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.
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.
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
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.
MudMan@kbin.social 1 year ago
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 along 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.
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
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.