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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I am so so glad Meta, or any company continue to invest in AR and VR. Not because I like AR / VR, to the contrary I am not a big fan of wearing a glasses to use it.

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.

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I think VR would be completely dead by now if Meta weren't continuing to lose billions every quarter on it. Not many companies can endless sink that much money into a product

I am not so sure about that. When it felt like Meta was abandoning the space we saw some resurgence of smaller projects that tried to innovate, but if you have a big player sucking out all the oxygen you can't build smaller scale projects

Unfortunately a couple of small start ups isn't enough to carry the industry. Even big players like Valve who have more money in the bank to take a hit couldn't bring their headset in below $1000

Valve never sells at a loss. A significant slice of that is probably the RAM and storage, even at scale.

They couldn't make that price on a high end standalone, without taking a hit, in 2026. And they choose not to take a hit so ability doesn't matter.

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.

Meta burned all that money because Zuckerberg had just read something related to Snow Crash, not because he had a good idea for how to develop the sector.

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?".

On the contrary, if Meta didn't acquire Oculus which hadn't poached Valve staff maybe the Steam Frame would have been out years ago.

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.

That seem plausible. As a gamer and 3d aficionado since 3dfx voodoo 1, I've never owned a VR set and that was partly because the good ones, at least on paper, all seemed to be Meta products. I don't use any Meta products, although I am probably _used by_ Meta products, which is part of the reason I don't use them.

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 is a great space now. Lots of competitors with great products. Meta has the best mass market option but many competitors with higher end displays like 4K per eye micro-OLED.

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.

We know the speed at which Valve operate. There's no way they'd even come close to producing headsets as quickly as meta can.

Nonsense. VR was and still is sustainable as a profitable niche product for specific use-cases. Zuck spending billions to try and own a new mass market category has nothing to do with that.

Valve has annual profits in the billions, they invest in the future of VR too.

Counterpoint: there are plenty of companies making VR hardware but they all remain niche and struggle because they can’t subsidize their hardware by taking both losses and user data as part of the price. Meta are better at killing competition more than they are at innovating.

Worst thing that happened to humanity is the birth of Anduril thanks to Meta buying Occulus.. making that one slightly chipped person go think: "What to do with my Occulus exit.. hmm killing people isn't efficient, let me fix that."

The only people anduril drones have had a chance to kill are russians that are currently invading Ukraine.

The biggest issue with VR adoption currently is not VR hardware. Quest 3, Pico 4 etc are all great headsets which launched with amazing price points. The issue is that these standalone headsets are pretty much useless. Sure you can watch some videos, or play some extremely basic games which remind me of N64 graphics. But that's about it. To get the most out of these headsets, you need a powerful PC. Driving in Assetto Corsa in VR feels amazing, you get actual realistic car physics and can drive in Tokyo with traffic around you which feels 'real'. VR in Microsoft Flight Simulator allows you to fly in any plane in any part of the world. VR in Elite Dangerous allows you to fly in outer space in a 1:1 scale Milky Way Galaxy. But require a beefy PC to run.

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.

So much to dissect in this post. By “N64 level” content I’m assuming that you refer to low poly geometry with low res textures and baked lights, correct? Well, I don’t know which VR games you are playing because even something as basic as Beat Saber would have been impossible to execute in the N64 era. I also find it interesting that you mention Apple being a VR company when they’ve only released one headset a few years ago and have not announced any major updates or successors in the last two WWDC. Meanwhile you ignore VALVe altogether who are about to release their second VR headset (third if you take the OG HTC Vive into account. And who developed and published what is perhaps one of the most immersive experiences on the medium: Half-Life Alyx. There’s nothing N64 about this game as they really pushed the technology as far as you could possibly do with the hardware limits of that time. No, you are not going to get GTA VI running on an untethered headset anytime soon and perhaps for good reason.

Half-Life Alyx is great, but it still requires a tethered headset and a beefy PC to run with high fidelity graphics.

Beat Saber is still quite basic graphics, I wouldn’t call it high fidelity.

Half-Life Alyx will run on VALVe’s upcoming frame completely untethered. https://vr.org/articles/half-life-alyx-standalone-steam-fram...

at 30 fps tho, its a joke.

30fps in VR is nausea inducing

I think it should be fine with async reprojection.

I have a different take on this: I bought a Quest 2 several years ago, spent some money and bought about 10 experiences/games/etc. for it, and it is good enough that I continue using it with no real desire to buy a newer model. My wife was watching me use it last week and she commented “isn’t there an upgrade for that?”

Wonderful toy, even though I only use it about 90 minutes a month it is worthwhile for me to own.

The three year old Quest 3 is still the absolute best thing you can buy in this space in terms of value per dollar. Especially the color passthrough is a feature I found to enjoy quite a lot and it prevents me from even considering the new Steam Frame. After the price hike I think Meta might now sell roughly at break even or perhaps even with some tiny margins, but before it was definitely at a loss. If mine fell down and broke today, I'd probably buy it again in a heartbeat, even though I only use it semi-regularly like you.

The Steam Frame has a $150 addon for pass-through.

For a total of $1200 I'd expect a bit more.

Given the memory and general hardware shortages, I expected the price to be above $1200. Valve’s subsidy isn’t as high as Meta’s insane and aggressive hardware subsidies which is not the norm.

Still, you basically pay twice the price for finger and eye tracking and a slightly newer snapdragon with more RAM. Resolution, lenses, refresh rate are all basically equal and passthrough is way worse without the hardware upgrade.

I average about 2-3 hours per week. I’ve gotten into simracing and an average Le Mans Ultimate race is around an hour which I play a couple of times per week.

The native experiences are too barebones and I don’t even use it untethered

I bought my Quest 2 when it first came out, and I played it for a while, about 2-3 hours a week, peaking at about an hour a day when I found that Blade and Sorcery is a really good game for "exercise".

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.

The nice thing for me is I was able to pick up a brand new meta quest 3 still with receipt and warranty for €200 second hand (buyers remorse I guess, there wasn't much they could do with it), and I was able to do all that stuff you mentioned with my beefy pc.

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.

Wow I disagree with this. Even with Quest 2 the hardware was powerful enough to create interesting VR experiences. I think a bigger limiting factor is the comfort of the headsets and the quality of the source material (in the case of streaming).

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.

Standalone wireless headsets are great for fitness. Almost every game is a cardio workout. You won’t need to have a separate workout from playing video games.

Also the visuals got a big improvement with Quest 3. I’m sure that Steam Frame will also have decent visuals.

I am also very glad for Meta's investment into the future, so second your voice here. In a sense though it's Palmer Luckey who punched the tech into a defensible product. John Carmack surely tried to do the right thing, but I think part of why he left is that it's too difficult for any individual to make significant (risky) design decisions.

Do I have faith in Meta to 'win' in VR or AR commercially? Well... not really, but the technological advancements are real.

agreed. would be nice to see the size of the meta glasses and the reviews first before considering to purchase.

> Everything in modern computing is slow

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 ...

VR is at the intersection of low latency, high throughput, high compute, flexibility and affordable prices.

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.

I have 5 programs open right now - Firefox, Visual Studio, Word, Photoshop and a terminal.

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.

Maybe it's a Windows thing? My M1 Air is way quicker than my XP laptop of years ago was.

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.

I'm just glad the era of having to look down all the time will soon be over.

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