this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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We could talk a lot about how much Meta has been getting out of their investment, but ultimately they've not been spending that money on funding huge triple-A releases, and you can't buy your way into a platform's worth of content.
And yes, of couse profiting from the games matters. ESPECIALLY if you're selling the hardware at a huge loss, which is really where a bunch of those Meta billions ended up going. The idea was to get money from the games and the data funnel, but without software and hardware that people use daily both of those things dry up.
As for VR headsets being garbage for the VR monitor use case... that's not a design issue. The issue is that when I'm using a monitor I want to be able to also look at other stuff. If I want to check my phone, or read a piece of paper I don't want to be looking at things through a camera and a screen, let alone take a whole set of glasses off.
VR as a monitor is a bad idea not because the tech is bad, but because it's a bad solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You want to look at an image in space? We solved that problem in the 1940s, and that solution didn't require you to strap an opaque thing to your face.
Good passthrough is very much not indistinguishable from reality. That's why on my face there is currently a set of lightweight lenses instead of screen with a camera attached to it.
In fairness, you're not alone in being wrong about the issues with the VR business being about incremental hardware upgrades. That's a very costly mistake that a lot of very smart people have made.
But they're wrong.
It's not about the quality of the hardware or missing improvements to the features. The mode of usage, the application itself, is simply not a go-to, first-use thing. You're NEVER going to use a headset instead of a monitor. The quality of the headset doesn't matter. It's just not a leading application or a leading solution to the problem of having a display.
So no, Apple Vision Pro will not fix this problem. If I had to guess, they are aware enough of this to charge a ridiculous amount for it and see what happens before betting the farm on it like Meta did. And my guess is the takeaway will be that their branding goes a long way but people who do buy it still won't use it as their daily driver for eight hours a day of work.
That sunk cost fallacy right there is how Meta bled money on this until it was untenable to keep it up. Those goalposts have been moving for a decade now. First it was when the shipping version of the Rift got out, then when the lag got better, then when inside-out tracking was solved, then when resolution got better, then when the price was right, then when passthrough improved...
...it's none of those. It's the fact that you're in VR.
Being in VR is the dealbreaker for VR as mobile phone-like quantum leap in consumer electronics, which is what Meta thought they had.
It's not. It's a cool bit of tech with a gimmick that you crack out at parties sometimes. Or, you know, for weird porn if you live alone. I'm not judging.
That's a fine thing to be, but you need to spec your product to that target.
You may have to acknowledge that you're an outlier. Way off the mainstream, in fact.
The reason me and the rest of the mainstream will never ever use any type of passthrough in the way you describe is that you still have a headset strapped to your face. I don't know if you've ever tried to have a conversation with a person using passthrough, but no amount of creepy video of your eyes is going to solve that fact. It doesn't look normal, it's never going to look normal and you don't have to put up with being that weirdo because it turns out monitors are just fine and keep getting better.
So no, the endlessly moving goalposts of HMDs will never get to the bottom of the rainbow where they are a superior alternative to phones and displays. There is simply no feature tradeoff to justify -and I will keep repeating this- strapping a display to your face.
The few VR evangelist stragglers out there keep telling people to wait. You'll see, it'll get good enough any second.
But it already got good enough. The people that bounced off of the Quest did not bounce off because of quality. That's been my point here all along. The Quest 2 is, in fact, good enough for most people. They've certainly put up with bigger limitations on handheld devices or flatscreen gaming. Everybody who tries one for the first time has their minds blown. It's amazingly cool tech.
And exactly none of those people ever consider using it instead of their current screens.
It's an additive thing, at best, and it fits best for dedicated sessions where you won't be interrupted by kids or dogs or text messages or have to deal with a sweaty brow or scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses.
It's not gonna happen.
No, they're not old timey. That's the issue you get from, pardon my language, techbros sometimes. It's what deceived people into thinking say, crypto was a linear evolutionary process that would eventually replace other aplications doing the same thing. That's not how it works.
Your smartphone comment is a great explanation of why not, actually. Yes, we've all moved to tiny screens and low battery. Why?
Because the device solved problems that we wanted solved and provided features we wanted to have. It wasn't the tech. People were as crazy about the first iPhone as they are about the 15th iPhone. The tech improvement provides a replacement upgrade path, not a removal of the roadblock to success.
What people wanted from smartphones was a camera in their pocket, the internet available when they want it and a pocketable media player with good enough quality. That was achieved very quickly, now we're just iterating.
Nobody wants a replacement workstation from VR. That's not a problem to be solved. Nobody wants a replacement game console either, as it turns out (see the attach rate of the PSVR for evidence of that). Those aren't problems to solve with better tech.
When the smartphones started exploding the techbros applied that logic to talk about device convergence. "We won't have PCs anymore man, that's the past. Everybody is going to be just using their phones".
But nope, that did not happen. We wanted convergence with cameras, so cameras did get replaced. But PC workstations weren't. Because that wasn't a problem that needed a solution. The handsets can do it, look at Samsung Dex. But nobody wants it, so that's not an application that drives the hardware.
Instead, we got that factor scaled up to tablets, and then people figured a physical keyboard is neat, so we got keyboard covers and now the smartphone tech scales smoothly from a pocket device to a hybrid device to a laptop to a desktop. But the phone? The phone is still for what it was when it was first introduced, despite its limitations, because cameras and portable media were valid use cases.
So yeah, that's the fundamental misunderstanding. VR is good for sporadic "wow" moments, social gimmickry and a niche industry of gaming and... eh... 3D porn.
It is NOT and it never will be a replacement for workstations, TV gaming or smartphones. Because those are not applications with demand for a new solution. We already know that, the tech is mature enough to know.
Hah. I did not call you a techbro and I was not projecting cryptobro vibes on you specifically...
...but hey, I'm gonna say this makes sense.
Look, I've been warning people off wasting money in some of this stuff for fun and profit for a while and I've made my point.
Oh, wait, one more thing. You can absolutely use Dex with a normal USB dock, you don't need any additional hardware and you can absolutely carry any peripherals you need on a small bag and set up a desktop workstation on any screen, both wired and wirelessly.
That's neither here nor there, but Dex is pretty cool and the one thing I miss from leaving the Samsung ecosystem. I feel I owe them recognizing their good software after all the crap I gave Bixby. Still won't replace my workstation, though.