tracking/spyware, and it isn't even good for anything beyond launching apps that take over the whole environment. Want to use your fancy headset to open up apps in 3d space and do some multitaking work? Well I sure hope you're happy with exactly 3 2d apps (all equally sized) lined up in a row in a fixed location, because that's all you're getting. If you want to do anything real you need to install an app that launches its own environment for multitasking, but of course then you can only pull in windows from a remote PC, so if you want to run any local applications it's back to basics for you. Oh, and of course you can't mix those remote PC windows with local apps. As poor as Apple's Vision OS is in the multitasking department Horizon falls far behind even it.
And though I haven't an athletic bone in my body, the fitness / boxing apps are actually a great way to get some exercise in.
Generally, quest 2 was one of the things I haven't had any interest whatsoever until after a year's campaign, my friend basically forced me to try it during a visit :-). I have one now, largely for those 3 apps.
This is really the only move that gets them back in (perhaps only somewhat) with the dwindling ads market.
Much as I don't like it, it is a legitimate tactic. I just don't see it being effective in the current market, even with Apple as a player.
Or the next Apple with the next iOS ?
Google famously made Android "open source" and allows third party manufacturers to run it.
The are only opening things up in their marketing speak. There is not actual opening up happening. "Open" sounds cool, inclusive, and like you are creating a stable platform for others to build on top of (IBM opened up x86, Linus opened up Linux, etc).
Judge by what they do not what they say -- most valid advice in this age of lies.
Lunatics like these can't be sated by the official songs: https://youtu.be/CKwX349aV98 https://youtu.be/sJQSy3KG-oQ?t=33
That first chart averages 12 notes per second for 5 straight minutes and the player only missed a single note.
1. On that note - my tremor does hurt me here too but unlike twitch shooters (which I loved before my tremor got bad) and things like guitar hero (which require comparatively precise movement) beat saber is usually pretty forgiving about precision of placement and angles - so long as your rhythm is correct you can go pretty far with it.
OG BeatSaber comes with a small-ish selection of tracks, most of them obscure and not generally known. Good or bad, they get boring quickly. Modding lets you expand to arbitrary number of tracks, including pretty much all the ones you like. It's what makes it fun and worth returning to. Not being able to add your own music, makes BeatSaber not worth the sticker price (much less if you're getting Oculus just to play it).
Also note that people were used to this capability, because before BeatSaber became a poster child for Oculus, it was streamed to other headsets from PC, where adding custom tracks was tacitly allowed.
There's moral discussions to be had I'm sure, but the purpose of the beat sabre mods is pretty factual :).
This is especially true within the rhythm game community, for which many fans simply like to make rhythm songs and for people to play them.
That is absolutely a valid usecase that should be allowed.
I don't want to sign in to use a headset, period.
Fe: gaming - yes, this is why Apple had separate IDs for gaming center.. and I think Microsoft does this too for Xbox vs Microsoft account?
On a scale of trust for how companies are handling my data, Apple, and to a much lesser extent, Google, are still more trustworthy than Facebook, I feel.
To be fair that is all I really want. Regardless, its still a privacy nightmare which makes it a no-go for me, combined with the fact that the most powerful ("productivity") app I can expect to run on it would be something like excel which makes me not really need anymore than 1 window, at which point its no better than a regular laptop.
I'm waiting for the Simula One, or maybe XReal Air support for linux
EDIT: To be clear, the kind of apps I'd want to be running (what I run on my regular laptop) that I doubt would be available on Meta OS include things like: Godot, Blender, VSCode, terminal windows, probably a bunch of other stuff but those are the main ones
a meta account is an account that you can optionally link to their social medias, but it isn’t required
meta accounts are basically just oculus accounts
So, needing an account for these is more comparable to needing an account to use Steam
It's still unclear to me why an account is needed. I mean, I get the profit and control motive, I just don't understand the technical reasons.
I doubt there is any actual technical reason, just profit/control. I mean, it’s Meta, would you really put it past them?
Profit and control fit the data points, but I suppose I could "put it past them" if a better model explained everything.
My device is not signed into any Apple services right now or any Apple IDs. Anything my company needs to deploy gets pushed by MDM or via enterprise-signed applications.
It hasn't been called Oculus for ages and it doesn't require a Facebook login. Meta accounts are stand alone and completely different, you can create as many as you want without giving your identity, just an email address, you don't need to link it to anything.
And it's still based on Android.
The reason will be the same as for Android by Google: Control the market.
All they are doing is allowing some companies to pay them billions of dollars to put meta onto their own headsets. Similar to how Valve allowed a few companies to put SteamOS onto their own hardware to create 'Steam Machines'.
I cant think of a single time in history when this tactic has worked. and made a product or brand more successful. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I can hear the replies already, "If you don't want one, don't use one," but if something becomes normal enough, the outside world does change around it. Why invest in street signs, for example? Who prints maps or encyclopedias now? Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?
It's not just that I don't want to use it. I don't want it to become normal among other people either.
As for your examples, such as maps/encyclopedias, they still do even in the smartphone age.
>Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?
There's a great movie called Virtual Nightmare that is basically about this. But I don't think it's such a bad thing, to be honest. We'll have a world where art can be more easily exchanged and public spaces become more collaborative. And the flip side is that hopefully, "offline" will have less ads and there will be a renewed focus on more indie and subversive decoration.
Change isn't always bad, and it isn't always good.
I'll consider it a tragedy if it ends up being the case that they can't imagine having grown up actually seeing the real world.
This may have more to do with your particular social circle (or mine) than a general trend in pop culture. I don't know anyone who thinks any of those are cool.
- it's too damn expensive (you look like a rich klutz wearing one)
- the content is mostly just normal games and videos that you watch in stereo
- the FOV and camera resolution are too poorly miniaturized to do anything serious with
Why doesn't it surprise me that public perception did a 180 when they saw the brushed-aluminum model with an Apple logo on it? At this rate Apple should sponsor a second Hindenberg just to check if their luck's run dry.
I dislike Apple's version for other reasons, but for something to out-dork me really takes a lot.
But I also see the value of AR/VR to a number of industries that need more visual interaction metaphors. CAD/CAM, architecture, and real estate come to mind. I could totally see buying a house across the country “sight unseen” based on a 3D scan (if regulatory guards are in place to prevent modifying the scan).
Having an open OS architecture for AR/VR apps is key to making this happen. Current offerings all fall short in various ways, so I’m curious to try this out.
Lets face it, we spend considerable amounts of time in front of a screen. A bigger and more immersive screen will be a better experience for everyone.
I would rather do neither of these things.
I would rather _not_ be immersed in the whole virtual world AND _not_ stare at a 7 inch screen for a large part of my day.
(written from a 16 inch laptop that I stare at for work)
I've been trying to exist more (in terms of "time-spent") without my phone in my pocket as it seems to be primarily a driver of distraction.
I'm sticking with this line of reasoning. This is already bad enough. I do not think more of it will make things better.
On the other hand I do appreciate beauty in nature and design.
But why not have both?
It will definitely be a cultural change though, and I totally get how that can be almost repulsive from a different perspective. I just want you to be aware though that there are people who at least are interested in that future.
If these only replace desk work, I might agree with you. My fear is that wearing them full-time becomes normalized.
But yeah, I’d personally not want much beyond that.
Of course, to each their own.
Is the Overton Window now a mobius strip?
I'm asking because it seems to me from this press release that they're just letting a handful of hardware partners use their software, which is not open in the sense of POSIX Open Group.
I'm sure dang is really busy right now.
Instead, we get five (5) "Not an actual product render" illustrations.
Anyway, this seems like a licensing deal announcement, not a big software release.
I can easily see less tech savvy consumers being confused.
just as the AI bubble starts to fizzle its one last push at AR