this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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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 Simply put, Meta managed to make VR look boring and out of date.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.
You tried a VisionPro or Varjo XR3? Since that's the only ones that have good passthrough. All I have here is a Lenovo Mirage Solo, which while still lowres and black&white does have proper distortion free 3D and really good automatic contrast adjust. Even on that old thing I constantly forget that I am in passthrough. Having proper 3D vision and being able to see your hands and legs goes a very long way into fooling your brain that what you are looking at is real. It's orders of magnitude better than any actual VR game or the nausea inducing pseudo-3D passthrough you get on Pico4.
I already replaced 95% of my TV usage with VR and spend a ton of computer time in WMR Portal. I'd happily go monitor-less and replace it all with VR if I could get something a little more high resolution, more comfort, with better connectivity (e.g. HDMI input support) and software.
You can't comfortably read text on current headsets. Hardware has to get a lot better before this use case is even possible.
The price is dictated by high resolution MicroOLEDs having terrible yields which drive the price high, along with bleeding edge CPU/GPU. Though even with that, it's not really expensive compared to the competition, Varjo XR3 cost $6500 and Hololens2 costs $3500 too. It's obviously not aimed at the mass market just yet, it's focused on setting the bar for what a comfortable and versatile VR device has to look like.
Meta sucks at building products. They are rich, but incompetent. Every time they accidentally stumble into something good (Quest2 $300 launch price), they ruin it with something else (Facebook account requirement, Metaverse focus, and a $350 price increase), only to than back paddle and end up right were they started. They have been wasting years doing that, killing all the hype and good will they could have had. And even now with the hardware cheap again, the games offering still suck due to wasting so much time on the Metaverse. And lets not even talk about the failure that was QuestPro ("high end" AR/VR headset without a depth sensor and stuck at the same low resolution as a Quest2).
Simply put, Meta has not released a single good or finished VR product so far, neither has anybody else for that matter. Modern VR is basically a slightly easier to use version of what people build 10 years ago by taping Razer Hydras to their DK1s, there has been a serious lack of actual progress in the space, outside of very slow incremental spec increases. VisionPro is the first thing that feels like a true step forward, though some problems remain (battery life, still heavy).
You may have to acknowledge that you're an outlier. Way off the mainstream, in fact.
The reason me and the rest of the mainstream will never ever use any type of passthrough in the way you describe is that you still have a headset strapped to your face. I don't know if you've ever tried to have a conversation with a person using passthrough, but no amount of creepy video of your eyes is going to solve that fact. It doesn't look normal, it's never going to look normal and you don't have to put up with being that weirdo because it turns out monitors are just fine and keep getting better.
So no, the endlessly moving goalposts of HMDs will never get to the bottom of the rainbow where they are a superior alternative to phones and displays. There is simply no feature tradeoff to justify -and I will keep repeating this- strapping a display to your face.
The few VR evangelist stragglers out there keep telling people to wait. You'll see, it'll get good enough any second.
But it already got good enough. The people that bounced off of the Quest did not bounce off because of quality. That's been my point here all along. The Quest 2 is, in fact, good enough for most people. They've certainly put up with bigger limitations on handheld devices or flatscreen gaming. Everybody who tries one for the first time has their minds blown. It's amazingly cool tech.
And exactly none of those people ever consider using it instead of their current screens.
It's an additive thing, at best, and it fits best for dedicated sessions where you won't be interrupted by kids or dogs or text messages or have to deal with a sweaty brow or scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses.
It's not gonna happen.
You are stuck thinking about yesterdays problems in the world of tomorrow. Yes, talking via passthrough will be a little weird. That's why you don't do that and use your VR to call them. That's why you are wearing that thing in the first place, it brings the power of the Internet straight into your eyeballs.
Look at local multiplayer in gaming, it's basically dead, because everybody plays over the network instead of walking over to their friends house like we did in the 80s and 90s. People of the future will watch movies together with their friends that are living hundred of miles away, thanks to virtual cinemas.
And those few that want to do things the old school way, they can still just remove there headset in a second. It's not like you are forced to use VR 100% of the time.
It's only moving because Meta never finished any of their VR devices. Had they actually delivered on their ~$300 PCVR, as promised back in 2014 back when the hype was at its peak, things might look quite a bit different today. But they sold it two years late, for double the price, reduced the feature set to a forward-facing-only experience, added god rays and an Xbox controller and than wondered why nobody was buying it.
Simply put: Nobody has a build a good VR system yet. It's not surprising why the whole market is a mess.
Call me old school, but I consider smartphones a gigantic trade-off due to there tiny screen barely usable screens.
It's good enough for kids that really like the initial wow-factor that comes with 3D and VR (many of which aren't allowed to use the device due to Meta's age13 account requirement). Quest2 is very definitely not "good enough" for any experienced gamer, the resolution is pathetic, the games are trash and even the good stuff you can mod and patch together is years old at this point. Once you are past the initial wow-factor, there is no worthwhile content, neither released nor announced.
Again, old-timey problems. VisionPro or BigScreen don't even allow glasses in the headset, you get prescription lens insert and take your glasses off. Your dog will automatically get blended into VR when it get close. And your text message will show up right in the headset, WMR figured that out years ago, there is no reason to think that Apple won't have that too. Many modern headsets also come with a fan to deal with heat issues.
All that said, this will all take many years. VisionPro will at best be the device that finally demonstrates that VR is viable, it won't be the device that the masses buy, that will still take a few more hardware generations. Meanwhile Google and Microsoft have just finished killing their old VR attempts, so it will take quite a while for them to reboot and catch up to Apple. Meta might be a little quicker once they can point at Apple and just clone what they see instead of coming up with something themselves.
No, they're not old timey. That's the issue you get from, pardon my language, techbros sometimes. It's what deceived people into thinking say, crypto was a linear evolutionary process that would eventually replace other aplications doing the same thing. That's not how it works.
Your smartphone comment is a great explanation of why not, actually. Yes, we've all moved to tiny screens and low battery. Why?
Because the device solved problems that we wanted solved and provided features we wanted to have. It wasn't the tech. People were as crazy about the first iPhone as they are about the 15th iPhone. The tech improvement provides a replacement upgrade path, not a removal of the roadblock to success.
What people wanted from smartphones was a camera in their pocket, the internet available when they want it and a pocketable media player with good enough quality. That was achieved very quickly, now we're just iterating.
Nobody wants a replacement workstation from VR. That's not a problem to be solved. Nobody wants a replacement game console either, as it turns out (see the attach rate of the PSVR for evidence of that). Those aren't problems to solve with better tech.
When the smartphones started exploding the techbros applied that logic to talk about device convergence. "We won't have PCs anymore man, that's the past. Everybody is going to be just using their phones".
But nope, that did not happen. We wanted convergence with cameras, so cameras did get replaced. But PC workstations weren't. Because that wasn't a problem that needed a solution. The handsets can do it, look at Samsung Dex. But nobody wants it, so that's not an application that drives the hardware.
Instead, we got that factor scaled up to tablets, and then people figured a physical keyboard is neat, so we got keyboard covers and now the smartphone tech scales smoothly from a pocket device to a hybrid device to a laptop to a desktop. But the phone? The phone is still for what it was when it was first introduced, despite its limitations, because cameras and portable media were valid use cases.
So yeah, that's the fundamental misunderstanding. VR is good for sporadic "wow" moments, social gimmickry and a niche industry of gaming and... eh... 3D porn.
It is NOT and it never will be a replacement for workstations, TV gaming or smartphones. Because those are not applications with demand for a new solution. We already know that, the tech is mature enough to know.
Both US and Europe are doing an official digital crypto currency:
It's inevitable in the long run. Cash is already seeing declining use and the alternative to crypto is the Visa/Mastercard duopoly, which sooner or later will run into anti-trust issues.
That early attempts at future technology often fail doesn't mean that the future won't have something extremely similar. See Apple Newton, that was a flop too, yet the modern iPhone is basically the same thing in a little smaller and with better wireless connection.
People still have multi-monitor setups, ultrawides, projectors or even crazy monitors like the Odyssey Ark, which cost similar amounts to a VisionPro. VR can do the same thing, everywhere you go with zero setup. Or cinemas, they are still popular, now you can have one in your f'n pocket everywhere you go. Big screens still matter and VR can make screens as big or small as you need them to be, no physical display can replace that.
PSVR2 doesn't have enough games and can't even access PSVR1 games. Getting VR off the ground takes more effort than the minimum effort that Sony is willing to put in, their focus is obviously still on plain PS5 content.
If I haven't been clear enough: Modern VR SUCKS, big time. It keeps failing because it's crap. Nobody has build one good enough for Desktop use, they haven't even build one good enough for gaming.
That's the right idea and a crappy implementation. Being able to connect your phone to a bigger screen is a great idea. Only being able to do that when you can find a DeX docking station (aka nowhere) ain't it. And you won't even get a real Windows desktop out of that, but just whatever Samsung hacked together out of Android bits. If I could take a Windows desktop, pack it into my phone, carry it somewhere else and run it, that would be great. But there are obviously some technical hurdles that need to be overcome and that can take a very very long time in a fractured ecosystem with numerous competing companies.
Guess who doesn't have to deal with a fractured ecosystem? Apple Vision Pro. Apple controls the whole stack, hardware, OS, software, they even app stores and TV channels. They can take it all and bring it into VR and optimize the experience to their hearts content.
So you think we'll be using smartphones and workstations until the end of time with no new innovation happening ever again? Look at the Xreal Air. Something like 60% of people already wear glasses on their face, if those had the choice between regular glasses and smartglasses, you don't think they'd pick the smart ones once the tech is ready (which it obviously isn't today)?
Hah. I did not call you a techbro and I was not projecting cryptobro vibes on you specifically...
...but hey, I'm gonna say this makes sense.
Look, I've been warning people off wasting money in some of this stuff for fun and profit for a while and I've made my point.
Oh, wait, one more thing. You can absolutely use Dex with a normal USB dock, you don't need any additional hardware and you can absolutely carry any peripherals you need on a small bag and set up a desktop workstation on any screen, both wired and wirelessly.
That's neither here nor there, but Dex is pretty cool and the one thing I miss from leaving the Samsung ecosystem. I feel I owe them recognizing their good software after all the crap I gave Bixby. Still won't replace my workstation, though.