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pharke | 3 years 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.

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h0l0cube|3 years ago

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.

andirk|3 years ago

There was Google Glass but it got laughed out of town for being made for dorks. Seemed like perfectly good tech.

pharke|3 years ago

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.

polio|3 years ago

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.

TomSwirly|3 years ago

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.

slaw|3 years ago

It is not tight financial climate it is normal financial climate.

jimmySixDOF|3 years ago

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.

curioussavage|3 years ago

I’m pretty sure it works in vr now. Just not on mobile vr which would matter for meta.