I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
I'm kind of sad they're now officially dumping it, it was always so much fun to see completely fake sponsored discussions on the Metaverse and Metaverse ads in podcasts, and book publications about it. There's something satisfying about watching that whole universe of cognitive dissonance and pretense. Like a sandbox demonstration of the fake hype this industry often indulges in.
Zuck and Co just completely failed to read the room. Horizons didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready - it failed because nobody actually wanted the product. It didn't solve any problem and added a ton of friction (headsets, eye goggles, no legs, etc). The headsets were uncomfortable and isolating. The vibes were creepy and weird.
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR:
Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
The Oculus is actually pretty decent for the price and as a standalone device. The issue is the OS feels so... like it was built by a big company with a dysfunctional org chart?
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
Speaking of Apple, and honesty asking: how are their VR devices going? Looks like they released a spec'ed up version with the M5 processor end of 2025 but, what's their future? There was some (artificial?) hype in the beginning, are people actually using it? What's the SV landscape?
> many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.
You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.
Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.
No, Microsoft bailed pretty early. Apple gave it one shot and gave up.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
As a VRChat regular, Meta's VR world efforts have been hilarious every step of the way. So long and thanks for all the headsets! :)
Maybe not everything has to be the next big thing for everyone. Maybe it's valuable for smaller companies or sovereign divisions to find niche markets, and simply build products and services for modest profits for strong customer bases that will never hit hypergrowth. (And are therefore resistant to the cancerous financialization that hypergrowth invites/incites)
I hope they figure out how to make a modest but steady profit making headsets still. The Quest Pro is still my favorite headset, ever since I ditched the awful controllers and went back to Index controllers.
Then again, the Steam Frame is likely to deliver us from this reliance, though it would be really nice to keep having budget headset options.
"Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Worlds is officially sunsetting its VR version in June in a move that will probably make all five of its players sad.
The Mark Zuckerberg metaverse monstrosity has been around since 2020 and was designed as a virtual reality metaverse world back when people were trying to make metaverse things happen and pretending Second Life didn’t exist. (It was a deeply exhausting era.) However, Horizon Worlds’ game/world/metaverse was poorly received and widely mocked, owing largely to dreadful graphics, redundant content, and oh yeah, that whole thing where people didn’t have legs. The boondoggle has led to thousands of layoffs and billions in financial losses, proving it is still possible for companies to lose money trying to make VR happen."
As an engineer I love that Zuck likes to throw his money around. He has been one of the big reasons for SWE salary inflation over the past 15 years. We should be thankful that not every company is relentlessly cost cutting
You mean throw those billions, tens of thousands of man hours, shareholder attenton, industry power and mindshare to a mostly useless concept, just because he had the money? Why are those resources not better spent on 100+ startups and 100+ unique ideas that are immediately tested by the market?
Hilarious thing to say a couple days after the news of 20% layoffs at Meta dropped. This is after a 10% "performance based" layoff last year and successive rounds of 10%+ layoffs post-covid in 2022-23.
The company may have been a wonderland for devs a decade ago, but at this point it is right up there with Amazon in terms of terrible work environments, internal politics, PIPs and layoffs.
I am still surprised that they thought they'd see success with the extremely low quality version they shipped at launch. Just awful models and missing features along with a completely lackluster and shallow vision for what any sort of VR world could be.
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
Cause he doesn't actually want to spend time in a VR world, and has no idea what a good or bad one would be. He just was hoping it was the next smartphone and he'd own the platform.
The problem is that this cool technology got taken over and advanced by companies, Meta and Apple, that are not games companies and do not understand nor are interested in games.
So what occurred was an exercise in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, while the actual obviously interesting use of the technology (games!) was sidelined and ignored.
It's a real shame I picked up a PSVR and really enjoyed playing around with it. Seems like this particular niche however is not enough to fund the mega expenditure required to move the technology to the next level where it would genuinely get more mass adoption.
As it is feels like VR is going to die out at the Wii U point, just before it gets technically good enough (read lightweight) to be the successful Switch.
Otoh, someone with a massive checkbook had to fund the hardware and optical research to enable the devices. Small gaming studios weren’t going to be able to do that. A lot of the smaller VR device companies weren’t able to build on top of core research or hire people that learned on Zuck’s dime.
I was surprised by how may VR games I played and how many hours I put into it once I got a headset.
That being said I still think VR will always be a niche thing. We had VR headsets decades ago, aimed at the kind of person who builds a full cockpit setup at home for playing extremely nerdy flight sims. Now things are amazing if you're one of those people but I dont see VR ever being truly popular.
I honestly think VR hasn't taken off yet because every VR headset since forever has been a locked-down platform or not a stand-alone device (meaning: You need a powerful PC to use it, which makes the cost too high for casual players). The development barrier to entry is far too high and the market far too small.
The Steam Frame is a full PC that doesn't require a tether. I think it'll change everything if it doesn't cost a fortune (which it might). The possibilities for 3rd party hardware and the open ecosystem of a complete Linux distro + Steam are endless.
Day one of the Steam Frame I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of open source tools/scripts that make it better. Then 3rd party hardware will be announced and suddenly everyone's going to want one because all those things together make it sooooo nice.
Somewhat related, Meta recently introduced SysPTW which is basically frame generation for the Quest:
> We’re introducing System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW) from Depth-From-Stereo to Quest headsets. PTW uses real-time scene depth to reduce visual judder and lag when apps drop frames, making movement in VR smoother and more comfortable. [...] You can expect a more stable experience, especially in demanding social and gaming apps.
The "demanding social apps" they aren't naming here is almost certainly VRChat which is poorly optimized on the Quest.
Maybe the metaverse is a viable concept or maybe it isn't. But Meta doesn't care about the metaverse or the potential users of it -- they simply want their own platform similar to how Google has Android, and Apple has iOS, and Microsoft has Windows. Apple, in particular, is a thorn in their side.
Not caring about what the user's want is the first problem. The second is that they wanted this done yesterday. So rather than evolving the technology and seeing where the market was going, they tried to build the whole thing at once immediately.
They didn't know what they were building, how to build it, and they threw it together as quickly as possible. The result was, unsurprisingly, pretty lame.
Then to justify the expenditure, they then forced it into every aspect of their Quest devices trying to force adoption. Unsurprisingly again, this failed and also pissed off all their Quest customers and damaged the viability of that platform.
Meta thought they could simply spend their billions and that would be enough to succeed.
No one wants to wear a PC on their faces. The few who did wanted that for games but Zuck wanted a social VR platform, not a third-rate gaming console. Games couldn't even bring in the numbers needed to pivot anyone to social so they're giving up.
If you're interested, Folding Ideas did a video essay covering the metaverse and why it never really took off, that's really well done. However the main bullet points:
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
I think it was both the horrible technical implementation and the full and total control they demanded over it. It's like what I would imagine the Oasis to look like ten years after the bad guys won in Ready Player One.
The internet only succeeded because it was so free and open at the beginning, decentralized, open protocols, everything free, no borders, no censorship, no surveillance just hackers that layed the foundation with no restrictions placed upon them (except the severe technical limitations of the time for them to overcome). Of course that's almost all gone now with capitalism taking over turning everything to shit, but that came only after it already was successful.
Meta's vision and implementation of the metaverse was exactly the opposite end of the spectrum in every way from the start: centralized, commercial, proprietary, censored, surveilled, restricted, closed, walls everywhere, safe, advertiser friendly, it was uncool, not fun and no style. Like they paid people to create shitty "worlds" and force their employees to use it, otherwise nobody touched that shitshow willingly, except (concerningly) for some random toddlers for some reason.
Neither. The VR space simply isn't it. Sounds cool in science fiction but nobody wants to spend their life with a giant headset strapped to their face. Their Orion glasses were the first time I could see the space actually going mainstream, but I'm not sure if they will ever be able to take it past the prototype stage.
Was the product. It's fundamentally unsound, but beyond that, why would you be in that thing? The Metaverse had barely any content worth using, there was no reason to buy it beyond disposable income and novelty.
"Metaverse" will never happen because we don't fit in the wires and can't eat electricity.
You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.
If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.
In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.
Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.
Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.
I think Meta's position as a large company under (rightfully) a lot of media scrutiny fundamentally prevents it from creating a successful "metaverse". It'll be pushed towards being overly corporate/sanitized and centrally controlled to meet expectations of managing misinformation, player safety, etc. opposed to the less restricted conditions that resulted in the web. Smaller companies (like VRChat) or individual hobbyists can get away with more, and generally have less cynical motivations.
I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate.
I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram."
Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
I bought my son a Meta Quest headset and a second one for me to use while playing with him. Honestly, it kind of makes me sick when I use it. Will have to see if it gets any better the next time we play. I'm kind of lazy and just want to lie down when using it, but the last time I tried using it I had to stand up to be able to do whatever it was we were doing.
I was a VR developer from about 2014 to 2020 after many years in traditional video games.
The really sad thing about how VR evolved is that sim sickness was not taken seriously as a barrier for mass adoption. Too many devs and players cast it aside as a "them" problem. "They" couldn't handle it. "They" didn't have VR legs.
The bottom line is that most things that became popular in VR were violating the rules which prevented sim sickness. This was a self-fulfilling prophecy that led the VR world into a corner.
I'm hopeful that Valve will be better stewards of VR in the long run, once Meta shuts down its hardware division, which you know is coming in the next couple years.
I actually think there's a huge number of people who want to do online social "world"/ "reality" -- just not without the "3D VR" art. I'm talking like old school MOOs and MUDs but modernized -- or something with a 2d "Zelda overworld" or "isometric" UI even. Something that is less literal, and more "use your imagination."
The immersive 3d stuff is "wizbang neat" to Zuckerberg and investors and gamers. But actually most "regular people" I know don't actually like being "in" such environments. Some people get dizzy and sick. Some people don't like dissociating from the "real" world like that, even for simple 3d games. Some people are visually disabled. Or just don't enjoy the modality.
But more than anything, no matter what, it's always awkward in its immersion and people's imaginations will always be far richer than the uncanny and limited simulated "3d" world that a computer can deliver. Even if you had 99% fidelity, it'll still be a poor simulacrum that often leaves you feeling poorer.
I think Zuckerberg completely misread what his own customer base / world audience wanted because of his own generational biases growing up with technical "lawnmower man" fantasies and fiction, and a misplaced philosophical bias where he believes transcendent, progressive technology leading inevitably in this direction. Because that's what the 1990s and early 2000s was pushing in gaming and other tech. Having billions of dollars at his disposal, and brought up to want and see this future, he saw it as both inevitable and something that he could be pushing the forefront of.
Yes people want to connect with other people in online social spaces. And I think they're probably very excited to do so in a manner which models the thing/place/object aspect of the "real world" rather than the glorified magazine / bulletin board which is Facebook. Especially if they can create and author and extend that world from within.
But I don't think they want to strap facehuggers to their face and do that in simulated three dimensions. And I don't think it's necessary to do the latter to get the former.
(But I'm biased, I've been trying to rebuild the magic I found in LambdaMOO in various forms ... for the last 30 years... https://timbran.org/moor.html )
About time. I guess there are worse things Facebook could have spent their money on?
I remember saying to someone one day that while Facebook kind of seems to be going places with their VR hardware, their software division were just reinventing Nintendo Miis, but worse. Anyone who actually cared about doing VR social stuff were going to use VRChat, as that was a much better product.
Even then, if you just look at Facebook's VR hardware in a vacuum, sure, it got better, pretty good even, but not to the point of appealing beyond niche groups, i.e. VR gamers and people who use VRChat, and making VR appealing beyond those groups is a thing I don't think is going to happen.
It would appear that the Metaverse (as envisioned by Meta) was nothing more than a way to "grow" when there was no other reasonable path. It was a solution to this problem and this problem alone. Nobody wanted it.
Then AI comes along and offers real growth opportunity. But of course, Meta fumbled that one out of the gate because they are more interested in winning than in actually offering anything of value. So they figured they could sabotage the whole thing by open sourcing Llama. Then they got steamrolled by everyone actually creating value for people instead of following their tried and true parasite model.
No tech company in this era has been more destructive to society than Meta. Their utter lack of principles has led them down this path. Ironically the most value they have generated is to their investors and especially their employees who are all wealthy now, funded with advertising dollars from across the economy.
I am a bit late to this thread, nevertheless, I wanted to put my thoughts down as well.
Horizon Worlds and the Metaverse were both pitched as a "social" platform. And this in itself is where I believe they went wrong. It fundamentally differs from my limited experience with VR and its potential. I see VR as an "anti-social" platform rather than a "social" one - and I say this in a good way.
When I put on a VR headset, its as if I am shunning my current world. The experiences I find valuable in VR are the ones that elevate that feeling - imagine watching a basketball game courtside, or watching NASCAR while floating right above the track, or watching a live concert happening halfway across the world, or VR tourism (visiting different places anytime you want, from some breathtaking angles - my most memorable experience of this was a video on Angel Falls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_tqK4eqelA), or even the classics like playing VR games and watching movies. I believe that they should have doubled down on providing a much richer "anti-social" experience.
It's funny that Horizon Worlds will shut down before its actual launch here. Meta Quest headsets are sold here but the Horizon Worlds part of the OS was entirely blocked off. (The mobile app shows it, but I could never get the headset to navigate anywhere, just stuck in the homeworld lobby)
[+] [-] stephc_int13|14 days ago|reply
I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
[+] [-] mistersquid|14 days ago|reply
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
[+] [-] elcapitan|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] randycupertino|14 days ago|reply
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|14 days ago|reply
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR: Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
[+] [-] kilroy123|14 days ago|reply
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
[+] [-] jfoster|14 days ago|reply
I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.
[+] [-] darkwater|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] parl_match|14 days ago|reply
As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.
You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.
Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.
[+] [-] estimator7292|14 days ago|reply
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
[+] [-] taeric|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] jdashg|14 days ago|reply
Maybe not everything has to be the next big thing for everyone. Maybe it's valuable for smaller companies or sovereign divisions to find niche markets, and simply build products and services for modest profits for strong customer bases that will never hit hypergrowth. (And are therefore resistant to the cancerous financialization that hypergrowth invites/incites)
I hope they figure out how to make a modest but steady profit making headsets still. The Quest Pro is still my favorite headset, ever since I ditched the awful controllers and went back to Index controllers.
Then again, the Steam Frame is likely to deliver us from this reliance, though it would be really nice to keep having budget headset options.
[+] [-] spcebar|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|14 days ago|reply
"Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Worlds is officially sunsetting its VR version in June in a move that will probably make all five of its players sad.
The Mark Zuckerberg metaverse monstrosity has been around since 2020 and was designed as a virtual reality metaverse world back when people were trying to make metaverse things happen and pretending Second Life didn’t exist. (It was a deeply exhausting era.) However, Horizon Worlds’ game/world/metaverse was poorly received and widely mocked, owing largely to dreadful graphics, redundant content, and oh yeah, that whole thing where people didn’t have legs. The boondoggle has led to thousands of layoffs and billions in financial losses, proving it is still possible for companies to lose money trying to make VR happen."
[+] [-] wnevets|14 days ago|reply
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
[+] [-] georgeburdell|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] poisonborz|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] robotresearcher|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|14 days ago|reply
The company may have been a wonderland for devs a decade ago, but at this point it is right up there with Amazon in terms of terrible work environments, internal politics, PIPs and layoffs.
[+] [-] anonymousab|14 days ago|reply
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
[+] [-] fullshark|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|14 days ago|reply
So what occurred was an exercise in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, while the actual obviously interesting use of the technology (games!) was sidelined and ignored.
It's a real shame I picked up a PSVR and really enjoyed playing around with it. Seems like this particular niche however is not enough to fund the mega expenditure required to move the technology to the next level where it would genuinely get more mass adoption.
As it is feels like VR is going to die out at the Wii U point, just before it gets technically good enough (read lightweight) to be the successful Switch.
[+] [-] edmundsauto|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] everyone|14 days ago|reply
That being said I still think VR will always be a niche thing. We had VR headsets decades ago, aimed at the kind of person who builds a full cockpit setup at home for playing extremely nerdy flight sims. Now things are amazing if you're one of those people but I dont see VR ever being truly popular.
[+] [-] riskable|14 days ago|reply
The Steam Frame is a full PC that doesn't require a tether. I think it'll change everything if it doesn't cost a fortune (which it might). The possibilities for 3rd party hardware and the open ecosystem of a complete Linux distro + Steam are endless.
Day one of the Steam Frame I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of open source tools/scripts that make it better. Then 3rd party hardware will be announced and suddenly everyone's going to want one because all those things together make it sooooo nice.
[+] [-] nolist_policy|14 days ago|reply
> We’re introducing System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW) from Depth-From-Stereo to Quest headsets. PTW uses real-time scene depth to reduce visual judder and lag when apps drop frames, making movement in VR smoother and more comfortable. [...] You can expect a more stable experience, especially in demanding social and gaming apps.
The "demanding social apps" they aren't naming here is almost certainly VRChat which is poorly optimized on the Quest.
[+] [-] geophph|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|14 days ago|reply
Not caring about what the user's want is the first problem. The second is that they wanted this done yesterday. So rather than evolving the technology and seeing where the market was going, they tried to build the whole thing at once immediately.
They didn't know what they were building, how to build it, and they threw it together as quickly as possible. The result was, unsurprisingly, pretty lame.
Then to justify the expenditure, they then forced it into every aspect of their Quest devices trying to force adoption. Unsurprisingly again, this failed and also pissed off all their Quest customers and damaged the viability of that platform.
Meta thought they could simply spend their billions and that would be enough to succeed.
[+] [-] asadotzler|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] ToucanLoucan|14 days ago|reply
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
[+] [-] lyu07282|14 days ago|reply
The internet only succeeded because it was so free and open at the beginning, decentralized, open protocols, everything free, no borders, no censorship, no surveillance just hackers that layed the foundation with no restrictions placed upon them (except the severe technical limitations of the time for them to overcome). Of course that's almost all gone now with capitalism taking over turning everything to shit, but that came only after it already was successful.
Meta's vision and implementation of the metaverse was exactly the opposite end of the spectrum in every way from the start: centralized, commercial, proprietary, censored, surveilled, restricted, closed, walls everywhere, safe, advertiser friendly, it was uncool, not fun and no style. Like they paid people to create shitty "worlds" and force their employees to use it, otherwise nobody touched that shitshow willingly, except (concerningly) for some random toddlers for some reason.
[+] [-] paxys|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] luckydata|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] mrguyorama|14 days ago|reply
You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.
If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.
In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.
Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.
Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.
[+] [-] Ukv|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] floren|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] LogicFailsMe|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] sharkweek|14 days ago|reply
I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate.
I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram."
Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
[+] [-] topherPedersen|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] bentt|14 days ago|reply
The really sad thing about how VR evolved is that sim sickness was not taken seriously as a barrier for mass adoption. Too many devs and players cast it aside as a "them" problem. "They" couldn't handle it. "They" didn't have VR legs.
The bottom line is that most things that became popular in VR were violating the rules which prevented sim sickness. This was a self-fulfilling prophecy that led the VR world into a corner.
I'm hopeful that Valve will be better stewards of VR in the long run, once Meta shuts down its hardware division, which you know is coming in the next couple years.
[+] [-] paxys|14 days ago|reply
Tried some fancy Quest headset more than a decade later, and same thing.
It's crazy that after spending like $100 billion in the space they still haven't been able to remove the most fundamental barriers to entry.
[+] [-] ChoGGi|14 days ago|reply
Though I usually only play around with it on weekends.
I've noticed sitting and playing a cockpit game is more uncomfortable than standing and playing an fps (with teleport movement).
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|14 days ago|reply
The immersive 3d stuff is "wizbang neat" to Zuckerberg and investors and gamers. But actually most "regular people" I know don't actually like being "in" such environments. Some people get dizzy and sick. Some people don't like dissociating from the "real" world like that, even for simple 3d games. Some people are visually disabled. Or just don't enjoy the modality.
But more than anything, no matter what, it's always awkward in its immersion and people's imaginations will always be far richer than the uncanny and limited simulated "3d" world that a computer can deliver. Even if you had 99% fidelity, it'll still be a poor simulacrum that often leaves you feeling poorer.
I think Zuckerberg completely misread what his own customer base / world audience wanted because of his own generational biases growing up with technical "lawnmower man" fantasies and fiction, and a misplaced philosophical bias where he believes transcendent, progressive technology leading inevitably in this direction. Because that's what the 1990s and early 2000s was pushing in gaming and other tech. Having billions of dollars at his disposal, and brought up to want and see this future, he saw it as both inevitable and something that he could be pushing the forefront of.
Yes people want to connect with other people in online social spaces. And I think they're probably very excited to do so in a manner which models the thing/place/object aspect of the "real world" rather than the glorified magazine / bulletin board which is Facebook. Especially if they can create and author and extend that world from within.
But I don't think they want to strap facehuggers to their face and do that in simulated three dimensions. And I don't think it's necessary to do the latter to get the former.
(But I'm biased, I've been trying to rebuild the magic I found in LambdaMOO in various forms ... for the last 30 years... https://timbran.org/moor.html )
[+] [-] Telaneo|14 days ago|reply
I remember saying to someone one day that while Facebook kind of seems to be going places with their VR hardware, their software division were just reinventing Nintendo Miis, but worse. Anyone who actually cared about doing VR social stuff were going to use VRChat, as that was a much better product.
Even then, if you just look at Facebook's VR hardware in a vacuum, sure, it got better, pretty good even, but not to the point of appealing beyond niche groups, i.e. VR gamers and people who use VRChat, and making VR appealing beyond those groups is a thing I don't think is going to happen.
[+] [-] jabedude|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] bentt|14 days ago|reply
Then AI comes along and offers real growth opportunity. But of course, Meta fumbled that one out of the gate because they are more interested in winning than in actually offering anything of value. So they figured they could sabotage the whole thing by open sourcing Llama. Then they got steamrolled by everyone actually creating value for people instead of following their tried and true parasite model.
No tech company in this era has been more destructive to society than Meta. Their utter lack of principles has led them down this path. Ironically the most value they have generated is to their investors and especially their employees who are all wealthy now, funded with advertising dollars from across the economy.
[+] [-] xnx|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] pncnmnp|13 days ago|reply
Horizon Worlds and the Metaverse were both pitched as a "social" platform. And this in itself is where I believe they went wrong. It fundamentally differs from my limited experience with VR and its potential. I see VR as an "anti-social" platform rather than a "social" one - and I say this in a good way.
When I put on a VR headset, its as if I am shunning my current world. The experiences I find valuable in VR are the ones that elevate that feeling - imagine watching a basketball game courtside, or watching NASCAR while floating right above the track, or watching a live concert happening halfway across the world, or VR tourism (visiting different places anytime you want, from some breathtaking angles - my most memorable experience of this was a video on Angel Falls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_tqK4eqelA), or even the classics like playing VR games and watching movies. I believe that they should have doubled down on providing a much richer "anti-social" experience.
[+] [-] smileybarry|14 days ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 days ago|reply
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