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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they spend more than everyone else does in the space combined just blows my mind. Their Horizon worlds is literally just a worst VR chat which was developed for <$100 million. Their os frontent for the quest is great, but how many devs can you even realistically have having an impact.

And that $4 billion is just per quarter. I honestly would love to see a full breakdown. Nintendo's entire revenue is 12 billion, which is less than Meta VR spends alone, and that includes everything Nintendo does, including developing games. How has Meta spent so much and has so little to show for it?

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Surprised to see so many people negative on meta in this thread. I've used VR at conventions and buddies houses but I've been holding off on picking up a headset for a couple of revisions until they are in their sweet spot of development. Where most of the kinks are worked out, there's a good library of Apps and games, and doesn't require enthusist level commitment which I don't have the time or patience for anymore.

Recently picked up a Quest 3 and it's honestly astonishing. I (half) joking had the thought when they get to the Quest 5 or 6 and can get the cost down humanity is gonna be in serious trouble. I brought it to a family gathering and one person went out and bought one the next day. Another is going to pick one up as soon as they can find a good deal used.

Horizon worlds is admittedly a little goofy but this is one of the first revision of it. And it works well as drop in for some Apps like escape rooms which probably saves some dev work. I only breezed through the report but it looks like their numbers are up massively YOY.

Only complaints is passthrough is still a little distorted but an enormous improvement. Battery life could still be better but a battery pack helps balance the heatset anyway. Also you can't directly connect to steamVR without going through Quest link which I can't see any reason for other than being anti-competitive and user hostile.

The matrix is coming and I got a feeling metas gonna own it.

Anecdotally, the pattern many of us have seen keep happening over the last 5+ years is that enthusiasm and novelty is very very high when first discovering these modern lightweight headsets but then usage just falls off a cliff after a while.

You're in the first phase. Maybe the second phase won't arrive for you.

They're extremely exciting, but seem to get a little same-y or something. Only insiders really know, but there might be a bit of an invisible ceiling that somebody still needs to figure out how to break through in order to keep engagement up. It might be a killer app, it might be a further advances in mixed reality, it might be continued reduction in weight or increases in display quality, but it also might just be that there's an inherent limitation that prevents them from taking over the world. Not every cool gadget does.

I think VR will gradually and massively extend the capabilities of humanity but not revolutionize them. Regular screens, phones, etc will still exist, they will always have a place in our society. But VR will more and more become an accepted and common tool, for use cases that are different from regular devices. Until suddenly you realize that indeed they are everywhere and you use them all the time. It's not going to be an immediate "revolution" the way ChatGPT was (I think you could probably say the same about any hardware innovation).

I think the closest comparison is that VR right now is like PDAs in the 90s. Yeah, everyone knew they were the future, but the hardware absolutely blew, And it took another 10-20 years to arrive at the perfect form factor of a smartphone. Lots of hardware innovations need to happen for VR - hell, not a single consumer headset has shipped with a vergence-accommodation conflict solution. But give it another 10-20 years and I am certain we'll be seeing that smartphone type moment.

It's nice to know you're in the good old days before you've left them. :-)

I can definitely see the novelty wearing off given enough time, same as anything. Plus to your point you can clearly see apps follow one of a few formulas.

> Also you can't directly connect to steamVR without going through Quest link

Is this true? I have a quest 2 and just downloaded the steam link app and it seems to just work. Are you talking about wired?

Yes. The app will work over wireless. Not wired.

> The matrix is coming and I got a feeling metas gonna own it.

This is the least cyberpunk sentence I've ever read.

10 years and tens of billions of dollars to get to that experience. Not astonishing in my book.

Im not surprised about the negative comments. I’d be more surprised if the negative commenters have even tried VR. VR and AR are just such a huge paradigm shift that according to the data, only tweens and children “just get it” as a demographic group without a lot of coaxing and explaining. I would say that it’s their generation’s NES. Being an adult VR enthusiast feels like being part of something like the homebrew computer club, well until Quest came along.

I've tried VR, have a bunch of friends with headsets (and a team headset for work, since I work adjacent to AR/VR) and find it mildly interesting when I do try it but not interesting enough to buy a headset with my own money. My kids have both been offered turns but declined.

I honestly don't see the trend that you've been describing among my kids or their older peers. Honestly, NES is this generation's NES; I was shocked that "Marios & Bowsers" is now a playground game (it's basically sharks & minnows), and my kid will spend hours playing MarioKart if given a chance. My kid is an avid gamer but his favorites are all the Tower-defense games you get on Google Play, as well as classics like Tetris or Candy Crush and racing games like MarioKart.

I think there's also a trend - particularly among affluent families - of going back to basics and going outside for face-to-face entertainment more. IMHO the 2010s were the high water mark for gaming, and that if anything the trend today has been to detach from devices and have more actual experiences.

> I think there's also a trend - particularly among affluent families - of going back to basics

You’re right, but tbf you’re filtering for upper class families

Yeah, and the friends whose houses I've been over to so I could try their VR setups — stopped using their headsets soon after getting them.

This is just not my experience at all.

I have 12-14 year old gamer nieces and nephews. They simply don't care about VR.

Even at a family gathering with the host having a Quest, no one cares to even try it out.

It was just absolutely nothing to do them.

Personally, I have been waiting for VR since the early 90s and the Lawnmower Man.

With having no interest in games, my experience is exactly the same as my nieces and nephews. Just a whole lot of nothing. I almost wonder if people who post things like this are not some kind of viral marketing because this is just not reality.

According to the data, it’s children and tweens that dominate the MAUs. Also just read Reddit about complaints of most online VR games being dominated by children as a counter to your anecdote of one family.

"Most VR users are children" is a very different statement from "Most children are VR users." The former can be very true without the latter being true at all; it just implies that "most people are not VR users", which is also true.

You have a point, but my comment is better than an anecdote.

There’s about 30 million children in the US in the right age group for using VR headsets, and over 20 million Quest headsets have been sold. It might not be accurate to believe that most children will accept VR, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility especially since the MAUs for adults are terrible.

The market for VR headsets is worldwide, so the right denominator is the ~600B children in the developed world. If you generously figure that half of those headsets are used by children, that's ~2% penetration, which seems more like it.

20M units sold is tiny for a consumer electronics product, BTW. I work on Android Tablets, and we have ~300M MAU. Phones are 3B. 20M makes VR only about 20% of the market size of AndroidTV, which has about 110M units sold.

That’s not a good way of framing it because the vast majority of the headsets were sold in the US. I would be surprised if there were even healthy sales in developing countries, so we shouldn’t be counting all of the children in the world. Not to mention that you probably have to exclude children under 10 give or take.

Yes, I agree that VR is not popular with most of the adult population. At the moment, VR has a similar stigma that computers, the internet, and video games once had. It will likely stay that way until these children become adults, unless Apple can refine “spatial computing” fast enough to overcome the stigma.

Tweens and children are the only ones with supple inner ear linings.

As a 40-yo VR enthusiast, I can't play anything that requires elective X/Y movement (first person shooter) without getting sick. The "teleport" mechanic is really clunky.

My kids can play anything and never get sick.

My parents can't even do a driving sim without getting dizzy in a couple of minutes.

Not 40 yet but neither me and friends have experienced that.

I'm in my late 40s and I can run around with smooth movements without any issues.

Of course, N=1...

Same for me too. I tried different VR headsets, but could not use them for more than 15 minutes without getting dizzy.

I'm guessing a big chunk of those losses are from selling the hardware at a loss, which is a fine strategy if you're Sony or Microsoft and can easily make that money back from game licensing and subscriptions, but the Quest has (a) a reputation for people buying one and then barely using it, and (b) a subset of active users who only use it to play SteamVR games without ever giving Meta a cent after the initial purchase.

I don't know exactly how much they're losing on each Quest they sell, but the fact that it's significantly cheaper than any "dumb" headset that requires a PC or PS5 to do all of the heavy lifting, despite having what's effectively an entire smartphone built-in says it all really.

I think it's reasonable to assume that a pretty large portion of this is going into R&D. They've shown multiple prototypes that are addressing different technologies/techniques for improving the clarity and quality of VR experiences.

I could be mistaken, but I believe they were the ones to pioneer varifocal displays, a technology which has still yet to ship in an HMD. The earliest prototypes relied on physically moving the lens, where the latest prototypes are using some form of electrically charged lens that changes its focal distance based on voltage.

Once you start going down the rabbit hole of projects they've either announced or have been leaked it's easy to see how you could spend that kind of money, and that's only the stuff we know about.

I admit that I didn't like Zuck before. But I have to say, I am becoming a big fan of him, primarily due to his strategy in ML/AI for Meta, and his willingness to burn cash to solve the problems of VR. Zuck is many things good and bad, but certainly one of those things is that he's a nerd who loves technology and wants to move it forward, and I can't help but respect that massively especially given his results.

I respect the same about Musk. It's the only thing that I respect about either of them. But, boy, it's hard for me not to respect individual who are inventing the future.

Yes, Musk is in the same category. You can hate his opinions, sure, but to not respect him in some form or fashion just betrays an ignorant worldview IMO.

Reality Labs includes a bunch of AI stuff. I assume a bunch of this is training compute for Llama 3/4

It's the hardware, man. The software practically doesn't matter until they figure out the hardware. If they went all in on adding all the necessary features to Worlds right now, they'd end up having to change things later on to accommodate whatever form the hardware ends up taking.

There are some crucial avenues of research Meta is working on. Varifocal, form factor, face / body tracking, resolution - once these things are nailed, and I'm pretty sure it'll be in the next 10 years, then suddenly we're gonna WANT to be in Horizon Worlds. But it can't happen without massive R&D on the hardware side.

> The fact that they spend more than everyone else does in the space

We don't know how much Apple spent on Vision Pro.

The project has been going on for at least a decade.

it's very obviously "creative" accounting. Facebook is throwing lots of other expenses into the VR bucket to make other departments look better.

That is a very serious charge. Do you have any proof or are you just making things up?

In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs. This also includes Meta's fundamental AI Research laboratory FAIR which is now part of the Reality Labs - Research (RLR) division.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs

This is wild.

Their accounting could massively hurt the VR industry (to the point, the comment above about how it’s too bad VR can’t be profitable).

IMO it’s not AI or VR that will take over, but a combination of the two.

All the ai research is under reality labs through FAIR. Theyre spending billions on GPU buy alone. You can claim gen ai is a necessity for the metaverse but I do think its a bit misleading to say VR lost 4 billion this quarter when a huge amount of that went to an open source LLM

Yeah horizon worlds is really bad. In their push to make it child friendly the whole thing has become a bland playground for kids with nothing to offer adults.

After all, when I go to the movies I don't go for a Disney cartoon but an action movie.

The user-generated content in VRChat is so much more compelling. It also looks better. And it's actually harder to do it.

Why don’t they just hire devs who have clearly spent years building their own 3d projects alone, bootstrapping themselves? Tbf they tried to interview me during my peak where I had already made my own networking engine and a custom 3d env but I was too scared to interview after hearing they prefer fresh code monkeys out of college .

Just offering some advice I think they reap what they sow with their unfortunately overfitting in their main? choice of applicant.maybe I’m wrong

To be fair to Facebook - they actually did offer me an interview

TLDR; im a self made millionaire now I’m just saying the people you want are the ones that don’t apply, too busy coding instead of applying to FAANGS

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