I wonder if this "opening" of the operating system is their way of putting the metaverse project out to pasture - analogous to donating it to the Apache Foundation - without admitting that the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure.
Having a personal computer at home was a game-changer, though. "The Metaverse" has been around for a couple years now, and yet consumer VR (which has been around for eight years now) is still just a "gimmick", rather than a must-have.
The IBM Personal Computer released in 1981. By 1989... yeah.
iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
> iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
Advanced phones with proper os, apps, camera had been around for years, and personal digital assistants before that. Tablets, too. iPhone got the form factor and ui exactly right and triggered an explosion, but it was far from the first. We might still be in the "smartphone, pre-iPhone" years.
I don't know what exactly is the right analogy for this, but two other points of context which make me discredit this line of thinking.
1. Feature/smart 'Phones' were around before the iPhone *and* were already pretty much ubiquitous. VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (either in people's houses or in distribution centres not being sold).
2. VR has arguably existed in some ways before the Quest, Nintendo Virtual Boy was from the mid-90s.
Maybe the iPhone comparison isn't right, but if we're decades into developing this technology and still very early in development I think we should assume we're a LONG way off these things becoming mainstream consumer devices and we should be wary of any company that brings them to the consumer market.
> VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (sic)
Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million. Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players.
If you allow for some overlap, that's roughly ten million monthly users, and in sales VR is already more successful than a lot of computer platforms of the past.
> Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million.
There is no way that those numbers are right.
EDIT: Yeah, Steam has 120 million active users per month. And the 6+ million users for Quest is from 2022, during the pandemic and metaverse bubble. Would be curious to know the trends for 2023 and 2024 thought.
It’s crazy because if you try the Quest it’s quite insane how good it is already. If I were to guess what could give it an iPhone moment:
- lighter/more comfortable
- faster to get started when you put the headset on
- more social experiences and event organized in VR
- shorter time from headset on to hanging out with your friends in VR
A number of years ago I convinced a bunch of my friends to buy the Quest after being blown away by board games in VR, but turns out Catan only worked for the Go and it was a lot of work to do something together in VR.
IMO there needs to be some sort of lobby that does not take you away from hanging out with your friends when you’re in between games. I should be able to easily join a lobby or pause a game to go to a lobby and wave at my friend who’s playing to pause and join me in the lobby
It's this and one other point: Games that people aren't bored of in an hour.
To me, very few games have come out for VR that don't feel like gimmicky experiences. Even Half Life Alyx, as advanced as it was, kinda felt like a theme park ride after a while. I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously.
It's hard to justify strapping a TV to my face and feeling uncomfortable for one-off experiences. Even if there was a game with some depth and replayability, I would be even more annoyed to play it on such an uncomfortable headset.
Almost everyone I know is not using their VR headset anymore. I'm not sure it will ever move past that phase, because people want it to be smaller and, simultaneously, more technically immersive. So we're in some weird in between zone where it's neither.
>I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously.
The "technical" reason for it is very very very simple: Nearly no video games are actually improved by "increased immersion" to an extreme. Chess won't be more fun because you have to physically move digital chess pieces around a virtual board, people playing Call of Duty do not want to physically move their arms around to aim, and don't want to jump around to move, and if you aren't doing those things you don't want the downsides that are inherent to a VR system, like extreme seclusion of wearing a headset, physical ability being an inherent filter, clunky UI, nausea etc.
The TWO areas where VR is useful, flight simulators and driving simulators, haven't even fully adopted VR simply because it's too much hassle.
VR is only a gimmick unless you can benefit from that extra immersion, and most things cannot.
The Wii sold gangbusters because everyone and their grandma could understand "swing remote to swing tennis racket", but you couldn't actually build a hyperaccurate tennis sim off of that because a Wiimote is NOT a tennis racket and you cannot get beyond that. VR is the same way. Everyone can experience the "Oh VR is soooo coool" gimmick but very few genres inherently benefit from what VR provides.
Where VR shines, in my opinion, is in fitness. Where the goal is ultimately to move around in a gamified way. That's effectively how I use my Quest 2 and I'm not alone. Recently I've been trying to increase my table tennis skills.
But why does it need a heavy screen attached to your head? Just get some shorts and go outside, and if you can afford a quest 2 then surely you can afford a tennis table
It's not that heavy. I don't have the room for a tennis table nor am I close enough to my friends to play it for 30 minutes every night like I do in VR.
I think part of the problem is this weird insistence that VR means having to physically move arms around etc. For most games, the visual experience of VR can vastly improve immersion, but control schemes nearly universally suck. Simulators work so much better largely because they don't fall into the same trap - if you're playing a flight sim, say, you're still probably using the same stick/throttle/pedals as you would without the headset. For space sims, I find that headset + mouse combo works amazingly well (End Space is a good showcase of what can be done there). And so on.
But for some reason there's practically no uptake on any of this outside of sims. I would love to see a first-person shooter that is fully VR enabled while still allowing me to use WASD + mouse. In fact, I already kinda sorta do that by using 2D theater mode with games like Insurgency: Sandstorm, but that doesn't give you the actually useful VR stuff like the ability to turn your head to look around etc. If somebody were to make an FPS that did all that, they'd have my money in a heartbeat.
That some reason is motion sickness. There has to be consistency with your perception, else it develops into compounding vection feelings. It tend not to apply for vehicular controls hence sim usage.
That varies from person to person. I have played games with keyboard and mouse in VR (e.g. Polynomial 2, or the unofficial GTA 5 VR mod), and it works great for me.
>The TWO areas where VR is useful, flight simulators and driving simulators, haven't even fully adopted VR simply because it's too much hassle.
I see this come up, over and over again. It's so obviously wrong based on even a basic reading of the market. The Quest is unambiguously the most popular VR headset and it's store has barely any cockpit simulators at all.
At a smaller scale, Eleven Table Tennis is an extremely accurate VR Table Tennis game that supports paddle attachments. It is extremely close to the real thing, professionals use it for practice.
> Nearly no video games are actually improved by "increased immersion" to an extreme. Chess won't be more fun because you have to physically move digital chess pieces around a virtual board
Couldn’t disagree more. Experiences in VR are insanely immersive and this is why there’s so much love for VR.
Also, I played Catan (a board game) in VR and it was the most social experience I’ve ever had in a video game.
It's a completely different level compared to Wii.
The amount of sensors we have on controllers now means, it can pick your slight wrist movements for top spin, side spin and more accurately measure bat speed. The physics engine on these games are so close to being realistic.
Now, let's compare it to IRL and since I played college level cricket, I'll tell you the difference.
When I practiced as an amateur, I was able to face at the most 25-30 pitches per day. Of them, only 1 or 2 were what I can remotely call "quality" pitches and I'd have to spend 3 hours per day.
In the Metaverse, in 3 hours, I'd have faced 750 quality pitches including 95mph pitches (The highest I ever faced in IRL was 70mph) including extremely difficult curve balls, deception etc.
All this for a marginal cost of $0 and the physics and simulation will only get better
I game quite a bit and had access to multiple headsets at home because of the work my wife did, for a couple years. Official permission to use the hardware for whatever.
I tried beat saber for like 10 minutes and never bothered with anything else. The headset’s just too big a hassle, and blocking out the world sucks a lot.
Plus I can’t help but think of the VR headset guy from the Pearl Jam video “Do the Evolution” when I look at the damn things.
Kinda like how I think of the dad from Serial Experiments Lain any time one of my kids walks in and I’m in front of a glowing screen.
Speaking of Serial Experiments Lain, there is also the guy walking around the street in the AR headset which everyone thought was weird. Funny that it's still weird 27 years later.
I have access to a Vive headset for school project right now and do not find it very fun to use, Beat saber remains the only VR game that is at least on the same tier of replayability as osu.
The Quest is insanely good, for a single person in isolation, once it's up and running. But there's a ton of friction that shouldn't exist before that happens, and Meta hasn't nailed most of the UX here yet. For example:
- App sharing / libraries doesn't work properly yet. (The owner has to secretly log in to each individual app themselves, before anyone else can use it on the device. There is no documentation informing anyone of this requirement)
- Add/ons or DLC also don't work properly yet. (You have to 're-unlock' each individual DLC, for it to share to anyone else on device in something like Beat Saber, for example)
- Child permissions don't work properly yet. (The notification does work, but a parent is not allowed to approve an app from that notification, the child has to entirely shut down and restart the whole device, before an approval takes effect)
- Screen sharing doesn't work, at all. (If you have a child, you just can't ever mirror their view onto a TV or Tablet -- full stop, no exceptions. Which also means, there's no way to help a child who is wearing a headset -- ever). Note that "taking the headset off" triggers a state reset, so a child can't hand the headset over to their parent for help, since the face sensor will kill state the second a face is removed.
- Windowing UI doesn't really work yet. (You can have windows, but only three, and only side-by-side, and only for a select few apps) -- it's more usability-restricted than even stage manager on an iPad. You can tell the Quest is designed around the expectation that you will be in one-and-only-one full-screen game, pretty much the entire time your wearing the headset.
- Online sharing is app-dependent, a bunch don't work. Many more don't work at first, you have to spend 30 to 60 minutes "unlocking" the right to match-make. (making the online/networking more seemless is critical because of the nature of the device -- you can't both look at it the way you might with a TV or PC or Laptop or Tablet, since it's a worn device)
None of this is dealbreaking stuff, none if it needs any kind of "new invention" or anything to fix. But as a product, friction is still really high here, and I can see why it's not necessarily super popular outside of techie/gaming scenes yet.
This is definitely not true. The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.
Also not sure what state reset you're talking about. I've definitely grabbed the headset from another person and continued with the game.
> The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.
You don’t have your kid on a child account, you have your kid using an adult account. Child accounts can’t screen share —- it’s acknowledged in the Quest FAQ - https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experiences/o...“only the primary account can cast”
> Not sure what state reset you’re talking about.
Setup a child account. Let your kid login. Have the kid take the headset off. Congrats, everything just got killed, and it’s now PIN-locked to the adult account. When the adult types in a PIN, it trashes the child’s session, and starts an Adult session.
(We work around this by gently holding the face sensor with a finger while moving the headset around between people, to trick the headset into thinking it’s still being worn -— but this is ridiculously broken, no one should have to do that just to get it to work)
They actually do have cross game party chat these days, just FYI. Just make the party and then hop into the game. Support is a little inconsistent as games are not forced to support the feature, though.
There is, but it is kind of crappy. It's crossplay, but not in a meaningful way. You can't create a room and share a room code. The best you can do is invite a friend, but only if they are on the same platform. They've never done anything to improve it or make it more player friendly. They released it and forgot about it.
I'm still a little nonplussed. i don't like apple stuff, but did a couple demos at work with the vision elite or whatever its called.
Came away very impressed with the technology, but really didn't like having the damn thing strapped to my head for 15-20 minutes.
it reminds me of getting the original 3ds that could do some cool AR stuff, and could do 3d without glasses, but ultimately was an impressive tech demo that I mostly didnt use.
I already spend too much of my day in front of phones and monitors, I'm not sure if the answer is moving the screens closer to our eyes and shutting out more of the world.
industrial applications for sure can have a niche with this, but as a mass market device I think there's a long way to go, even if the experience looks good.
Even as a kid before the iPhone came out, it wasn't hard to see the appeal of a smartphone. People loved their Blackberries and Palm Treos. Having internet access wherever you go was incredibly appealing even before the hardware, software, and infrastructure were ready to make that mass marketable.
VR makes a ton of sense for video games, but I just don't see how it could enhance the rest of my day-to-day life. I don't see it becoming a good general purpose computing platform that most people use all day. I see it being useful for specific niche tasks like CAD, but I'll never put on a headset just to send an email, file my taxes, or browse the internet.
I see tons of appeal for headsets in day-to-day life. Maybe Im unique but I spend a solid hour a day lying in bed reading or on my tablet, I think this experience of using a computing device while lying down could be vastly improved with the right headset and thats an hour every day straight away.
Consumer VR hasn't had it's Blackberry moment yet!
Coincidentally, someone I interacted with mentioned "I never thought I'd get rid of my Blackberry" in passing, which reminded me of the term once popular term "Crackberry".
VR headsets can be fun for some games, but the hardware and software still have a lot of maturing to do, it's not like smartphones where it feels very developed and there's not much more room for obvious growth/improvement.
Yesterday i was close to buying a Pico 4 (Cheaper non meta Quest 3 equivalent), then i realised there has been zero fully triple a games since my friend blew me away with a Half Life Alyx demo 4 years ago.
I find it incredible there's still only 1 actual "serious" VR game - lots of people then recommended Skyrim VR, a game from 2011.
It's not at all, no. There's plenty of compelling games, there just aren't any AAA games (not ones built for VR only anyway) because the market simply isn't big enough to justify the incredible production costs.
If you're dead set on only AAA games then yeah, it's not a useful purchase, but that doesn't mean it's "standing still".
It's both. Meta can be "giving it away" and "hoping to establish an OS foothold" but if there is no major interest in playing in this space, it's going to be a very empty metaverse.
How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?
At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better.
Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.
100k/yr is not reasonable for Bay Area, let alone top talent. There are people working on it making $1M/yr+. Junior developers straight out of college are making more at Meta. You're also assuming everything went to just engineering payroll, which is obviously not true.
Then FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr.
And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast?
Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).
That's confusing the decision to work on something with the quality of the folks working on it. Brilliant engineers often work on things which are risky from a market perspective. It doesn't make them less brilliant at engineering when it turns out there isn't a market for the thing.
John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.
I want to make a snarky comment about how any reasonable person would want 10x that to work for Facebook but 500 human lifetimes is still a wild amount of time for what they’ve gotten.
In terms of difficulty/complexity, nothing you've listed there comes anywhere close to the r&d required to go from the original oculus prototype to volume shipping the meta quest 3.
1. Zuck always wanted to own a platform. He was a developer at heart and wants a product that developers can build on. He’s personally invested in this.
2. I’m pretty sure a lot of the cost quoted for their “Metaverse” stuff included their CapEx for a ton of GPUs which probably have a lot of other uses within the company.
I wonder how 1. works. Won't any developer tell you that platforms are traps, to be avoided unless necessary (or unless you're prepared in advance to jump off it at any time)? I feel platforms are only interesting to business folks, particularly those selling access to them.
Animals usually realise there is something off about a trap. They interact with it extremely cautiously, sometimes leaving it for a few nights and then coming back.
Eventually their desire for whats in the trap overcomes their caution and they put their head in.
It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are.
I'm not keen on more headsets having a Meta data vacuum built-in, but this isn't the opposite of putting the metaverse stuff to pasture.
They're just shifting from an Apple strategy of full-control vertical integration to a Android/Windows strategy of platform ubiquity.
> It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are.
Which would be weird cause the hardware (Quest 3/Quest Pro) is top notch, while Metas software for it is garbage. Everything good is provided by 3rd party companies.
Pixel phones are great too, but Google would be a radically different company if they tried to saturate the demand for Android hardware on their own.
Making flagship/reference hardware on the Oculus legacy is a much better strategy for Meta and lets them focus on platform vision and data collection, which is exactly the company they spent the last 15+ years building.
"Opening" what? I can't think of anything here that even remotely resembles opening something to a public or donating a project to any foundation.
They realized they have an asset, and they made some money by licensing it. Sales department did their job, story at 11. But it would've been a boring non-story, so a copywriter used the corporate brandbook - and "open" is the buzzword of the last few years when it comes to the technology.
Someone need to make an LLM SaaS to de-bulshittify the news.
Which, I guess, makes sense. I think it is absolutely nuts that people would buy an OS developed by an ad company that relies on user profiling for their whole business. But then again it works for Google.
Exactly this. Facebook makes money by network effects. They are incentivized to grow network engagement, more than they are to make direct money off new network members.
Using the name « horizon » without showing Horizon Worlds at all definitely hints at Horizon Worlds being a side social feature of the Horizon OS, versus this being an OS specifically FOR the horizon worlds metaverse.
Meta/Facebook really has trouble with focus, I hope they can pick 1 vision for VR.
I think they have the most focus out of any big tech company. They have like 4 products.
They’re trying to build a platform to build VR experiences on. That’s clearly their goal. Horizon Worlds is “just an app” to show that off. It’s a “hero use case”.
I looked at it seriously for content authoring but gave it up.
The big problem is you cannot import images, textures, 3-d models and such from ordinary tools. You have something like constructive solid geometry to work with but only so much and there is a slider you can use to set the number of players and the more players the less geometry you can use.
I want to make worlds based on photographs (particularly pano and stereo) and art. McDonalds needs to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup. Either way it is a non-starter.
HW supports collaboration (more than one person shares the world) but https://aframe.io/ lets me make the content I want. If I have to choose one or the other I am going to pick the second.
My take on Meta Quest is that it seems highly successful as a gaming environment based on an app store but is skews towards single-player experiences. Like a lot of AAA games, the excellent Asgard’s Wrath 2 has some multiplayer tacked on but it is all meaningless like leaderboards and the occasional ghost that shows up in a procedurally generated dungeon.
Of course, Meta wants to make multiplayer experiences but somehow they just can’t do it.
The most popular gaming experiences on Quest are all social - Gorilla Tag, Rec Room, VR Chat, Population One, Contractors etc.
It makes sense that expensive AAA experiences like Asgard's Wrath are single player since that's a fairly dominant model in gaming. The Quest doesn't have the player base to support a AAA multiplayer model at this point.
Why would they shut down the Metaverse? It’s clearly the future and Zuck brought it up again in the last podcast that people are linking to. Apple just release a bad headset that just confirmed the bet that Meta took
Agreed. Zuck on Dwarkesh's podcast definitely seemed to be doing some aggressive retconning, making it seem like AI was always the plan, and the metaverse never was. Of course the opposite was true.
Meta kind of doesn't have a choice. The major platforms are now owned by Apple, Google, and Microsoft (and also to a lesser extent IBM and Amazon). The strategic risks of being dependent on other companies' platforms are huge. Meta is desperately hunting for a disruptive innovation that will allow them to control the next major platform. A lot of people are betting that will be AR/VR but it could be something completely different.
The number of employees who can see failure coming does not matter when they are organized by hierarchy and coerced to work toward failure under threat of losing their wage.
Speaking from the perspective of a person who is very into VR. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong. First, Facebook/Meta pushing hard with low-end hardware that caused the existing VR gaming to take leaps backward. PCVR was progressing fine before Zuckerberg intervened. Now the VR space is just cluttered with so many low effort, low res games. None of the big players want to get involved, because everyone is so convinced it is too "niche." Meanwhile, you have people who really want to spend money on VR and there's nothing worth spending the money on.
While we can debate plenty on what the right amount of App Store fees might be, it is objectively true that developers absolutely care about the market of available consumers on the high end platform.
I mostly meant when Apple goes crazy like Vision Pro being $3500, Mac Studio and Mac Pro prices, etc. Those are low-volume items and I think Vision Pro will be relegated to that niche too. If they cut a lot of useless fluff like the eyeball cams/screens, and focus on fit/price they can have a good V2. But the "spatial computing" thing was dead on arrival, it'll never take off as it hasn't taken off in 40 years. People don't want to wave their arms in the air all day.
Not really. There is no money in VR/AR headsets. All the money is in the services that back them. Even further, the less money is in making headsets, the more money is in the services.
To say nothing about your data, which is Facebook's primary revenue driver.
