[llmthrow0827]

All the VR/AR/XR demos are so insanely trivial and yet still manage to be much more difficult than current methods of doing things. Like, really, cooking?

Normal method:

* Search for a recipe

* Leave my phone on a stand and glance at it if I forget a step

Meta glasses:

* Put glasses on (there's a reason I got lasek, it's because wearing glasses sucks)

* Talk into the void, trying to figure out how to describe my problem as well as the format that I want the LLM to structure the response

* Correct it when it misreads one of my ingredients

* Hope that the rng gods give me a decent recipe

Or basically any of the things shown off for Apple's headset. Strap on a giant headset just so I can... browse photos? or take a video call where the other person can't even see my face?

[hdjrudni]

I dunno, if these worked perfectly I don't think it'd be awful to be able to open my fridge and say "what can I make with this" and it could rattle of some suggestions based on my known preferences and even show me images in their new display.

Hands-free while cooking (not having to touch my phone with messy hands) is not a bad thing either.

[vasco]

I touch my phone with messy hands all the time. They are water resistant now, just wash it after

[mewpmewp2]

I think more so I feel like after touching the phone I should really wash my hands before touching the food or doing anything food related etc.

[vasco]

Yeah but I already live by the 5 second rule anyway so I'm more careless, you do have a point though, it's less hygienic for sure.

[mewpmewp2]

Yeah, I care less myself, and I'd probably believe I was training my immune system, but my partner would kill me though.

[hattmall]

It sucks now, no idea why, but a few years ago, with the Google Home mini, I could just yell out all kinds of cooking related questions with "Hey Google" and it would always give me a good answer, was great for doing stuff hands free when cooking, like when I just don't want to get raw chicken or whatever on my phone.

But yeah, it doesn't give me good answeres any more, usually trys to start an unrelated YouTube video or email me something about Youtube plus or w/e

[aembleton]

I suppose thats a bit easier than reading it out to ChatGPT.

[croes]

But your $800 glasses are exposed to the cooking area with steam, grease fumes, heat etc.

[jayd16]

So wipe it. It's not like it's got an air intake.

[croes]

But microphones and speakers. And what about the cooling of the chips?

[jackbrookes]

This reads a bit like like a pre-PC take: "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?"

Imagine it’s 1992:

Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.

PC: Turn on tower, wait for DOS, fiddle with floppies, pray the printer works, hope the shareware recipe isn’t weird.

Not saying you're wrong but its easy to miss the big picture

[aembleton]

> "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?"

I still feel that way. I have cookbooks because I find the UX better than searching for recipes.

[wpm]

So I can read the 20,000 story about how the author was told this recipe by their brothers husbands step-grandmother while vacationing at the lake house with their golden retriever named Max before I can get to the recipe.

[atrus]

While this joke is never mentioned and is hilarious every time, you'd be hard pressed to find a recipe site that didn't have either a "print" or "go to recipe" button at the top.

[pavel_lishin]

Right, but we're in the 1992 of these glasses. Maybe they'll be good eventually. They aren't now.

And frankly, even the online recipe experience leaves much to be desired. Skip past the blog post. Skip past the list of ingredients. Skip past another blog post. Find the single statblock on the bottom that lists ingredients & amounts, & instructions - hoping that it exists.

Like other commenters, I've also started going back to paper cookbooks.

[rs186]

Not the same.

Internet and recipe websites solve a real problem: accessing recipes was expensive and not easy

AR headsets don't solve any problems. If anything, they make up a nonexistent problem, attempts but fails to solve the problem, during which the experience becomes even worse.

[aylmao]

I mean, depends on how you describe it. One could easily say:

Phone method:

* Find phone

* Search for the right app, before finding the right recipe

* Leave my phone on counter, constantly having to move it as I move plates, pans etc.

* Wash and dry hands after each step, before unlocking phone

* Clean it every time gunk gets to it

Meta glasses:

* They're already on, just ask for recipe

* No need to ever wash/dry hands, move a device around, or clean it since one can easily unlock it without touching it

Right? Similarly with cookbooks, the best case is great and the worst case is terrible. There's a reason there's a market for recipe websites, cookbooks, etc.

[48terry]

Okay. Now: Imagine it's 2025:

Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.

New gadget from mult-billion dollar company: showcases on a live demonstration that it's a broken piece of crap that doesn't work.

Like, are we forgetting that it didn't work? It sucked at the job! Let's not what-if or have some imaginary "okay, but pretend it's actually good," deal here. It was bad!

[0x457]

No? Because traditional cookbook (paper or digital) is deterministic and LLMs are not.

[endymion-light]

honestly cookbooks genuinely are better

i got the art of italian cooking recently and it's genuinely far easier to get a recipe than trying to scroll through a 50 page monologue about the intracicies of someones childhood before even listing the ingredients

[rhetocj23]

Indeed. There is an element of trust with an actual cookbook - it signals quality.

The internet over time has been riddled with junk, especially since the cost of production of information is just your opportunity cost of time. Even that is going away with the use of LLMs....

[endymion-light]

Core issue within the content age that I don't see being readily resolved. Unfortunately, I think the SEO marketing crowd are slowly catching up with LLMs, which is leading to poorer actual output when attempting to get information.

In the same way that google search used to be amazing before it was taken over by optimization, I think we're seeing a mass influx of content production to attempt to integrate itself into training corpus.

[rhetocj23]

TBH I for one am glad about this.

I have always believed there is a cost borne to get the best of something. This means a sacrifice is entailed. Theres something very important about this re. the culture - a culture in which everything is free is how you get crap stuff produced. And people settle for crap stuff just because its free.

People who can see the bigger picture when you have this, can see the dangers of it.

[makeitdouble]

To note, you can buy the recipes and skip the dumpster internet or register to a site like cookpad. At this point even YouTube is a decent place for that.

I agree random recipes are hell on the internet, but it's also not something we're forced into if we care any bit about recipes in the first replace.

[twalichiewicz]

Watching the announcement, every feature felt like something my phone already does—better.

With glasses, you have to aim your head at whatever you want the AI to see. With a phone, you just point the camera while your hands stay free. Even in Meta’s demo, the presenter had to look back down at the counter because the AI couldn’t see the ingredients.

It feels like the same dead end we saw with Rabbit and the Humane pin—clever hardware that solves nothing the phone doesn’t already do. Maybe there’s a niche if you already wear glasses every day, but beyond that it’s hard to see the case.

[Gareth321]

If executed well I think this could reduce a lot of friction in the process. I can definitely unlock my phone and hold it with one hand while I prepare and cook, but that's annoying. If my glasses could monitor progress and tell me what to do with what while I'm doing it, that's far more convenient. It's clearly not there yet, but in a few years I have no doubt it will be. And this is just the start. With the screens they'll be able to offer AR. Imagine working on electronics or a car and the instructions are overlaid on the screen while the AI is providing verbal instructions.

[01100011]

I'm oldish, so maybe I'm biased, but this sort of product seems like something no one will want, outside a few technophiles, but that industry desperately needs you to want. It's like 3d TV, a solution in search of a problem because the mfgs need to make the next big thing with the associated high margins.

To me the phone is a pretty good form factor. Convenient enough(especially with voice control), unobtrusive, socially acceptable, and I need to own one anyway because it's a phone. I'm a geek so I think this tech is cool, but I see zero chance I would use one, even if it were a few steps better than it is.

[hombre_fatal]

On the other hand, having to constantly consult a recipe on my phone while I cook is the main quality of life aspect of home cooking that could be improved.

You're missing the part where I'm reminded that my phone autolocks so I have to go into the settings in the middle of cooking to make it never autolock (or be lazy and unlock it every time I need it). And then I have to find a clean knuckle to scroll the ingredient list and the recipe steps every time I'm trying to remember what step I'm at.

You could do some killer recipe UX with a HUD on some glasses.

[SchemaLoad]

These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just went all in on gaming it would be a much better product than trying to push AI slop cooking help.

[bayarearefugee]

As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games either.

Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero.

If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.

[swalsh]

I LOVED VR gaming, but after playing the same 2 games for 10 years, it never really evolved. They stopped innovating and went all in on AR.

[SchemaLoad]

I had a HTC Vive and I really loved playing VR games, particularly a shooter called Pavlov. Felt pretty social with a ton of absurd custom maps where the actual game was almost secondary to experiencing the immersive and strange maps.

But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems pretty distasteful now.

[tsimionescu]

I think you're very much in the minority. Also, VR games didn't really evolve because it can't really evolve - the fundamental thing that makes it attractive (immersion in a digital space) can't work well because of motion sickness. So, the only way to make an immersive VR game is to have an extremely tiny game world or an on-rails experience, and that drastically reduces the appeal.

Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a display strapped to your head.

[swalsh]

> can't work well because of motion sickness.

This is an overated problem. You play VR for a small amount of time then you adapt to it. You get your "VR Legs" as they say.

[xdfgh1112]

This is such nonsense. The new Batman game on VR has full motion and smooth turning. It's not on rails at all. Games have got better at reducing motion sickness, and players also adapt over time.

[dontlaugh]

The many of us who get motion sickness have simply stopped bothering with VR. Since the market has shrunk anyway after the initial excitement, the few VR games left can afford to be less accessible.

[DonHopkins]

They adapt to the taste of their own vomit? Or mitigate it by drinking lots of chocolate milk before playing?

[thepryz]

In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools.

I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.

[bee_rider]

VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals.

I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.

[ubb_server]

I agree that VR gaming is a niche, but I think it could be explosively improved if we had the kind of all-in idealism that the previous commenter referred to. I think because VR gaming IS niche, we haven't yet delved into what VR/AR could do in non-gaming.

An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.

[tsimionescu]

> for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D

This is the kind of thing that buries VR ideas. It's very cute in a demo, but as an actual product, the cost of coming up with 3D models and animations for all MTG cards currently being played is many orders of magnitude more than the total number of people who would pay for this. Ultimately this is completely unnecessary fluff for the game, like chess games where the pieces actually fight: irrelevant, and it actually detracts from the game because it interrupts the flow of what you're actually doing.

[jdprgm]

I remain convinced VR gaming is niche because despite these companies being willing to drop boatloads of money on all kinds of things they for some reason never decided to just allocate a few billion to create a handful of true AAA games and jumpstart the industry. I think even just 3 proper games with several hundred mil budgets and VR gaming might be in an entirely different space than it is now.

[xdfgh1112]

Facebook made a very expensive new Batman game in VR, there's also Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, a ton of other high budget games like Red Matter.

It just isn't taking off. In my experience even though VR is unique and amazing, it's not that much better than playing those games flat screen. I tend to spend most of my time in Beat Saber.

[jdprgm]

Expensive in the context of other VR games sure. I couldn't find any official numbers but i'm sure it pales in comparison to dozens of other games that came out this year.

Also i'm not sure what these single player relatively short playtime/runtime games accomplish as you buy it play it in less than a week and are done. What I would like to see is the large scale infinitely playable MMO type game done on VR with at least at 250M budget.

[tsimionescu]

I think this is extremely doubtful. The reality remains that it's impossible to make a first person or even third person VR game with free movement, because of fundamental limitations in how human brains process movement. Having your eyes tell you are moving but your muscles and inner ear tell you that you are not makes you extremely sick very quickly, and technology can't actually fix this. The better and more immersive the visual illusion of movement, the worse the movement sickness you'll experience.

And without free movement, you can't build any of the mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work.

Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't play your 70-80 dollar game.

[WhiteNoiz3]

> Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work.

Half Life Alyx is still considered to be one of the best VR games ever made and one that is still consistently recommended to new users even years after release. IMO people buy hardware because of the exclusive content. If a standard game console came out and it only had one AAA game on it, I probably wouldn't bother buying it. But if there were 3-4 games that looked really interesting it starts to look more worth the investment. Playing VR games takes a lot of committment (time / physical space / $$$) so the payoff has to be worth it or you'll lose people. With the huge amount of money spent on R&D for new hardware I think it's a valid argument to say that maybe funding content would have been a better investment in terms of ensuring platform growth.

Also, side note but not every game requires free motion. Plenty of hits had no movement or teleport etc. A lot of these were completely new (sub-)genres that didn't exist or hit the same as they would in a traditional pancake game. Plus lots of kids seem unaffected by free movement (maybe as high as 50% of users by my rough estimate).

[xdfgh1112]

Those games literally exist now. Almost all new VR games use free movement not teleportation. It is frustrating that you seem to be talking confidently when your knowledge is 5 years out of date.

[bee_rider]

Maybe a really high budget VR shooter game could be successful, I don’t know.

I played some VR sword-fighting games and they were bad in a way that AAA budgets would not fix. Stuff like an attack animation being pre-scripted feels incredibly goofy in VR.

I think this is a general problem. VR worlds need to be more dynamic than typical games. AAA games tend to have higher quality assets, but arranged in a more restrictive and scripted configuration. More innovative indie work is needed to work out what the language of VR should be (it is a bit weird compared to the past because stuff like Quake was innovative, AAA-equivalent for the era, but also small and independent enough to be innovative).

[Aeolun]

We should re-watch Dennou Coil every few years to be reminded of what we’re working towards :)

[jayd16]

Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.

[intrasight]

> the only ones VR actually works well for

I had really expected a different "only one"

[numpad0]

No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me, maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of social media.

[1]:

Most played VR games

  Rank Name          Curr   24h pk All-time
  1.   VRChat        33,032 46,652  66,824
  2.   War Thunder   26,388 65,589 121,318
  3.   PAYDAY 2      23,513 31,619 247,709
  4.   No Man's Sky  22,509 46,010 212,613
  5.   OBS Studio    11,434 22,388  27,334
  6.   Phasmophobia   7,716 22,789 112,717
  7.   Forza Hz 5     4,940 13,617  81,096
  8.   Assetto Corsa  3,885 13,598  19,796
  9.   OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030  4,299   6,418
  10.  Tabletop Sim.  2,902  7,755  37,198

1: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978

[croes]

To me the chart shows that VR is mainly used for games. And the steam chart don't include the games played directly on the Quest headsets.

[numpad0]

That's certainly one useful spin, but the red flag here is that these don't correlate well with games known as best VR games to VR communities. What I believe to be a more accurate interpretation is, there's nothing but VRChat in VR, and gaming demand in VR can be ~10x smaller per title relative to it.

[tempodox]

Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the facebook company.

[jayd16]

Voice input is just too annoying but with the display and wristband I think the dream is there. Your hands are deep in messy food prep, you have a recipe up, you can still pause your music or take a call with the wristband and without stopping to wash up or getting oil or batter on everything.

[dyauspitr]

I wear my glasses all the time. If I could just talk to the void and get help with things I’m directly seeing reliably that would be a game changer. I’ve used Gemini’s video mode and we’re not all that far away.

[rhetocj23]

People dont realise how amazingly efficient touch interfaces already are.

THere is no need for these stupid glasses. Some refuse to accept it - especially Zuckerberg who relies on folks like Apple to make his money. Thats really whats driving this project if you tear away all the BS.