Regardless of how actually successful their attempts at VR and AI end up they already going to have some place in history for that.
Especially so in database technology: rocksdb, zstd compression, presto, Cassandra, Hive, Velox (this one’s new) are all Meta’s doing.
And those are just the popular ones, there’s way more (database-related) projects they open sourced that didn’t get too popular!
So all in all, as much as I’m happy to complain about them as a company, they’ve always been huge contributors to the open-source ecosystem.
AI research is different though. Everyone else decided against open source and started to dig their own moats justifying it with different kind of BS.
Yet Facebook / Meta has decided to be on side of open innovations.
I got a quest 3 about months ago and it's a world of difference from where the form factor was at in the past. It's to the point now where it's actually better for certain use cases than other alternatives and hence sees some daily use from me.
If the trend continues to get better and hardware that's smaller, lighter, more comfortable, and generally more useful, then I do see it hitting mass adoption at some point.
I think the demo Zuck did with Lex on his podcast where they did the podcast in VR using their avatars was pretty neat and the point where that is commercially available and as easy to use as a smartphone, it's a no brainer that it'll sell well.
What Google trying to do other than maintain their ad revenue? IDK.