[faitswulff]

> However, if Mark Zuckerberg goes back on the drawing board to figure what went wrong, he’ll probably realize that data breaches and privacy awareness aren’t the causes of an impending downfall.

> Instead, a lack of effort in developing their own operating system a decade ago might be Facebook’s biggest regret. And this has come back to bite them today.

Crazy that it came to this.

[dougmwne]

Zuck is personally all in on capturing the VR and AR market and making it the next ubiquitous computing platform. They already have their own OS. One fifth of the company is working on VR and AR, 10,000 employees. They are pouring billions into it. Zuck likely understands that he missed the platform boat last time around and doesn't intend to miss the next one.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...

[nottorp]

I don't think VR will ever take over the world. Too many people get motion sickness from it and I don't think it's only a matter of more pixels/fps.

AR... maybe. My personal opinion is the needed electronics (and especially the battery tech) aren't small enough yet, if we're talking AR glasses.

If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app? Pokemon go?

[reportingsjr]

> If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app?

Off the top of my head, some very big ideas that are being worked on: * Clothing fit without actually going to a store and trying things on. * Construction assistance (being able to know where things are in walls, being able to measure things accurately in 3 dimensions, check out the leica RTC360) * Furniture arrangements or additions in a home. e.g. use the ikea app to plop down a SÖDERHAMN to see how it would work and look in your space. * See what a room would look like with different paint. I've actually tried this with an app on my iPad recently, and it is still a little glitchy, but was really freaking cool vs using paint swatches or buying test pints of paint. * Troubleshooting and repair. I tried out this really cool app last year called inspectAR (https://www.inspectar.com/). The desktop app was mindblowing and at my last job when I did lots of circuit board repair/manufacturing adjustments this would have been insanely useful! I can only imagine how nice this would be to have on a trip to Shenzhen for troubleshooting production issues.

Beyond this, yes, games are a huge potential for AR. Brush it aside as something unimportant since it isn't "useful" or whatever, but games are a huge part of people's lives at this point. I've been waiting for a company called TiltFive which basically spun out of valve to launch their AR hardware, it looks and sounds really impressive.

The list goes well past this, but AR has some serious potential.

[shock-value]

The things in your first paragraph are all useful, but not killer apps (IMO). Just nice conveniences.

My prediction is that Pokemon Go will prove to be by far the biggest splash to have been made in the phone AR space, and in the larger scheme of gaming it so far hasn't been more than a long-since-passed fad.

I'm pretty doubtful that even glasses-mounted AR will catch on among consumers in day-to-day life -- but there could be significant specific use cases e.g. education, certain professions, etc. On-the-job type stuff.

Having experienced VR as an owner of a Quest 2 linked to a VR capable PC -- I'm very bullish on VR in the home entertainment space -- not just games but also pre-recorded or live video content, etc. Not sure about social but I'm sure Facebook will try.

[tshaddox]

> The things in your first paragraph are all useful, but not killer apps (IMO). Just nice conveniences.

I think "nice conveniences" might move slower and get less attention, but in aggregate I suspect they're actually more important for a major long-lasting general-purpose computing platform than "killer apps." We always think of "killer apps" for smaller, narrower, shorter-lived platforms, like a particular gaming console when it launches, but less so for bigger, broader, older platforms like the Internet, personal computers, or smartphones. These huge platforms all had some things which were called "killer apps" (mostly early in their history), but I think we should attribute their longevity and ubiquity more to a massive aggregation of what could be called "nice conveniences." And my impression is that Facebook's bet is that AR/VR will be one of these huge, broad, ubiquitous, long-lasting platforms.

[nottorp]

> The things in your first paragraph are all useful, but not killer apps (IMO). Just nice conveniences.

Agreed. A killer app is something you use daily.

That said, I can't wait for the furniture testing app. That would be very useful.

[grahamburger]

Amazon app already has this built in, btw. Most furniture type items have a "view in your room" button that launches an AR viewer.

[Xplune13]

AR has a long way to go for sure, but I am more interested in AR than I am in VR and I think AR has the potential to go far beyond what VR achieved till now.

[dannyw]

You're saying it ain't small enough yet. Another way to say it is, it'll get there, but in the future. That's what FB is investing in

[simonh]

General Magic was investing in the future, but jumping the gun by 10 years didn’t work out so well for them. I suspect VR and AR are probably still that far out. I still remember the buzz about VR back in the late 80s and early 90s. Thirty years later we’re still really not there yet and LeapMotion fell completely flat already.

[MetaWhirledPeas]

The difference is, 30 years ago we did not have viable VR consumer devices for sale. They might not be "iPhone" popular, but they exist now. I liken this to the MP3 player years before the iPod launch.

[tailspin2019]

> I don't think VR will ever take over the world. Too many people get motion sickness from it

I imagine similar things were send about planes in the early 1900s. "It's not natural!"

But in all seriousness I think they'll solve this (motion sickness) one way or another.

[nottorp]

I don't know, it seems much bearable to get airsick during a finite flight than to get a VR headset when you know that it will always get you sick.

Maybe I sound more sceptical than I am. The second they put out a VR system that doesn't make me sick (and isn't linked to Facebook) I'll be queueing for one. I'm just not sure when that will happen.

[danaris]

The killer app for AR isn't going to be on phones. It's going to come when (and, I suppose, if) the hardware gets small enough that it can be integrated into glasses that are comparable in weight and bulk to current prescription eyeglasses (and, ideally, can actually incorporate prescription lenses, for those of us who need those to see every day).

At that point, the "killer app" becomes the ability to augment your own senses and memory with, for instance, facial recognition that reminds you of who this person is, useful facts you know about them, etc. Or walking or driving directions that are overlaid directly on your view of the actual paths/streets/etc. Or even virtual tours of places—either places you're physically in, or places you're nowhere near, but have a space of comparable size you can walk around in!

The danger, as we saw with Google Glass, is twofold: on the one hand, allowing an unregulated tech titan like Google or Facebook to have access to cameras attached to people's faces; and on the other hand, the fear of allowing anyone to walk around with an always-on (or potentially always-on) camera, whether its recordings ever left the device or not.

[nr2x]

The book rainbows end by Vernon vinge had some really intriguing ideas about AR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

[nottorp]

Gibson's Virtual Light is about a stolen pair of AR glasses.

Charlie Stross's Accelerando has a chapter where the main character is basically crippled because ... he lost his AR glasses and can't function without the info in them.

Last one is available online:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

[nr2x]

Really not a fan of virtual light personally, Accelerando on the other hand is a very fun ride.

[ctvo]

> I don't think VR will ever take over the world. Too many people get motion sickness from it and I don't think it's only a matter of more pixels/fps.

To think they won't solve motion sickness (or N other teething issues), like it's general AI vs. a problem of incremental improvement is a little short sighted.

[gpm]

> Too many people get motion sickness from it and I don't think it's only a matter of more pixels/fps.

What do you think it's a matter of then? I guess I would add latency to the list, but those 3 metrics seem to capture the difference in visual perception between vr and the real world?

[Miraste]

There are a lot of differences, some of which cause more discomfort than others. Color and contrast are two smaller ones; VR headsets aren't HDR yet and it really shows when trying for realism.

There is also focal length, which is fixed (generally at 2 meters) in VR and creates discomfort, especially when reading. Facebook has eye tracking and motorized varifocal lenses to deal with this, but they're too big and loud and they haven't been able to put them in commercial headsets.

[Agentlien]

I'm someone who's used a fair bit of VR. I never really got motion sick, but initially (a few weeks) I did feel somewhat disoriented and at one point almost lost my balance. For me what caused it was the dissonance between what my eyes and my inner ear were telling me regarding my movement and orientation.

However, I've noticed that with time my brain seems to have learned that VR is a different mode. I no longer get dizzy from it, but I feel a strange numb feeling in the back of my head. It's like my mind knows not to trust my eyes anymore for balance when in VR.

[krapp]

I've tried to use VR on a treadmill and immediately regretted it every time.

It's too bad, because I would really like to be able to do virtual walking tours of places while on the treadmill, but as soon as the camera moves anywhere but where I'm looking at the time, I want to vomit.

[gpm]

That strikes me as a software design problem, you can make movement in VR 1-1 with the real world, for many non-game's it makes a lot of sense to do that.

Maybe also a latency problem (a big part of why it's in the list above).

[Agentlien]

To be clear, this wasn't a matter of walking around or turning my head and it not matching. It's mainly been when using a joystick for locomotion and turning.

When I almost fell was a situation where in the VR simulation I was swinging on a rope >360 degrees around a horizontal ledge while spinning around 180 degrees with the stick and trying to aim a bow with my hands.

( Windlands 2 )

[throwaway3699]

The sickness thing has been solved on the hardware side. It's only software that is the issue.

Remember when FPS games would never take off because they gave people motion sickness?

[nottorp]

Well, my one data point is i never got sick from a FPS (anything from Wolfenstein for Dos till the present) but I did get sick when I borrowed a PSVR for a weekend. Couldn't use it more than 20-30 mins no matter what i tried, and i had a stack of different games with it to try.

Maybe Occulus does it better, I'll never know though.

[alert0]

I get motion sick from Minecraft and nothing else. I have thousands of hours in other FPS, even watching someone else play Minecraft in person makes me nauseous.

[throwaway3699]

Well, I mean, people used to feel queasy after classic FPS games back in the day, but generally people adapted. I expect VR will be similar.

[spideymans]

I cannot imagine that Facebook will be able to compete with whatever Apple has planned in the AR space. Every platform advantage that made the Apple Watch incredibly difficult to compete with will be so much more important with AR.

This is particularly evident when considering Apple's lead in silicon, which will allow Apple's AR products to be lighter, faster and longer lasting than their competitors. Apple's vertical integration means that there should be more AR "apps" and better software integration than any of their competitors. Apple's pro-privacy push means that consumers will be far more willing to strap Apple branded AR glasses to their face all day.

Facebook might be able to out-compete Apple in VR (silicon performance and efficiency is not as critical for VR), however VR likely will not have the same mainstream appeal that AR will have.

[dougmwne]

I believe the key moment that Facebook is racing towards is an AR conversation with a loved one sitting across the table from you, as there and present as real life. We'll see if Apple can get there first.

[xenihn]

Oculus uses Android. What are they using their own OS for, and what is it called?

[dougmwne]

It may be based on Android, but without Google Services, it's just an open source OS they can base their custom distro for Oculus off of.

[onion2k]

What's even more crazy is that they kind of did have their own OS, albeit one that was really just a launcher on top of Android with some deep integration of Facebook content - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home

[insert_coin]

Is it that crazy? It's the reason Google not only developed Android, but Chrome, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, the Google speaker thing and all that, and Samsung has Tizen, which is sort of their plan B, of plan F or whatever, and Amazon developed the Fire line, Alexa, AWS, the speaker thing, etc. They know they can't trust each other. Even Apple had to develop their own maps!

It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.

[bredren]

When the initial FB OS attempt failed, I think Zuck realized the investment to make something work was beyond the capital he was willing to invest.

When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile.

With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way.

You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.

It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work.

I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future.

If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure.

FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus.

The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there.

Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do.

It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.

[spideymans]

>You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.

They fumbled, but that really didn't matter in the long run. Apple now has a perfectly competent mapping application. They've siphoned data away from Google and redirected it to themselves. Maps is now a key component to Apple's products and service, and has clearly become a cornerstone of Apple's AR roadmap. Apple Maps is now part of Apple's moat, and nobody can take that away from them. There is no situation in which Apple would go back to Google Maps. Sounds like a strategic win to me.

[bredren]

I’m in full agreement. My comment was to show just how much investment was required and how injurious it was early on.

I’m saying Zuck / FB could not stomach it at the time.

[dannyw]

FB more or less always had access to capital markets, and they could 100% have borrowed money and dumped billions into mobile. Subsidized, $100 phones that are comparable to flagships (but data-sucking for FB) would have beaten the market.

[bredren]

Yes, but they were not willing to. The environment for risky internet companies at that time was tepid still.

They knew money came from ads and tracking and the web and the other thing did not move the needle.

[lotsofpulp]

Same with Microsoft.

[tmccrary55]

Facebook's never done anything great or prescient. They were just at "the right place, at the right time" to be MySpace 2.0.

[pmontra]

I don't like FB as anybody else but FB was not alone there at that time. There were many other social networks and FB was the one that succeeded. Other social networks were born later on and FB is still here. Beating the competition and surviving almost 20 years is quite great enough IMHO.

[beagle3]

They weren’t prescient, but they were functionally equivalent: they were spying on users (e.g. through Onavo) and knew stats about Instagram, snap and WhatsApp very early on, that let them respond well early (and price an offer, or build a competitor).

I think Zuck, having taken the market from Orkut, Friendster and MySpace, decided he will not let anyone take it from him, no matter what.

E.g. Skype was still on every phone in 2014; it’s not about install base - it’s about potential to become a social network, which WhatsApp had, and Skype didn’t.

[pmontra]

I didn't know or didn't remember about Onavo. Thanks.

WhatsApp is a social network because of groups. I think I never had a group with Skype. I don't even know if they are a thing there.

I'm currently using WhatsApp and Telegram groups to chat and exchange pictures and links with groups of friends and colleagues. I'm trying to move from WA to Telegram starting with the most technical friends (as always has been with new things.) I'm basically not using Facebook anymore. I appreciate that those apps let me partition people in groups with well defined boundaries. I believe FB has something like that but the UI was more about posting something and let all contacts see it.

Anyway, everything I post there is meant to be lost. I'm backing up images, messages not so much. Definitely not on WA which is pretty much hostile to backups as it doesn't give us the key to decrypt the local databases. Maybe it is not to break E2E encryption and not let other apps decrypt messages, but I should be able to download the key from somewhere if I ask for it. Uploading to Google Drive an unencrypted database is not good.

On the other side Telegram has a kind of distributed database on all my devices. Probably bad for E2E encryption unless every devices has its own key and messages are encrypted for all of them, or another equivalent system. I didn't investigate how it works.

[tmccrary55]

I suppose it's an accomplishment but it's not really creating a new market or revolutionizing an existing one.

Also Facebook has only been top dog for a little over 10 years.

[swiley]

They had the open web, which they worked well to kill.

Facebook can go die in the grave they dug for themselves.

[distribot]

I don’t see how that is related since nowadays most people use Facebook products from mobile apps. They’d still be hosed right now.

[swiley]

You used to be able to use Facebook on mobile OSes without the apps. Many people did this (because the apps don't really add anything anyway and take up a ton of space) but Facebook put themselves at the complete mercy of these mobile OS vendors by killing that off.

[asciimov]

I still use Facebook on iOS only through the browser. Have a little shortcut in my Home Screen and it takes me straight there.

[browningstreet]

People visit sites outside of apps and those sites feed back data to Facebook for targeting purposes. On desktop, people use FB in browsers, too.

[sneak]

Ultimately every platform is about control. With the situation wrt bonzai buddy and a million search bars on every '95 box, treacherous/trustworthy DRM-everywhere computing was eventually inevitable.

Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.)

In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control.

Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably.

I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.

[croes]

Isn't FB developing an OS for the Oculus Quest?