- cross-posted to:
- hardware
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- hardware
- technology
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I expected it would lead to worse services, worse support, and worse privacy.
Well, they have changed the world, they have ruined the perfectly good term metaverse with their failed product.
Despite their company name, they have nothing actually called metaverse. Their entry in the metaverse category is called horizons.
They also ruined Oculus by not supporting my Rift S anymore, and forcing everyone to move over to Meta accounts.
I literally will never purchase an Oculus again. I owned a DK1 and a DK2, then skipped the CV1 for the Rift S. I am done with Oculus now, maybe I will look at HTC or some other HMD instead if I ever need to replace my Rift S.
Wait, so the original Rift is useless? Like, I can finally toss it out and stop trying to sell it to someone?
the idea that Oculus could change the world died the moment fuckerberg decided to buy it
It’s just not ready yet. Vr in general is too awkward, inconvenient and expensive. The stuff that’s available now can be a lot of fun, but it’s a long way from where it needs to be, to “change the world”. And yeah, I wouldn’t want it for free since the acquisition.
fuckerberg
I prefer Zuckerfuck.
Fuckerberg sounds like you hate ice bergs, and it’s a “cute” pun.
Where Zuckerfuck where you clearly hate Zuckerberg so much, you want to say his name incorrectly out of spite.
No, the article title says expectations were that Facebook would change the world by buying Oculus. Which is obviously a stupid take, and even more obviously didn’t happen…
They injected a ton of money into it. Hard to say where it would be now without that money. Sure alot of people don’t want to buy a headset from them, but they are pioneering alot of tech that eventually proliferates. So even if you never buy a meta headset, VR as a whole did still benefit.
There are about 30 games alone that wouldn’t have been made, or would have had to have been kickstarted, most of them are still some of the best VR games to have been made. But the games are only a very small part of the money they have spent. Their R and D for VR is nuts. Like 90% of what a modern VR headset is made of has come from their money. There is a reason every other headset feels like it’s one generation behind all the time.
Buying up game developers to make them exclusives and selling hardware at a loss to stifle competitors is the only “benefit” their money has produced. This is a net negative for VR as a whole.
Like 90% of what a modern VR headset is made of has come from their money.
Like what? I can’t think of a single invention they pioneered that’s used in their own headsets, let alone everyone else’s.
Major one being inside out tracking, it was the whole reason for the division that led to them and the team at valve separating back in the day. What was then Oculus wanted to focus on computer vision tracking, rather than laser tracking because computer vision tracking had the better future, and wouldn’t take long before it surpassed where laser tracking was at anyway. But it also was the path forward to make inside out tracking possible any time soon.
They had to optimize the processor use of computer vision based tracking down to the point that not only could a mobile chip handle it, but a co-processor to a mobile chip. That optimization would have easily taken a decade longer without the compute power facebook had access to, to process all the data and machine learn better and better algorithms. Hand tracking was also insanely accelerated by the same. Notice how crappy the hand tracking is on literally everything else? Even the Apple Vision pro with their quadruple camera res have a hard time tracking hands anywhere near as accurately despite a significantly clearer image and infrared projection, and laptop levels of processing power. Not to mention, they rely on hand tracking only, as they have no other method of input/control. Their hand tracking should be awesome if it was easy to do. It’s not easy, and yet meta headsets make it look easy.
Pancake lenses are downright one of the most important advances in VR headsets lately. If you haven’t tried a headset with pancake lenses, get to an electronics store and do a demo with either the Quest pro or the Quest 3. The clarity is insane, and the total light retained is so high, the screens all of a sudden look 30% brighter. With no distracting artifacts.
The pro controllers optical reckoning is definitely the way of the future. It’s still a little expensive now, so you won’t see it in cheap headsets yet. But it won’t be long before that is just the right way to do controllers. They track just as accurately, except the headset doesn’t need to be able to see them. So you can aim a bow for more than a few seconds, or have your hands down at your sides when relaxing. There are a whole bunch of game mechanics that can’t currently be used in standalone VR games as opposed to PCVR because most controllers can’t be tracked in many locations.
They funded the creation, and took part in the design of -the- mobile XR chipset, and the second one. Almost all headsets use it now, rather than funding one of their own.
The way passthrough works on good headsets, recreating the world around you in 3D from the camera feeds, so that things can be properly occluded by and occlude stuff that is created by the headset. Would again have taken so much longer without access to the processing power at facebook. For now, it isn’t even on the released version of the headset software, it is still in internal testing for the most part, but it’s getting close. And it’s gonna be huge for mixed reality.
There are a bunch more individual pieces of headsets that still either wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be cheap enough to make yet without meta’s R and D money. And a bunch more coming soon.
Here’s the thing, I hate meta just as much as anyone else. But I want the best hardware, you really can’t get it anywhere else, and it might be a long time before that changes. When it changes, I will buy that instead. I don’t need old games from my old headsets to carry forward to the new one. At the time, I’ll be playing 2 or 3 games at most, and I can choose if I want to buy those for the new headset or finish them on the current headset. Just like old consoles, if I want to play those old games again, I can either play them on the old console/headset or wait until there is a way to emulate old games on the new hardware. Or a remake.
And to address your other point about the exclusives, yes they bought some studios, but they also put a ton of money into other games without requiring the games to be exclusive to Oculus/meta headsets or stores, only to make sure there was at least a version for their headsets and store. Those companies could have made versions or ports for other stores and hardware, and many did. Some didn’t, as those versions didn’t get funded.
I stopped reading when you implied that Facebook invented pancake optics. They have been used in cameras for decades. And while I agree they’re the way forward in the future, saying they let more light in is factually incorrect: they only let about 10-15% of the light through. This page has a good overview of why that is and how they work.
Ok, well I guess I’m sorry I fell into your trap and got one thing wrong. You wanted me to list a bunch of stuff off the top of my head, I’m just some random guy. It doesn’t matter if the rest is right, I failed your test. I assumed since all the headsets with pancake lenses were so much brighter than the old ones without worse battery life that it must let more light through than the previous lens types did. But I guess it was some other advance in some other tech that let them run the screens 10x as bright at the same battery cost.
And I’m not sure what part made it sound like I thought they invented the very idea of pancake lenses. You wanted me to list the innovations they brought to VR. And making pancake lenses affordable for VR is very much a thing they did, by spending money. The money spent went to a company that was making them for other applications. But it was still money spent by meta to bring them to VR.
What? I didn’t want you to list a bunch of things off the top of your head. I asked for one factual thing, and you instead you provided a bunch of assumptions. If you can’t provide actual facts maybe just don’t state guesses like they’re true?
The moment they made you use Facebook to sign in was the moment I decided I’ll never buy one of those.
They dropped that requirement so I got it for my kids.
I just set up a Quest Pro and couldn’t get past the setup without Meta account
Meta account yes, facebook account no. The meta account is just a renamed oculus account. Has your games and stuff on it, but not tied to anything else.
And the company meta is just the renamed company Facebook. So you still give Facebook/Meta your data. Who knows what they will do with it
It’s still data I’m providing to Zuckerberg, and I’m seemingly getting friend requests on it?
Yeah, but I don’t think that this is really Facebook so much as VR in general.
Pretty much. I’d never buy anything Facebook related but it’s more that the tech just is not quite there yet. This fact not just causes some big caveats, but also drives the price up. Even the Oculus ones, which are considered entry level, are still fairly expensive kits. It’s a big investment, and the actual support is still fairly limited.
There’s some great tech & prototypes out there that are really interesting though. From very high-tech enthusiast gear to very small and lightweight solutions. I’m sure we’ll eventually see a bigger market push for VR at some point that makes it more mainstream.
What do you mean “not there”? What features and improvements do you think current gen VR is lacking?
Anything that pushes the price down, anything that pushes the weight down, anything that pushes the size down, anything that improves the quality, ways to mitigate motion sickness, better inside out tracking so you don’t have to rely on external stations, etc. etc.
The Quest 1 doesn’t need external stations, and it’s so old Meta considers it obsolete and no longer sells software for it. Now granted, that’s not very old, but what I’m saying is the technology is well and truly there. When I use my quest 1 for long enough that the battery runs out, the only ill effects I get are the same I’d get from standing for that same duration of time. No neck pain at all. And I don’t think motion sickness has a technological solution, I think it has a personal solution. I played video games on the TV until I got sick a dozen times when I was small. Now I don’t get motion sick from anything. Video games engage your brain differently, they just do, and your brain has to adapt just like with any hobby. If you play a sport, the exercise will hurt at first. Your body will adapt. If you don’t want to rewire your brain to be able to deal with the sensations of multiple realities at once, then video games just are not for you. Because that’s what video games are.
I agree, the price was a bit high when I got my Quest 1, but that was years ago and I have never felt the need to upgrade. It’s a perfectly fine device that can do everything I want. I suspect that in 2024, you can buy an old headset on the cheap. I actually had a friend who was giving away a quest for free last year and was looking for someone to take it.
I said better inside out tracking. Most enthusiasts still swear by the Index because of this. Also, the Quest 1 is like looking through a cutout with that POV. And no, there’s several techniques already used to reduce / mitigate motion sickness, with more being used as we move further to understand the underlying issue of it.
Fundamentally motion sickness comes from the instinctive expectation that reality exists and follows certain patterns, and I consider this an immoral belief. The process of adapting to motion sickness requires internalizing on some level a tiny part of the idea that our experience of reality is mutable, so I think we should never use motion sickness mitigating technologies except the kind that help people make this realisation.
That’s the dumbest shit I’ve heard all day. I have better things to do than talk about esoteric bullshit.
But everyone hates Facebook and meta do that narrative will prevail
I mean, it changed the world the way I expected- not at all.
Since when have any of these tech companies done anything but change the world for the worse?
I know we are on lemmy so corporations are bad and capitalism is bad and so on and so forth…
But there is not one aspect of my life that hasn’t been improved upon greatly by one or more tech companies over the course of my life.
There are new problems that I never would have expected to deal with that have come up as a side effect of this improvement, but it’s way too reductive to imply that tech companies haven’t changed the world for the better as well.
It’s a net sum to me. The harm they have done to our society and planet far outweigh and good that has come with it. Technology isn’t inherently evil but these tech companies that only care about profit at all cost are.
Despite the Facebook hate the Quest really did revolutionize VR. It made entry level VR at a great price with no hassle. The Quest was $500 and worked without needing beacons and a headset tethered to a gaming PC.
VR went from a few million users before Quest to tens of millions after.
Inside-out standalone HMDs were getting developed with or without Facebook. AMD’s “Sulon Q” was previewed in early 2016.
VR went from a few million users before Quest to tens of millions purchasers after.
No one uses these thingsFIFY
This can’t be overstated. VR is one hell of an investment, and there’s not really any way to figure out if it’s something that works for you in advance. I enjoy it for the discounted price I got a Quest 2 at last holiday season, but I would have been disappointed if I had paid a higher price.
How often does one actually use their Octopus?
All my friends that got into VR all said the same thing when I asked them why they don’t play it more- it’s all packed away and setting everything up again is more of a hassle than it’s worth. The Quest really just made things dead simple- no wire, no lighthouses, use anywhere there’s a little bit of space.
For all we know, that acquisition ruined VR.
Doubtful, while facebook does have a huge segment of the VR market, they’re not the only relevant player, so dont have the ability to entirely control it, and while I’ll certainly not be buying any headset of theirs given their extreme lack of trustworthiness even for a tech company, they have played a pretty big role in improving the tech and bringing the costs down a bit. I think some people just expected the tech to go from “blurry 3-d monitor strapped to your face” to “indistinguishable from reality the way its shown in fiction” in short order and have taken the gradual refinement of the tech instead of rapid leap as a sign that the technology has failed or something.
I mean, the acquisition did change VR from being a pretty open standard to being a walled garden where Facebook is paying devs to make their games not work with any other headset. I think without exclusivity there would be more interest in PCVR as a whole.
Apple is helping a lot, though.
How so? They’re shockingly late to this party.
What Apple actually brought was visibility and a sign that maybe it’s not just for nerds anymore. Their headset doesn’t have to be worth buying to do that, it just has to be worth making. Most people that try an Apple Vision pro end up buying a Quest 3. But the Quest 3 is surprisingly awesome, especially when you compare the price points. And I think with a bit more time on the market, the Apple Vision pro will steadily gain usefulness. It’s mostly in a position of lacking software right now. They launched out of the gate in much better shape than any other companies first headset software-wise, but they had to of course, as they are playing catch up.
I do think they will catch up, and their second or third headset might be a real contender. Even though it can definitely be said that their first headset wasn’t a revolution, it still needed to be made. You can only make software for unreleased hardware for so long, eventually you need some hardware on the market.
There are few things that boost inspiration and innovation quite like a competent competitor.
honestly, I feel like something like Pico is more of a competitor to facebook/meta in the VR market, considering apple’s vr seems to be aimed at an entirely different part of the market, whereas pico makes hardware that is very similar in capability, use case and price to what meta puts out.
I’ve had so many VR fanboys going on and on about how it’ll change the world, and I’ve always told them they were wrong because of the cost and tech limitations like battery life. Also the fact that people will think it looks stupid - even something as comparatively minimal as Google Glass was ridiculed, hated, and flopped.
Looks like I was right. Again.
tbf, google glass and similar are AR rather than VR. Honestly the technology has been improving over the last few years, though not in as dramatic a fashion as when it went from a rare lab or obscure tech hobbyist thing to something mainstream consumers could buy, if expensively, more in the same sense that things like computer gpus get a little bit more powerful each generation but stay fundamentally being the same kind of thing. The cost has also gone down a bit on the low end (though the higher end is still thousands, its possible to get a decent headset for the mid hundreds, or low hundreds if you get a refurbished or lightly used one). I dont think it will really revolutionize all that much, but I do think it will gradually become a reasonably significant area of the entertainment market, in the same way that things like video game consoles arent revolutionary technology beyond a certain segment of the entertainment market, but are still common enough to be economically and culturally relevant. With the current prices and use case, video game consoles are essentially what they are. Im personally exited to see where the tech goes, even though it probably wont be the next smartphone the way some claim.
I feel like glass was accidentally very beneficial for the industry.
It both drastically increased the general public’s consciousness and awareness of the industry around AR/VR and then set the bar so low as to be trivial to exceed. People who mocked it know that bad AR with privacy concerns is not good, but when they try acceptable VR they are blown away by it.
It’s mostly just the lack of the “killer app” equivalent that is holding us back.
Half Life Alyx?
It sure would. Just not yet
What? Who tf expected that!? They bought Oculus, enshittification happened, and their products are worse now.
i hate facebook as much as the next person but the products definitely aren’t worse, I just figure that iteration on VR tech is really hard. The quest 2 and quest 3 are, genuinely, kind of incredible devices from a technological perspective, they’re just hamstrung by faceook. that’s bad but I don’t think it’s fair to say the products are specifically worse when oculus was acquired so early on
Facebook is the only reason I don’t already have one or two of these headsets right now.
“enshittification” is an enshittification of the english language
English teacher here. Languages change over time and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Feel free to speak with old english if thou very regard it matters. :)
i know that, im not a child.
i’m talking about a particularly stupid word, not the evolution of language.
also, i don’t believe enshittjfication will stand the test of time, you jive turkey.Look at this old fucker yelling at clouds again.
i don’t believe enshittjfication will stand the test of time
I actually hope you’re right, because I believe it will only linger as long as there’s behavior taking place that it clearly defines.
you jive turkey.
I love this. I wish it was my account name.
make it your account name then
It’s just a wish. It’s a funny term and I like it, but not worth the effort of making a new account and subbing to all the same groups again. I’ve done it thrice already and it’s a pain in the ass. Maybe I’ll use it next time I sign up for something though.
Yeah, we’re a society. Things happen outside of grammar and word rules handed down to us from above…
lol, no rules… it’s just a stupid word that sounds stupid and makes anyone who uses it look stupid…
Shakespeare invented tons of words, and they were all great, inventing new words is great. enshittification, in particular, is just lazy and dumb
p.s. love it when people do dumb shit and then defend the general category of what they’re doing as if that was the problemFair enough but what word do you use instead of enshittification? It filled a gap in the language.
depends on the context:
“exploitation”
“make it shitty”
“ruined”
“fucked it up”
if it was used way less, in non-pseudo-intellectual contexts, i wouldn’t care…
there is a term for companies buying companies and lowering the quality of the product while capitalizing on the brand reputation… i forget it though…i mean, i barely care but people keep commenting on this so i feel like replying.
parentification is another one like that. just verbifying the noun and sticking “ification” on the end to have more syllables.
you could just write out, “children being forced into parenting roles” or something…
In large families, the eldest child has traditionally taken on more parent-like responsibilities… it’s not new and if it really needs it’s own word, it deserves a more thought out word structure than just:
“+ification and now let’s try to spread the word and get people to take me seriously!”Before I reply I just wanna say I’m not trying to fight or argue I’m just quite interested in language.
All your context-dependent examples are verbs, whereas “enshitification” is a noun - a state of being. That’s why it fills a gap in English.
Otherwise you need an entire sentence to describe that process A happened to B thing and the result is C state.
It doesn’t seem intellectual at all to me, I mean it has the word shit in it and its closest contender for meaning is probably “fuckedupness”.
meh
Why, in objective terms, is it lazy and dumb? Or do you just not like it?
Plenty of useful and appropriate words are used by people in dumb ways, that does not make the words themselves dumb.
i’ve already talked about it more than i care about it
“I have an irrational dislike of it and can’t defend my opinion with facts.”
“i feel personally injured by someone else not liking something that i like, so i will harass and berate them for saying so”
What you describe as the word’s flaws make it perfect though. The word itself is an icon for the actions it describes
It’s main problem is that people overuse it massively and act like they’re saying something really clever by using it
🛎️ 🔔 🔔
yep. it’s like pseudo-intellectuals got too lazy to learn big words and use them incorrectly, so they just added syllables to “shitty”
Those of us whose hype withered the moment Facebook bought it were pretty spot-on in our expectations.
I at least was able to recoup a few bucks when they forced fb accounts. A friend was interested in buying a headset anyway so we worked out a price for my account and just migrated it to his fb instead of mine. Bought an index and it’s pretty tight.
i felt the same way but i was gifted one recently… it’s still pretty awesome, and it runs android so you can put it in developer mode and sideload whatever you want…
i expected it to be locked down like apple, but no it’s pretty sick.
see also: original NES Legend of Zelda ported to oculus…
Yeah, but you can’t just enable developer mode on the device itself. You need Meta’s blessing for that.
not really their blessing, but yeah you have to create a developer account, agree to be part of a human centipede, and then you’re in…
there’s even an alternative side loading store call side quest that streamlines it and has a ton of stuff to download…
I’m in a similar boat, however I was very disappointed to see that in order to enable developer mode you have to make/sign in with a Meta account and “register” as a developer with them.
i didn’t like that either… but it was quick and free…
had to take a shower afterwards though…
It did change on thing for me: it made me drop support for Oculus in my game dev project.
I still own an Oculus DevKit 2. But after wildly succeeding with his Kickstarter, the founder has done nothing but jerk moves. First he silently dropped Linux support, then he funded a pro-Trump troll army on Reddit and finally he sold his entire VR company to Facebook/Meta, which then did its own jerk move by rendering everyone’s hardware useless if they didn’t sign up to Facebook/Meta. My Oculus account was forcefully obliterated just a week ago.
What a complete nosedive that was.
They had the nicer tech (Oculus uses infrared LEDs around the headset that are filmed by special cameras to track your orientation, i.e. it’s steady state – HTC Vive / Valve Index have light-sensing diodes on the headset itself and their lighthouses swipe light curtains horizontally and vertically through the room, with an annoying whining noise and all the wear & tear from constantly rotating parts), for a while, Meta even had John Carmack polishing the system.
I still hope VR will not completely die. Half Life: Alyx was fun, some archery, zombie shooting and climbing games were highly enjoyable and I could well imagine getting into sculpting / 3D modelling that way if only the tools were better.
But if, as the HTC exec in the article says, Meta has defined the “market perception of what this technology should cost” (and they’re producing at a loss, too), then Meta has walled off most of the VR market to Facebook boomers (sorry, Meta boomers) and is hogging the more robust tracking tech for itself, too.
