I bought a Vive since I was careless and wanted to see what the VR hype was. Considering that I’ve probably used it less than 100 hours in about 4 years, I think of it as a bad investment.
In its current technologically limited state, VR feels more like a gimmick than a real experience. I think that all of what VR is currently trying to do is still waiting for that uninvented Star Trek holodeck technology to come around anyway. Headsets and wands are unwieldy and breaking down/setting up the system is a PITA.
I’m not sure if even Apple can turn the tides. I can’t see how Apple can succeed if Meta struggle finding a market even with their much cheaper models.
Maybe they will find a market among the most diehard Apple/tech enthusiasts, but it’s probably going to end there.
Meta struggles because their content in trash. Quest2 is a mobile phone strapped to your face, with games that look exactly like what you’d expect from that (overly simplified cartoony graphics, very basic gameplay). And the sad part is, that it’s not even really a technical limitation. Quest2, while slow, is still fast enough to play ~20 year old games in VR and it has a few ports of those games (e.g. Doom3, RE4), but it has nothing new at that level of quality. Even the port of GTA:SA that they announced two years ago hasn’t been heard from since.
Meta just seems unable to both secure quality new content and can’t even manage to get enough of those older games ported either. Despite Meta burning literally a billion dollar on VR each month, nothing interesting is happening in VR gaming, they can’t even manage to keep the existing stuff up and running (e.g. EchoVR servers were just shutdown).
I have more hope for Apple’s approach, as they essentially completely sidestepped the VR content problem by focusing on making their VR headset work for 2D content. VisionPro has enough resolution to work as both monitor as well as cinema screen replacement, and they are smart enough to build a UI to take advantage of the 3D, eye and hand tracking. That’s again something Meta could never figure out. QuestPro was their take at an VisionPro’ish headset, but despite the $1500 price-tag and a whole lot of tracking cameras, it ended up as little more than a Quest2-with-better-lenses, as none of the additional features found much use in any software. The resolution of the device was also low enough to render it unusable as monitor replacement.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Cheap VR is super important and $300 is a great price for a headset. But you aren’t going to get gamers to give up their PS5 or gaming PCs with the lackluster games offering you find on Quest2. Even in the best of cases, Quest2 feels like stepping 20 years backwards in time. Simply put, Meta managed to make VR look boring and out of date.
You can use the Quest as a PC HMD, both wired and wireless. So no, it’s not a problem of performance.
The reason the Quest can’t secure content is the content doesn’t sell. Which is the same reason Sony struggles to secure content. They both basically have to finance the entire library. Sony and Valve sidestep this by having VR be a feature in flatscreen games, but even then people arent’ queuing up to get them.
And nobody wants to use VR as a monitor, either. Maybe in a plane if you’re a weirdo or to watch movies in private if you live in cramped quarters, but nobody is going to get to their desk and slap on a face-screen to type a text document, no matter how fancy and expensive it is.
The reason the Quest can’t secure content is the content doesn’t sell.
Meta spends enough money on VR to make a new GTAV or Cyberpunk-level AAA game happen once a week. If it sells or not is irrelevant when the company making VR is already not only willing, but actively burning, that amount of money. The issue is that Meta is neither interested in games nor are they interested in PC support. So little to nothing of that money flows in either direction and the games look mediocre as a result.
Making profit from selling games is something you can worry about once VR is popular, but to get VR popular you have to have great games first. And of course they wouldn’t even need to spend that much, porting existing games into VR can be done for cheap as numerous mods demonstrate, but that’s an avenue that they barely touch too (RE4 and that GTA:SA port we haven’t heard from in two years).
And nobody wants to use VR as a monitor, either.
Nobody wants to do that because all VR headsets currently on the marked are garbage for that use case. BigScreenBeyond gets closest, but still falls short. On top of that the whole “desktop-in-VR” software is garbage too. Everybody just puts 2D windows into 3D space and gave up. There are no GUI toolkits that take advantage of the fact that VR is 3D, there is no way to have multiple-3D apps run side by side, pass-through mode still sucks, etc.
Apple actually spend effort on making 2D apps in VR work. Nobody else in the industry did that, so of course nobody wants to do that right now. That will change once VisionPro is out if people that tried it are to be believed.
We could talk a lot about how much Meta has been getting out of their investment, but ultimately they’ve not been spending that money on funding huge triple-A releases, and you can’t buy your way into a platform’s worth of content.
And yes, of couse profiting from the games matters. ESPECIALLY if you’re selling the hardware at a huge loss, which is really where a bunch of those Meta billions ended up going. The idea was to get money from the games and the data funnel, but without software and hardware that people use daily both of those things dry up.
As for VR headsets being garbage for the VR monitor use case… that’s not a design issue. The issue is that when I’m using a monitor I want to be able to also look at other stuff. If I want to check my phone, or read a piece of paper I don’t want to be looking at things through a camera and a screen, let alone take a whole set of glasses off.
VR as a monitor is a bad idea not because the tech is bad, but because it’s a bad solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. You want to look at an image in space? We solved that problem in the 1940s, and that solution didn’t require you to strap an opaque thing to your face.
and you can’t buy your way into a platform’s worth of content.
That’s exactly how Xbox started. Microsoft lost something like four billion on Xbox, bought Bungie, Rare, etc. to get high quality games on their console and sold the console at a loss. Once the next generation came around, Xbox360 was a big hit.
Meta spend double the time and more than 5x that money and VR still can’t get any real traction.
you’re selling the hardware at a huge loss,
It’s not a huge loss, it’s around $50 that they lost on Quest2 hardware on release.
The idea was to get money from the games and the data funnel,
In the future. VR isn’t established enough to milk it for profits.
The issue is that when I’m using a monitor I want to be able to also look at other stuff.
That’s not an issue, that has been solved for years with pass-through.
If I want to check my phone
Pass-through aside, you can stream your phone into VR with Microsoft Phone Link.
I don’t want to be looking at things through a camera
Good pass-through is essentially indistinguishable from reality.
Simply put, the “problems” you list there are problems because the current VR space is an unfinished mess when it comes to regular 2D apps. Companies still use $1 tracking cameras for passthrough instead of stereo RGB cameras, they still lack depth sensors to allow proper composition of virtual and real objects, and the software side lacks smooth integration and lots of fundamental features.
Guess who doesn’t have any of those problems because they actually cared and finished the product instead of giving up half the way through? Apple Vision Pro.
Good passthrough is very much not indistinguishable from reality. That’s why on my face there is currently a set of lightweight lenses instead of screen with a camera attached to it.
In fairness, you’re not alone in being wrong about the issues with the VR business being about incremental hardware upgrades. That’s a very costly mistake that a lot of very smart people have made.
But they’re wrong.
It’s not about the quality of the hardware or missing improvements to the features. The mode of usage, the application itself, is simply not a go-to, first-use thing. You’re NEVER going to use a headset instead of a monitor. The quality of the headset doesn’t matter. It’s just not a leading application or a leading solution to the problem of having a display.
So no, Apple Vision Pro will not fix this problem. If I had to guess, they are aware enough of this to charge a ridiculous amount for it and see what happens before betting the farm on it like Meta did. And my guess is the takeaway will be that their branding goes a long way but people who do buy it still won’t use it as their daily driver for eight hours a day of work.
That sunk cost fallacy right there is how Meta bled money on this until it was untenable to keep it up. Those goalposts have been moving for a decade now. First it was when the shipping version of the Rift got out, then when the lag got better, then when inside-out tracking was solved, then when resolution got better, then when the price was right, then when passthrough improved…
…it’s none of those. It’s the fact that you’re in VR.
Being in VR is the dealbreaker for VR as mobile phone-like quantum leap in consumer electronics, which is what Meta thought they had.
It’s not. It’s a cool bit of tech with a gimmick that you crack out at parties sometimes. Or, you know, for weird porn if you live alone. I’m not judging.
That’s a fine thing to be, but you need to spec your product to that target.
The OG Vive is a really horrible experience compared to modern VR headsets already. There are incredible technological advancements being made and to say all VR is doing is waiting for some Star Trek technology is incredibly ignorant. And frankly an insult to those super talented engineers that are breaking new ground on a yearly basis.
Sorry if I sounded disrespectful to the brilliant people working on this tech. I don’t mean to say they aren’t making insane progress in the field. However, I stand by the main point of my original comment: until VR makes a lightyear jump in tech and frees itself of the headset and the wands/hand pieces (or minimizes them to the point of negligible discomfort), I won’t be sold on VR as a consumer.
I get that but I feel like we’re much closer than you think. Hand tracking has been a thing in budget headsets for years now and it’s really solid. There are quite a few really fun experiences that don’t require controllers at all.
Apple is about to ditch controllers completely, combining hand tracking with eye tracking. The displays are almost as sharp as real life and headsets today are fully wireless, standalone computers while being 50% slimmer than your Vive. Oh yeah, they also map the environment automatically and have high definition 3D passthrough with AR capabilities.
A lot of that stuff was considered science fiction when the Vive was released. What you want from VR is happening within the next decade, no lightyear jump needed.
I bought a Vive since I was careless and wanted to see what the VR hype was. Considering that I’ve probably used it less than 100 hours in about 4 years, I think of it as a bad investment.
In its current technologically limited state, VR feels more like a gimmick than a real experience. I think that all of what VR is currently trying to do is still waiting for that uninvented Star Trek holodeck technology to come around anyway. Headsets and wands are unwieldy and breaking down/setting up the system is a PITA.
The Quest is really easy to use since you don’t need external sensors, but it’s underpowered and also from Facebook.
We need wider FOV and better screens. The controllers are okay I think. Hopefully with apple stepping in we get more desperately needed content.
I’m not sure if even Apple can turn the tides. I can’t see how Apple can succeed if Meta struggle finding a market even with their much cheaper models.
Maybe they will find a market among the most diehard Apple/tech enthusiasts, but it’s probably going to end there.
Meta struggles because their content in trash. Quest2 is a mobile phone strapped to your face, with games that look exactly like what you’d expect from that (overly simplified cartoony graphics, very basic gameplay). And the sad part is, that it’s not even really a technical limitation. Quest2, while slow, is still fast enough to play ~20 year old games in VR and it has a few ports of those games (e.g. Doom3, RE4), but it has nothing new at that level of quality. Even the port of GTA:SA that they announced two years ago hasn’t been heard from since.
Meta just seems unable to both secure quality new content and can’t even manage to get enough of those older games ported either. Despite Meta burning literally a billion dollar on VR each month, nothing interesting is happening in VR gaming, they can’t even manage to keep the existing stuff up and running (e.g. EchoVR servers were just shutdown).
I have more hope for Apple’s approach, as they essentially completely sidestepped the VR content problem by focusing on making their VR headset work for 2D content. VisionPro has enough resolution to work as both monitor as well as cinema screen replacement, and they are smart enough to build a UI to take advantage of the 3D, eye and hand tracking. That’s again something Meta could never figure out. QuestPro was their take at an VisionPro’ish headset, but despite the $1500 price-tag and a whole lot of tracking cameras, it ended up as little more than a Quest2-with-better-lenses, as none of the additional features found much use in any software. The resolution of the device was also low enough to render it unusable as monitor replacement.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Cheap VR is super important and $300 is a great price for a headset. But you aren’t going to get gamers to give up their PS5 or gaming PCs with the lackluster games offering you find on Quest2. Even in the best of cases, Quest2 feels like stepping 20 years backwards in time. Simply put, Meta managed to make VR look boring and out of date.
You can use the Quest as a PC HMD, both wired and wireless. So no, it’s not a problem of performance.
The reason the Quest can’t secure content is the content doesn’t sell. Which is the same reason Sony struggles to secure content. They both basically have to finance the entire library. Sony and Valve sidestep this by having VR be a feature in flatscreen games, but even then people arent’ queuing up to get them.
And nobody wants to use VR as a monitor, either. Maybe in a plane if you’re a weirdo or to watch movies in private if you live in cramped quarters, but nobody is going to get to their desk and slap on a face-screen to type a text document, no matter how fancy and expensive it is.
The application is just not mainstream enough.
Meta spends enough money on VR to make a new GTAV or Cyberpunk-level AAA game happen once a week. If it sells or not is irrelevant when the company making VR is already not only willing, but actively burning, that amount of money. The issue is that Meta is neither interested in games nor are they interested in PC support. So little to nothing of that money flows in either direction and the games look mediocre as a result.
Making profit from selling games is something you can worry about once VR is popular, but to get VR popular you have to have great games first. And of course they wouldn’t even need to spend that much, porting existing games into VR can be done for cheap as numerous mods demonstrate, but that’s an avenue that they barely touch too (RE4 and that GTA:SA port we haven’t heard from in two years).
Nobody wants to do that because all VR headsets currently on the marked are garbage for that use case. BigScreenBeyond gets closest, but still falls short. On top of that the whole “desktop-in-VR” software is garbage too. Everybody just puts 2D windows into 3D space and gave up. There are no GUI toolkits that take advantage of the fact that VR is 3D, there is no way to have multiple-3D apps run side by side, pass-through mode still sucks, etc.
Apple actually spend effort on making 2D apps in VR work. Nobody else in the industry did that, so of course nobody wants to do that right now. That will change once VisionPro is out if people that tried it are to be believed.
We could talk a lot about how much Meta has been getting out of their investment, but ultimately they’ve not been spending that money on funding huge triple-A releases, and you can’t buy your way into a platform’s worth of content.
And yes, of couse profiting from the games matters. ESPECIALLY if you’re selling the hardware at a huge loss, which is really where a bunch of those Meta billions ended up going. The idea was to get money from the games and the data funnel, but without software and hardware that people use daily both of those things dry up.
As for VR headsets being garbage for the VR monitor use case… that’s not a design issue. The issue is that when I’m using a monitor I want to be able to also look at other stuff. If I want to check my phone, or read a piece of paper I don’t want to be looking at things through a camera and a screen, let alone take a whole set of glasses off.
VR as a monitor is a bad idea not because the tech is bad, but because it’s a bad solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. You want to look at an image in space? We solved that problem in the 1940s, and that solution didn’t require you to strap an opaque thing to your face.
That’s exactly how Xbox started. Microsoft lost something like four billion on Xbox, bought Bungie, Rare, etc. to get high quality games on their console and sold the console at a loss. Once the next generation came around, Xbox360 was a big hit.
Meta spend double the time and more than 5x that money and VR still can’t get any real traction.
It’s not a huge loss, it’s around $50 that they lost on Quest2 hardware on release.
In the future. VR isn’t established enough to milk it for profits.
That’s not an issue, that has been solved for years with pass-through.
Pass-through aside, you can stream your phone into VR with Microsoft Phone Link.
Good pass-through is essentially indistinguishable from reality.
Simply put, the “problems” you list there are problems because the current VR space is an unfinished mess when it comes to regular 2D apps. Companies still use $1 tracking cameras for passthrough instead of stereo RGB cameras, they still lack depth sensors to allow proper composition of virtual and real objects, and the software side lacks smooth integration and lots of fundamental features.
Guess who doesn’t have any of those problems because they actually cared and finished the product instead of giving up half the way through? Apple Vision Pro.
Good passthrough is very much not indistinguishable from reality. That’s why on my face there is currently a set of lightweight lenses instead of screen with a camera attached to it.
In fairness, you’re not alone in being wrong about the issues with the VR business being about incremental hardware upgrades. That’s a very costly mistake that a lot of very smart people have made.
But they’re wrong.
It’s not about the quality of the hardware or missing improvements to the features. The mode of usage, the application itself, is simply not a go-to, first-use thing. You’re NEVER going to use a headset instead of a monitor. The quality of the headset doesn’t matter. It’s just not a leading application or a leading solution to the problem of having a display.
So no, Apple Vision Pro will not fix this problem. If I had to guess, they are aware enough of this to charge a ridiculous amount for it and see what happens before betting the farm on it like Meta did. And my guess is the takeaway will be that their branding goes a long way but people who do buy it still won’t use it as their daily driver for eight hours a day of work.
That sunk cost fallacy right there is how Meta bled money on this until it was untenable to keep it up. Those goalposts have been moving for a decade now. First it was when the shipping version of the Rift got out, then when the lag got better, then when inside-out tracking was solved, then when resolution got better, then when the price was right, then when passthrough improved…
…it’s none of those. It’s the fact that you’re in VR.
Being in VR is the dealbreaker for VR as mobile phone-like quantum leap in consumer electronics, which is what Meta thought they had.
It’s not. It’s a cool bit of tech with a gimmick that you crack out at parties sometimes. Or, you know, for weird porn if you live alone. I’m not judging.
That’s a fine thing to be, but you need to spec your product to that target.
The OG Vive is a really horrible experience compared to modern VR headsets already. There are incredible technological advancements being made and to say all VR is doing is waiting for some Star Trek technology is incredibly ignorant. And frankly an insult to those super talented engineers that are breaking new ground on a yearly basis.
Sorry if I sounded disrespectful to the brilliant people working on this tech. I don’t mean to say they aren’t making insane progress in the field. However, I stand by the main point of my original comment: until VR makes a lightyear jump in tech and frees itself of the headset and the wands/hand pieces (or minimizes them to the point of negligible discomfort), I won’t be sold on VR as a consumer.
I get that but I feel like we’re much closer than you think. Hand tracking has been a thing in budget headsets for years now and it’s really solid. There are quite a few really fun experiences that don’t require controllers at all.
Apple is about to ditch controllers completely, combining hand tracking with eye tracking. The displays are almost as sharp as real life and headsets today are fully wireless, standalone computers while being 50% slimmer than your Vive. Oh yeah, they also map the environment automatically and have high definition 3D passthrough with AR capabilities.
A lot of that stuff was considered science fiction when the Vive was released. What you want from VR is happening within the next decade, no lightyear jump needed.