Meta VR Glasses
meta.com
meta.com
But it is the only thing that will move Low Latency Computing forward. Everything in modern computing is slow, we might have increased throughput by 1000 or 10000x over the course of 30+ years. But latency has gone backwards, from Apps to OS UI response. Decent AR/VR experience mimicking the real world would require sub 10ms results. And this should finally force developers to take latency into account.
If they launched a year ago it probably would have been $600-700.
If they take a hint and make a version that can't do games standalone they might even drop the price in half.
I think for now games are the best use of VR, and Valve actually care about games, and Zuckerberg moving on to the next shiny thing leaves room for Valve to join Sony and Microsoft for the next PlayStation/XBox alternative.
If anything, when the Oculus Quest became the Meta Quest, it started feeling like regression rather than progress, with the games going from "wow!" to "did they port a phone game?".
It wouldn't have been touted at the "metaverse" and a revolution of having business meeting in a virtual room... looking like a boring office and maybe it would "just" be millions of gamers, but to stay we are in a better state because of Meta is questionable.
They did invest a ton and their products (if one can manage to make abstraction why they even exist in the first place) are actually well done but the line their brought on the entire industry created unrealistic expectation.
Is it good, is it bad, I'm not actually sure but I'm rather confident to say it's not obvious.
Now I'm getting older and have less interest in VR, certainly don't want augmented reality glasses, even if they could be used for gaming. If anything I want glasses that subtract reality, as its a little too much at times.
VR gaming has never been hotter. AI coding agents mean lots of enthusiasts can now turn their favorite flat games into VR. Huge community with that.
Nonsense. Embedded systems, often event driven, improved as did the rest of the computing landscape (perhaps at a tad slower pace). HST has been a major driver on low latency computing in the data center. And then there are of course robotics and military applications ...
Embedded systems are often not flexible. They are often designed to do just one thing, like driving an engine, and may run the exact same software for their entire life, which may be decades. They are often limited in term of general computing requirements too.
I don't know HST, but it seems to be similar to embedded: single, highly constrained application, maybe more compute, and I would guess that affordability isn't even on the menu.
Meta VR is consumer software, running on consumer hardware, it runs third party apps, with all the flexibility that is asked of PCs. You can't just put your own realtime OS and claim the entire system for your own specific application.
Out of these 5, only Firefox loads faster than it did on a 512MB Windows XP machine 20 years ago, the other 4 are at least a few times slower.
Though Vista on a cheap laptop was an epic peak of slowness where you could wait a minute for a right click menu to appear.
Apple, Meta and other VR companies just keep throwing more and more VR hardware with better lenses and form, but the issue is content. If someone is spending 1200 bucks on this headset and playing/interacting with N64 level content, the novelty wears off pretty fast.
Beat Saber is still quite basic graphics, I wouldn’t call it high fidelity.
Wonderful toy, even though I only use it about 90 minutes a month it is worthwhile for me to own.
The native experiences are too barebones and I don’t even use it untethered
I bought the Quest 3 as an upgrade because I had noticed my Quest 2 started having intermittent input lag issues. I never pinpointed what was causing it, but my Golf clubs would fly out of my hand and I'd have to wait a few seconds for them to eventually find their way back to me. My controllers would drift out of view when navigating menus. I uninstalled everything, reinstalled it again. When that didn't work, I upgraded.
The issues persisted in the new version as well. So for about the last 20-ish months, I've averaged under an hour a month, most months I don't even pick it up. I might do some homemade PC VR "experiments" (still have access to mouse and keyboard for the game, and not the controllers) on some random claude code experiments. I have a "cyberpunk" mobius strip space station walking sim I've been working on, that will eventually hook into a treadmill.
VR has been around for decades, and its always been a really niche nerdy thing, for the same type of people who will build a mock cockpit of a plane in their house for flight sims. I dont think that's gonna change no matter how much cash mega-corps pump into it, it will always be a niche nerdy hobby thing imo.
Driving sims may not be peak running on a Quest, but I think that is a different realm from what I am talking about. There is plenty to do and see without photorealistic 3D graphics.
Also the visuals got a big improvement with Quest 3. I’m sure that Steam Frame will also have decent visuals.
Do I have faith in Meta to 'win' in VR or AR commercially? Well... not really, but the technological advancements are real.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wnkje9/my_inst...
Hopefully it's not so bad.
Oh BTW they showed a new Beat Saber game, and among the logos I've seen Ace Attorney VR among a few others. Let's see if those come for Quest 3 and maybe even PCVR.
Ouch, that's a tough sell. Maybe useful for AR type stuff, but I wouldn't want to go from a Quest/Index/Frame/etc to that for VR.
I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year and it got consistently better across the board every iteration.
Edit: Since the FOV is only 70 degrees, that leaves 110 degrees outside the image, divided between the edges of the glasses and the rest of the room. So for sure in daylight outside light would destroy the theater effect.
That didn’t happen because you would need market demand for that. Only Gen Alpha likes VR as a demographic.
But it of course is large and heavy like the quest pro and expensive most likely. Things that when you market to consumers don't pan out.
So they are optimizing on the other dimension (weight) which of course trades of many other dimensions.
More niche manufacturers like Pimax have accomplished much higher FOVs but people keep returning them because they're expensive, heavy and uncomfortable (I think they're popular among people who lie down in cockpit rigs).
They would be if they had gotten popular and competition had ramped up. But that didn't happen.
e.g. who's Meta competing with via these VR Glasses?
TLDR, put LEDs all around the lens. They extend the scene even though they have zero resolution, you perceive the environment as extending to the full angular width you can see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1618&v=qp2IbgJ5Z-8
I know you probably know that, but this is a new low, even for Meta.
Same for kids wasting their life on screen, most parents don’t mind as long as it keep them busy and it’s one less thing to care about.
And another random youtube influencer who tried it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8oIs1GA0o
$1300 price
But yeah, the angles are to obscure thickness. It's not going to be as thin as it appear from a distance.
That video is on the page itself as well, right top
What problem does it solve? I see a bunch of potential uses but I don’t see any problems looking to be solved.
Will I like gaming better if I control the games with my hands instead of a controller?
Will I like working in my glasses better than my laptop screen? Or even a dual laptop screen like a ZenBook Duo? Or a cheap second portable display? Do these glasses fit better in a backpack than a laptop and a second portable screen? They can’t collapse flat.
Are these glasses more portable and convenient than a smartphone? What are the benefits to watching an NBA game on this compared to a phone or my TV screen at home?
I can’t believe Meta is blowing their money on this stuff still.
So: no problems solved.
I have a VR headset, but other than the one time I tried Skybox just to see what it looks like, it never occurred to me to take the headset out to watch a full length movie. It's just not worth it.
Makes me wonder how often people use it for "watching content on a gigantic screen at home", or it's just mostly theoretical in VR headset marketing material.
VR desktop: that's supposedly the "killer application" of Apple Vision Pro back in 2005 (and only usable on high resolution headsets like those). Guess what, these days nobody talks about it. I haven't seen anyone bringing it up on HN for a long time.
I received my Vision Pro on release day (February 24, 2004). After trying every feature and use case, today (2.5 years later) the ONLY times I use it are 1) To watch films like "Disclosure Day," "Crime 101," "Dune," etc. in 4k on a virtual 30 foot screen — at any time of day — since I can black out the screen surrounding with the control knob, and 2) Watch the short (10 minutes or so long) Immersive Videos that Apple releases more or less monthly. They're fantastic.
N.B. All use is while lying down flat with my head comfortably supported on a pillow, using Apple's Version 2 headstrap. Only the supine position enables even enough distribution of the device's weight across my forehead and under my eyes such that I can (for the most part) not be aware of the VP's weight.
Live NBA and MLB: FAIL
3D movies: meh
Working with virtual Mac screen(s): FAIL because 1) text is blurry, and 2) headset is just too heavy after 15 minutes or so.
In summary: 1) I would NEVER recommend the device to anyone, and 2) I'm glad I bought it because when in use it's like something that came from the future, the viewing experience is so detailed and enveloping and the sound so perfect.
Under $2,000 for a device that retails brand new for $3500.
Imagine if you could hop on eBay and buy a pristine condition MacBook Air M5 for $600.
Regarding heavy weight and use case, I think Valve has the right product design going on with the Steam Frame. They’re taking a product and refining it for what its actually good at with proven utility: gaming, with real controllers, streaming from a powerful PC, and minimizing weight on your head.
Apple and Meta have already effectively disproven the other hypothetical use cases of the technology. The Steam Frame probably won’t even sell that well despite being the most focused product on the market.
I’ve always wanted it to be better, but it’s just terrible. It’s like working on a projector screen where the pixels never line up.
I've a pair of Nreal Air glasses (before the rebrand) and a pair of Xreal Ones. I have found the latter remarkably comfortable and sharp enough for coding, reading text, playing games, etc. for extended periods of time.
The new widescreen modes are a real treat too. Still waiting for Real 3D to get upgraded to 60FPS though.
This is a 4K monitor that cost roughly $500 along with a real keyboard and mouse.
As far as portable screen setups, we have a portable monitor, which slips into a backpack like a laptop. It’s about the size of an iPad.
I’m not saying any of this to criticize your setup at all. I agree that it’s a use case that probably works for some people.
Still, it’s clear that traditional alternatives exist, and they lack a lot of the downsides that VR has.
You can even buy laptops that already have two screens built-in like the ZenBook Duo.
I recommend getting one that’s above 1080p, probably marketed as 2K or 2.5K. 4K is probably overkill since it’s gonna be a pretty small screen.
I’ve also been of the mind that really only one external monitor in addition to the laptop screen is really helpful, but I know opinions vary on that.
The geometric waveguide technology used in the Display glasses is quite complicated and costly, the birdbath optic that Xreal uses is stupid, so to speak, and various holographic solutions used by Even Realities and likes is not so spectacular in light loss(IIUC the fancy term is "quantum efficiency"), as well as multi color feasibility(needs 3 layers with separate image sources).
Prior to now we didn't know if Meta will be doing a Display 2 or Quest 4, or if they plan to do something else. This is that something else.
I agree that these seem like a stopgap short of the thing everyone wants - Vision Pro specs (ahaha) in a pair of regular glasses.
Personally, as a glasses-wearer, I'm not quite convinced it's the right target though - even my 20 gram glasses are uncomfortable to wear all day and I take them off whenever they're not needed. I'd rather have a ski-goggle device (similarly light, but with the weight more evenly distributed, and still with optical see-through) with fewer performance compromises. Of course that wouldn't let the manufacturer dominate "the next form of personal computing" or whatever.
(I have a fairly strong prescription, so the literal glass in my glasses does weigh a fair bit more than for most people. Yay modern optional media! It's so much nicer than it used to be)
It's essentially the xr-glasses /vr glasses category. Plenty of options around on stores
If we really step back and think about how most people enjoy sports I think the whole idea of VR being a top tier option is a little silly.
Sports are very much community and family activities. How much fun are they to alone compared to watching with fans?
I see VR as something of a backup method like if you’re on a plane or something. And once we are thinking about that use case we might think to ourselves all the reasons why an iPad is better for that use case.
Hololens was a transparent display with stuff drawn on top of it.
This has reality drawn on top of opaque display
The closest thing so far is a Bigscreen Beyond 2 w/ a laptop if it wasn't for the fact that you need a base station for the damn thing.
I know my request is a fantasy right now, but I put this our there in case someone that could make it less of a fantasy reads this.
Drawback - they don't do 3DoF tracking, so the screen just follows where you're looking, you can't change screen size, and no multimonitor setup. They have IMU sensors, though. It's possible to create your own virutal monitor software (or use someone's else like RealWarp), but IMU drift is hard to beat and experience is far from perfect. So I stick with 'just one high-quality screen' for now, and to be honest it was some quality-of-life improvement for me.
PS. Couple of weeks ago there was new release from RayNeo, which supposedly have 3DoF and same quality. Haven't tried those.
Again, the screen is fantastic. Even overkill for text-related stuff (reading, coding, terminal, etc). It's FullHD HDR 10-bit OLED. I do edit videos Davinci with these glasses. They target it for gaming and movies.
I can see value on a plane. But I’d rather use my MacBook then look like a crazy person pretending to work.
With buds, people just shout into the void... Or the bus...
It is as close as Ive gotten to the cyberpunk dream so far.
The key problem is it's Meta. People don't even trust other people near them to use Meta hardware, and the way they dealt with Oculus users was just grimy. From basically any other company this would be a very welcome device. Zuckerberg needs to fix the company first, because there's no such thing as a killer product good enough to overcome this hurdle.
HN constantly under-estimate how much the mass forgives a company as long as they release a cool product (barring a few holdouts that really don't matter to 3B DAU company)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662990
> I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots
"Everyone loves Meta Muse now, it is organic growth. My social media feed told me so!"
Nope.
Anything it does, you are responsible.
anyone know whats going on with muse. twitter has gone crazy with fake things ppl've supposedly achieved like getting airline to refund 4k, negotiating 45k furniture to 5k, booking flights for 20 dollars. These are the same ppl that were hyping openclaw, not sure what happened to that. and how muse topping charts. Its all befuddling to me.
Muse / Instinct were the first to do frictionless setup at scale (Poke was technically 'first' but not sure how large they got before acq)
2) How is your life any better than Meta Muse user (with similar other attributes as yours)? No, imaginary conspiracy theories don't count. Being paranoid actually counts as negative-life experience
First he needs to fix himself
Video, showing how random Meta employees don't like slightly creepy stranger obviously using Meta glasses to record them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHKhYL3is5o
Meta allegedly took down the video when it was uploaded to their own platforms.
I guess the approach here is to shrink down the VR glasses and make them look more like normal glasses from a distance. But I still don't think I'd wear one of these walking around the mall or airport. Reduction in FOV is also a big negative. I'm not really sure where one would use this device over a Quest or the Ray Ban Display. It occupies this awkward middle point where it's not a transparent glass display, but it's also makes a lot of compromises compared to the rest of the VR line.
The Ray-Ban Metas had no ecosystem. No SDK, no app store, just apps made by Meta. They finally announced an SDK in 2026 but why would I support a device that was so anti-developer for years?
I see Ray-Ban Metas as basically fancy airpods with a camera. Airpods don't have an SDK, or an app store. Nor would it make sense to have one. So it doesn't rub me the wrong way.
What kind of SDK would you like to see? Are you wanting them to be more like an Alexa, and expect an Alexa style SDK/marketplace with custom integrations?
The better question is why in 5yrs we will have to use ID to buy a product on some random ecommerce site or to play a video game or use Uber or post a comment on Reddit. It will be because people pushed for this for kids on social media and opened the door for the rest of the internet companies to demand it and therefore the government.
If you haven't seen it, it's probably because your account is old and they have scraped enough contact lists to believe your name is real.
How gullible can you be?
But I guess if people like you are able to ignore that to make yourself feel better about giving your personal information to Zuckerberg's advertising company then anything is possible.
I don't know what conversation you think you're having here, but it's not that.
If you'd bothered to read... and then ready for it... stop, take a breath, and process the information. You'd have noticed I was pointing out you can use a Quest headset WITHOUT providing them your personal ID OR having a Facebook account. Almost as if, you know, I was highlighting that giving the company your personal info isn't required. Woe me though for pointing that out.
I'm sorry for interrupting the indignant rants. Please continue.
I had the Oculus Rift dev kit before they sold to Facebook. It was so amazing at the time
The stronger argument for it being a product is that it was available to the public.
I just bought it on the website.
I mean, I was/am a dev, but I had no plans to develop on it, I just wanted it to play with.
There was a site that you could download experiences that people created, which is what I used it for.
The post you are replying to doesn't claim they did...?
They did change the branding in late 2021/early 2022.
Prior to that the product was called the Oculus Quest, after that it was the Meta Quest.
And Meta did start heavily enshittifying the product alongside the rebrand.
Everything from “freedom sticks” to get women to breath in smoke and ash like the foolish men, to going from “government IDs are just conspiracy theory” to “you have to show your papers to see information and communicate with other humans on the only method that is still widely possible; it’s all just been slowly salami sliced and microdosed into our societies. Worse yet, still a large chunk of society seem utterly oblivious as long as they can consume their particular customized and personalized opiate of the masses.
Plus they already have all that data... Your ID is not private information. It's an identifier that they don't need or want.
Not for allowing you to use your own hardware, what utter nonsense.
It was their choice to forcibly link their hardware to their online account system despite it working fine without it. But it’s absolutely not true that the government requires age verification for using VR goggles.
ID checks just came to the Quest because they forced facebook accounts which already had ID checks on it. They should never have made facebook accounts mandatory for playing games.
I don't think they particularly _want_ legal id (though maybe they do? who knows)... but it's obviously false that this was caused by the government when Meta itself was lobbying for such laws even before then.
https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
As much as I'm a proponent of VR, I won't play by Meta's rules.
This has not been my experience at all and there are very few headsets I have not owned.
Everything else I can't really disagree with.
I think the software kept getting better except for the latest UI redesign intended to mimic Apple which is indeed terrible. I hate the heavy use of double clicking on the controllers. The older UI was better (though even before this they constantly redesigned it every 6 months or so)
But they've only improved things over time. The quest 1 shipped without passthrough or hand tracking. By the end of it's support it had both. The quest 2 and 3 also continue to receive new features like higher frame rates, keyboard view etc.
Not that I am comfortable uploading ID or that I even consider Quest, but that is how it starts.
Perhaps it has something to do with if you had an old account you deleted a decade ago; maybe Meta assumes that any person who ever deleted their account will never ever want to make a new one, so anybody using the same email or name or face or ID or device as anything that has touched a deleted account is by definition fraudulent.
But that's different from whether it's important that Facebook has real competition, or that there's now a reference device for not just VR on Linux but a bunch of other compatibility tooling and infrastructure for Linux on ARM specifically.
Even if it tanks, I think the Steam Frame will be a big deal outside of VR, sort of like how if you're on Linux you're probably benefiting from the Steam Deck's existence regardless of whether you own one. (I also don't.)
I'm not sure that I could say that about any of Facebook's headsets. They're big for their niche, but making a Para Para game semi-mainstream isn't really the same magnitude for everyone else as enabling you to play PC games on your phone.
It's delusional to think people are going to drop $1k on an optional, almost-single-purpose gadget when most don't even spend that much on a laptop.
The only thing people are spending that much on are phones. But that's something people use all the time for years.
Phones, that can now run your Steam games through FEX.
That's kind of my point. That this thing is important even if you don't buy one, because everything else that they had to build in order to enable it will trickle out into other places.
Doesn't matter. Check out Proton's current stats, and see the Deck's impact on everyone who didn't buy one: https://www.protondb.com
Anyone who cares about Windows->Linux compatibility layers, x86 emulation on ARM, or VR will benefit greatly from the Steam Deck/Machine/Frame ecosystem, due largely to Valve's reported 100+ developers they have making open source contributions in applicable areas.
From SteamVR to Mesa to Proton to SteamOS to FEX, Valve's easily one of the most important Linux contributors these days.
When someone gets this right I do think we're all gonna ditch the 2d screens and phones.
It doesn't even matter if it's Meta that instigates this, if money is smelled there will be more consumer friendly alternatives popping up overnight (e.g. see how quickly the industry copied the iPhone).
* Display Type: Micro-OLED
* Resolution: 2412 × 2288 pixels per eye
* Angular Resolution: 37 PPD
* Field of View: 70° × 66°
* Chipset: Snapdragon Reality Elite
* Memory & Storage: 12GB RAM with 128GB internal storage (expandable up to 1TB via microSD on the puck)
* Tracking & Sensors: 6DoF positional tracking, depth sensing, autofocus, 4-camera eye tracking, face tracking, and hand tracking
* Passthrough: Color RGB passthrough cameras at 26 PPD
* Price: $ 1300,- USD plus your data
Similar PPD to an AVP at, what I as a former owner of one (alongside a Quest 2 and 3, a Magic Leap, Xreal and Viture) would call is a far more appealing implementation for actual productive work.
Really wish Apple had gone down this route, have the puck incorporate an A series chip rather than shoving a M series one into the headset itself and heck, I could see such a design being doable for them back when they first launched the AVP if they hadn't forced that utterly ridiculous eye display and stupendously heavy metal body.
There is, unless I am mistaken, nothing here that isn't established technology as found in the AVP, all the fancy display and lens experiments from Starburst, over Holocake to Mirror Lake seem to remain in the lab, this seems to be "just" pancake lenses plus Micro-OLED once more.
Not sure where this lands functionality wise. I feel like it's most direct competition would be as a cheaper Apple Vision. You would need to pair it off with a Windows system for heavier productivity work most likely. Even though their OS is "android", it doesn't have the Google ecosystem behind it, let alone matured on that front. Media consumption on the go seems to be the other use case.
So, compare them to either XREALs plugged into a laptop/phone, or Apple Vision Pro I guess.
Closing the lid and working in one of these would be great, but there's always a caveat that blocks this.
* Display: also micro-OLED
* Resolution: 2560 x 2560 per eye
* Angular resolution: 32 PPD
* Field of view: 116°D, 108°H x 96°V
* Chipset: none lol plugs into your computer
* Tracking and sensors: needs base stations
* Weight: 107 g
* Passthrough: no
* Price: $959 (+$200 for eye tracking)
* needs base stations, a PC, and has a cable, and looks kinda like dorky swim goggles (but still pretty futuristic and cool)
meanwhile the Steam Frame:
* Display: LCD
* Resolution: 2160 x 2160 per eye
* Angular resolution: 20
* Field of view: 110 degrees
* Chipset: Snapdragon 8 gen 3
* Memory and storage: 16GB of ram with 256GB UFS plus microSD
* Tracking and sensors: inside out camera based tracking
* Weight: 185 g core headset, 440 g including strap, rear battery, facial interface, and audio
* Passthrough: idk
* Price: $1059 for 256GB, $1299 for 1TB
Said the guy who has not checked this thing for head-turn-to-pixels-changed latency. That is the one metric that nobody has approached the AVP on -- the one that keeps me (and many others) from being nauseous.
When Meta bought Oculus a decade ago I though "why the heck are they buying this VR company..." which prompted me to read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2018 Shoshana Zuboff's book.
The idea is precisely that they don't need more of the same data, they have enough (even though they do need to keep them up to date) but they instead need more KINDS of data to keep on earning money from selling ads.
They don't care for the technology itself, only for ways to distinguish needs better and that's exactly what a new digital medium provides.
TL;DR: yes.
Now someone just needs to learn how to hack into these glasses remotely…and then we will have the Ghost in the Shell moment.
I’m still buying this for myself. I enjoy the private movie theater experience and turning every video game session into a decent cardio workout; I’ve lost 60 lbs with VR to date.
For me the biggest calorie burners are boxing games. Beat Saber and others like Synth Riders are great too. Then there are fitness focus apps like Body Combat and even one for rowing machines.
Hopefully, Meta can convince HR firms that this is a fitness device that is eligible for FSA like benefits.
I have found VR an easy way to get moving in a fun/low friction way at the end of the day, instead of heading somewhere else. Depending on what you are doing, it isn't going to cover everything, but moving something is better than nothing.
Personally, I found Synth Riders a good way to queue up 60min continous activity that I enjoy.
Instead, pick out your own internet information diet. Make it a project. If you're not afraid to use AI, it can help with this tremendously.
Then you need to build habits that replace your unhealthy browsing with healthy browsing. IMO it's best to just install tools that make it difficult or even impossible to do the unhealthy browsing.
Youtube subs only to Science, History, Cozy content. Aggressively unfollow click bait.
Discord only with close personal friends who are chill.
Play single player games, or multiplayer games only with close personal friends.
The internet doesn't have to connect you with hordes of terminally online droolers.
At the office, it was nice to see him put the glasses down and shake hands with the person who rocked up. If that person had arrived 'in VR' I think I would have been completely turned off.
I guess if you want to be alone, it's a good device -- but the best times for me with modern technology have been when it brings me closer to other people. Online games were better on LAN. Couch co-op as a genre is one of the best console experiences I think. Meeting people in real life, who I spoke to on IRC -- again, a great moment.
I'm not anti-tech, and the device form factor sure looks amazing -- but I can't imagine any moment I would use something like this at home while anyone else in my house was here.
This! And it isn't close either.
The other fundamental thing for me is to have visors that seamlessly and by default connect to the nearby ones so that experiences are shared.
Probably a good bet looking at the numbers: https://www.readers.id/en/global-studies-reveal-post-pandemi...
I'm in VR a lot, mostly in bigscreen VR, and have had the Quest, Quest 2, and Quest 3. I don't see any reason to upgrade from the latter at all.
Agreed. When I tried the Apple Vision Pro, I was a little disappointed at the PPD (which is like, 34 to Quest's 25 or so), didn't expect to still be so sensitive to it.
I've yet to see the first use case that makes it more than a party trick.
I tried pushing it for 3D configurators during sales, but sales people hate it with reason: you're missing out on the buyer's reaction and it breaks the sales journey.
As long as we can't see the user's eyes etc this will flop.
Some future date we will get there, but this isn't it.
To use most VR headsets that are also standalone devices, I would start by fighting with IT on getting some kind of security exception to use the necessary software on my laptop, then get started with streaming/connecting/sharing screens with it. Hopefully.
I have a Quest 2, and I only held off on getting a Quest 3 because I don't want to keep giving money to Meta unless they made something game-changing.
Given that rhythm games are the primary purpose of my Quest 2, I think this settles me on the Steam Frame as my next headset. It runs Linux and plays games I already own.
Unfortunately, the "watch movies one inch from your eyeballs", or "block out the world at a coffee shop to check your email", or "emotionlessly watch basketball in the middle of the court" are not good selling points for me.
In any case, that transaction is not going to happen because Zuck thinks he can actually make it work. It's just what I think they should do.
I'm not going to buy it from Meta, but what I'm saying is that at the same price I would buy it from Apple. I'm far from the only one.
They theoretically could, but they would never do it, as we see with the Vision Pro, which is, apart from being far heavier, also far more expensive.
"Puffery" has made a mockery of the concept of truth in advertising. Judges will bend over backwards to insist that no "reasonable person" would assume that image is representative.
An additional factor is that the American consumer is just absurdly stupid and easy to take advantage of. If you put "No growth hormones" on your chicken you sell more, even though you also have to write "No chickens in the US can use growth hormones" right next to it!
"Made with 100% Real Cheese" is top line marketing in this world. It's pathetic.
What are best competing products? My use cases would be productivity and watching movies; gaming, not so much.
I’ve personally always thought the headsets were simply too clunky, which puts off the average person from trying them, due to the hassle (and price).
This new design from Meta is the first I’ve seen that feels like something more people would actually want to try. Perhaps VR isn’t dead — maybe it’s just lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right hardware tech to bring it to the masses.
SteamFrame it is! As far as I can tell the SteamFrame lets you install a different OS.
If they could give me this today and worked somewhat like they promise, even though for $500 or so I can get glasses that do what I need them to do today, for more fidelity I would gladly pay 1k+ they are asking.
I am not sure what will happen till Spring or Summer next year.
I'm never going to wear a thing like this in public, and at home, I have my laptop and TV. The TV I'm usually watching with someone else, and this is worse than the laptop...so what's my use case?
And if you use any Meta thingy close to me, get ready for a fight.
We need to face Meta with the same fear we face Flock. They're equally dangerous.
I'm amazed though at the amount of effort and corporate money that keeps being thrown at VR trying to make it a thing.
It feels like, to the public, it's like some tired The Beverly Hillbillies re-run that keeps popping up from time to time.
I have a teenager and a 9 year old and I've never heard this from anyone.
I think nintendo for that generation is nintendo switch. Or roblox.
One of the big complaints of online VR games is that it’s overrun by Gen Alpha children. The only mystery is why meta keeps targeting adults instead of Gen Alpha. It’s a marketing strategy that has already failed multiple times now. Judging from most of the comments here, it will continue to fail. IMO only Apple can breakthrough to adults and even they failed with AVP.
Somebody cited Gorilla Tag. I looked it up and it has 3 million monthly actives. I don't know how that measures for an online game, but that is pretty small for a social network. Roblox is at least 100x that.
Will it? Even if you offer people AR glasses and smartphones at the same price, I'd expect most people to pick the phone. Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.
The VR/AR modality struggles when OEMs rely on unique native experiences as a selling point. There's no "killer app" for VR a even decade after the original Oculus DTK. Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.
I too once abandoned a bowl of cereal for a steak dinner, but that says nothing about the quality of the cereal.
Nobody used their cell phone to take pictures, that's what a camera is for! And music came from a Walkman. But then the iPhone came out, and the rest is history. A pair of glasses that takes pictures could very well be the future. We won't know until after it's happened though.
Because the camera you have in your pocket right now was always better than the one you left at home.
People abandoned laptops as a primary computing platform for phones with small screens because the "masses" prefer convenience above anything else. Those phones eventually increased their screen size, but never got to laptop size of course.
People don't want to have to put on a headset to doomscroll.
VR/AR is not a "faster horses" problem. It's a "buy my 40-foot-tall horse with 9 legs" one. The market has several high-quality headsets to choose from, and none of them are selling like hotcakes. The people have spoken, even at $1,300 I expect Meta's glasses to be a flop.
On the audio end of this, you can even throw in some properly righteous speakers in both rooms. All combined, this is still cheaper than or equal to the vision pro price for an objectively better movie experience. The projector image will always be bigger than your TV and speakers that expensive will rattle the walls with bass and shatter your eardrums. It doesn't matter how good earbuds get, there's no replacement for displacement (of air). Don't you like feeling the power?
I’m not saying AVP is cheap, I’m saying visually it’s better.
> more comfortable
Nothing could be more comfortable than lying flat on bed with head propped up just a bit, and screen floating at 45 degrees in front of me, which I can easily reposition and resize to perfectly hit my FOV.
> more social
Heh, I’m not looking to socialize while enjoying a movie at home
The only way a physical setup would win is righteous speakers. I suppose I could connect physical speakers, but that breaks the awesome immersion of enjoying a movie in perfect (to the rest of my family) silence.
But really all I can say is that the visual experience and physical comfort (when lying down) of a movie on AVP is unparalleled, and this is not at all why I bought it, and it’s probably something one really has to experience to understand.
I agree it's a novelty, it's never going to be the mainstream thing that replaces all existing interfaces and transforms the very concept of reality like some people want it to be. But it is fun within its niche.
I think what's holding it back is price more than anything. I'm still hanging on to my Quest because it just isn't worth the money for me to upgrade, even though half the apps no longer even work (fuck you very much DeoVR.)
I believe that launched as an Apple exclusive. I wonder if that means the millions of Oculus Quest headsets that have been gathering dust for years will finally have some immersive content worth watching.
This is XR for the rest of us and a worthy competitor to the Xreal.
Steam Frame is the one you want.
1) Blackout. Let me use them as a way to get complete pitch black when i want it 2) Amazing resolution. None of the existing products are good enough to replace my physical screens, but i'd love to. 3) Comfortable. Nothing has been comfortable enough to wear long term. Sure maybe an hour or two, but 8-10 hrs a day for work? Not even close.
Hope they get there someday.
Shove all of the compute in the external unit, instead of having all of that weight in your face.
Meta Ray Ban Audio
Meta Ray Ban Display
Meta VR Glasses
Meta Quest 3
Meta Ray-Ban Display
Ray-Ban Meta Audio
I have Xreal airs. And, while, I like them, they’re rather useless because 1080p just isn’t enough.
If they had the courage to open up their plattform for external developers like Apple or Android (not even talking about open APIs), they could have an amazing ecosystem. Currently, it feels like a car with a stuck handbrake.
This may come as a surprise, but most phones can capture audio these days. Has your state made them illegal yet?
This might be the killer app if latency is low enough.
I understand this is quite good, but I also have something like 20/12.5 eyesight. To me, using these things feels like looking through a coarse screen door.
E: For reference, I can comfortably count pixels on a 24.5" 1080p screen from a normal seated position.
I've been buying HMDs since the first Oculus, and I promptly sell them to somebody else. 37 PPD is a little more than halfway to "perfect" for someone with 20/20 eyesight
What in the world are you using as your benchmark to call 37 “dogshit”?
Doing more with a narrower field of view is easy, it is even cheaper. Doing more with the same or better field of view means you need more pixels and more computing power to drive them, so more expensive, heavier hardware that gets hotter and with less battery life.
People at Meta consitered 37 PPD to be a good compromise, and I kind of agree.
This is mostly driven by the fact that even in the current optimal case where they can maintain the number of defective pixels per panel, multiplying the number of pixels tanks bins. And then the follow on effects of longevity based on heat/brightness vs refresh rate, which improves generation over generation much faster than the former. The shit they're doing to print OLED panels out like an inkjet is exciting because once it gets good enough they will no longer need to write off the failures and will be able to selectively remove or overwrite the defects, which is not something that can usefully be done with other screen types.
The operation of switching the pixels themselves becomes increasingly inexpensive as they get smaller. For a long time the biggest barrier holding progress back was consistently and reliably being able to deliver smaller and more precise voltage swings. Almost all of the increased power consumption comes from either how much less backlight can make it through (which also becomes heat, this is already enough of a problem that certain display types include a separate extremely tiny panel that sits there and displays nothing so that they can be measured to adjust the voltage levels and termination resistances), or how bright each individual pixel can be. That's why the first 6? generations of OLED panels have so many wacky and (IMHO goddamn abhorrent) arrangements of R/G/B/W shapes and subpixels.
I was vaguely okay with this when they started doing things like including yellow/magenta subpixels on TVs but anything other than a square pixel aspect ratio for computers is so gross. Even if you're willing to ignore the fringing or outright cannot see it, I can still tell one generation of iPhone apart from another consistently in books.app with the smallest white on black text, the leading/trailing edges of the letters have different rainbows.
And displaying fractionally lower resolutions onto high dpi displays does not incur much of a cost at all, retina displays existing at all on mobile phones is proof of this.
In other words I bet that subpixel-aware or even just pixel-shape-aware text rendering could avoid that fringing but they don't want to bother.
Several solutions have been proposed, like varying the focal mechanically based on where you are looking (Varifocal, see Half Dome prototype). There are some others, but the simplest solution is to get old!
With age comes presbyopia, which is the inability for the eye to focus on short distances, bad in real life, great in VR! Because the inability of your eyes and your headset to adjust focus cancel out!
So yeah, be careful of the play area. :)
Obligatory subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/VRtoER/
I had Meta Raybans for a while and liked them. Always refusing firmware updates. Everything I needed worked fine, normal headset for listening podcasts on walks, taking occasional picture, that's all I need! In this use case battery lasted a week outside of its case. Until recently it started prompting me with voice to update the glasses urgently every half an hour. And I did (to version 128, hey, even number!) and oh boy, Meta AI this Meta AI that everything is Meta AI can't do anything without it. Battery is drained in less than a day of me not wearing them, bluetooth audio breaks up all the time, connection getting lost. I was perfectly happy with the product and they had to ruin it to shove their AI garbage down my throat.
They recently added Meta AI sidebar to WhatsApp which you can't turn off.
So, hope you like Mark's AI because you'll sure have to use it with these.
Bonus: No Facebook BS.
Nope.
Some of the decisions they made around ux are so insane I feel like ripping it off and throwing it across the room. I bet there are some properly talented people at meta, but someone senior is committed to making it suck. Wouldn't be surprised if it's zuck himself. So even though I'm passionate about it, I have no VR in my life because I can't afford another one
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
These are not $400 and therefore have competition. They also don't seem to be that great for gaming, because they have an exceptionally low FOV.
Every time a major tech company comes out with a new headset, I check one thing: Does it have a light field display? (In this case, no it doesn't.) In 5-10 years, headsets are going to be much better. Your eyes will be able to focus on objects like they do in real space and you won't have to deal with the hassle of an external battery.
A huge impediment to VR uptake is having to go through the process of strapping a brick to one's face.
This isn't quite the "just putting on a pair of glasses" experience, but it's much closer to that than the former.
Honestly I don't know why that's not more common. I've used puck-based ones, they're great - far less heat and mass on your face is a major benefit. They're also usually easier to plan upgrades for, as the two most costly pieces (which do very different things and have very different progress cycles) are separated.