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.
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
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 Simply put, Meta managed to make VR look boring and out of date.
MudMan@kbin.social 1 year ago
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.
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
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.
MudMan@kbin.social 1 year ago
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.