I'm bearish on VR generally, but admire a lot of the hardcore tech R&D Meta have been doing, and that Zuckerberg embraced being a total nerd and went for it.
But . . . their whole product direction in the last few years has been baffling, specifically "Meta Horizon" which is at best creepy, and at worst some nightmarish fusion of Microsoft Teams and the Wii Mii channel. They need to get this crap out of the way and focus on delivering experiences people might actually want.
sylens · 1d ago
Meta (and Zuckerberg) are nomads in the current tech space. They have no platform to call their own, so when a platform holder decides to turn the screws on them (like Apple with the App Tracking Transparency), they have little recourse. This is what the future would have looked like for Google if Android did not become a success.
Zuckerberg knows this and saw VR as a potential platform that they could own moving forward. It's why they have invested so much in it, renamed the company, and played for keeps making deals with game developers to publish their games on their store. The problem is that VR is a niche that will never crossover to the mainstream until major problems are solved with the form factor and battery life. Nobody wants a headset strapped to their face for a prolonged period of time. Even the most hardcore of gamers see their headsets collecting dust after a few months.
BobaFloutist · 1d ago
>It's why they have invested so much in it, renamed the company, and played for keeps making deals with game developers to publish their games on their store.
Do you know this from anything he or meta has explicitly said, or is it conjecture based on assuming rational behavior and working backwards to come up with the most plausible explanation?
Occam's razor still says to me that Zuckerberg just personally finds VR really cool and compelling, and decided to point his money-printing machine in its direction. Kinda like Musk and space or the Kochs and preventing local investment in public transit.
I really do think he just thinks it's neat.
fidotron · 1d ago
> played for keeps making deals with game developers to publish their games on their store
I know rooms full of games industry business people that would die laughing at this suggestion. It's in the same league as talking about third party support on the Wii U.
sylens · 1d ago
It's not great but when compared to the effort Sony put into the PS VR2, Meta's effort to support their Quest devices seems herculean.
bentt · 1d ago
Sony has never lied to itself that VR is a gateway to the metaverse. It tapped the TAM of VR gaming and saw it was small, not worth their attention. Rational actor compared to Zuck whose only goal is to dominate a future he is attempting to will into existence (which nobody wants).
karmakaze · 22h ago
This is why I believe Valve will win the space regardless of how slow they move. Meta's desire for VR/AR is incidendal, primary is 'the platform' they'll own and so it will never be as good as someone making it as a primary goal. Same goes for Apple's Vision Pro/Air who's reluctant to even call things VR or AR--I wonder what they'll call the games, experience apps?
apwell23 · 1d ago
> like Apple with the App Tracking Transparency
I remember this was a big news a few years ago and stock was battered for a while.
How come it didn't seem to effect their bottomlines and stock prices now ?
No comments yet
bentt · 1d ago
He has no vision other than “MINE”. He’s playing defense but nobody’s playing offense.
lvl155 · 1d ago
What did he actually create? Did you see any of his “protypes” he desperately showcased before Apple released the Vision Pro?
jack_riminton · 1d ago
What do people want?
juancroldan · 1d ago
As a 400h+ VR gamer, more fun games. No AAA stuff, not crazy graphics, just more incentives for developers to build unique experiences that might not be possible if not for VR. I don't think I've met a single VR user that bought the headset for a different reason.
arnaudsm · 1d ago
400h+ VR gamer too, I disagree on "no crazy graphics". The Standalone strategy of leaving PCVR made VR accessible, but killed game innovation entirely. The entire industry was downgraded graphically of 2 entire generations. Sure, there are wizards like StressLevelZero that can ship beautiful games on Quest, but most studios cannot.
I wish they hadn't abandonned PCVR, and kept pushing the boundaries of the medium like Valve did with Alyx.
atrus · 1d ago
No, the crazy graphics has ballooned the cost of games so much that it's hurt the industry. Making a 3d game is hard enough, throwing the additional complexity and intricacies on top of that would make it too expensive to be profitable.
Minecraft and pokemon have famously behind the times graphics and they've done well.
Beat Sabre and Gorilla Tag have done well on VR, and those are hardly crazy graphics.
Instead of Meta buying game companies and never releasing games, they should have bought those companies, seen how their pipelines looked for a successful release, and then developed software that streamlined those releases, making it easier for outside companies to release more and better games.
arnaudsm · 1d ago
Production budget != Compute budget. Minecraft, a 15 year old game, runs at 30fps on the Quest2, which will make anyone instantly sick.
Although I've had a blast on Minecraft in PCVR (but you need strong VR legs)
atrus · 1d ago
I wasn't using minecraft and pokemon as vr examples, but as examples of good graphics not being a good indicator of a game selling well.
BobaFloutist · 1d ago
It's interesting, because 3d graphics are already something that games do very well in 2d.
Is it because the platform is more resource limited, so you have to find a way to squeeze high-quality graphics out of less compute? And I guess I don't know that much about the technology, but I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one, so that might be a multiplier on the compute to get a given perspective?
I mean Nintendo is pretty well known for squeezing appealing and attractive visuals out of limited hardware, so I can totally see an argument for going for more BOTW/TOTK-style graphics than your CODs or your Gods of War?
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1d ago
> I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one
Yes, producing two camera views at a time and at pretty high resolution. You can get away with more resolution compromises on a 2D display sitting a couple feet from your eyes versus VR displays hovering just beyond your eyes.
BobaFloutist · 23h ago
Clearly we just need to make longer VR headsets so that the screen can sit several feet away from your eyes! I see no potential complications or downsides with this plan.
Or wait, even better: scan lines used to allow crts to do more with less. We should really look into using CRT displays for VR headsets
sjsdaiuasgdia · 22h ago
>Clearly we just need to make longer VR headsets so that the screen can sit several feet away from your eyes!
I think the current real-world version of this is called an "IMAX theater". Not very portable though.
foobarian · 1d ago
More like Blades and Sorcery! :-)
It's impressive that they still managed to brute-force a non-trivial size market for VR games. Having a headset used to be rare but nowadays at least in our neck of the woods everyone knows at least a few other people who "have a VR". Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration.
fidotron · 1d ago
> Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration.
The big question is why so many of these things are collecting dust.
In my case a huge part of it is resistance to putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today, along with how they've rearranged the UI, when all I want to do is fishing and table tennis.
foobarian · 1d ago
My charitable answer would be it's hard to break the chicken and egg cycle. Not enough headsets -> game developers don't target the platform -> no demand to buy headsets without games.
I have to respect how much they were willing to invest to try and break the cycle; for now it seems the headset count at least is nontrivial enough to get at least a handful of appealing games. Time will tell if that continues I guess.
(I found kids love to play Yeeps Hide and Seek. I would never in a million years suspect that would be a successful game. It's an MMO, and it has an interesting mechanic of defaulting to voice comms, which ends up with the kids forming an ingroup that rejects anyone who sounds "grown up". There are also levers to deal with griefing behaviors. I think is a great way to filter out the usual internet boogeyman the "creepy perv" types.)
zemvpferreira · 1d ago
That’s easy to answer: there have been no great new games since Beat Saber and that was 6 years ago. People go through a lot of trouble and expense to have fun, but there’s no fun to be had in VR for most.
cableshaft · 1d ago
Puzzling Places and Walkabout Minigolf would like to have a word with you.
They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content.
Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great.
That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.
zemvpferreira · 23h ago
I don't mean to say that there are no fun games, but they're just not good enough to drive $400 expenses. They're not Pong and they're not Mario. They're not even Fruit Ninja or Mafia Wars. And yeah, your counterpoints being 4 years old isn't helping the case either.
New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.
foobarian · 1d ago
As I mentioned above, Blades and Sorcery is my anecdotal counterexample. I will throw money at any new games like it.
smoothgrammer · 1d ago
Wait for Into the Radius 2. The first was a masterpiece as well.
delichon · 1d ago
Mine is collecting dust because something in my subconscious remembers the (mild) nausea when I use it and diverts me to something else. I think of it as a hind brain reaction, like a memory of a food that once made me sick. Is anyone looking for a good deal on a lightly used Quest 3?
glenneroo · 1d ago
That sucks, I think I know your pain. I'm also extremely sensitive (weak "VR legs") even after 6 years of developing for various headsets. Sorry to go into unsolicited debug mode (feel free to ignore) but have you tried any mixed reality games? Personally I have no problems with games like Eleven table tennis in MR mode, which lets you place the table in your living room so you don't have to worry about crashing into furniture (as much) and more importantly > 50% of what you see is color passthrough camera footage so your brain doesn't have to fight (if that's your issue). Also did you play with the IPD settings on the headset? That can also cause nausea if they are set wrong.
I always get nauseous with games where I'm floating or that use fake movement e.g. running, flying, jumping, anything my body can't possibly be doing right now. I find teleporting to be the least bothersome, and vignetting sometimes workable (esp. if I look upwards more than at the floor as it's moving beneath me). I always check for games that they are labeled "comfortable"... there's been a ton of crazy indie stuff coming out lately using various creative forms of mixed reality/passthrough which are much easier on sensitive brains.
foobarian · 1d ago
I found I am not highly sensitive to the VR disconnect but still found that there are a particular type of scenarios that get me nauseous in seconds - similar to yours but more narrowly isolated to motion that doesn't match balance sensations. I am fine with games where you run or float as long as it's in the forward direction. But I played some racing simulator the other day with rapid turns and sideways motion against the biological direction that took me an hour to recover from after having the headset on for a few minutes. Pretty big range of response out there.
fidotron · 1d ago
When I briefly worked in the field the conclusion some others in the studio had come to was it was acceleration that kills you, which makes sense in terms of matching our inner force detectors.
i.e. a fixed forward floating velocity is fine, but whenever it varies you throw up.
They had some rather extreme tests to demonstrate this phenomenon, and no one could last more than a second of one of them (bouncing around in a dune buggy) without tearing the headset off.
jerf · 1d ago
One of the slow and quiet phase changes in the industry is IMHO the broader recognition of how to create VR experiences that don't induce motion sickness, such as your example of "you can 'legally' move forward at a constant speed and no-one gets upset", which for instance Pistol Whip puts to good use. That game has never given me trouble.
I got into VR about six months ago with the Quest 3, and for a moment I wondered if all the talk of motion sickness was overblown, or maybe it didn't bother me. So I boldly downloaded a roller coaster simulator. Literally couldn't do more than about 10 seconds of it, even after setting up the blinders (which also effectively ruin the nominal experience anyhow).
So I do think the experiences are getting better about that over time.
However, the problem is, the resulting limitations are a pretty big deal in terms of game design. The VR industry really, REALLY wants to do first-person shooters. I mean, first person, it's almost right there in the name. But the technology that on paper is the very embodiment of "first person" also can't really do that. I've played a bit of Batman on the headset, with it set to 'normal' motion and navigation, and that rides the line of nausea for me, and Batman is really generally a slowly-moving character. I can't imagine trying to do a high-mobility FPS in the style of Quake 1. None of the "I really want to be a first-person shooter" games I've tried really quite work for me. (Have not tried Alyx, admittedly. Next sale. But even if that works, nobody else is copying it very well.)
So if you think of all the possible games, and then remove from them all the games that induce motion sickness, you've cut out rather a lot. Then you face the problem of, of the remaining games, how many of them are actually improved by VR? For instance, you can make a VR chess game, but beyond the initial "oh wow" of the 3D environment, chess is chess, and if anything the VR controls become an impediment versus the precision of the several paradigms for playing chess with mouse and touchscreen that already exist that are able to just fade away until you are just playing chess without thinking about the interface. The VR interface is always there.
The answer is absolutely not zero. Beat Saber, for instance, sure, nominally it could be done in conventional 3d on a 2d monitor and some motion controls, but the millisecond-by-millisecond kinesthetic experience is certainly a qualitative change in VR. It is The Game for a reason. But for VR to ever be more than just a niche, it is going to have to get to the point where it is nearly transparent. We're talking a "VR headset" that is basically the weight and encumbrance of conventional glasses. Maybe a thin wire that goes to a dedicated battery and external compute. If I had something like a dedicated shoulder pocket for that or something it might not be too bad. And we're a ways away from that still. And even then gaming is going to remain a niche unless someone finds a genre that works in VR, doesn't work well without VR, and basically doesn't involve motion through space, and I've got no more idea what that is than most game developers. I just can't entirely exclude its existence.
sandworm101 · 1d ago
>> putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today
For me, it isn't the accounts but questioning whether some update in the last month has bricked the thing. Between updates to my OS, my graphics drive, the games, or VR hardware itself, I inevitably have to go through a period of turning things off and on again ... holding the headset or waiving it in front of the sensors as I wonder if it will connect properly. I tried to use it last week, but rage-quit when steam told me it had updates for the base stations. Just ... no. I have better things to do.
h2zizzle · 1d ago
>Go to open field/park (irl or virtually).
>Look at your hand.
>There is a virtual Pokéball/Yu-Gi-Oh card in it.
Something like that.
OR
I put on my headset, look at my computer/call for my NAS. I ask to see my photos folder. They appear around me as I'd configured previously: as a mass of images that I can manipulate as if they were real, but also if I were psychic. I wave one over, pluck it out of the air, gaze at it. This is way better than scrolling on a tiny phone screen.
OR
People don't know what they want yet. All they know is that the offerings so far don't appeal to them, being some combination of geek-niche and corporate blandness. One or two or three megacorporations cannot build and control the successor to the PC and smarptphone ecosystems in the heavy-handed manner that they've tried to. Make the tech cheap enough for everyone to get their hands on and easy to develop for (even if you don't get a cut of every single red cent that passes over the platform). Watch the public weave miracles for you.
spicyusername · 1d ago
Walkabout Mini Golf is the only VR experience I regularly dust my headset off to return to with friends. Most everything else is either too gimmicky or is just not fun enough to make it worth the cumbersome headset.
VR is still really in its infancy, but with Walkabout I really feel like I can see the vision, can feel what is coming.
I don't know what it is about that game, but something about the graphics and the gameplay really come together to make you feel like you're inhabiting the space with other people.
ashoeafoot · 1d ago
Having meetings while walking? Not to be in office , but appear to be there.
markus_zhang · 1d ago
I'd like to have arguments reality. For example AR could be helpful for defensive driving. It could also be very useful for, say, reverse engineering a piece of hardware - so instead of taking a picture and get into a software, I can do it in AR glasses. I think it's going to be useful for many scenarios but it needs to be small and comfortable.
Gigachad · 1d ago
The only thing I ever hear people do in VR is VR chat. And that mostly seems to consist of virtual sex.
mrweasel · 1d ago
A very small VR setup, with a multi-directional treadmill, which can easily fold in under the sofa. Drop anything but first person gaming, just make that work.
Oh and make it PS5 and Xbox compatible.
Gamers want to walk Skyrim, or the Fallout wasteland, but if it's just a set of goggles on your face then what's the point? You could just get a bigger TV.
I doubt that you can actually do it, with current tech, but $60B and we're no closer? It's still just a set of goggles.
polotics · 23h ago
the only thing that would justify VR for me would indeed be the physical activity angle: a good omnidirectional treadmill to do my 20000 steps while gaming.
Beijinger · 1d ago
Porn?
spacebanana7 · 1d ago
The best thing for VR adoption would be for Meta to send out a few thousand VR cameras to onlyfans creators, and pay onlyfans a $1B to add VR video support.
This might sound expensive and wasteful, but it’s actually probably cheaper than the effort to improve gaming or hand tracking by a substantial amounts. Also more likely to drive unit sales.
elcritch · 1d ago
Porn is already destructive enough to society. Making it more immersive would be even worse.
spacebanana7 · 1d ago
Just wait until Meta puts targeted adverts in there too.
chasd00 · 1d ago
there use to be a saying that went like "no internet technology can be considered a success until it's adopted by the porn industry".
Der_Einzige · 1d ago
The only, actual objective way for VR to work is for it to be properly world-scale.
We need spaces/buildings dedicated for this, and we need setups and headsets from manufacturers which acknowledge this situation.
We specifically need users to understand that VR really means VR + giant GPU in your backpack (or I guess laptop in this case).
Seriously, this video came out 5 years ago, and nothing has improved what-so-ever with VR.
YesBox · 1d ago
I work in the video game industry and recently saw a chart on the predicted growth of AR/VR (as calculated at the time) over the last decade (i.e. updated predictions over time by various groups). The curves all start curving straight up at the beginning of the chart, and each successive year, they become flatter and flatter. The amusing thing is that the actual sales are drawn below all the predictions and it's basically a flat line (averaged out)
This is the outcome of flaccid antitrust/corporate tax policy.
rchaud · 1d ago
And also ZIRP, which put too much free money in the hands of too few people, who sank into anything that looked like it could pay off one day.
hokumguru · 1d ago
Decent number of materials scientists, etc that they’ve slurped up too
owebmaster · 1d ago
> This is more than the total funding of all modern fusion startups by a factor of 8 [1].
That $60B is like US GDP, big but inefficient. Meta spent it on bad acquisitions and inflated comp while those fusion startups are lean and actually build things.
HDThoreaun · 1d ago
Well meta at least has a product here and all the fusion companies dont
this_user · 1d ago
I think this entire "metaverse" idea is a trap. It's an idea that is very popular in fiction, and that makes tech people believe that this is something that should exist in the future. But the reality is that, from a user perspective, it just doesn't work very well, because it's not a good interface for most use cases for digital devices.
Why would I want to strap a clunky VR device to my head to enter a 3D VR to then awkwardly use a virtual keyboard to type an email? Why would I want to do a 3D VR call with low-polygon avatars when I can just do a regular video call? There are very few use cases where this adds anything. Even in gaming, it will probably remain a niche genre, because most genres just work better without VR, especially competitive ones where input precision and latency are crucial.
makeitdouble · 1d ago
The main issue could be that everyone's clamouring for a new smartphone moment, when no technology needs to be that.
VR can live on alongside tablets and desktop computers and be a healthy nichey market. It doesn't need to take the world by storm and there is IMHO no need for it to replace Zoom calls (to be honest, Zoom calls are already the bane of our life, why would I want to pay to do them in even more constraining ways ?)
Trying to find the "next big thing" in absolutely everything is a curse.
mountainriver · 1d ago
I agree, but at some point it will be as simple as putting on a pair of glasses. We are just a ways from that yet
this_user · 19h ago
That would lower the hardware barrier, but it would still not solve the issue that VR is not a great user interface in most situations, and I think that is something that can fundamentally not be solved. AR might be a much better bet, because that would have some actual utility in a wide variety of situations.
rchaud · 1d ago
You can put on AR glasses right now. Maybe the issue isn't "the technology isn't good enough yet". Maybe it's just not something anybody besides hobbyists and wannabe futurists want.
mountainriver · 23h ago
AR glasses are terrible. As soon as we have real feeling VR thats as simple as a pair of glasses, it will be a huge thing.
cryptos · 1d ago
You nailed it! The Metaverse reminds of the block chain in a tragical way. It is a solution waiting for a problem to solve.
immibis · 8h ago
Also we already have one - it's called video games
laborcontract · 1d ago
Facebook is one of the few large companies that's in control of someone who is able to take large risks and does that by way of R&D. I find this admirable (do not conflate this with "I find mark zuckerberg admirable").
Just look at what Microsoft did with Hololens. They bought it, chafed at the thought of a couple billion dollars of additional capex to make it a viable product and dumped the entire project 20 meters from the finish line. If you're going to do something, do it with conviction.
Whose money is this? The company's money and investors' money. Let them lose it.
Should I be cheering for them to instead to spend that money on streaming rights? Buybacks? C'mon now.
h2zizzle · 1d ago
If they'd taken that $60 billion and doled it out in free headsets to high schools and colleges (stripped of cynical phone-home functions and opened up for tinkering), plus a substantial number of no-strings-attached $10k grants, they'd have 50 killer apps by now. I know that they did smaller scale versions of this, but most funding must have gone to dead-end in-house initiatives like their "metaverse" offerings; Zuckerberg's lust for control will be his undoing.
Also, screw them for trying to co-opt the term "metaverse".
cmrdporcupine · 22h ago
Yeah, Meta doesn't want "killer apps" for a headset or whatever.
They want a "place" they control and monopolize to box people into and then feed them
cack and discourage them from ever leaving. Like their "social" media products, but even more immersive and totalizing.
Meta and VR is a good case study to keep in mind when people think only the government can be wasteful.
rchaud · 1d ago
Any large, bureaucratic organization will have enormous problems in maintaining an upward trajectory. This criticism is usually levied at government, but is outdated in the 21st century as there are now multiple companies whose revenues and workforce sizes rival those of many regional and national governments.
cmrdporcupine · 22h ago
At least when guvmint "wastes" money in R&D, the IP is often out there and available to people to do things with later.
Big companies will hoover up very smart people and employ them paying big bucks basically moving protobufs around in more and exotic ways, and the IP they generate is kept inside (usually).
LorenDB · 1d ago
I hope Meta can continue to develop and push VR, but they need to stop pushing Horizon Worlds so hard. They are ruining the overall experience by doing so.
unsupp0rted · 1d ago
I was listening to Zuckerberg's podcast interview by Dwarkesh, and Zuckerberg is incisive, intelligent and well-reasoned about AI and Meta's place in the new world order.
And then I remembered how hard he pushed all the VR/AR stuff just a couple years ago, just as incisively, going so far as to rename Facebook to Meta.
On balance I think I have ever more respect for him because of this flub: most CEO's, especially ones whose entire adult identity is tied to their company, would not be willing to pivot this completely from a lost cause to a smarter one. And of those, only a subset would be able to accomplish it.
Gotta give credit where it's due.
bredren · 1d ago
The name change and push were at least in part a way to change the narrative away from Facebook’s lack of data privacy, misinformation and platform harm.
Facebook was to Phillip-Moris as Meta is to Altria Group.
Part was a strategic realignment toward something zuck perceived as bigger, sure. And this kind of spend goes beyond what would have been needed to accomplish a rebrand.
hathym · 1d ago
That would go down in history as the most expensive and award-winning sunk cost fallacy study case ever.
No comments yet
margorczynski · 1d ago
The thing about Meta and other "Big Tech" companies is that even after two decades of being on the market the expectation from them is still to deliver constant growth and revenue avenues.
Meta had a stockpile of cash and Zuck took the bet with VR to be the "next big thing" and drive hype from investors. If it did pan out it would free him from Apple's and Google's grasp on iOS and Android.
disqard · 1d ago
The world's smartest and dare I say, wisest (for the tech space) people attacked this problem in the 90s: Jaron Lanier, Randy Pausch, etc.
No one was able to come up with a mass-appeal killer app back then, and no has managed to do that this time around, either. No, "Beat Saber" is not it.
I imagine we'll see Apple throw in the towel first (like how they got out of the self-driving car space), and then Meta will be left holding the bag.
I want to clarify that the tech has improved, plus lots of us geeks will continue to buy and enjoy such devices, but it is not a Visicalc, nor an iPhone. Thus, the Gartner hype cycle hump is gonna tank very soon, and big players hoping to sell millions of units every month will have to exit this space.
evanjrowley · 1d ago
They could probably make it all back if they partnered with From Software and LWMedia to bring Bloodborne PSX Demake[0] to the Oculus Quest.
Am I the only one distressed by the amount of good that could have come from $60B over 5 years if applied to a social problem, but was instead squandered on nerd fantasies?
makeitdouble · 1d ago
60B is half of what pharma companies allegedly sent back to their shareholders from insulin price hikes. There's better places to direct anger towards overspent money IMHO. At least some people are happy with their Quest 2/3.
> Novo Nordisk and Sanofi have seen huge gains as the list price of insulin has grown. The companies have collectively distributed a total of $122 billion to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and cash dividends over the period 2009-2018.
Don't be. That kind of money was never going to be earmarked for something in the public interest. Corporations get financing at 0% (or they did back then), so they can set it on fire in an effort to burnish their 'market making' credentials, while regular individuals and nonprofits pay 'market rates' for loans.
The only way it could happen is if Zuckerberg had a Bill Gates moment and decided to use his enormous personal wealth to at least try to do some good.
jstummbillig · 1d ago
"Lost" is a somewhat silly word in this context. All comparisons fall flat but: How much money did the Manhattan Project "lose"?
It's R&D. At the very least, the stuff that you learn guides other stuff that you do. It's of course necessary to do book keeping, but let's at least be honest about what can not be captured by that.
kyledrake · 1d ago
There seems to be this emerging consensus from tech leaders that people want to escape reality and go into a VR world or some flavor of AI focused singularity and I suspect they've miscalculated how much most of their users prefer to, or at least aspire to live a high quality human experience in the actual world.
andybak · 1d ago
Whatever if you think of the amount spent or the direction in general it's disingenuous to say "lost" when it's actually "spent". It was a deliberate investment in r&d and a pitch for a future platform. It's not a business that's desperately trying to break even every quarter.
I'm not a big fan of meta and I'm not convinced they've made correct decisions all our even most of the time but Zuckerberg has been consistent in saying that this is a long-term plan. (Weather he sticks to it or not here's a different question. The rise of AI and the looming antitrust threat might well change his priorities)
Changerons · 1d ago
A dream job working there, making the Zuck poorer every single day while creating the future !
rchaud · 1d ago
The CEO doesn't pay the price for losing billions, tens of thousands of workers do in the form of mass layoffs. The CEO meanwhile is praised for his "courage" in "pioneering a new market".
42lux · 1d ago
At this point you can be sure if it’s an original idea of zuck it’s going to be a dud.
xnx · 1d ago
That's such an inconceivable amount of money. They could've given away 120 million $500 headsets with built-in ads or whatever.
Shadowmist · 1d ago
Love the hardware, will never buy another for reasons such as the latest news around their Ray Ban smart glasses AI privacy policy.
andrewstuart · 1d ago
Once you’re lucky, twice you’re good.
Zack has always wanted to make his own ideas happen but hasn’t had any success doing so.
Beijinger · 1d ago
Well, few people and companies did. Meta, Google. Ebay is the main example. They owned Skype, kinda social network, they owned Paypal. eBay could have been Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, Zelle but always stayed...eBay.
Amazon is different. Went from books to total ecommerce to IT provider, logistics provider. Yet I hear many complaints about their service quality. They screwed me out of 40 USD that they promised to reimburse in a chat (I have the chat!) and then called it a "misunderstanding". People also complain about Amazon Prime on Reddit and why they canceled.
cmrdporcupine · 1d ago
$60B is an expensive mid-life crisis.
vincnetas · 1d ago
For you. And for me. But everything is relative. And to rephrase "time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted". Same goes for money i guess.
cmrdporcupine · 22h ago
Hey, if it kept some smart 3d graphics nerds employed doing neat stuff for a while... Good? I guess? Too bad it's Meta that owns their IP, though.
_joel · 1d ago
The Winklevoss twins would probably take issue with even once.
TheOtherHobbes · 1d ago
What's the opposite of visionary?
CyberMacGyver · 1d ago
Dillusionary ?
rchaud · 1d ago
status quo stooge
geor9e · 1d ago
They must be sitting on some really cool products that will come out any day now.
cadamsdotcom · 1d ago
Thank you Meta for not just putting money in safe investments.
HN you love risky bets, don’t you?? Isn’t the hacker ethos all about risk?
Why deride this - it’s just risk at the big boys table.
latexr · 1d ago
> HN you love risky bets, don’t you??
HN isn’t a single person or hive mind. Like everywhere else on the web and the world, there are many different opinions and views.
> Isn’t the hacker ethos all about risk?
No? I’ve never before seen anyone making that argument. Doing a quick search, I’m not still not finding sources which place “risk” as a mainstay of hacker culture.
chasd00 · 1d ago
> HN isn’t a single person or hive mind.
i really beg to differ on the "hive mind" phrase. Try to run counter to the the thoughts/beliefs de jour in any conversation on economic/government policy and you'll find out how much of hive mind HN really is. Recall the discussions during Covid of Sweden's approach to lockdowns. The rejection was swift and harsh to the idea of even discussing the topic.
latexr · 1d ago
> Recall the discussions during Covid of Sweden's approach to lockdowns.
I don’t recall those. Do you have a link? Preferably more than one, since there’s bound to have been more than one discussion.
Every time I’ve seen someone giving examples of HN agreeing on a stance of some contentious topic, I went back to the discussions and could find plenty of comments supporting either side.
Nevertheless, one example doesn’t prove a rule, and agreement on one subject doesn’t demonstrate a hive mind. I’m feeling confident that if a Flat Earth topic were to be posted, most people here—like most people in the rest of the internet and the world—wouldn’t agree with it.
Furthermore, there have been plenty of issues which have been flagged in which I disagree with the flagging, and they still contain plenty of conversation supporting either side. Sometimes it’s even reposted at a later point and it becomes a highly-voted front page article. It often depends on the day and time something is posted. There are simply too many humans on HN.
rchaud · 1d ago
Facebook is IBM now, this isn't hacker risk taking, it's a stodgy corporation with an out-of-touch CEO desperately trying to create "the future".
$60bn could have financed a PS/Xbox competitor and then some, but the genius thought it should be VR, something the mainstream consumer market has rejected over and over again.
Dlemo · 1d ago
With 39 Billion in spending and 30 Billion into humanity would have done a lot more to society
feverzsj · 1d ago
How much did their AI labs lose?
caseyy · 1d ago
At least they tried something genuinely new and exciting. I would say that is an admirable gamble. A real alternative seems to be buying a social media site to radicalize and enshittify it.
rchaud · 1d ago
Zuck the multi-tasker has managed to do both.
add-sub-mul-div · 1d ago
But by all means let's privatize government services, to avoid inefficiency.
But . . . their whole product direction in the last few years has been baffling, specifically "Meta Horizon" which is at best creepy, and at worst some nightmarish fusion of Microsoft Teams and the Wii Mii channel. They need to get this crap out of the way and focus on delivering experiences people might actually want.
Zuckerberg knows this and saw VR as a potential platform that they could own moving forward. It's why they have invested so much in it, renamed the company, and played for keeps making deals with game developers to publish their games on their store. The problem is that VR is a niche that will never crossover to the mainstream until major problems are solved with the form factor and battery life. Nobody wants a headset strapped to their face for a prolonged period of time. Even the most hardcore of gamers see their headsets collecting dust after a few months.
Do you know this from anything he or meta has explicitly said, or is it conjecture based on assuming rational behavior and working backwards to come up with the most plausible explanation?
Occam's razor still says to me that Zuckerberg just personally finds VR really cool and compelling, and decided to point his money-printing machine in its direction. Kinda like Musk and space or the Kochs and preventing local investment in public transit.
I really do think he just thinks it's neat.
I know rooms full of games industry business people that would die laughing at this suggestion. It's in the same league as talking about third party support on the Wii U.
I remember this was a big news a few years ago and stock was battered for a while.
How come it didn't seem to effect their bottomlines and stock prices now ?
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I wish they hadn't abandonned PCVR, and kept pushing the boundaries of the medium like Valve did with Alyx.
Minecraft and pokemon have famously behind the times graphics and they've done well.
Beat Sabre and Gorilla Tag have done well on VR, and those are hardly crazy graphics.
Instead of Meta buying game companies and never releasing games, they should have bought those companies, seen how their pipelines looked for a successful release, and then developed software that streamlined those releases, making it easier for outside companies to release more and better games.
Although I've had a blast on Minecraft in PCVR (but you need strong VR legs)
Is it because the platform is more resource limited, so you have to find a way to squeeze high-quality graphics out of less compute? And I guess I don't know that much about the technology, but I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one, so that might be a multiplier on the compute to get a given perspective?
I mean Nintendo is pretty well known for squeezing appealing and attractive visuals out of limited hardware, so I can totally see an argument for going for more BOTW/TOTK-style graphics than your CODs or your Gods of War?
Yes, producing two camera views at a time and at pretty high resolution. You can get away with more resolution compromises on a 2D display sitting a couple feet from your eyes versus VR displays hovering just beyond your eyes.
Or wait, even better: scan lines used to allow crts to do more with less. We should really look into using CRT displays for VR headsets
I think the current real-world version of this is called an "IMAX theater". Not very portable though.
It's impressive that they still managed to brute-force a non-trivial size market for VR games. Having a headset used to be rare but nowadays at least in our neck of the woods everyone knows at least a few other people who "have a VR". Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration.
The big question is why so many of these things are collecting dust.
In my case a huge part of it is resistance to putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today, along with how they've rearranged the UI, when all I want to do is fishing and table tennis.
I have to respect how much they were willing to invest to try and break the cycle; for now it seems the headset count at least is nontrivial enough to get at least a handful of appealing games. Time will tell if that continues I guess.
(I found kids love to play Yeeps Hide and Seek. I would never in a million years suspect that would be a successful game. It's an MMO, and it has an interesting mechanic of defaulting to voice comms, which ends up with the kids forming an ingroup that rejects anyone who sounds "grown up". There are also levers to deal with griefing behaviors. I think is a great way to filter out the usual internet boogeyman the "creepy perv" types.)
They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content.
Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great.
That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.
New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.
I always get nauseous with games where I'm floating or that use fake movement e.g. running, flying, jumping, anything my body can't possibly be doing right now. I find teleporting to be the least bothersome, and vignetting sometimes workable (esp. if I look upwards more than at the floor as it's moving beneath me). I always check for games that they are labeled "comfortable"... there's been a ton of crazy indie stuff coming out lately using various creative forms of mixed reality/passthrough which are much easier on sensitive brains.
i.e. a fixed forward floating velocity is fine, but whenever it varies you throw up.
They had some rather extreme tests to demonstrate this phenomenon, and no one could last more than a second of one of them (bouncing around in a dune buggy) without tearing the headset off.
I got into VR about six months ago with the Quest 3, and for a moment I wondered if all the talk of motion sickness was overblown, or maybe it didn't bother me. So I boldly downloaded a roller coaster simulator. Literally couldn't do more than about 10 seconds of it, even after setting up the blinders (which also effectively ruin the nominal experience anyhow).
So I do think the experiences are getting better about that over time.
However, the problem is, the resulting limitations are a pretty big deal in terms of game design. The VR industry really, REALLY wants to do first-person shooters. I mean, first person, it's almost right there in the name. But the technology that on paper is the very embodiment of "first person" also can't really do that. I've played a bit of Batman on the headset, with it set to 'normal' motion and navigation, and that rides the line of nausea for me, and Batman is really generally a slowly-moving character. I can't imagine trying to do a high-mobility FPS in the style of Quake 1. None of the "I really want to be a first-person shooter" games I've tried really quite work for me. (Have not tried Alyx, admittedly. Next sale. But even if that works, nobody else is copying it very well.)
So if you think of all the possible games, and then remove from them all the games that induce motion sickness, you've cut out rather a lot. Then you face the problem of, of the remaining games, how many of them are actually improved by VR? For instance, you can make a VR chess game, but beyond the initial "oh wow" of the 3D environment, chess is chess, and if anything the VR controls become an impediment versus the precision of the several paradigms for playing chess with mouse and touchscreen that already exist that are able to just fade away until you are just playing chess without thinking about the interface. The VR interface is always there.
The answer is absolutely not zero. Beat Saber, for instance, sure, nominally it could be done in conventional 3d on a 2d monitor and some motion controls, but the millisecond-by-millisecond kinesthetic experience is certainly a qualitative change in VR. It is The Game for a reason. But for VR to ever be more than just a niche, it is going to have to get to the point where it is nearly transparent. We're talking a "VR headset" that is basically the weight and encumbrance of conventional glasses. Maybe a thin wire that goes to a dedicated battery and external compute. If I had something like a dedicated shoulder pocket for that or something it might not be too bad. And we're a ways away from that still. And even then gaming is going to remain a niche unless someone finds a genre that works in VR, doesn't work well without VR, and basically doesn't involve motion through space, and I've got no more idea what that is than most game developers. I just can't entirely exclude its existence.
For me, it isn't the accounts but questioning whether some update in the last month has bricked the thing. Between updates to my OS, my graphics drive, the games, or VR hardware itself, I inevitably have to go through a period of turning things off and on again ... holding the headset or waiving it in front of the sensors as I wonder if it will connect properly. I tried to use it last week, but rage-quit when steam told me it had updates for the base stations. Just ... no. I have better things to do.
>Look at your hand.
>There is a virtual Pokéball/Yu-Gi-Oh card in it.
Something like that.
OR
I put on my headset, look at my computer/call for my NAS. I ask to see my photos folder. They appear around me as I'd configured previously: as a mass of images that I can manipulate as if they were real, but also if I were psychic. I wave one over, pluck it out of the air, gaze at it. This is way better than scrolling on a tiny phone screen.
OR
People don't know what they want yet. All they know is that the offerings so far don't appeal to them, being some combination of geek-niche and corporate blandness. One or two or three megacorporations cannot build and control the successor to the PC and smarptphone ecosystems in the heavy-handed manner that they've tried to. Make the tech cheap enough for everyone to get their hands on and easy to develop for (even if you don't get a cut of every single red cent that passes over the platform). Watch the public weave miracles for you.
VR is still really in its infancy, but with Walkabout I really feel like I can see the vision, can feel what is coming.
I don't know what it is about that game, but something about the graphics and the gameplay really come together to make you feel like you're inhabiting the space with other people.
Oh and make it PS5 and Xbox compatible.
Gamers want to walk Skyrim, or the Fallout wasteland, but if it's just a set of goggles on your face then what's the point? You could just get a bigger TV.
I doubt that you can actually do it, with current tech, but $60B and we're no closer? It's still just a set of goggles.
This might sound expensive and wasteful, but it’s actually probably cheaper than the effort to improve gaming or hand tracking by a substantial amounts. Also more likely to drive unit sales.
We need spaces/buildings dedicated for this, and we need setups and headsets from manufacturers which acknowledge this situation.
We specifically need users to understand that VR really means VR + giant GPU in your backpack (or I guess laptop in this case).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM
Seriously, this video came out 5 years ago, and nothing has improved what-so-ever with VR.
Source (Page 48): https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
Im really curious what Meta/Apple/Microsoft are predicting for the future
Gonna put that in my pocket to pull out next time someone is touting a consultant’s overly rosy market forecast.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/every-fusion-startup-that-...
That $60B is like US GDP, big but inefficient. Meta spent it on bad acquisitions and inflated comp while those fusion startups are lean and actually build things.
Why would I want to strap a clunky VR device to my head to enter a 3D VR to then awkwardly use a virtual keyboard to type an email? Why would I want to do a 3D VR call with low-polygon avatars when I can just do a regular video call? There are very few use cases where this adds anything. Even in gaming, it will probably remain a niche genre, because most genres just work better without VR, especially competitive ones where input precision and latency are crucial.
VR can live on alongside tablets and desktop computers and be a healthy nichey market. It doesn't need to take the world by storm and there is IMHO no need for it to replace Zoom calls (to be honest, Zoom calls are already the bane of our life, why would I want to pay to do them in even more constraining ways ?)
Trying to find the "next big thing" in absolutely everything is a curse.
Just look at what Microsoft did with Hololens. They bought it, chafed at the thought of a couple billion dollars of additional capex to make it a viable product and dumped the entire project 20 meters from the finish line. If you're going to do something, do it with conviction.
Whose money is this? The company's money and investors' money. Let them lose it.
Should I be cheering for them to instead to spend that money on streaming rights? Buybacks? C'mon now.
Also, screw them for trying to co-opt the term "metaverse".
They want a "place" they control and monopolize to box people into and then feed them cack and discourage them from ever leaving. Like their "social" media products, but even more immersive and totalizing.
Meta and VR is a good case study to keep in mind when people think only the government can be wasteful.
Big companies will hoover up very smart people and employ them paying big bucks basically moving protobufs around in more and exotic ways, and the IP they generate is kept inside (usually).
And then I remembered how hard he pushed all the VR/AR stuff just a couple years ago, just as incisively, going so far as to rename Facebook to Meta.
On balance I think I have ever more respect for him because of this flub: most CEO's, especially ones whose entire adult identity is tied to their company, would not be willing to pivot this completely from a lost cause to a smarter one. And of those, only a subset would be able to accomplish it.
Gotta give credit where it's due.
Facebook was to Phillip-Moris as Meta is to Altria Group.
Part was a strategic realignment toward something zuck perceived as bigger, sure. And this kind of spend goes beyond what would have been needed to accomplish a rebrand.
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Meta had a stockpile of cash and Zuck took the bet with VR to be the "next big thing" and drive hype from investors. If it did pan out it would free him from Apple's and Google's grasp on iOS and Android.
No one was able to come up with a mass-appeal killer app back then, and no has managed to do that this time around, either. No, "Beat Saber" is not it.
I imagine we'll see Apple throw in the towel first (like how they got out of the self-driving car space), and then Meta will be left holding the bag.
I want to clarify that the tech has improved, plus lots of us geeks will continue to buy and enjoy such devices, but it is not a Visicalc, nor an iPhone. Thus, the Gartner hype cycle hump is gonna tank very soon, and big players hoping to sell millions of units every month will have to exit this space.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQb6MEBNqd8
> Novo Nordisk and Sanofi have seen huge gains as the list price of insulin has grown. The companies have collectively distributed a total of $122 billion to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and cash dividends over the period 2009-2018.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/who-benefits...
The only way it could happen is if Zuckerberg had a Bill Gates moment and decided to use his enormous personal wealth to at least try to do some good.
It's R&D. At the very least, the stuff that you learn guides other stuff that you do. It's of course necessary to do book keeping, but let's at least be honest about what can not be captured by that.
I'm not a big fan of meta and I'm not convinced they've made correct decisions all our even most of the time but Zuckerberg has been consistent in saying that this is a long-term plan. (Weather he sticks to it or not here's a different question. The rise of AI and the looming antitrust threat might well change his priorities)
Zack has always wanted to make his own ideas happen but hasn’t had any success doing so.
Amazon is different. Went from books to total ecommerce to IT provider, logistics provider. Yet I hear many complaints about their service quality. They screwed me out of 40 USD that they promised to reimburse in a chat (I have the chat!) and then called it a "misunderstanding". People also complain about Amazon Prime on Reddit and why they canceled.
HN you love risky bets, don’t you?? Isn’t the hacker ethos all about risk?
Why deride this - it’s just risk at the big boys table.
HN isn’t a single person or hive mind. Like everywhere else on the web and the world, there are many different opinions and views.
> Isn’t the hacker ethos all about risk?
No? I’ve never before seen anyone making that argument. Doing a quick search, I’m not still not finding sources which place “risk” as a mainstay of hacker culture.
i really beg to differ on the "hive mind" phrase. Try to run counter to the the thoughts/beliefs de jour in any conversation on economic/government policy and you'll find out how much of hive mind HN really is. Recall the discussions during Covid of Sweden's approach to lockdowns. The rejection was swift and harsh to the idea of even discussing the topic.
I don’t recall those. Do you have a link? Preferably more than one, since there’s bound to have been more than one discussion.
Every time I’ve seen someone giving examples of HN agreeing on a stance of some contentious topic, I went back to the discussions and could find plenty of comments supporting either side.
Nevertheless, one example doesn’t prove a rule, and agreement on one subject doesn’t demonstrate a hive mind. I’m feeling confident that if a Flat Earth topic were to be posted, most people here—like most people in the rest of the internet and the world—wouldn’t agree with it.
Furthermore, there have been plenty of issues which have been flagged in which I disagree with the flagging, and they still contain plenty of conversation supporting either side. Sometimes it’s even reposted at a later point and it becomes a highly-voted front page article. It often depends on the day and time something is posted. There are simply too many humans on HN.
$60bn could have financed a PS/Xbox competitor and then some, but the genius thought it should be VR, something the mainstream consumer market has rejected over and over again.