Meta debuts Horizon OS, with Asus, Lenovo, and Microsoft on board
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Lol, I wish. There still isn't a killer app. If Half Life 3 is released on the Index 2, or Nintendo releases a VR Zelda/Mario, or if someone makes a cohesive education environment for VR we could see it break through. Until then, set phasers to hobbyist!
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Not at all happy to see VR going down the path of Meta and Apple. Locked in walled garden is not a good way for VR to succeed.
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My oldest wants one, and I told him there's no way in Hades he's getting one of those. If (when) Apple Vision stuff comes down in price, then I'd gladly get us one of those or even consider it for him, but the Facebook/Meta version? Hell naw. Never.
Related, can somebody explain in broader terms how Facebook can monetize eyeball tracking? At some level, it seems like tracking what I spend time looking at would devolve into excess data for data sake. Or is it just when you get to big data sets it starts to really actually become predictive or useful to somebody?
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When I look at Apple's solution and it's supposed to be the most advanced as of today, I would say we still have a long way to go.
A device like this should be as natural to use as sunglasses, you don't even think about it, you use it, do some work and put it away.
I think Xreal came quite close to this. However it lacks a wider field of view and still requires a cable. On the software side it should be like, you plug it in and the UI that normally is all flat is in 3D all by default (like buttons and all controls inside a window, it makes it easier and faster to distingish the UI), any game that is not VR gives you a stereoscopic screen experience by default.
So no cable, size of Xreal, an immersive field of view with windows all around you and some good software. That's when it becomes common place like any flatscreen nowadays. I don't know about the eye tracking. An avatar for video conferencing probably not so useful anymore, as soon as it's you in front of a camera and it looks like you're wearing regular glasses.
If someone wants to compete with Apple at the current moment and go bulky against bulky, then a VR headset preloaded with Cyberpunk 2077 would be the way to go. The game itself would be the interface, wether you want to get some work done, then you sit down in an office in Cyberpunk, or you want to play other games, then you put VR glasses on inside the Cyberpunk game an go meta, like in "Vurt" the novel.
A device like this should be as natural to use as sunglasses, you don't even think about it, you use it, do some work and put it away.
I think Xreal came quite close to this. However it lacks a wider field of view and still requires a cable. On the software side it should be like, you plug it in and the UI that normally is all flat is in 3D all by default (like buttons and all controls inside a window, it makes it easier and faster to distingish the UI), any game that is not VR gives you a stereoscopic screen experience by default.
So no cable, size of Xreal, an immersive field of view with windows all around you and some good software. That's when it becomes common place like any flatscreen nowadays. I don't know about the eye tracking. An avatar for video conferencing probably not so useful anymore, as soon as it's you in front of a camera and it looks like you're wearing regular glasses.
If someone wants to compete with Apple at the current moment and go bulky against bulky, then a VR headset preloaded with Cyberpunk 2077 would be the way to go. The game itself would be the interface, wether you want to get some work done, then you sit down in an office in Cyberpunk, or you want to play other games, then you put VR glasses on inside the Cyberpunk game an go meta, like in "Vurt" the novel.
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HL Alyx is pretty much Half Life 3 (or at least something like Episode 3) and it didn't exactly break through anything
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Apple fanboy 101
Ars Tribunus Militum
Is Google going to be left on the sidelines?
What’s certain is that Meta is pushing the Android analogy with an ecosystem that is both united and fragmented. Not certain that is the best approach, I think that Apple’s more coherent approach from the start is a better idea but, like with Android, Horizon has to cater with as many people as possible which means fragmentation. This feels like a repeat.
At the same time I feel hopeful that it’s the start of something. Maybe we will actually all be wearing some sleek headset in 20 years.
What’s certain is that Meta is pushing the Android analogy with an ecosystem that is both united and fragmented. Not certain that is the best approach, I think that Apple’s more coherent approach from the start is a better idea but, like with Android, Horizon has to cater with as many people as possible which means fragmentation. This feels like a repeat.
At the same time I feel hopeful that it’s the start of something. Maybe we will actually all be wearing some sleek headset in 20 years.
True, but most people probably won’t care. They don’t care about using Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Too bad for them.
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IMO, the preferred company for standalone HMD/VR OS/Ecosystem would be Valve. But they may not be interested.
The tethered approach attached to a PC was the the start for VR where Valve was a big player, but it really looks like standalone is the way forward. So if Valve wants to be involved in VR of the future, the may want to look into a standalone device.
Valve has shown both a commitment to open platforms, and a lack of datamining it's users.
The tethered approach attached to a PC was the the start for VR where Valve was a big player, but it really looks like standalone is the way forward. So if Valve wants to be involved in VR of the future, the may want to look into a standalone device.
Valve has shown both a commitment to open platforms, and a lack of datamining it's users.
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HL Alyx is great, but wasn't a mainline game. It felt more like one of the HL2 episodes than a full HL.
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I feel like VR is still a fad and very, very niche...something which Apple is probably starting to realize, as well.
I had some spending money at the end of last year and in an impulse purchase, got myself the Meta Quest 3 headset.
Timing was great since Steam Linik just became available for the Meta Quest at around the same time.
And let me tell you, those first few days playing HL:Alyx were indeed a blast!
But as time passed, I found myself using the Headset less and less...while it is indeed impressive technology, using it with my wife and the kids being around is very isolating...yes, you can stream your picture to the big screen but it doesn't change the fact that one person is enjoying a VR experience and everyone else has to watch.
But even when I'm alone late in the evening it feels like a hassle getting the headset out of it's cradle, making sure I have ample space around myself AND turning on my gaming PC so I can access the few Steam VR games.
The Quest only games haven't really captivated me too much....Assassin's Creed was kinda cool but seems to have been a major financial flop for Ubisoft.
I don't know...simply grabbing the Steam Deck or the Switch is just more comfortable most of the time...and as long as using VR is such an isolated experience I don't see this tech ever growing out of it's niche.
I had some spending money at the end of last year and in an impulse purchase, got myself the Meta Quest 3 headset.
Timing was great since Steam Linik just became available for the Meta Quest at around the same time.
And let me tell you, those first few days playing HL:Alyx were indeed a blast!
But as time passed, I found myself using the Headset less and less...while it is indeed impressive technology, using it with my wife and the kids being around is very isolating...yes, you can stream your picture to the big screen but it doesn't change the fact that one person is enjoying a VR experience and everyone else has to watch.
But even when I'm alone late in the evening it feels like a hassle getting the headset out of it's cradle, making sure I have ample space around myself AND turning on my gaming PC so I can access the few Steam VR games.
The Quest only games haven't really captivated me too much....Assassin's Creed was kinda cool but seems to have been a major financial flop for Ubisoft.
I don't know...simply grabbing the Steam Deck or the Switch is just more comfortable most of the time...and as long as using VR is such an isolated experience I don't see this tech ever growing out of it's niche.
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Valve might be interested, in the future, to combine Index and Steam Deck into one device, when AMD's mobile chipsets are a little more powerful. But right now, you only need to look at the Steam Survey to see that almost 55% of Steam VR players are using Meta Quests, vs 15% on Index, 12% on Oculus Rifts, and 8% on Vives.
If a user wanted, they could use a Quest 2 or 3 to launch nothing but Valve's own, official, Steam VR Link for Quest app, in order to play PC VR games via wifi - which works better than you might expect it to.
To me, it seems wirelessness is more important than being standalone for immersive VR experiences. Especially since being oblivious to the outside world means you are much safer doing it in your own home.
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Facebook already seems to do a more primitive version of this based on your scrolling behavior. Pause long enough with a post on screen, to read the caption or whatever, and it will count as an interaction and you will likely see 'more of that' going forward. Clicking is a much stronger signal but they seem to be quite good at extrapolating your interests from limited data.
In another life I did some work for a very well heeled local retail chain and they were already moving in that direction for physical in store displays. Tracking how many people stop at a display and for how long was already part of their planning process for promotions and store layout. (At that time they only had a couple of test stores in key markets wired with video and motion detection. Mostly for testing but they did use the results in other stores and were planning a larger roll out once they settled on the hardware.)
Eye tracking is really the next logical (and intrusive) step. If you can tell what people actually looked at you can deduce a lot about their thought process. Were they interested in the free swag but then walked away after looking at the price? It isn't a game changer on its own but retail is a rather ruthless business, and is only getting more so, so if there is an edge to be gained by sticking little cameras in floor displays they will definitely try it.
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Yes, that's what I said, it's at least like an Episode 3
I seriously doubt it'd make much difference to EV adoption if it had a few more gameplay hours in it.I have the OG Samsung Odyssey and haven't touched it in almost a year probably. Yes the harwdware is outdated, but it was good enough.
My main issue is the lack of content, once you play HL Alyx, Lone Echo and maybe a few more games. Once you finish those, that's basically it. What's left are tech demos, sims and endless grind like Pistol Whip or beat Saber. If they made another HL game I sure as hell would pick it up again.
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LOL. The hardest no ever.
I'd set my device on fire before installing anything Meta on it.
The rubes who use this deserve everything they get.
I'd set my device on fire before installing anything Meta on it.
The rubes who use this deserve everything they get.
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I agree but can't help but think that there will be a tipping point when the hardware gets good enough. I already wear eyeglasses without thinking about it and if they can get a useful VR or augmented reality headset in that form factor I could see it taking off.
We are still a pretty long way from that, not just in terms of hardware but also they haven't really cracked the overall experience, but it almost seems inevitable longer term. Watching kids grow up with touch screens has been interesting, once tech gets good enough it simply becomes a normal part of life. We are now a very long way from the early Pentium and CRT I used in college even if it feels like yesterday.
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So they just renamed their android fork? Or is this something new and different?
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I have to dust out my grand unified half life 3 theory.
Everything released by valve since half life 2 (and it's episodes) is part of half life 3. Some are settings up plots (portal) while others are GlaDOS running testing simulations (DOTA2)
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Another test simulation. Just replace Chell with the survivors , and the test chamber with zombies.
Go even further with it, GlaDOS could have known the combine was coming, so it ran it;s own warped simulations to see how humanity would face overwhelming odds.
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You're lumping together by OS. I'm talking about by company. Apple is currently the #1 seller of smartphones.
Apple did this during a time when there wasn't another revenue stream after that. Not only did it not have a core piece of software like Office, but more importantly stores weren't skimming 30% off the top of all software sold on the platform. That's where the big money comes in. Meta is already doing that with Quest. They've made a ton in selling other people's software. Their losses have been all the money they've sank in their stupid attempt to get everyone to use Horizon Worlds.
Again, Apple didn't have a store to skim 30% off all purchases from. NeXT & Be were DOA for a lot of reasons. Again, they didn't have any revenue so they had to get massively popular in order to not go under. And none of them had a big install base when they went that route. The Quest line has sold 20 million. And each new version (save the Quest Pro, but that wasn't for the same market) has sold lots more than the one before it. The Quest 3 install base alone is in the 1-1.5 million range.
None of those other companies (save Apple) could even come close to a fraction of those numbers.
I left Psion out, because to be honest I know less about them. I was only vaguely aware of Symbian, which google says was the most popular mobile OS worldwide in 2010. Right before Apple and Android came along. It's eventually downfall seems to have more to do with it being and old OS with lots of layers added just not being able to compete with iOS and Android being fresh competitors built around being a modern smartphone. Plus eventually those getting the whole 30% of software sales on their devices.
I think the big difference here is that Meta is coming at this from a position of strength, not floundering around trying to figure out a way out of the hole they are in. If they'd stop trying to make The Metaverse a thing and set themselves up as the future king of all VR, they would be an across-the-board success in VR.
They're simply doing this move to head off Android XR before it can get a foothold. They don't even need to make that much money on it. All they need to do is deprive Google from getting any oxygen in its attempt to get back into the VR market by becoming the de facto OS.
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I'm starting to think that it's already worked. Looking back, I think I had misremembered or misunderstood the announcements made at CES about Google and Samsung's devices, and conflated that initiative with other Android-based VR headsets announced at the time, like Sony's.
It seems like Meta already has more hardware partners than Google, on top of being the market leader by tens of millions of units with their own brand models. It seems like it's going to be quite difficult for the company with a reputation for giving up on its ideas* to compete.
*Google abandoned Cardboard and Daydream, with nothing to follow them, not to mention Stadia. Meta has also abandoned Gear VR and Oculus Go, Quest 1 is out of support, and the PC-connected Rift line are no longer being sold. But there has always been a successor device, including Quest Link for the Rifts, and there is some continuity of purchases for Quest games that were also sold on the earlier devices.
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So much this. If VR has a future, it's definitely standalone. PCVR may not be dying exactly, but I don't think it will ever outgrow its niche.
For standalone VR to succeed, there needs to be a system open enough that you can move from one device vendor to the next without losing your software and digital identity. Valve's Deckard might have been a device like that, but that seems to be either abandoned or stuck in development hell. I'm just hoping that this Horizon OS doesn't suck too bad, isn't too tightly coupled to Meta and open and usable enough for VR to have a future.
Sucks that it's Meta, but better than VR not existing at all, and that's where we were heading with all these walled gardens.
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Facebook isn't burning billions of dollars on AR/VR to figure out what kind of video games you like to play. They already track your clicks online.
They want to know what you're thinking of clicking on. What needs just a little push, and what kind of push you respond most to.
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Oh yes, it's absolutely unfathomable why Facebook would want to follow the business model of Android and of Windows, what horrible inconsequential disasters those have been for every company involved! /s
Honestly, I hate Meta's advertising and privacy invading business model as much as everyone else but some people here seem straight up blinded by it.
This makes sense from a strategic point of view. Meta is already putting in all this effort to maintain an Android fork, for a little extra effort on the software development and support side they get to offload some R&D risk and let other companies take bigger or more niche bets on different hardware.
It's unfathomable to me that anyone could look at what is essentially Microsoft's business model, which has led them to be a dominant force in computing for 30 continuous years (and enriched many of their partners along the way), and go 'nah no one would want that'.
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In the USA. Samsung is higher globally or at least it has a higher percentage of sales for most quarters in 2023.
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Nope. Globally.
Yes, for times that are not now, Samsung was the leader. But they're not now. You can quibble with that all you want, as the point was mainly just that Apple rose from making money on iPods to having a huge smartphone presence. Everything else is just getting into the weeds.
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I feel like people that make this argument have never actually used VR. People - in general - do not use VR to surf the web. Or to use any kind of application. They use it to play games. The certainly use Meta's VR hardware to play games.
And games are just pretty crap to try to figure out what people are doing in them (that they couldn't already figure out by cheevos or other analytics that already exist in videogames). Or to figure out how to get any value of those things.
Meta, Google, etc. like to know you've been browsing reddit about a handheld emulator so they can show you an ad for a handheld emulator from one of their paying customers. There's just not an equivalent you can get by watching someone play a videogame.
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Because not every country supports Bluetooth in exactly the same way - France, for example, uses different channels for Bluetooth than most of the rest of the world.
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You're arguing what people actually do with VR - play games and watch porn.
The person you are responding to is arguing what Facebook wants VR to be. And they are absolutely right. The entire idea of the "metaverse" is to track what you are looking at, what you are interested in, what you are about to buy or do but need just a little nudge that Facebook can't see on a regular computer/phone system.
And it failed because the people who tried to make the "metaverse" a thing don't actually use VR. At least not how the public does.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
p*rn
Well, the only way to grow the market is to do more things than existing VR headsets.
As in, OEMs want the pie to grow.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
Right, and that's the problem they're trying to solve. If you never use VR to surf the web, run apps, or other things, then people who don't play VR games will never buy a VR headset
Which is 100% why they want to do everything else a smartphone can do.
You're trying to argue that motorcycles are terrible at moving lumbar, why would a manufacturer try to build a truck?
The answer is: So people will buy their truck.
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Even in the way Meta tried to make the metaverse, it was far suboptimal to doing the thing being alleged. Scrolling on a web browser, pausing and looking at things is so, so much easier to digest by an algorithm. Trying to figure out what people are thinking while walking around a virtual reality looking all over the place is much, much harder to the point of being useless. It's the kind of thing people dream up in scifi but in reality is just about impossible to realistically do.
I'm not saying some people at Meta didn't think they could somehow magically make that happen, but considering people didn't even like their shoddy VR experiences it was a moot point.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
So it makes perfect sense then for Meta to pivot from a VR that didn't work the way they wanted into being a different VR that might work another way instead.
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Having been a VR user since the Vive came out and a VR developer for several years, in my opinion VR is just not suited to those things. It's like the roll-up keyboard. Yeah, you can roll it up and take it on the go, but it's a terrible keyboard. Nobody wants it.
Similarly for VR. It's just a terrible way to browse the web and always will be. A flat screen with a keyboard and mouse/trackpad, or a flat rectangle with a thumb is far, far superior. It's why we still use mice and don't use eye tracking. It's just inferior, no matter how whizzbang futuristic it sounds.
Licensing out your OS isn't going to magically make those things work. All it's going to do is head off competition from Android XR.
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So, like, just to be cheeky, I could say the current Quest 3 is an Xbox vr headset because I have a white Series S and it’s white... so the colours match... and I can download Xbox cloud gaming beta anyway. I can even pair it with one of my white controllers too.
This is not innovation.
This is not innovation.
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I think it's worse than not innovation. It's actively confusing. Let's say I'm a regular person and I hear there's an Xbox VR headset, and I think it works with my Xbox and my Xbox software. Which it doesn't, at all. Hell, I thought it was supposed to be an actual Xbox headset when I first saw the announcement. It took a little reading to realize, oh, it's just a marketing tie-in.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
The Meta Quest VR is a terrible general purpose compute platform, but then again so is a smartphone.
It's a spectrum though. A large screen with mouse and keyboard/trackpad is going to be better than a tablet, which is going to be better than a smartphone.
Pair a 4K AR headset with a keyboard + trackpad, however, and it will be a far superior interface than a smartphone.
Why are you assuming that an AR headset would abandon the mouse? Apple uses the trackpad to browse the web with the AVP.
No, you're right, Meta still needs to get things right. Licensing your OS doesn't mean Meta gets things right.
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The Quest is also a terrible smartphone. That's why giving it smartphone features isn't a target. You said "Which is 100% why they want to do everything else a smartphone can do.", but I see no evidence that they want to do that. The original response you tagged onto was mentioning maps and accurate geolocation. They haven't even tried to put real maps into it. And there's not even been a suggestion of adding a GPS to it. Mainly because those features just don't make sense for a VR until we are in a far, far different world than we are now. You shouldn't even take these headsets outside, because you'll fry the optics.
I'm not arguing that in 30-50 years it'll be the same as today. Sure, if we get VR/AR via contact lenses, it's a different story. Or the totally scifi future of chips that interface with our brain. But I expect what we're doing today will connect with that even less than the Newton connects to the iPhone, even though they are made by the same company. Meaning not a whole lot.
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