Comment by thecupisblue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thecupisblue | Hacker News Reader

Again?

Seeing HTC do this makes me sad. They will get burnt by Google again.

HTC was an amazing technological frontrunner for Android phones.

The team got absorbed by Google.

They had people working on VR/XR.

That team got absorbed by Google too.

Now, the VR team is getting absorbed again.

Google tried this already - and failed. And as someone who held multiple workshops educating people to use Google's AR/VR tech, I see nothing but a barely-useful Android fork coming out of this that will be used for cheap VR/AR headsets.

So to recap:

- There was the AR (https://developers.google.com/ar)

- There was the VR (https://developers.google.com/vr)

- There was Google cardboard

- There was Google Glass.

All of these projects were:

- Early to the market

- Had a huge advantage over competition

- Were (relatively) simple to build on/use

All of these projects ended up abandoned as the responsible person probably got promoted and moved on, leaving them to die. Now, when the competition stepped up their game and is gaining some serious ground in the field (META) it's someone else's turn to get their big promotion by releasing a half-assed product that they will forget about in a year.

In the end, all that this signals to me is to be bullish on Meta, as their VR play seems to be sticky enough to draw out the competitors.

HTC's standalone VR headsets already run Android as their OS. They could've gone with Windows, had Microsoft not shut down their mixed reality ambitions last year.

It's not like Apple is going to open their VR iOS software (whatever it's called) and Facebook won't just give them their Quest OS either. At the moment, their choices are "build a custom OS" or "continue using the existing Android OS". And to be honest, I doubt HTC will be able to pull off a new OS/Linux distro to run VR on either.

I believe that Apple's platform is called visionOS

Android will almost definitely be the base OS for all standalone headsets that aren't made by Apple - the question is which layer and associated ecosystem to use on top of Android - Google, Meta - or go it alone.

(OpenXR abstracts away some of this - but not enough)

Meta is starting to license HorizonOS to other companies.

They still have the problem of no Google Playstore apps. And it doesn't look like Google and Meta are coming to an agreement anytime soon

I have been using Quest for the past 3 years. Not once did I miss anything from the Play Store (as a daily Android user). You can go to Quest subreddit or other VR forums and find that most people think the same as me.

And that is exactly what Meta wanted. They don't want to rely on Play Store, and they managed to ship tens of millions of devices without it.

In an AMA last year Bosworth said that they offered Google to have flat apps on the Quest but they wanted to limit it to that and not allow VR apps AFAIK ( they are making the money with the VR apps, so they most likely won't give that market away ) and Google wasn't interested.

For gaming it's not an issue but if they ever want to sell people on the idea of it being used for productivity, that flat android app market would be a big factor. They have recently started their own toolkit to build/convert regular android apps to HorizonOS so they maybe hope to beat Google at their own game, but we'll see how that turns out

My hot take: productivity on VR is not and will never be a thing, at least in the current heavy, bulky form. There won't be more than a few hardcore enthusiasts who can make use of it. It is made up by Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook.

VR and watching videos, on the other hand, are real use cases, just like how people are using them today.

I don't really disagree, although I did try out the GodotEngine editor on the Quest with just a small bluetooth keyboard [1] and that experience was actually more than just acceptable. Full disclaimer, I have not repeated that since because I haven't felt the urge to.

But where productivity really makes sense are the pure glasses ( like XREAL One, Viture, etc. ). Ever since I tried those I do want that much more than productivity in a headset.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEuCKIMZN9g

Have they really sold tens of millions of devices? That's better than I thought it was doing.

Current estimates are around 30M but I think that was before this Christmas period

That is far more than I expected. Although my mental model for VR is that Community episode[0], which is perhaps not a great benchmark.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawnmower_Maintenance_and_Post...

They really do want play store and offered them zero fees. But it would be a limited one that couldn't sell full VR apps, mostly bring 2d and 2d with system rendered 3d elements to their platform, and meta keeping the rest to themselves.

And Quest runs an AOSP fork (Android without the TM).

The question isn't what OS will be dominant - the question is will Google manage to fumble this again and what will happen to the users, companies and developers that decided to rely on the ecosystem.

I think it is more like AOSP without Java, what Brillo was supposed to be, before being replaced by the short lived Android Things.

At least based on occasional remarks from Carmack when he was still there.

HTC also has its own Windows VR game app store (Viveport), that they seem to have put a hell of a lot of effort into, but it's relatively small in active userbase compared to Steam and Quest.

They seem to be trying to out-compete the 2019 Valve Index with several newer products that on paper add incrementally so many additional features that they've left the index in the dust, but they manage to keep flopping on the basics - comfort, FOV, speaker and microphone quality, and last I tried it (a couple years ago to be fair), their frame reprojection was warpy and stuttery compared to Index's very impressive reprojection, when the rendering FPS drops below the headset refresh rate.

If they could have just refined and polished the fundamentals, they could start eating the Index's lunch, and there's a large number of people still buying the Index. And valve would still benefit from that because most people will probably use steamVR. The steamVR market is not small, but it'll get even bigger when Valve release an Index 2, or someone else releases something that nails the basics and uses 5-year-newer tech.

Heck, Google Cardboard was a thing 10ish years ago, and it was incredible. If they instead made a ~$50, cheap-ish but comfortable headset, with lenses and a strap and slot for dropping in and securing a phone, so that users don't need to keep holding their phone on their face, we could have had everyday MR back then. Plus, now we have wide FOV cameras on the phones, which should enable usable gesture interaction with your hands in front of you, just not something as intense as the vision pro or controllerless quest 3 where there's 6 cameras looking everywhere to track your hands.

"If they instead made a ~$50, cheap-ish but comfortable headset, with lenses and a strap and slot for dropping in and securing a phone"

Isn't this literally the Google Daydream? Although it was priced around $100 by what I remember

Tango and Filament as well, remember those.

This kind of stuff, alongside the way Java updates languish, or the whole Kotlin vs Java discussions, or how nowadays most of those efforts are code samples dumped on Github with NDK only APIs, kind of made me lose interest.

AFAIK, the press says "some of the HTC VIVE engineering team to Google,", so they could still develop VR products with the remaining team.

They also some products for 5G O-RAN and VR deploy solutions. But can those keep a big company running?

Honestly my read of this is that they just need some Dev Kits and an in with manufacturers. Their goal is to sell software services (which is WIP for release), and they need reference hardware for development.

They have partners via Samsung to make hardware already who is prepping to release a Vision Pro clone. HTC hardware is bulky and ugly, and more expensive for what you get compared to Meta’s products. Google would never release that as a consumer product.

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