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Ten years later, Facebook's Oculus acquisition hasn't changed the world as expected
(techcrunch.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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I don't think many outside the tech-money bubble thought this would work. Instead people mourned the loss of Oculus as an innovator when it was bought up.
Look at it now - it has slowed the VR market right down by delivering a low price but low quality experience. That has discouraged other manufacturers from the market.
The high end of the market has been held back as a result - the Valve Index and their like give a better experience but content growth is slow as a result of slow growth. The quest is a decent product but their teams are solving the problems constantly constrained by the cheap price point rather than building the solution and iterating it to the price point.
I think the market will converge on a Vision Pro like device at an affordable price but I think Oculus/Meta has slowed that down as people experience their product and think that's what VR is. Although in fairness there is also a tech problem - the vision pro shows how expensive it is at the moment to create something close to the ideal in terms of an untethered device without base stations and hand controllers. The realistic way for quality VR at present remains tethered to a PC.
We'll get there in the end but I think it may have been sooner of Meta hadn't thrown 100s of billions at buying market share with a lower quality version of what VR needs to be. The mobility is right, but the casual-gaming level of experience is way off, and it's damaged expectations.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least). That would be technically difficult but offloading as much of the graphics and game/program processing as possible may make a lighter device and an added battery may last longer or be lighter. Essentially a halfway house between an Quest and Index - the quest mobility but the index quality (which is already achieved by offloading to the PC). However it may not be feasible due to lag and it's still a compromise from the ultimate dream. But it'd probably be a good step on from full tethered if its doable.
That or economies of scale do make the Vision Pro or a future version of it affordable over the coming years. Doubt that will be Quest prices though - if people are paying £1k for phones then that seems more realistic for good quality VR imo.
This thread is the first time I’ve heard of Steam’s VR headset.
They've literally had 2 of them. The Vive, built by HTC and sold by Valve on Steam and its sucessor The Valve Index. Anyone who would consider themselves even mildly interested in VR Gaming probably knows about at least one of them.
They're damned good examples of VR, too: they shipped the vive with actual vr inputs! and the index's Knuckles inputs are such a step up from 6dof inputs overall.
Don't we already have that? The Quest 2 could manage it, although I think people have more luck with a third party app (Virtual Desktop maybe?) doing it rather than the official software.
It does need a good Wifi 6 router though, as it's heavy on bandwidth.
Personally, I think VR needs to be able to have an HDMI input (or get rolled into the HDMI standard so controllers/head locations can be passed back through it), so people can at least use it as a large screen for non VR software, e.g. watching movies or just playing regular 2D games from any source.
What's really holding VR back is every company wants to be the king of VR, and none of them can be.
Streaming feels like the way to go, I already have a computer so all I'd really want out of a headset is the interface part, it doesn't need to be a self contained unit. And It'd be way easier to get into VR if the headsets were priced more like a monitor than a whole PC.
I have no problem streaming from my desktop to my Quest with a WiFi 5 router
Some better software to stitch it together and some higher res cameras, the Quest 3 could do what the Vision Pro does. The Quest 2 was just enough that you could get around the room. The Quest 3 you can actually read a book or a screen through. It's just a bit blurry and wonky from the panorama being stitched together and the fact the cameras aren't as good.
I think people would sacrifice a little bit of quality for an affordable product that can literally do all the same stuff. Actually, the Quest can do a bit more considering the software library for the Vision fuckin sucks and doesn't have much at all.
Then again, people also just want these things to be like putting on sunglasses and not strapping a literal computer to their face looking like a cyberpunk nightmare. And I don't think we are anywhere close to Google Glass form factors with Apple Vision Pro quality picture.
they're definitely chasing apple on AR interaction and in some ways (ML trained hand tracking) I think Meta is ahead.
Still doesn't make me want to work with either meta or apple stuff though.