The data I'm looking at makes the Facebook decision a little more sensical.
Yes there was a Big Spike in VR interest around Oculus, and most of the people who bought one have it sitting in a corner collecting dust...
But a significant subset of people continued to use it, and their usage is steadily growing. There are huge numbers of people willing to pay $500 -$2k, on each new device that comes out, just to "see if its ready".
There are tons of people who work from home on a couple monitors, who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. Obviously the comfort, battery, and visual performance is not there yet, but most people have a feeling that would could just be a generation or two away from it.
I would guess that more than 50% of hacker news readers over 40 years old had an MP3 player BEFORE the iPod. They were all garbage and completely replaced when the iPod came out, but for the 2-3 years before the iPod, all the early adopters new something like that was coming and they were hungry for it.
All the Oculus hype was based on the promise of a $300 headset. The amount of people that are willing to pay $500-$2k is rather tiny (<< 1 million), especially with a near complete lack of AAA game content.
Meanwhile the VR-as-monitor replacement fails due to the low resolution. VR headsets by design waste a ton of resolution to get a larger FOV. That's good for immersion and gaming, but renders desktop use impossible. It's possible to build headsets with a small FOV and high resolution, such as what Nreal is doing, but that's not something Meta is focusing on. Worse yet, they kind of pretended that the QuestPro was ready for that use case, but it's not even close.
I do agree that there is potential in VR, but Meta has been focusing on all the wrong things. They were far more concerned with gaining total control over the space then they are were about making VR actually worth having. Nobody is looking at Horizon World and goes "I wanna have that", it not only looks terrible compared to stuff we have outside of VR, it even looks terrible compared to all the non-Meta stuff we have in VR.
> who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls.
I saw that in the tech demo last year and would agree with that sentiment. Yet I wouldn't want to wear headset for a full day to achieve that.
No, they weren't. There were excellent ones. What they lacked was enough storage to carry your entire music library with you -- that was the problem the iPod addressed.
But in terms of playing music, the iPod was not exceptional.
Yes there was a Big Spike in VR interest around Oculus, and most of the people who bought one have it sitting in a corner collecting dust...
But a significant subset of people continued to use it, and their usage is steadily growing. There are huge numbers of people willing to pay $500 -$2k, on each new device that comes out, just to "see if its ready".
There are tons of people who work from home on a couple monitors, who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. Obviously the comfort, battery, and visual performance is not there yet, but most people have a feeling that would could just be a generation or two away from it.
I would guess that more than 50% of hacker news readers over 40 years old had an MP3 player BEFORE the iPod. They were all garbage and completely replaced when the iPod came out, but for the 2-3 years before the iPod, all the early adopters new something like that was coming and they were hungry for it.
I feel that's exactly where VR is.