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by pharke 1240 days ago
Nah, Microsoft and Meta are obviously partnering up. This is likely just a symptom of that with Meta getting buy in from Microsoft to use Meta's VR platform. I agree that Horizon is the worse of the two but that doesn't mean they'll fail. Worse is better sometimes. The lynchpin will be if Meta is really married to Unity, Unreal Engine is eating Unity's lunch with adoption and features. If Meta makes the jump to UE they'll win a bigger share of the market with a far superior engine. It waits to be seen.
2 comments

It's more that the industry is bearish on long bets in a tight financial climate. The tech for VR/AR is too clunky to seamlessly integrate into peoples' daily lives like mobile phones and smart phones did. There will need to be an iPhone-like leap in affordable and portable vision tech before VR/AR becomes a feasible marketplace.
There was Google Glass but it got laughed out of town for being made for dorks. Seemed like perfectly good tech.
Iirc there was some face-punching resistance to people recording discreetly. I suspect that may have subsided some in many areas due to the longer them of high-res-video-recorder ubiquity.
don't disagree, i find it interesting that people get unbelievably angered when individuals record them in public, but could care less when business do. I could understand some difference in reaction between the two, but the actual gulf displayed is astounding.
The pizza place's security camera isn't going to prank me or ask me about a sensitive topic and then same day blast my reaction on 7 vertical format video platforms as an out of context meme with sensationally misleading captions.
I’m not familiar with the google glass incidents but surely people have good reason to feel differently about being singled out and clandestinely recorded by an individual compared to a business that automatically records everyone who enters. I don’t think carrying a camera down the street would get you punched.
I don't disagree. I'm not saying how they should feel, just that I think they feel less of it lately.
There are laws that prohibit companies from filming and posting it online. You can sue them for millions of dollars.

Private persons can leak all this stuff anonymously and nobody is going to track them down. Glasshole also represented a new frontier for hackers.

I never understood why they didn't let the camera flip up (to give visual appearance you weren't recording directly ahead). A simple physical move could have helped it gain acceptance
I don’t think Google Glass provides any augmented reality functionality? It’s just a mobile head-up display. You need a lot more processing power (and clunkier hardware) to be able to do augmented reality
Ray Ban Stories are basically the acceptable version of 80% of the purpose behind Google Glass: taking photos and videos.
On the price point, the original iPhone retailed for $499USD which in inflation adjusted dollars today would be $714USD. The Quest 2 is significantly cheaper than that as a standalone device. The Quest Pro is much more expensive but is targeted at businesses, watch Zuck's intro of it if you doubt that. The biggest barrier is that for really good performance on any headset you need to tether to a gaming PC. That's a lot more cost and complication for non-technical people. That said, the hardware is there and capable of delivering outstanding visuals and inside out tracking. The compute and networking are lagging behind, we really need a small, user friendly and powerful device that anyone can go buy, plug in and then connect their VR headset to with 0 frustration. That would free up headsets to only worry about the displays and tracking.

I don't think the future of VR is portable. I have an aversion to lumping AR in with it since they are fundamentally different. If it makes it easier, VR is desktop, AR is mobile. Similar but not at all the same. The way I envision the future of VR is that it does for your physical experiences what computers and the internet did for your paperwork and documents. Thinking about VR as a cellphone is the wrong mental model, it's not a peripheral that exists in your physical environment. It is a replacement for your physical environment or more congenially, it is another physical environment to which you can travel in addition to the places you currently go to.

VR will always be more of a destination, whereas the vision for AR is that it'll integrate with your daily life via a wearable.
When display technology has miniaturised and matured, and the requisite wireless bandwidth is deployed at scale, you won’t need two different devices
Corporations are almost universally posting record profits. In what way is this a "tight financial climate"?

Answer: some people will do anything to justify corporate cruelty to peope.

It is not tight financial climate it is normal financial climate.
We (https://www.quintar.ai/home) are learning we can do a lot with a phone. But I hope someone figures out AR glasses.
I am afraid you are not paying much attention to the xr dev community which is overwhelmingly Unity vs UE. Both have their shortcomings but the new UE features like Nanite don't work out of the box double rendered and thats just one reason.
Yes, Alex and his team(s) are out there in the front pushing what's possible but its not off the shelf he has a lot of talent. Big fan of his Heavenue work on live rendered VR/XR/3D shows & the one they did for A Christmas Carroll is still state of the art theater.
I've also played a few indie VR games that are using it. It's not like you have to be some technical wizard to enable it, you just need to make sure you aren't stomping on your FPS with a bunch of other stuff at the same time.
I’m pretty sure it works in vr now. Just not on mobile vr which would matter for meta.