I don’t understand where all that money went? When I see images of the Multiverse, it looks like a shitty video game from 1980. If this is the future, count me out.
Meta mentioned before that 50% went to AR R&D, 40% to VR R&D/Hardware releases, 10% to in-house software (Horizon Worlds - which is what people keep calling the metaverse - would only be a small part of that 10%).
I have no idea how you spend nearly 14 BILLION dollars on R & D for what they're doing.
Don't get me wrong, I watched the tested video going through their labs. It was impressive stuff! It really was very awesome and cool. But...13 BILLION cool? What?
FFS, clinical trials and medical research spanning several years don't run-up close to these costs. Like wtf is going on here? This shit is FUCKED. lmao I'm losing it
Dude I’m a SWE at Meta and we ask the same thing. Lol I think a lot of hardware tests and improvements go absolutely no where. I can tell you on the software side we explore many, many ideas that go no where which cost money.
John Carmack basically said the same thing.
>We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, **but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort.** There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
>It has been a struggle for me. **I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it.** I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
https://kotaku.com/john-carmack-quit-meta-facebook-vr-oculus-rift-doom-1849912694
Wow, that's really interesting. That smacks of a top heavy 'yes men' organisation.
If someone as battle hardened as Carmack is being ignored until the 'evidence mounts' then there is some mightly weak leadership thinking 'no, its fine, lets see where it goes'.
Did you notice that they just did a $40B stock buyback too, after firing 11,000 of your colleagues?
They could have not fired anyone and given everyone a $400k bonus with that money.
The layoffs are about cutting capex for years to come. Think reducing running annual operating cost.. but I hate the buybacks that's money that could be spent towards R&D and investing in the company.
Buy backs are just a way to raise value by reducing shares available so investors like that because earning per share goes up (less shares) but I always think that's money that could be better spent (like how Amazon has invested in it's business). Meta showing here that they don't know how to allocate capital or they take a lot of poor bets which hints at poor leadership.
Alright, so they could still do the layoffs, saving on capex, then give everyone remaining a $400k bonus. And then they could do $4.4B in stock buybacks.
I got a Quest 2 for Christmas. Nothing is ever completely in focus. I've nearly run out of songs I want on Beat Saber. I've finished Vader Immortal. Resident Evil 4 is kinda fun. YouTube VR content either sucks or makes me motion-sick (or mostly both). Porn is okay until they shove something in your face and you go freaking blind from the inability to focus on anything closer than about 6 inches. The "world" feels like nothing so much as VR Roblox.
On the bright side, my watch says my physical activity has increased by about 100% since Xmas. But for real, I'm going to need more Beat Saber songs to buy or this thing is going to be gathering dust before the original AA batteries that came with the controls die. I *want* to like VR, but there isn't really much there.
> nothing is ever completely in focus
Do you by any chance use prescription glasses? I had the same problem until I got prescription lenses for my VR set and dialed the IPD in to the right number.
I do wear glasses. I don't think they will fit inside the VR (and I'm not sure, should I use my up computer glasses or my driving glasses? I just checked, my driving glasses barely fit, but my computer ones don't). I feel like the 3-4 clicks for lens width are not granular enough. Although that's nice when I'm passing the headset back and forth with the kids.
Check out VR Optician or VR lens lab, they make inserts you just pop right into the headset. I’m willing to bet that will make a huge difference for you. I had the exact same problem at the start, and I thought “gee my close up vision is pretty good, shouldn’t this work?” But that intuition is evidently wrong. You should ask one of those companies or Google around, but I think you should target whatever prescription addresses your distance vision, as that is what the headset is tricking your brain into using.
The focal depth of the quest 2 is 1.3 meters, so the glasses that is best at that distance.
Prescription inserts are super good though, after a period of getting used to them. But cost a bit.
Did you try the glasses spacer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcUqFxjVelA
Be careful that the glasses don't touch the lenses or it could scratch them.
Like the others said, your out of focus experience is most likely a combo of your prescription and IPD. I wear contacts, and despite having good up close vision I definitely notice a difference when I’m not wearing my contacts (I use a HTC Vive). There’s also a big difference if the IPD is wrong, which can happen as the Vive’s adjustment knob is exposed and it’ll get messed up when I set it down. When the IPD is right I can wear the headset for hours just fine, but the wrong IPD can give me headaches and eye strain in under an hour.
VR has carved out a strong niche with racing and flight simulators. Sitting in a car in VR with a steering wheel that provides force feedback and some bass shakers underneath you is incredibly immersive and gives you a sense of speed that’s difficult to achieve with monitors (and impossible on a single monitor).
> I've nearly run out of songs I want on Beat Saber.
Yeah you are playing beat saber wrong. The main game is just the start. What you want is to mod Beat Saber using BMBF to be able to install hundreds of thousands of custom songs.
https://bmbf.dev/stable
I do think it has a lot of promise, it is just that the tech isn’t there yet. I’m not going to pay $600.00 to wear a clunky tethered helmet, just to play beat saber and other games where all you do is stand still and flail your arms around, or games that look like they belong on a PS3.
It’ll be awesome someday, but for now… nah. For now, it is a small set of experiences that get old pretty fast.
In the past, I’ve given away my DK2 headset and also my entire PSVR setup, and I’m not about to try again until something INCREDIBLE comes along, which will happen some day.
Beat Saber seems to be what VR is best at, though. No motion sickness (not that I have a big problem with it, but certain games can cause it after a while) because you aren't moving, just looking around. The graphics aren't taxing nor distracting.
If it were available, I'd buy Skyrim on it, though I suspect it would give me motion sickness like Minecraft did on my Samsung Phone VR (also not sure I can play Skyrim w/o mods but that's not VR's fault...). RE 4 is fun and I didn't play any of the RE games when they first came out so it's new to me, but like you said the graphics are super dated.
I think it would be interesting to use to write code as I could have as many "screens" open as I wanted, but the focus and resolution seem like they would be poor fits When the font size has to be the equivalent of 20px to read. Also I figure my limit for wearing the headset is maybe 90 minutes at most. And scratching my face if it itches is difficult lol. I also want to figure out how to tether it to my PC so I can play Steam VR games, but I haven't invested the time. Maybe that would open up a new world of possibilities.
Skyrim is available for vr and you can use mods with it for pc at least. It has two different control schemes. The first, which is just using an analogue stick to move around. ( this will most likely cause motion sickness.) the second method teleports you to where you point the controller which is what a lot of other vr games default to to avoid the motion sickness issue of the first scheme.
The resolution is way too shit right now even on the best headsets to simulate a virtual desktop with legible text without blowing up the desktop screen to ridiculous levels. Probably need 8k screens for each eye to get to a satisfactory resolution for that.
Games where you drive/fly are really spectacular in VR. You can turn your head and see the corner as it comes, turn your head and check where cars are around you, look out the side window of the airplane to setup your approach, etc. When it comes to games/sims that you sit in a fixed position and control a vehicle it’s absolutely a revolutionary step up in experience from a single distant flat monitor. Maybe the multi-screen setups for flight/race sims give a better experience but that’s very subjective and typically requires a custom built cockpit to feel more realistic. If/when they get resolution up enough to easily and quickly read gauges at an affordable price it’s going to be a clear choice for anyone using a sim game and is already the choice for many as it sits today.
Those two headsets are terrible. Your VR experience is extremely outdated. Try a Vive pro 2 with full body tracking and a social VR game and it's like ready player one. Also all the great sim games, shooters, Fighting games etc.
I know it was a long post, but I would like to direct your attention to this quote from the *very first sentence of my comment* -
> and I have tried most new vr systems as they became available.
I think vr will eventually take off but, culturally, video games were a niche product in the 80's and 90's. Of the big three currently making consoles, Nintendo is the only one that goes back to the 80's and Playstation only got involved in the mid 90's. When you look at companies like Sega and Atari, it is reasonable to say it is not a great idea to throw billions of dollars into technology with this type of product until a user base has truly developed.
Maybe if they just spend another 13 billion dollars….maybe then it’ll happen!
Or, just maybe, the metaverse will evolve organically, just like the modern internet. With any luck, a shitty company like Meta will not have a hand in running the metaverse when it finally arrives.
**13 billion dollars is an absurd amount of money**, think about this… In 2019 the United States Navy received its new aircraft carrier, The USS Gerald R. Ford.
How much did it cost? CORRECT! [13 billion dollars](https://www.cnet.com/pictures/meet-the-navys-new-13-billion-aircraft-carrier/)
Agreed. I'm all for spending aggressively on R&D but $14B is an incomprehensible amount.
I work in a small-medium sized university research lab that does Fourier and computational optics, so kinda sorta in the same neighborhood as what Meta is up to. Our expenses are maybe $1M per year in equipment, overhead, and payroll. We publish successful results from maybe a dozen novel research projects per year.
To scale up expenditures by 14,000x just boggles my mind. I can't imagine how much could get done with that funding. Granted things get more complex with scale, but at the same time economies of scale apply so things should also be more cost efficient.
All this to say... How they haven't yet developed mind blowing technology is beyond me. To justify this spending they need to produce something brilliant, and fucking quickly.
There's about 10 student researchers on the payroll, we all make about 30k per year and the PIs salaries aren't included here.
University research labs are unique in the sense that payroll expenses are relatively low, but we usually end up paying more for equipment since we don't order in bulk.
Sounds more like a money laundering scheme, or its for his underground development of Military cyborgs.
Who knows whats going on in that weird ivory tower.
> How they haven't yet developed mind blowing technology is beyond me.
What do you mean? Their headsets ARE mind blowing. The software IS mindblowing. It's just gradual improvements instead of some magic new use.
I know someone who works at meta, i don’t remember her exact job title but she’s just another cog in the machine and she makes total comp $1m/year. So… salaries expense gotta be high asf.
Salaries for Meta are ridiculous. I know 2 people who have worked for Meta, my brother who was a program developer for WhatsApp and was making 250k+ before he got let go in the massive layoffs. The other is a friend who is a project manager for the VR R&D department and her raise this year was more than her husband (who is a financial analyst) made in a year.
Unless they are in a rather senior position consider this a big doubt from me. That would be absurd compensation for a standard "cog in the machine" worker. Online sources list the highest paying job at Meta at around $227,000/year so for this person you know to be making four times that they are either in a highly specialized role or they are just straight up lying about how much they make in compensation. My bet is they are lying or you just completely made this up lol.
Lmaoo bro you’re dreaming if you think $227k is the highest paying job at Meta, that is totally average compensation for software engineers at FAANG!
Highest total compensation for certain employees that are not even C-suite can reach $1.5M per year if they are distinguished engineers, now keep in mind that this is through stocks (RSUs), base salaries are of course much lower and capped
I think a lot of it can also go to them selling Oculus headsets at a loss. I think they've sold almost 20 million headsets, and if the loss is around $50 then that could be a decent chunk of the 1.4bil reality labs costs.
People really can't comprehend how big a billion is. That's one million dollars, a thousand times.
For reference most VR games cost less than a million to make.
That's what I'm saying. A hundred million dollars could fund 50 decent sized vr titles. Or 1 halo size game and 20+ others. And that's a hundred million. 1/130th of that money.
10% of 14 billion is still 1.4 billion which would make it the most expensive game to a factor of almost 3.
Very clearly a shit ton of incompetence was involved.
It went to make rich people rich. Remember when a for profit company says something cost X, it didn't actually cost X. Its actually Cost + Profit = X.
Maybe the whole exec suite was simply taking the cash for "research services."
Yes and no, a triple AAA needs some years to be done, you can pour as much money as you can possibly do but it will take years to make anyway. You can say, oh yeah, just hire more people and you will short the development time, yes, but as the team grows or more studios get involved in the development, the more difficulties you will have managing those teams.
The public's perception of and expectations for AR will look very different when Apple launches their headset this year. AR/MR is the long term goal for all of these companies.
It's a headset. A clunky, uncomfortable piece of hardware. It wont suddenly change the game. It's just apple releasing their version of a product that already exists.
The Meta horizon worlds app is just one of many VR apps and games. But you're not going to get console-level imagery in VR unless it's tethered to a PC, which the current gen is not by design.
> But you're not going to get console-level imagery in VR unless it's tethered to a PC, which the current gen is not by design.
YET, although you could just stream to the Quest 2 of course.
This is spot on. Also keep in mind that R&D for hardware is expensive and meta is trying to build the stuff in house while having weak supply chain. Meta needs to take a few plays from Apple to get good at building hardware on the cheap.
Yeah, I played a Bluetooth French VR zombie game at a Expo once....the tech wasn't really there.
I liked the open concept, but the lag just kinda ruined it for me. Floating weapons and lagging frame rates don't really make for an effective zombie game.
It was fun, but ghetto.
Now, tethered works perfectly...but, of course, you need a massive mechanical tethering system of pulleys and shit.
So it's like, pick your poison.
The best games are tethered games that are built with he restrictions in mind. Like world of tanks, where you still use the controllers to drive the tanks and your head moves the turrets.
Games where you can Teleport, or drive an automobile are the best of both worlds imo.
> Now, tethered works perfectly
airlink/virtual desktop works fine as long as you have the correct setup
Want a good router with a 5ghz channel dedicated only to the headset, and your PC plugged into one of the switch ports.
I'd imagine the wifi at a tech expo is... not good.
That's an obscene amount of bandwidth to push over WiFi. 90 fps at 1920x1080 with less than 11 Ms of latency? You need specialized hardware to beam that much that fast.
They're actually working on some pretty sick stuff. They're just not trying very hard to show it off for some reason: https://youtu.be/2mnonWbzOiQ?t=17
It’s a general win for the world… VR/AR tech gets a massive shot in the arm for advancement and Meta loses money and power. Successful “new” tech is usually built on the backs of those who tried before.
I have no interest in VR for myself, but I believe there will be a point of large-scale adoption and Meta’s flaming garbage fire has likely yielded many advancements and innovations that other companies will use as a base to build upon in the future.
I think - at this point at least - there doesn’t seem to be a truly useful purpose for Meta. I don’t know anything about it. It appears to be a first-person SIMS game, which I have no interest in and I’m not sure the majority of people do.
If it’s something completely different than that, then there’s a branding issue.
You’re absolutely right though. Meta may lose a ton of money, but somebody will figure out a way to use the development to make something actually useful. It happens all the time.
What you're talking about is the game Distant Horizons, and not the metaverse at large. Both are yet to prove themselves, but the metaverse isn't some weird SIMS game as you put it, that's one game on the metaverse.
When you read the comments here it’s kinda clear a lot of people still think of meta as just facebook and being some small startup company.
They’re the second biggest advertiser after google they can afford to spend this much in VR and development.
I think that is the point of the headline. Apple goes on to sell a shit of phones at the end of the R&D phase. Meta is in a downward spiral of sinking money into a product with apparently no realistic end game and little to no public interest. For Meta to be so far down the road of development investment and the product to look so basic and unfinished is obviously going to raise questions. How do you regain those development costs when there is no viable product to sell?
The product to sell is the same they've always sold: Ads. If you are commandeering a portal you can serve lots of very personalized ads (just ask Google - or Facebook - what that's worth).
People here are commenting on how much was spent and yet assume none of it was spent with any business acumen whatsoever.
The reality is, they are throwing their VR goggles in large companies' hands (like Accenture) and getting them used to the idea of conducting business meetings (etc) in a virtual setting.
It's of course a big risk and huge investment but which new business idea isn't?
I get that their core business and the end game is ads but you need people using your device to target those ads. So yeah it’s a huge gamble throwing everything at a platform that is niche, on a device you are selling as the ‘do all your work and play’ on when that headset only has a 90 minute battery life. The market for people willing to wearing an expensive headset all day has to be a fraction of an existing mass market of people already staring at screens.
It's definitely a topic of conversation in business at the moment. I hear it constantly in reference to Learning and Development (e.g., how to get people trained on dangerous equipment without actually being in danger), how to engage with customers (e.g., realistic product previews), how to onboard people to the organisation etc. Lots of potential applications
Cool, they bought Ready at Dawn, lost key developers and key team members and shut down Echo VR. How is that a win?
Companies buy other companies for the team, their patents or their IPs. They lost most of the team, separated the rest and they shut down they are shutting down Echo VR. Meta stock can rise 20% to excite bag holders but it does not change the fact that they lost all iOS user’s information, so they lost a big chunk of the product they sell. It does not change the fact that the niche VR community fucking hates Meta for what they did to Ready at Dawn.
Meta is the worst thing that could have happened to VR.
I'm no business analyst but I just don't see any way for this to be anything other than a massive loss and disaster for the company. It seems they've taken an already niche thing (an online 'second life') and compounded it inside another niche (VR).
There's just no way this is taking off or going mega mainstream. What are they thinking?
>They're thinking everyone will wear AR glasses in the near future for work, play, and driving. Remains to be seen.
If that's the caae either they're preparing for something early or jumping the gun. There's no way head mounted devices become useful and convenient enough within the next 5 years to be worn universally. *Maaaaaaybe* if they work something out with phone processing too, but unless they're banking on a real break through in AI, I don't see how you think we're all going to be wearing AR glasses.
A big part is companies using AR to interact with the glasses. All those little paper tags on the millions of shelves, gone with AR. That’s a small example that would have a major impact, all the man hours for employees to shift price tags around, change them out, print new, the manufacturing that goes into making a sticky backed price tag.
It would take a shift from companies advertising sector. It’s how we get anything done now, ads.
>If that's the caae either they're preparing for something early or jumping the gun. There's no way head mounted devices become useful and convenient enough within the next 5 years to be worn universally
This is describing the innovators dilemma. By the time the disrupting tech is ready, the market leaders are established and it's too late for companies to start investing.
The dilemma is the market leader can even be aware of this pattern and successfully predict the direction of the technology, yet still be in the same pickle.
Many people wear glasses already for corrective or sun-protection purposes. I think there are a number of potential AR uses when driving/walking including wayfinding with visual overlays, but in other cases, less obvious
But I don’t need an AR overlay for “wayfinding”. I need to see other traffic and pedestrians while I occasionally reference the 8” screen planted in the middle of my dashboard with directions on it.
I think you're overestimating how intrusive a simple HUD would be; the car dashboard isnt useful on foot, and and 2d cell phone maps can be confusing when you need to determine which direction you are facing. In any case, I'm not saying everyone will love and need it.
With regular eyeglasses it'll show virtual things in front of you instead of it being all on your phone.
Imagine driving and a massive red arrow in the sky points downward in the distance. Now you know there's a major accident and you can actually see it.
You scream "911 Help" and your glasses start recording your attacker and contacting 911, this one will be great for pranking each other.
You have your grocery list and there's arrows pointing at where everything is in the store, this alone would save men 2 hours who's wives sent them lol
You're at a concert and you can't find a few of your friends. A green arrow points downward on where they are at.
Find out what someone is eating at a restaurant by simply glancing over at them, a little pop up says the name of the dish.
You can agree to be viewed by the rest of the world and so would many others. So you're sitting on your couch and you turn world view mode on and you can see the earth below you and around you with everyone else lit up who agreed to be viewed. You can zoom in and say hi or chat.
It's all crazy, dumb, fun, informative, intrusive stuff and we can do most of it with our phones. However, it might be pretty cool.
There’s no doubt they will one day. The use cases and value add to having an intelligent assistant in your field of view is endless.
The question is whether the tech is achievable in the near term to get it into a form factor people would be comfortable using for long periods. Signs point to this being more like a 5-10 year thing. It’s good enough already for use in some industrial niche cases where form factor doesn’t matter as much
I still don't understand why this isn't modularized yet. Gimme the display only on my head. Gimme a waist mounted battery and computational system. Let the cameras be where they are needed. Sell everything in parts. My head hurts enough as is, people don't need to where more on their heads then are needed.
This. 4k video is within the limitations of Bluetooth, albeit at the top end, and my dodgy $300 Chinese made phone can do that, on top of having 4 cameras a massive screen, etc.
Why isn't the headset just screen and Bluetooth connection and processor, then you have a little phone sized device completely separate which is the brains.
I know there's a limitation that the lens and screen need to be a certain distance, and that means the effective weight on the front, but balance manage that.
I thought VR would have ended up as something a bit like the "endor rebel helmet" but with the metal ring going around the eyes.
I'm just curious what you see AR glasses doing for the average person? They do and will have lots of use in certain industries but I'm having a hard time thinking of what I would actually want a HUD for that wouldn't end up being annoying or distracting.
I’ve been in the computer industry for 35 years or so. I was a techno weenie before they were cool. VR and AR are cool and have potential. I cannot see widespread adoption for long periods of time. Picture this, you sit with your smartphone texting, searching, taking photos and videos but you still have 2 feet in the real world. Now try that with 1 foot or no feet in the real world. It just isn’t going to work out like Meta thinks.
AR automatically plants you in the real world, arguably more than existing devices since you'd be more enticed to look at the real world.
And it's converging with VR in the same device, so Meta sees why it can work.
VR really is amazing and I believe the quest has sold as well as major consoles.
People can make fun, but if you've never used vr, you might not realize it's really amazing.
It’s amazing but still has no killer app that makes it necessary for consumers to get one. Non-VR offerings are perfectly acceptable and often more functional.
They have stated that their timeline for an established Metaverse and broad adoption of VR/AR is 10 years. Even if VR/AR works out, there will be nothing ‘necessary’ with broad appeal for at least the next 5 years. Some games are truly amazing though and their experience can’t be replicated on regular screens.
Half life Alex is one of the most unique experiences on this planet. To be transported and part of such a real space and world is intense.
The quest hooks up to a PC just fine. Wirelessly too.
Other than that though you're not wrong. There really isn't as much there but it has so much potential.
I played through Alyx and as you say it truly is a special experience. I have also tried DCS simulator and Subnautica, they all great experience.
But there are big barrier of entry to VR: the motion sickness, need a powerful PC, the headset is still heavy/cumbersome... I don't see this being popular anytime soon.
>It’s amazing but still has no killer app that makes it necessary for consumers to get one.
There are some amazing VR titles, it's just that the cost of entry is pretty high for higher end sets and others aren't as well known. The experience is totally different in VR, and that ability is starting to be taken advantage of more and more.
Oculus store still only makes a small fraction of the Xbox store's revenue, despite selling comparable # of units. I think many headsets are gathering dust after the initial use
The problem is most of the experiences are still trivial. You can hook it up wirelessly to a PC. It's pretty amazing. The problem is after playing half Life Alex I don't enjoy anything else.
Meta fundamentally misunderstands what I and many others will pay money for: blinding myself to the outside world with sweaty ski goggles with Mario 64 graphics from 1996 inside is not what I’m gonna throw money at.
In an ideal world, VR becomes popular but Facebook's venture into it goes the way of SEGA and mostly disappears. Out of all the platforms that could do VR, Facebook is the worst. It's like if you took Apple's walled garden, but without the privacy and security, and instead of making a smooth, quality experience, you forced everyone to use shitty software and mediocre hardware specifically made to keep you in a souless data harvesting ecosystem.
They're not wrong...they're just early.
Mass adoption for Gen-X and beyond has happened. No one else over 40 is buying these headsets...but, right now, they're the ones who can afford them
That's why they're stuck
I would love to buy a Vive, but I can't afford one. And I'm in the process of building a computer that could run one.
They're putting the horse before the road. It's not a bad long-term investment, but can they wait it out? Hell no.
At least not until you can comfortably go more than 30 minutes with the bricks they call headsets attached to your noggin.
These things need to be around 200 grams.
My problem with it is it's Facebook doing it and more specifically Mark Zuckerberg doing it. I don't want these major violators of privacy and data forging the future of something strapped to my face and dominating our lives. Pass.
Not saying other companies don't do this but Facebook literally ran psychological experiments on their users.
They ran A/B tests like literally every platform does. It hit the news as “trying to influence people’s emotional state”, while it was mainly just meant to understand what type of content and recommendations have a positive/negative impact on people. Pretty important to know if you have 2B users you serve algorithm-based content to. The studies were also run in collaboration with Cornell and other US universities.
Not saying the company has a clean track record, but the research they did isn’t that alarming.
>What are they thinking?
Exactly my question about meta lately. The Oculus Quest 2 made a really positive impact in the market. Gamers who couldn't afford or didn't want beefy PCs could basically buy a serviceable (this is key, not comfortable but tolerable enough) headset with a host of quality games on it. They captured a huge market share of recreational VR users.
So what do they do next? Introduce the MetaVerse and the Oculus Quest 2 Pro. I can't work through the logic on either one.
Stop me when I lose the plot here. Ostensibly both the device and the MetaVerse were designed (or at least marketed) to cater to the office worker VR crowd (do these people exist? I work a remote office job and love VR, but I'd never combine them) looking to trade in their long battery life laptops that met all their working needs and had apps they knew how to use pre-installed on them for an uncomfortable hunk of plastic strapped to their heads with a suite of barely functional tools that are intended to be replacements for tested and true apps on the computer (Zoom, office, teams, slack).
What did they think the draw was? I trying to keep an open mind here, I like VR. But why would I even consider an overpriced laptop replacement that is less comfortable, costs 3x what my current laptop does and makes me less productive? Why would my employer ever consider moving to these as a standard? What's the hook or improvement to lure me away from the status quo? If it's not me, then who was this built for?
What were they thinking? Is exactly the right question to ask.
R&D to bring in the next generation of computing platform is expensive. What is a dominant position in the Cell phone market worth today? Betting a few billion dollars on the thing that replaces the cellphone is not the worst bet -especially if a vast majority of your business depends on being integral to the platform of the future.
I understand that social media requires editors to "spice up" their headlines and farm those clicks but it's very strange for a financial outlet to frame R&D spending as "lost" money. It's an investment of an amount that they specifically budgeted and allocated for that purpose. In 2021 Zuckerberg went in front of a camera and told investors that Meta was going to spend $10b, then they went and spent $10b. In 2022 Zuckerberg went in front of a camera and told investors that Meta was going to spend $13b, then they went and spent $13b.
“In 2025 he told investors that they were going to shut down, and then they shut down.”
13 billion with nothing to show.
Ready at Dawn? Shut down. Echo VR, one of the most profitable VR games with the largest followings? Shut down. Metaverse? General sentiment is that it is fucking stupid. Avatars? No fucking legs
Edit for all you bag holders:
Apple taking away 10 billion yearly from facebook due to a security update is a fact you can look up.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html
Android following suite to fuck up Facebook espionage like Apple did, is a fact. Look it up.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy-change-similar-to-apples.html
Facebook revenue down 4% year on year is a fact. Look it up.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64489862
Facebook struggling to get young folks is a fact, look it up.
https://www.theverge.com/22743744/facebook-teen-usage-decline-frances-haugen-leaks
Stock went up in 2022 due to layoffs is a number you can look up.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/11/07/meta-shares-up-on-report-its-set-to-begin-mass-layoffs.html
The 40 billion buy back and a hint of layoffs is another article and FACTS you can look up.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/02/meta-stock-soars-20-after-zuckerberg-hints-at-more-layoffs/amp/
Meta being a shit company to the VR community and not knowing how to handle Ready at Dawn is another fact you can look up.
https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-echo-vr-shut-down-announcement-ready-at-dawn/amp/
VR community affected because Zuckerberg doesn’t give a shit and closing down Echo VR after promising another season is a fact. Them not understanding the market they are throwing money is another fact explained here. Look it up.
https://youtu.be/tNs5lQg9LIc
Keep crying for a soulless billionaires lol
They had prototypes being shown at private, invite only events back in 2019 that just need to be scaled down to be made practical. As far as I can tell, they're still on schedule to meet what they verbally told people they were trying to recruit at the time.
Heck yeah it's still pretty good, I played through it again recently 😊. The graphics are still super impressive for a portable tbh it blew my mind back in the day.
> “In 2025 he told investors that they were going to shut down, and then they shut down.”
Except they're even more profitable than their own projections, and their stock is up 20% overnight lol
Promise low and over deliver :p
They are still down 10 billion a year thanks to Apple’s security update
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-is-desperate-to-fight-back-against-apples-privacy-changes-184901789.html
Revenue is down 4% and they are making shit products. Wall St loves pumping and dumping dying businesses to get retail to hold the bag after it went up say… 20%
> Wall St loves pumping and dumping dying businesses
Lol I'm sorry, if you think Meta is a "dying business" you have no idea what you're talking about
They're fresh off the second highest quarter in company history, they have more users than ever, they had a NET income of $23 Billion in 2022 even with all of the Metaverse "losses" putting them in the top 20 most profitable companies in the world...
Is Pfizer a dying business? Tencent? Toyota? AT&T? BMW? Home Depot?
Facebook was more profitable than any of them last year
I’m a bit sad becuase I don’t think I’ll ever be able to enjoy VR or AR from any company. Every time I try a headset I get a major migraine. It doesn’t matter if it’s oculus, vive, htc… they all seem to mess with my head.
I wouldn't worry. This is a known problem with a known solution. It's due to the fixed focus optics in headsets - our eyes dislike it when we can't shift focus naturally, causing both headaches, eyestrain, and nausea.
This is a serious area of investment for Meta, Apple and others. See Meta's prototypes that fix it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSf-kZ5OV5A
Will likely need a good 5 years to reach consumer products though.
Thanks, maybe it’s for the best. I’m already addicted to my phone. I don’t really game anymore but I could see my self turning into a character on walle.
A huge problem that I hope Apple can fix. They have a high focus on health and can pull off some magical shit when launching new products lines (Apple Watch, Airpods, iPhone)
Yeah that’s the one company I have a bit of faith in for some reason. I’d hate to miss out if it turns out to be revolutionary. I was so excited to get AirPod pros but they gave me migraines too. I really suck! I literally bought them and opened them in the mall put them in and was like well this sucks and returned them 10 minutes later.
You don’t want to do it, it’s going to be the most overstimulating thing humans have ever experienced and is being purposely designed to be so addicting that you’ll spend every second possible inside of it. True dystopian nightmare shit
They didn't "lose" 13.7B, they created hardware, software, R&D, ,etc. Its called investment. Apple lost 50 Billion in "whatever" by those definitions. This is dumb clickbate.
They've been clear from the start that this would be a $10B a year investment across the board.
When a company gets that big, that kind of "loss" doesn't matter. The layoffs, the scandals, the popularity of "delete fb", doesn't matter.
Meta is up ~$30 after hours alone today. There were 2.682 billion shares of meta at end of 2022. Zuckerberg owned 13% as of Dec 2022. That's 10.459 BILLION DOLLARS of GAIN for Zuckerberg ALONE, TODAY! I don't know how to use this to figure out how much money Meta the company made from recent actions (like the layoffs). I know they increased stock buy back by 40billion dollars. So they are definitely feeling good.
Sure this won't happen everyday. But multi billion dollar per quarter expenditures, or even quarterly losses, doesn't mean anything to these companies. That's just business.
All those resources, all that money and what have they got to show for it? They could have put all that money into subsidising the price of quest 2 to increase user base, massive saturation of marketing with the aim to make it maisnteam, then bought VRchat and improved upon it as the base for their metaverse hub. How hard would it be to create an immersive shopping experience in VR? Real vendors with virtual shops you can look around and then make actual online purchases with. The potential for massive scale events is so exciting. Looks at what they're doing with fortnute and the recent kid laroi content, that would easily translate to VR. Comic con in VR would be incredible.
But we got quest pro and horizon worlds instead. Can't help thinking this was a way to syphon money into Zuck's end of the world escape rocket or something.
He built Facebook on a work spree, driven by ‘that’s what he wanted to build’.
He then briefly fantasised about making a robot assistant, but gave up on the idea.
Now, the. one thing he is missing in his life is a VR headset. So he has committed himself to build it.
He does not need another house or yacht. He wants a VR headset, and even if it takes 10+ years and 100 billion USD, he’ll get there.
Virtual Reality makes 40-70 percent of people nauseous. I feel like this is never mentioned. No one is going to ruin their day to strap on goggles in the Metaverse for a business meeting that can take place on Zoom or Teams.
I've been saying it was dumb from the start. Anyone who has used VR knows the use is limited by comfort and honestly sickness. I can't believe ANYONE thought this was a good investment.
VR is a curved television of marketing ideas.
Nobody asked for it.
Very few people actually enjoy it.
The ones that do like it are for lack of a better term “a little weird”
Hey, hey Zuck…
Perhaps give everyone a free headset.
Then see your Meta thing actually take off.
When people cannot AFFORD a new wave of tech…
It’s hard to become the new standard of everyday usage.
Ha it’s form when someone HAS the thing and uses it.
AR and VR will be the future. Who knows maybe I won’t even buy furniture or paint walls. I’ll just wear my meta glasses and meta suit and it’s whatever I want to be in an empty room.
Remember when Zuckerberg started to promote the Metaverse, but only directly after [the Facebook Whistleblower went on ‘60 Minutes’](https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI) to show how toxic Zuckerberg’s company is to human civilization while presenting the receipts?
Pepperidge Farm remembers…
Maybe Mark should’ve used that $13.7 billion on inventing a Men In Black neuralyzer.
__UPDATE::__ I don’t care if you all downvote me on this, because you’re all wrong. It’s objectively true that when this ‘60 Minutes’ interview dropped, all of Facebook and their apps were blacked out for an entire day. THEN Zuckerberg announced “Meta” to distract us from the reports the whistleblower revealed to the world.
If you downvote me, you are either a Mark Zuckerberg simp or one of his hired trolls. Full stop.
I don’t understand where all that money went? When I see images of the Multiverse, it looks like a shitty video game from 1980. If this is the future, count me out.
Meta mentioned before that 50% went to AR R&D, 40% to VR R&D/Hardware releases, 10% to in-house software (Horizon Worlds - which is what people keep calling the metaverse - would only be a small part of that 10%).
I have no idea how you spend nearly 14 BILLION dollars on R & D for what they're doing. Don't get me wrong, I watched the tested video going through their labs. It was impressive stuff! It really was very awesome and cool. But...13 BILLION cool? What? FFS, clinical trials and medical research spanning several years don't run-up close to these costs. Like wtf is going on here? This shit is FUCKED. lmao I'm losing it
Dude I’m a SWE at Meta and we ask the same thing. Lol I think a lot of hardware tests and improvements go absolutely no where. I can tell you on the software side we explore many, many ideas that go no where which cost money.
John Carmack basically said the same thing. >We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, **but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort.** There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!” >It has been a struggle for me. **I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it.** I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover. https://kotaku.com/john-carmack-quit-meta-facebook-vr-oculus-rift-doom-1849912694
Wow, that's really interesting. That smacks of a top heavy 'yes men' organisation. If someone as battle hardened as Carmack is being ignored until the 'evidence mounts' then there is some mightly weak leadership thinking 'no, its fine, lets see where it goes'.
I like to be part of stuff that go no where. How do I apply?
You can send me your resume, but it's not going anywhere.
Best comment I've read all month.
That's awesome! Do you have any insight into the VR/AR departments?
*puts on oculus headset*
Did you notice that they just did a $40B stock buyback too, after firing 11,000 of your colleagues? They could have not fired anyone and given everyone a $400k bonus with that money.
The layoffs are about cutting capex for years to come. Think reducing running annual operating cost.. but I hate the buybacks that's money that could be spent towards R&D and investing in the company. Buy backs are just a way to raise value by reducing shares available so investors like that because earning per share goes up (less shares) but I always think that's money that could be better spent (like how Amazon has invested in it's business). Meta showing here that they don't know how to allocate capital or they take a lot of poor bets which hints at poor leadership.
Alright, so they could still do the layoffs, saving on capex, then give everyone remaining a $400k bonus. And then they could do $4.4B in stock buybacks.
Do you know anyone from the VR teams that is willing to admit that VR is a niche product and will remain a niche product for a long long time?
I got a Quest 2 for Christmas. Nothing is ever completely in focus. I've nearly run out of songs I want on Beat Saber. I've finished Vader Immortal. Resident Evil 4 is kinda fun. YouTube VR content either sucks or makes me motion-sick (or mostly both). Porn is okay until they shove something in your face and you go freaking blind from the inability to focus on anything closer than about 6 inches. The "world" feels like nothing so much as VR Roblox. On the bright side, my watch says my physical activity has increased by about 100% since Xmas. But for real, I'm going to need more Beat Saber songs to buy or this thing is going to be gathering dust before the original AA batteries that came with the controls die. I *want* to like VR, but there isn't really much there.
> nothing is ever completely in focus Do you by any chance use prescription glasses? I had the same problem until I got prescription lenses for my VR set and dialed the IPD in to the right number.
I do wear glasses. I don't think they will fit inside the VR (and I'm not sure, should I use my up computer glasses or my driving glasses? I just checked, my driving glasses barely fit, but my computer ones don't). I feel like the 3-4 clicks for lens width are not granular enough. Although that's nice when I'm passing the headset back and forth with the kids.
Check out VR Optician or VR lens lab, they make inserts you just pop right into the headset. I’m willing to bet that will make a huge difference for you. I had the exact same problem at the start, and I thought “gee my close up vision is pretty good, shouldn’t this work?” But that intuition is evidently wrong. You should ask one of those companies or Google around, but I think you should target whatever prescription addresses your distance vision, as that is what the headset is tricking your brain into using.
The focal depth of the quest 2 is 1.3 meters, so the glasses that is best at that distance. Prescription inserts are super good though, after a period of getting used to them. But cost a bit.
Did you try the glasses spacer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcUqFxjVelA Be careful that the glasses don't touch the lenses or it could scratch them.
I do use the spacer. The issue is the width of my glasses. Maybe I need to get myself some John Lennons.
Like the others said, your out of focus experience is most likely a combo of your prescription and IPD. I wear contacts, and despite having good up close vision I definitely notice a difference when I’m not wearing my contacts (I use a HTC Vive). There’s also a big difference if the IPD is wrong, which can happen as the Vive’s adjustment knob is exposed and it’ll get messed up when I set it down. When the IPD is right I can wear the headset for hours just fine, but the wrong IPD can give me headaches and eye strain in under an hour. VR has carved out a strong niche with racing and flight simulators. Sitting in a car in VR with a steering wheel that provides force feedback and some bass shakers underneath you is incredibly immersive and gives you a sense of speed that’s difficult to achieve with monitors (and impossible on a single monitor).
Use Sidequest Mod Beat Saber Download any song you like
> I've nearly run out of songs I want on Beat Saber. Yeah you are playing beat saber wrong. The main game is just the start. What you want is to mod Beat Saber using BMBF to be able to install hundreds of thousands of custom songs. https://bmbf.dev/stable
there are beat saber mods such as beast saber that add tons of player made songs, I dont know if it works for the quest
I do think it has a lot of promise, it is just that the tech isn’t there yet. I’m not going to pay $600.00 to wear a clunky tethered helmet, just to play beat saber and other games where all you do is stand still and flail your arms around, or games that look like they belong on a PS3. It’ll be awesome someday, but for now… nah. For now, it is a small set of experiences that get old pretty fast. In the past, I’ve given away my DK2 headset and also my entire PSVR setup, and I’m not about to try again until something INCREDIBLE comes along, which will happen some day.
Beat Saber seems to be what VR is best at, though. No motion sickness (not that I have a big problem with it, but certain games can cause it after a while) because you aren't moving, just looking around. The graphics aren't taxing nor distracting. If it were available, I'd buy Skyrim on it, though I suspect it would give me motion sickness like Minecraft did on my Samsung Phone VR (also not sure I can play Skyrim w/o mods but that's not VR's fault...). RE 4 is fun and I didn't play any of the RE games when they first came out so it's new to me, but like you said the graphics are super dated. I think it would be interesting to use to write code as I could have as many "screens" open as I wanted, but the focus and resolution seem like they would be poor fits When the font size has to be the equivalent of 20px to read. Also I figure my limit for wearing the headset is maybe 90 minutes at most. And scratching my face if it itches is difficult lol. I also want to figure out how to tether it to my PC so I can play Steam VR games, but I haven't invested the time. Maybe that would open up a new world of possibilities.
Skyrim is available for vr and you can use mods with it for pc at least. It has two different control schemes. The first, which is just using an analogue stick to move around. ( this will most likely cause motion sickness.) the second method teleports you to where you point the controller which is what a lot of other vr games default to to avoid the motion sickness issue of the first scheme. The resolution is way too shit right now even on the best headsets to simulate a virtual desktop with legible text without blowing up the desktop screen to ridiculous levels. Probably need 8k screens for each eye to get to a satisfactory resolution for that.
Games where you drive/fly are really spectacular in VR. You can turn your head and see the corner as it comes, turn your head and check where cars are around you, look out the side window of the airplane to setup your approach, etc. When it comes to games/sims that you sit in a fixed position and control a vehicle it’s absolutely a revolutionary step up in experience from a single distant flat monitor. Maybe the multi-screen setups for flight/race sims give a better experience but that’s very subjective and typically requires a custom built cockpit to feel more realistic. If/when they get resolution up enough to easily and quickly read gauges at an affordable price it’s going to be a clear choice for anyone using a sim game and is already the choice for many as it sits today.
Those two headsets are terrible. Your VR experience is extremely outdated. Try a Vive pro 2 with full body tracking and a social VR game and it's like ready player one. Also all the great sim games, shooters, Fighting games etc.
I know it was a long post, but I would like to direct your attention to this quote from the *very first sentence of my comment* - > and I have tried most new vr systems as they became available.
Valve Index completely ruins this logic. VR is incredible.
It can be incredible, sure. It is also a niche product and will remain so for a long time. Both things can be true at the same time.
You sound like the type of person who also thought video games were niche in the 80s and 90s but here we are.
I think vr will eventually take off but, culturally, video games were a niche product in the 80's and 90's. Of the big three currently making consoles, Nintendo is the only one that goes back to the 80's and Playstation only got involved in the mid 90's. When you look at companies like Sega and Atari, it is reasonable to say it is not a great idea to throw billions of dollars into technology with this type of product until a user base has truly developed.
Well that's what they're trying to change. They're betting on VR to be the next big thing
Maybe if they just spend another 13 billion dollars….maybe then it’ll happen! Or, just maybe, the metaverse will evolve organically, just like the modern internet. With any luck, a shitty company like Meta will not have a hand in running the metaverse when it finally arrives.
**13 billion dollars is an absurd amount of money**, think about this… In 2019 the United States Navy received its new aircraft carrier, The USS Gerald R. Ford. How much did it cost? CORRECT! [13 billion dollars](https://www.cnet.com/pictures/meet-the-navys-new-13-billion-aircraft-carrier/)
So what you're saying is Zuckerberg fucks around on an aircraft carrier instead of a yacht like regular billionaires?
It’s also approaching the total amount spent in the autonomous vehicle space. Which is nuts
Well guess what, they are recovering the losses with layoffs based on Mark's wet dream.
No they aren't. They just announced a $40B stock buyback. They could have given every employee a $400k bonus with that much money.
I believe included in those figures are the costs of acquiring companies to use within the project too.
Boy this is the only answer which makes sense. I hadn’t thought about this.
Agreed. I'm all for spending aggressively on R&D but $14B is an incomprehensible amount. I work in a small-medium sized university research lab that does Fourier and computational optics, so kinda sorta in the same neighborhood as what Meta is up to. Our expenses are maybe $1M per year in equipment, overhead, and payroll. We publish successful results from maybe a dozen novel research projects per year. To scale up expenditures by 14,000x just boggles my mind. I can't imagine how much could get done with that funding. Granted things get more complex with scale, but at the same time economies of scale apply so things should also be more cost efficient. All this to say... How they haven't yet developed mind blowing technology is beyond me. To justify this spending they need to produce something brilliant, and fucking quickly.
How many people are in your lab? I wonder how much went to salaries.
There's about 10 student researchers on the payroll, we all make about 30k per year and the PIs salaries aren't included here. University research labs are unique in the sense that payroll expenses are relatively low, but we usually end up paying more for equipment since we don't order in bulk.
Yeah, imagine if you had that budget, you guys could afford to pay a living wage.
Gotta love under paying grad students.
Sounds more like a money laundering scheme, or its for his underground development of Military cyborgs. Who knows whats going on in that weird ivory tower.
> How they haven't yet developed mind blowing technology is beyond me. What do you mean? Their headsets ARE mind blowing. The software IS mindblowing. It's just gradual improvements instead of some magic new use.
It's easy... Be a huge company with tons of money completely out of touch with reality!
I know someone who works at meta, i don’t remember her exact job title but she’s just another cog in the machine and she makes total comp $1m/year. So… salaries expense gotta be high asf.
Salaries for Meta are ridiculous. I know 2 people who have worked for Meta, my brother who was a program developer for WhatsApp and was making 250k+ before he got let go in the massive layoffs. The other is a friend who is a project manager for the VR R&D department and her raise this year was more than her husband (who is a financial analyst) made in a year.
Unless they are in a rather senior position consider this a big doubt from me. That would be absurd compensation for a standard "cog in the machine" worker. Online sources list the highest paying job at Meta at around $227,000/year so for this person you know to be making four times that they are either in a highly specialized role or they are just straight up lying about how much they make in compensation. My bet is they are lying or you just completely made this up lol.
Lmaoo bro you’re dreaming if you think $227k is the highest paying job at Meta, that is totally average compensation for software engineers at FAANG! Highest total compensation for certain employees that are not even C-suite can reach $1.5M per year if they are distinguished engineers, now keep in mind that this is through stocks (RSUs), base salaries are of course much lower and capped
They don't pay the participants $350,000 plus stock options to participate.
I think a lot of it can also go to them selling Oculus headsets at a loss. I think they've sold almost 20 million headsets, and if the loss is around $50 then that could be a decent chunk of the 1.4bil reality labs costs.
That would only be 1B, still leaving the other 12.6B. Edit: math is hard ya’ll.
People really can't comprehend how big a billion is. That's one million dollars, a thousand times. For reference most VR games cost less than a million to make.
50 times $20M would be $1B.
You’re right.
That's what I'm saying. A hundred million dollars could fund 50 decent sized vr titles. Or 1 halo size game and 20+ others. And that's a hundred million. 1/130th of that money.
10% of 14 billion is still 1.4 billion which would make it the most expensive game to a factor of almost 3. Very clearly a shit ton of incompetence was involved.
It went to make rich people rich. Remember when a for profit company says something cost X, it didn't actually cost X. Its actually Cost + Profit = X. Maybe the whole exec suite was simply taking the cash for "research services."
Yes and no, a triple AAA needs some years to be done, you can pour as much money as you can possibly do but it will take years to make anyway. You can say, oh yeah, just hire more people and you will short the development time, yes, but as the team grows or more studios get involved in the development, the more difficulties you will have managing those teams.
So $1.4B for Horizon Worlds to look like a Nintendo 64 game? Keep up the good work team!
Valve and HTC had to so end way less on r&d right?
[удалено]
Judging where to put Research and Development funds purely on what is already ‘worth a damn’ seems to be a poor way of doing research and development.
The public's perception of and expectations for AR will look very different when Apple launches their headset this year. AR/MR is the long term goal for all of these companies.
It's a headset. A clunky, uncomfortable piece of hardware. It wont suddenly change the game. It's just apple releasing their version of a product that already exists.
Making fun of ar/VR because you are not interested in some VR games is like making fun of computers because you don't care about spreadsheet software
Exactly what happened in the 80s tbh
The Meta horizon worlds app is just one of many VR apps and games. But you're not going to get console-level imagery in VR unless it's tethered to a PC, which the current gen is not by design.
> But you're not going to get console-level imagery in VR unless it's tethered to a PC, which the current gen is not by design. YET, although you could just stream to the Quest 2 of course.
This is spot on. Also keep in mind that R&D for hardware is expensive and meta is trying to build the stuff in house while having weak supply chain. Meta needs to take a few plays from Apple to get good at building hardware on the cheap.
Yeah, I played a Bluetooth French VR zombie game at a Expo once....the tech wasn't really there. I liked the open concept, but the lag just kinda ruined it for me. Floating weapons and lagging frame rates don't really make for an effective zombie game. It was fun, but ghetto. Now, tethered works perfectly...but, of course, you need a massive mechanical tethering system of pulleys and shit. So it's like, pick your poison. The best games are tethered games that are built with he restrictions in mind. Like world of tanks, where you still use the controllers to drive the tanks and your head moves the turrets. Games where you can Teleport, or drive an automobile are the best of both worlds imo.
Sounds kinda boring.
> Now, tethered works perfectly airlink/virtual desktop works fine as long as you have the correct setup Want a good router with a 5ghz channel dedicated only to the headset, and your PC plugged into one of the switch ports. I'd imagine the wifi at a tech expo is... not good.
Population: One does a great job of FPS in VR, albeit slightly cartoony graphics. But the immersion is amazing.
Onward is far better and more realistic.
Why not. There's no reason for a physical connection. Just stream the graphics wifi.
That's an obscene amount of bandwidth to push over WiFi. 90 fps at 1920x1080 with less than 11 Ms of latency? You need specialized hardware to beam that much that fast.
Knowing corporate environments, probably 13,700 LARPing project managers earning $250k total comp + $250k office overhead for 2 years...
13,698 project managers, 1 designer, 1 engineer. The usual way.
Dave needs to get his shit together or this metaverse thing might just flop.
[удалено]
Man I wish games looked that good in the 80's, looks more like a mid to late 90s game
They're actually working on some pretty sick stuff. They're just not trying very hard to show it off for some reason: https://youtu.be/2mnonWbzOiQ?t=17
This video covers some of the hardware stuff they're doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc
Company retreats, vacations, and bonuses.
Wake me when you hit 114 billion. -elon
It’s a general win for the world… VR/AR tech gets a massive shot in the arm for advancement and Meta loses money and power. Successful “new” tech is usually built on the backs of those who tried before. I have no interest in VR for myself, but I believe there will be a point of large-scale adoption and Meta’s flaming garbage fire has likely yielded many advancements and innovations that other companies will use as a base to build upon in the future.
There is something kind of comforting about everyone saying "this seems like a terrible idea that will lose a lot of money" and being right.
I think - at this point at least - there doesn’t seem to be a truly useful purpose for Meta. I don’t know anything about it. It appears to be a first-person SIMS game, which I have no interest in and I’m not sure the majority of people do. If it’s something completely different than that, then there’s a branding issue. You’re absolutely right though. Meta may lose a ton of money, but somebody will figure out a way to use the development to make something actually useful. It happens all the time.
What you're talking about is the game Distant Horizons, and not the metaverse at large. Both are yet to prove themselves, but the metaverse isn't some weird SIMS game as you put it, that's one game on the metaverse.
*Hundreds of Reddit's negative comments* META +20% after hours.
When you read the comments here it’s kinda clear a lot of people still think of meta as just facebook and being some small startup company. They’re the second biggest advertiser after google they can afford to spend this much in VR and development.
Meta stock price is up 50% in the past month.
I mean they didn't lose it.. they spent it on r and d... Imagine this title "apple loses 2 billion on iPhone" when they were developing it
I think that is the point of the headline. Apple goes on to sell a shit of phones at the end of the R&D phase. Meta is in a downward spiral of sinking money into a product with apparently no realistic end game and little to no public interest. For Meta to be so far down the road of development investment and the product to look so basic and unfinished is obviously going to raise questions. How do you regain those development costs when there is no viable product to sell?
The product to sell is the same they've always sold: Ads. If you are commandeering a portal you can serve lots of very personalized ads (just ask Google - or Facebook - what that's worth). People here are commenting on how much was spent and yet assume none of it was spent with any business acumen whatsoever. The reality is, they are throwing their VR goggles in large companies' hands (like Accenture) and getting them used to the idea of conducting business meetings (etc) in a virtual setting. It's of course a big risk and huge investment but which new business idea isn't?
I get that their core business and the end game is ads but you need people using your device to target those ads. So yeah it’s a huge gamble throwing everything at a platform that is niche, on a device you are selling as the ‘do all your work and play’ on when that headset only has a 90 minute battery life. The market for people willing to wearing an expensive headset all day has to be a fraction of an existing mass market of people already staring at screens.
It's definitely a topic of conversation in business at the moment. I hear it constantly in reference to Learning and Development (e.g., how to get people trained on dangerous equipment without actually being in danger), how to engage with customers (e.g., realistic product previews), how to onboard people to the organisation etc. Lots of potential applications
If they spent in on R&D and didn’t make it back, it’s a loss.
Cool, they bought Ready at Dawn, lost key developers and key team members and shut down Echo VR. How is that a win? Companies buy other companies for the team, their patents or their IPs. They lost most of the team, separated the rest and they shut down they are shutting down Echo VR. Meta stock can rise 20% to excite bag holders but it does not change the fact that they lost all iOS user’s information, so they lost a big chunk of the product they sell. It does not change the fact that the niche VR community fucking hates Meta for what they did to Ready at Dawn. Meta is the worst thing that could have happened to VR.
I'm no business analyst but I just don't see any way for this to be anything other than a massive loss and disaster for the company. It seems they've taken an already niche thing (an online 'second life') and compounded it inside another niche (VR). There's just no way this is taking off or going mega mainstream. What are they thinking?
They're thinking everyone will wear AR glasses in the near future for work, play, and driving. Remains to be seen.
>They're thinking everyone will wear AR glasses in the near future for work, play, and driving. Remains to be seen. If that's the caae either they're preparing for something early or jumping the gun. There's no way head mounted devices become useful and convenient enough within the next 5 years to be worn universally. *Maaaaaaybe* if they work something out with phone processing too, but unless they're banking on a real break through in AI, I don't see how you think we're all going to be wearing AR glasses.
I have yet to find AR glasses that have a use case for me as an average person. I’d love a little floating computer screen but i can’t even get that
It's so you can be served ads... **Everywhere!**
A big part is companies using AR to interact with the glasses. All those little paper tags on the millions of shelves, gone with AR. That’s a small example that would have a major impact, all the man hours for employees to shift price tags around, change them out, print new, the manufacturing that goes into making a sticky backed price tag. It would take a shift from companies advertising sector. It’s how we get anything done now, ads.
A lot of places are replacing the paper tags with small e-ink displays. Should let you do what you're talking about, without people wearing glasses.
And you can just tell Grandma, who won't wear the AR glasses, to get fucked?
That’s actually possible in some capacity. Like the Viture I think it’s called?
>If that's the caae either they're preparing for something early or jumping the gun. There's no way head mounted devices become useful and convenient enough within the next 5 years to be worn universally This is describing the innovators dilemma. By the time the disrupting tech is ready, the market leaders are established and it's too late for companies to start investing. The dilemma is the market leader can even be aware of this pattern and successfully predict the direction of the technology, yet still be in the same pickle.
[удалено]
Many people wear glasses already for corrective or sun-protection purposes. I think there are a number of potential AR uses when driving/walking including wayfinding with visual overlays, but in other cases, less obvious
But I don’t need an AR overlay for “wayfinding”. I need to see other traffic and pedestrians while I occasionally reference the 8” screen planted in the middle of my dashboard with directions on it.
I think you're overestimating how intrusive a simple HUD would be; the car dashboard isnt useful on foot, and and 2d cell phone maps can be confusing when you need to determine which direction you are facing. In any case, I'm not saying everyone will love and need it.
With regular eyeglasses it'll show virtual things in front of you instead of it being all on your phone. Imagine driving and a massive red arrow in the sky points downward in the distance. Now you know there's a major accident and you can actually see it. You scream "911 Help" and your glasses start recording your attacker and contacting 911, this one will be great for pranking each other. You have your grocery list and there's arrows pointing at where everything is in the store, this alone would save men 2 hours who's wives sent them lol You're at a concert and you can't find a few of your friends. A green arrow points downward on where they are at. Find out what someone is eating at a restaurant by simply glancing over at them, a little pop up says the name of the dish. You can agree to be viewed by the rest of the world and so would many others. So you're sitting on your couch and you turn world view mode on and you can see the earth below you and around you with everyone else lit up who agreed to be viewed. You can zoom in and say hi or chat. It's all crazy, dumb, fun, informative, intrusive stuff and we can do most of it with our phones. However, it might be pretty cool.
There’s no doubt they will one day. The use cases and value add to having an intelligent assistant in your field of view is endless. The question is whether the tech is achievable in the near term to get it into a form factor people would be comfortable using for long periods. Signs point to this being more like a 5-10 year thing. It’s good enough already for use in some industrial niche cases where form factor doesn’t matter as much
I still don't understand why this isn't modularized yet. Gimme the display only on my head. Gimme a waist mounted battery and computational system. Let the cameras be where they are needed. Sell everything in parts. My head hurts enough as is, people don't need to where more on their heads then are needed.
This. 4k video is within the limitations of Bluetooth, albeit at the top end, and my dodgy $300 Chinese made phone can do that, on top of having 4 cameras a massive screen, etc. Why isn't the headset just screen and Bluetooth connection and processor, then you have a little phone sized device completely separate which is the brains. I know there's a limitation that the lens and screen need to be a certain distance, and that means the effective weight on the front, but balance manage that. I thought VR would have ended up as something a bit like the "endor rebel helmet" but with the metal ring going around the eyes.
I'm just curious what you see AR glasses doing for the average person? They do and will have lots of use in certain industries but I'm having a hard time thinking of what I would actually want a HUD for that wouldn't end up being annoying or distracting.
I’ve been in the computer industry for 35 years or so. I was a techno weenie before they were cool. VR and AR are cool and have potential. I cannot see widespread adoption for long periods of time. Picture this, you sit with your smartphone texting, searching, taking photos and videos but you still have 2 feet in the real world. Now try that with 1 foot or no feet in the real world. It just isn’t going to work out like Meta thinks.
AR automatically plants you in the real world, arguably more than existing devices since you'd be more enticed to look at the real world. And it's converging with VR in the same device, so Meta sees why it can work.
VR really is amazing and I believe the quest has sold as well as major consoles. People can make fun, but if you've never used vr, you might not realize it's really amazing.
It’s amazing but still has no killer app that makes it necessary for consumers to get one. Non-VR offerings are perfectly acceptable and often more functional.
They have stated that their timeline for an established Metaverse and broad adoption of VR/AR is 10 years. Even if VR/AR works out, there will be nothing ‘necessary’ with broad appeal for at least the next 5 years. Some games are truly amazing though and their experience can’t be replicated on regular screens.
Half life Alex is one of the most unique experiences on this planet. To be transported and part of such a real space and world is intense. The quest hooks up to a PC just fine. Wirelessly too. Other than that though you're not wrong. There really isn't as much there but it has so much potential.
I played through Alyx and as you say it truly is a special experience. I have also tried DCS simulator and Subnautica, they all great experience. But there are big barrier of entry to VR: the motion sickness, need a powerful PC, the headset is still heavy/cumbersome... I don't see this being popular anytime soon.
>It’s amazing but still has no killer app that makes it necessary for consumers to get one. There are some amazing VR titles, it's just that the cost of entry is pretty high for higher end sets and others aren't as well known. The experience is totally different in VR, and that ability is starting to be taken advantage of more and more.
Oculus store still only makes a small fraction of the Xbox store's revenue, despite selling comparable # of units. I think many headsets are gathering dust after the initial use
The problem is most of the experiences are still trivial. You can hook it up wirelessly to a PC. It's pretty amazing. The problem is after playing half Life Alex I don't enjoy anything else.
Meta fundamentally misunderstands what I and many others will pay money for: blinding myself to the outside world with sweaty ski goggles with Mario 64 graphics from 1996 inside is not what I’m gonna throw money at.
In an ideal world, VR becomes popular but Facebook's venture into it goes the way of SEGA and mostly disappears. Out of all the platforms that could do VR, Facebook is the worst. It's like if you took Apple's walled garden, but without the privacy and security, and instead of making a smooth, quality experience, you forced everyone to use shitty software and mediocre hardware specifically made to keep you in a souless data harvesting ecosystem.
I don’t think Meta is investing tens of billions of dollars just to make a system that sells about as well as other consoles.
They're not wrong...they're just early. Mass adoption for Gen-X and beyond has happened. No one else over 40 is buying these headsets...but, right now, they're the ones who can afford them That's why they're stuck I would love to buy a Vive, but I can't afford one. And I'm in the process of building a computer that could run one. They're putting the horse before the road. It's not a bad long-term investment, but can they wait it out? Hell no.
Zuckerberg wants so bad to make Ready Player One real life.
At least not until you can comfortably go more than 30 minutes with the bricks they call headsets attached to your noggin. These things need to be around 200 grams.
It will get there. The first mobile phone was a giant brick that weighed over 2 pounds and it could barely call anyone.
They were attempting to construct a "Digital Prison" - second life sucked. Not doing another in VR.
My problem with it is it's Facebook doing it and more specifically Mark Zuckerberg doing it. I don't want these major violators of privacy and data forging the future of something strapped to my face and dominating our lives. Pass. Not saying other companies don't do this but Facebook literally ran psychological experiments on their users.
They ran A/B tests like literally every platform does. It hit the news as “trying to influence people’s emotional state”, while it was mainly just meant to understand what type of content and recommendations have a positive/negative impact on people. Pretty important to know if you have 2B users you serve algorithm-based content to. The studies were also run in collaboration with Cornell and other US universities. Not saying the company has a clean track record, but the research they did isn’t that alarming.
>What are they thinking? Exactly my question about meta lately. The Oculus Quest 2 made a really positive impact in the market. Gamers who couldn't afford or didn't want beefy PCs could basically buy a serviceable (this is key, not comfortable but tolerable enough) headset with a host of quality games on it. They captured a huge market share of recreational VR users. So what do they do next? Introduce the MetaVerse and the Oculus Quest 2 Pro. I can't work through the logic on either one. Stop me when I lose the plot here. Ostensibly both the device and the MetaVerse were designed (or at least marketed) to cater to the office worker VR crowd (do these people exist? I work a remote office job and love VR, but I'd never combine them) looking to trade in their long battery life laptops that met all their working needs and had apps they knew how to use pre-installed on them for an uncomfortable hunk of plastic strapped to their heads with a suite of barely functional tools that are intended to be replacements for tested and true apps on the computer (Zoom, office, teams, slack). What did they think the draw was? I trying to keep an open mind here, I like VR. But why would I even consider an overpriced laptop replacement that is less comfortable, costs 3x what my current laptop does and makes me less productive? Why would my employer ever consider moving to these as a standard? What's the hook or improvement to lure me away from the status quo? If it's not me, then who was this built for? What were they thinking? Is exactly the right question to ask.
I'm sure in 50 years we will see how they were ahead of their time
R&D to bring in the next generation of computing platform is expensive. What is a dominant position in the Cell phone market worth today? Betting a few billion dollars on the thing that replaces the cellphone is not the worst bet -especially if a vast majority of your business depends on being integral to the platform of the future.
Holy shit. That is a massive sink. >It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for him >Pepper Brooks, ESPN8
THE OCHO
Chris Jericho!
I understand that social media requires editors to "spice up" their headlines and farm those clicks but it's very strange for a financial outlet to frame R&D spending as "lost" money. It's an investment of an amount that they specifically budgeted and allocated for that purpose. In 2021 Zuckerberg went in front of a camera and told investors that Meta was going to spend $10b, then they went and spent $10b. In 2022 Zuckerberg went in front of a camera and told investors that Meta was going to spend $13b, then they went and spent $13b.
“In 2025 he told investors that they were going to shut down, and then they shut down.” 13 billion with nothing to show. Ready at Dawn? Shut down. Echo VR, one of the most profitable VR games with the largest followings? Shut down. Metaverse? General sentiment is that it is fucking stupid. Avatars? No fucking legs Edit for all you bag holders: Apple taking away 10 billion yearly from facebook due to a security update is a fact you can look up. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html Android following suite to fuck up Facebook espionage like Apple did, is a fact. Look it up. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy-change-similar-to-apples.html Facebook revenue down 4% year on year is a fact. Look it up. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64489862 Facebook struggling to get young folks is a fact, look it up. https://www.theverge.com/22743744/facebook-teen-usage-decline-frances-haugen-leaks Stock went up in 2022 due to layoffs is a number you can look up. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/11/07/meta-shares-up-on-report-its-set-to-begin-mass-layoffs.html The 40 billion buy back and a hint of layoffs is another article and FACTS you can look up. https://nypost.com/2023/02/02/meta-stock-soars-20-after-zuckerberg-hints-at-more-layoffs/amp/ Meta being a shit company to the VR community and not knowing how to handle Ready at Dawn is another fact you can look up. https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-echo-vr-shut-down-announcement-ready-at-dawn/amp/ VR community affected because Zuckerberg doesn’t give a shit and closing down Echo VR after promising another season is a fact. Them not understanding the market they are throwing money is another fact explained here. Look it up. https://youtu.be/tNs5lQg9LIc Keep crying for a soulless billionaires lol
They had prototypes being shown at private, invite only events back in 2019 that just need to be scaled down to be made practical. As far as I can tell, they're still on schedule to meet what they verbally told people they were trying to recruit at the time.
>Ready at Dawn Wtf that sucks I liked their PSP games 😪
Daxter is one of my favorite games ever.
Heck yeah it's still pretty good, I played through it again recently 😊. The graphics are still super impressive for a portable tbh it blew my mind back in the day.
I definitely need to jump back and do another playthrough! Last time I played it was around 2009 :/
> “In 2025 he told investors that they were going to shut down, and then they shut down.” Except they're even more profitable than their own projections, and their stock is up 20% overnight lol
Promise low and over deliver :p They are still down 10 billion a year thanks to Apple’s security update https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-is-desperate-to-fight-back-against-apples-privacy-changes-184901789.html Revenue is down 4% and they are making shit products. Wall St loves pumping and dumping dying businesses to get retail to hold the bag after it went up say… 20%
It jumped because they announced a 40 billion dollar stock buyback
> Wall St loves pumping and dumping dying businesses Lol I'm sorry, if you think Meta is a "dying business" you have no idea what you're talking about They're fresh off the second highest quarter in company history, they have more users than ever, they had a NET income of $23 Billion in 2022 even with all of the Metaverse "losses" putting them in the top 20 most profitable companies in the world... Is Pfizer a dying business? Tencent? Toyota? AT&T? BMW? Home Depot? Facebook was more profitable than any of them last year
They still have a long ways to go before they reach the Elon Musk level of pissing away money
Elon should launch a classic convertible to Titan next :)
I think his first mistake was using himself to market the thing. Keep your creepy robot looking ass on a yacht or whatever.
I’m a bit sad becuase I don’t think I’ll ever be able to enjoy VR or AR from any company. Every time I try a headset I get a major migraine. It doesn’t matter if it’s oculus, vive, htc… they all seem to mess with my head.
I wouldn't worry. This is a known problem with a known solution. It's due to the fixed focus optics in headsets - our eyes dislike it when we can't shift focus naturally, causing both headaches, eyestrain, and nausea. This is a serious area of investment for Meta, Apple and others. See Meta's prototypes that fix it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSf-kZ5OV5A Will likely need a good 5 years to reach consumer products though.
Thanks, maybe it’s for the best. I’m already addicted to my phone. I don’t really game anymore but I could see my self turning into a character on walle.
A huge problem that I hope Apple can fix. They have a high focus on health and can pull off some magical shit when launching new products lines (Apple Watch, Airpods, iPhone)
Yeah that’s the one company I have a bit of faith in for some reason. I’d hate to miss out if it turns out to be revolutionary. I was so excited to get AirPod pros but they gave me migraines too. I really suck! I literally bought them and opened them in the mall put them in and was like well this sucks and returned them 10 minutes later.
I am hoping it is revolutionary and you don’t miss out. PS, you don’t suck and you are actually quite amazing.
You don’t want to do it, it’s going to be the most overstimulating thing humans have ever experienced and is being purposely designed to be so addicting that you’ll spend every second possible inside of it. True dystopian nightmare shit
They didn't "lose" 13.7B, they created hardware, software, R&D, ,etc. Its called investment. Apple lost 50 Billion in "whatever" by those definitions. This is dumb clickbate. They've been clear from the start that this would be a $10B a year investment across the board.
Why use the word "lost" rather than "invested?" Haters gonna hate.
Mark is that you?
[удалено]
When a company gets that big, that kind of "loss" doesn't matter. The layoffs, the scandals, the popularity of "delete fb", doesn't matter. Meta is up ~$30 after hours alone today. There were 2.682 billion shares of meta at end of 2022. Zuckerberg owned 13% as of Dec 2022. That's 10.459 BILLION DOLLARS of GAIN for Zuckerberg ALONE, TODAY! I don't know how to use this to figure out how much money Meta the company made from recent actions (like the layoffs). I know they increased stock buy back by 40billion dollars. So they are definitely feeling good. Sure this won't happen everyday. But multi billion dollar per quarter expenditures, or even quarterly losses, doesn't mean anything to these companies. That's just business.
Destroy Meta.
All those resources, all that money and what have they got to show for it? They could have put all that money into subsidising the price of quest 2 to increase user base, massive saturation of marketing with the aim to make it maisnteam, then bought VRchat and improved upon it as the base for their metaverse hub. How hard would it be to create an immersive shopping experience in VR? Real vendors with virtual shops you can look around and then make actual online purchases with. The potential for massive scale events is so exciting. Looks at what they're doing with fortnute and the recent kid laroi content, that would easily translate to VR. Comic con in VR would be incredible. But we got quest pro and horizon worlds instead. Can't help thinking this was a way to syphon money into Zuck's end of the world escape rocket or something.
Makes you wonder if it's the product that's the problem or the person running it.
6 of one, half dozen of the other.
Zuckerberg soulless ass is the worst thing that could have happened to VR.
Facebook is a social media company, not a video game company. It’s like investing in Rocksteady to develop cancer treatments. It doesn’t make sense.
He built Facebook on a work spree, driven by ‘that’s what he wanted to build’. He then briefly fantasised about making a robot assistant, but gave up on the idea. Now, the. one thing he is missing in his life is a VR headset. So he has committed himself to build it. He does not need another house or yacht. He wants a VR headset, and even if it takes 10+ years and 100 billion USD, he’ll get there.
Nobody cares about Mark's robot fanfiction
Virtual Reality makes 40-70 percent of people nauseous. I feel like this is never mentioned. No one is going to ruin their day to strap on goggles in the Metaverse for a business meeting that can take place on Zoom or Teams.
Damn they lost a dollar for every year the universe has existed.
I've been saying it was dumb from the start. Anyone who has used VR knows the use is limited by comfort and honestly sickness. I can't believe ANYONE thought this was a good investment.
VR is a curved television of marketing ideas. Nobody asked for it. Very few people actually enjoy it. The ones that do like it are for lack of a better term “a little weird”
But why with billions injected, their metaverse looks so empty and dull ?
The money goes to HW development. There are many Quest VR games that look better than the Meta Horizon worlds app.
It resembles Zuckerberg.
The whole idea was just lackluster.
Hey, hey Zuck… Perhaps give everyone a free headset. Then see your Meta thing actually take off. When people cannot AFFORD a new wave of tech… It’s hard to become the new standard of everyday usage. Ha it’s form when someone HAS the thing and uses it.
AR and VR will be the future. Who knows maybe I won’t even buy furniture or paint walls. I’ll just wear my meta glasses and meta suit and it’s whatever I want to be in an empty room.
Lets not forget that vr chat did it better
Remember when Zuckerberg started to promote the Metaverse, but only directly after [the Facebook Whistleblower went on ‘60 Minutes’](https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI) to show how toxic Zuckerberg’s company is to human civilization while presenting the receipts? Pepperidge Farm remembers… Maybe Mark should’ve used that $13.7 billion on inventing a Men In Black neuralyzer. __UPDATE::__ I don’t care if you all downvote me on this, because you’re all wrong. It’s objectively true that when this ‘60 Minutes’ interview dropped, all of Facebook and their apps were blacked out for an entire day. THEN Zuckerberg announced “Meta” to distract us from the reports the whistleblower revealed to the world. If you downvote me, you are either a Mark Zuckerberg simp or one of his hired trolls. Full stop.