As I see it, the only absolute upper limit for VR is the resolution and frame rate of the VR headset displays, as well as the quality of the optical stack. Rendering of the graphics can be done by anything from a single high-end GPU in a PC up to a beefy server in the cloud—although in that case, of course, network latency and video compression will impact the experience.
unless it’s a niche thing (simulation, high end gaming), the future is undoubtedly free headsets like the Quest 3 and Apple Vision- for convenience in handling and setup, conformity and freedom of use.
The work to make or even use a proper VR app or game is so so much more than the flat equivalent and there are only some added utility for spatial input. Tech can certainly improve some of that...
But a VR video call is solved... You can do it mostly out of the box with an AVP but who is going to buy a $3k device for yourself and anyone you want to call and then have a couple calls and never use it because its not worth the hassle to strap it on.
"Hey John, grandpa will expire soon can you quickly jump in your headset and upload yourself to his VR cabin in the wood, the one we rent from MetaSpital for $99 a day, to take a selfie with him before he dies alone in a cold hospital room"
There are many use cases where this can add value. People these days live far from their families, what's wrong with connecting in a better/different way if desired?
Not everybody wants or can stay with their families for whole life and that's fine, something about personal freedom and right to self-determination, desire for massive personal growth that exposure to different cultures invariably brings in, adventures and so on.
This has to be satire, god emperor Zuck and his megacorp Meta fighting for our personal freedoms and right to self-determination. You're already living in an alternate universe apparently
It's a good thing. It's a nice thing. Chill.
I get that there's reasons to be angry at big tech but this isn't one of them. Accurate and easy 3d scanning, high fidelity rendering and a way to view in 6dof stereoscopic is just a great use case entirely separate from the machinations of our evil overlords.
> It's a good thing. It's a nice thing. Chill
That's your opinion, the fact that VR tanked hard seems to indicate most people don't agree
It's not always posible to meet up with people in real life. A lot of my friends moved overseas and I have neither the time nor inclination to be flying to sweden/the USA constantly.
> That's your opinion, the fact that VR tanked hard seems to indicate most people don't agree
This in no way changes the reality of their situation, in fact frankly, its irrelevant. Something being "nice" or "good" does not require it also have mass market appeal.
Everybody struggles with that trade-off; it would be nice if the pro virtual connected crowd acknowledged that a big part of the value of these relationships is that they aren't easy or casual. The infrequency and cost/effort involved is part of what inherently makes them special. I seem to be in the minority that would trade 100 cursory relationships for 1 deeply meaningful relationship.
That may be true for you, but it’s not universal. Only being able to see some of my cloest friends every few years beyond a phone call or text doesn’t make the relationship any more “special”, it just makes it feel distant.
VR doesn’t replace the real thing, but it does let me maintain closeness with people who aren’t geographically close anymore. I still fly out and see them, but between those moments, shared time in VR keeps the connection alive and meaningful.
> I seem to be in the minority that would trade 100 cursory relationships for 1 deeply meaningful relationship.
You’re not in the minority for wanting depth, but may be in a minority for assuming that depth can only come through scarcity and physical presence. Meaningful relationships are built on shared experience, and VR has given my friend group new ways to have those together despite no longer in fact, being together.
Once a month, I hang out in VR with friends scattered across the world. We drink, laugh, gesture, watch movies and even move. We attended a virtual dance party a while back and it was a fantastic time. It’s presence, not proximity, that matters for us in the end and we have found VR quite useful for that.
Yes! actually cars did have a plausibly negative effect on connection. in the before times you couldn't travel far so you didn't. and you saw your family ever day of your life. It's not all it's cracked up to be sure, but we're talking logistics.
Now with cars you can go wherever! And people move continents away and are told to make the family trip once a year at thanksgiving to do the family thing. Can you believe that with more optionality comes paradoxically fewer "chosen" options. See Netflix.
It's unsual, if you would have asked me 15 years ago- I would have told you _absolutely_ VR/AR would be huge. It just hasn't been the case. People don't want to wear headsets and there's nothing that the AR glasses can do that my phone can't. The whole thing has become a money blackhole.
Here’s the thing, though. To experience VR properly, you need to be able to walk arbitrarily through space. And houses are small. It sounds stupid and people have proposed solutions like rolling floors, but it’s actually not stupid. Sometimes a technology has a fundamental flaw (hello, there, hallucinating LLMs) which really does mean most of the value is unrealisable.
VR needs neural interfaces. Until then it’s going to be a minor sport.
The short term solution to this is AR. You can walk arbitrary distance subject to physical constraints you can navigate. This will drive the industry forward until neural interfaces are ready. Apple are right with Vision Pro, it’s absolutely amazing for a first product, but like the Newton they are just miles ahead of the curve, too far ahead.
* fortunately for AI companies, hallucinations simply require conceptual developments to fix - they’re not a hard constraint. They just need to stop overfocusing on scale.
Unfortunately I've been waiting for 10 years now and it still hasn't happened :(
Trying to play some 3D piloting games (Flight Sim, Elite Dangerous, etc) that had cockpits with text to read on displays also proved disappointing. Had to lean really close to be able to read it.
"Someday", it'll happen, though. Hopefully.
Most people who play video games do so as a leisure activity. It works because it allows you to be put into a world that requires little physical exertion - just eye/hand coordination. You don't need to to use your legs to jump in a video game. You don't even need to have legs.
In the vision of VR you're selling, it requires getting up and doing a lot of physical movement. The bulk of most gamers just want to play their game after work or school and relax. Most of my friends feel the same way about VR as they did when I was young and wanted them to play with the NES power pad when I was younger.
There are better, more entertaining options available on the 2D screen that don't require much physical movement. In fact, I'd say that anything other than eye/hand movement distracts from game play. "Jumping" in the video game isn't fun because you actually have to jump, it's fun because you don't. And that's a feature that appeals to people who will never be appealed to VR.
This is why racing games are such a good use case for the VR. Seems to me it is the only place where VR is used regularly
How would that solve the walking problem?
Yes, he’s saying metaverse will take off once humans achieve transcendence.
Only then will Meta recoup their AR/VR investment.
Even when have indistinguishable from reality visuals the illusion falls apart the moment you try to touch it. The fidelity through buttons is rudimentary and through hand tracking is non existent. The suspension of disbelief isn't there, humans fingers are incredibly sensitive and dexterous and we are trained whole life all the time to know how things feel. AI/AR isn't going to have any success without solving that.
I think it can work, think driving and flying simulators where you have realistic input for the machine like a driving wheel with feedback - thise can be quite convincing.
But I never use it. I don't really see the point. It's heavy on the head for no real benefit.
I'm kind of happy I have it though. I open it every six months to see if there's anything new. I'm going to try this Hyperscape just in case...
It could make sense selectively during construction, mining, etc, but even then its a sometimes thing and it needs to be completely unobtrusive. Meta dont seem to be aiming towards or catering to this.
VR probably hit its peak with VR Chat, and AR probably hit it with Pokemon Go. Just as we're never getting the Jetson's future with Rosie the Robot, but we do get roombas, we're never getting the cyberpunk future where everything happens in VR, but we do get furries hanging out in digital Taco Bells.
The interesting thing is that we kind of already knew this; 20 years ago, Second Life had a very similar "hype cycle->some niche groups kinda like this" story. I'm unsure why people thought that "like second life, but you have to strap this thing to your face" would necessarily be _more_ appealing.
It is more appealing, just not "world changing paradigm shift that renders all other interfaces obsolete" appealing.
One of the things I very much hoped for was to be able to "hang out" with friends who have grown geographically distant in a space that felt more our own.
But I don't think that makes it truly "huge" in a mass market way unless it's at a very affordable price point.
There are some pretty cool AR demos out there too, but for me they're not worth wearing the headsets I've seen.
What’s different this time?
According to this, 1.63% of Steam MAU have a VR headset which translates to roughly 2 million MAU: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
So, in some sense not a lot, but it has a decent foothold of people using it often. It's clearly different from VR in the past where there were literally a handful or maybe on the order of hundreds of headsets in the world. VR now also has a ton of different niches and use cases beyond games. I also think a comparison with gaming console hardware is more apt than comparing it to something like PC or smartphone sales.
(There's also number three: "this is magic and will change everything, and you'll do all your socialising and work via VR", but this is just bubble-pumping nonsense and I doubt anyone _actually_ believes it. And option four, which is like option two except that "good enough" is essentially technically impossible.)
I get that it can scan a physical space and then I can see a digital reproduction of that space on VR goggles...but then what? Do I just stand there looking around the space?
A common one is VR visits for real estate companies and travel agencies, for example. Also virtual previews for investors and C-suite execs in meetings where there was a ton of money involved - think someone trying to sell the creation of a whole neighbourhood and this is a fancy version of a powerpoint slide for their pitch.
This tech could probably have saved us a good amount of work, though It's still a head scratcher why Zuck thinks this is the one thing in which to bet the company's future.
Yes. There's a mini-industry doing this for real estate.[1] Some systems let you place furniture in the 3D model.
Versions of this idea go all the way back to Apple's "Quicktime VR", which was a chain of spherical images through which you could navigate.
It's a long way from a fun metaverse. (Doing a big metaverse at all is difficult. Making it fun is even harder.)
Lack of imagination and willingness to rely on someone else's judgement - other than the cyberpunk authors he read as a teen?
> Lack of imagination and willingness to rely on someone else's judgement
Perhaps, but given that his financial and investment judgement so far has netted him $250b, I think he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Either way, I don't see this taking off. I'm surprised they're still pursuing VR.
He seems to have an obsession of breaking free of Apples control.
I get that some people have a psychological mindset to "be in a place so as to do work" but offices are a compromise on so many things, most notably space.
Now you have tech to create entire wondrously imaginative virtual worlds and you want to recreate a bland little open plan box to cram avatars into?
Set some specifics, like open space, chair, table/desk. And you could have Hogwarts theme while I have a viking feasting hall.
I want a little virtual office and hallways and I can have hallway interactions and knock on virtual doors, etc.
I imagine if you ever want to "hang out in VR", it would be nice to do it in your own virtual living room, instead of the imaginary virtual spaces.
The technology is neat. I don't know that either of those justifies the R&D effort. So just try to enjoy that neat technology exists for its own sake.
One of those use cases is training in industrial settings like factories, mines, or construction sites. It is a lot cheaper and safer to have workers take their first steps in a VR environment rather than on the actual location.
At the moment, a lot of this training is implemented as custom 3D applications using e.g. Unity. I imagine that something like Hyperscape would make it much easier and faster to create and share VR environments for this purpose.
At that point you can have a very convincing VR performance with cheap hardware. That handles much much more viewer IPDs and head positions etc, than one of those expensive omni-directional camera rigs.
That said, the more general aspect of "accessible, user generatable content" is a better way to look at it.
Online meetup for Disney fans: each week in a different scan of the park
Online consultation with interior design or architect: takes place in you existing house and saves travel for someone billing $x hundred an hour.
Online highschool reunion planning meeting with people spread over the world: takes place at the highschool or potential venues
Deployed military personel meeting remotely on his anniversary with his wife: takes place where they had their first date
I thought we would have already had this with photogrammetry back in 2016 when the Vive released with a camera, but that usually involved too much cleanup and optimizing geometry and couldn't be done automatically, along with the issues with reflections. I was also really surprised Google Earth VR didn't add in multiplayer soon after launch for similar use cases.
People don't see posts from friends. The site spams you to death. They hijacked your email address, and replaced it with a facebook.com address. They've lied rather a lot about things generally
And that company is now the one presenting a Metaverse/VR/AR/whatever
It should be DOA just based on reputation, never mind the technical merits
What are the other direct uses?
* Surveys (I had the county come in once in my sort-of legal rental appartment when they were legalising them, they needed to make a floor plan and fire safety recommendations)
* Real estate, which already uses 360 degree photo's and simplified 3d floor plan models
* Video games. Very generic usage.
* Virtualised museums, but those would likely need extra work to make all the placards etc readable
* Street View next level, also indoor navigation.
(I first saw it in 1999, when it was considered old hat. I can only imagine how much more advanced it's become.)
Its pretty safe to assume that the primary driver of this is data hoovering for selling ads, everything else is just PR spin from the Meta thinktanks.
They're not happy to have a successful game store, they want me to use a VR headset to determine my schedule. Which I guess is alright, if I can also access my schedule with a desktop computer or a phone. Why I'd want to use VR to determine my schedule is beyond me, I think a 'minority report' kind of interface could be possible but it is 2025 and you'd think people would expect a conversational recommender that works everywhere.
Caving is one of those things where not many people get to go there and any damage is irreversible. Combined with other information, such scanning could provide invaluable information for geology.
But yeah, not in my house. I already used Valetudo to ensure my robot vacuum doesn't send info about my house anywhere. Why the hell would I do a high detail scan and upload it?
So you can completely change it all afterwards, and then highly confuse any criminal that comes in to try and take advantage of it?
Have fun planning to steal my Rhino Warframe!
I remain unconvinced re. his management style. Thus far it seems to work if the product is oriented around A/B testing.
Now there’s a sad sad thought - imagine if Kodak required monthly subscription to vote your photos
Strange how all the major technologies atm are concerned - at least partly - with escaping reality.
Geeees, I think I need some escapism...
It's popular with real estate agents. Not quite "virtual reality" but it also doesn't need expensive glasses. It does seem like future smartphones with AI may be a decent cheaper substitute for $6000 Matterport cameras.
i want my point cloud scanner dammit
I don't think any of the cameras run at 90hz, I'm pretty sure the slam cameras run at 25hz, with the IMU doing the rest. (that might have changed, It also may have been 15hz, I can't remember)
Also, again from memory, its been a year since I actually worked on it, the colour camera does some fancy fusion to make a compound image. The images need to be warped properly so that depth is displayed properly.
For starters, Quest is by far the biggest selling VR/XR headset. So he is already seeing some success here.
And as we’ve seen before, Facebook isn’t going to dominate forever. It makes complete sense throwing large sums of money at future technology while you still have large sums of money to burn.
Chasing new technology when you’re already behind and your revenue is decline is a guaranteed way to fail.
Moonshots like this you waste a tonne of money when that money is comparatively cheap anyway. Plus it keeps people talking about your business, which is never a bad thing.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/df26fc4c-5488-4994-b2b8-be4bfbda2...
> Moonshots like this you waste a tonne of money when that money is comparatively cheap anyway.
Can you explain that assertion in more detail?
The further out into the future you go, the less valuable the returns are when taken back into the present.
The reality is, Mr Zuck is a manager who is there to invest the cash of its shareholders on their behalf into projects that beat the hurdle rate. Shareholders dont care abut how cool the tech is.
So he is acting on behalf of the shareholders because he is also the most important shareholder.
Zuck can exercise all his power, but he can also enjoy a low stock price if he pisses off investors. Hence that power doesnt mean much.
That power means literally everything. Facebook is his company in every sense of the term and if investors don’t like that then that’s their problem, not his.
Meta establishing VR and the underlying ecosystem, building a moat, makes lots of long term sense (if they succeed).
HN crowd often criticizes big tech for milking ads and the lack of innovation. Meta deserves credit for sinking their own money into future techs like VR.
By the way, Exxon the oil company funded early research of lithium ion battery tech by Dr. Whittingham, clearly not for short term benefits.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...
Rechargable batteries have been around since the 1850s. The idea of "battery, but smaller" isn't exactly a hard sell when you already have devices with huge NiMH / NiCd battery bricks attached to them. Just look at the laptops and mobile phones from the 90s!
On the other hand, VR is almost entirely a solution looking for a problem. VR headsets have been around since the 80s. Sure they sucked, but the fact that there still isn't a killer app forty years later should be a good indication that the concept itself perhaps isn't too attractive.
VR development is driven solely by Facebook's desire to sell VR, not by customer demand for better VR headsets. If the current headsets aren't good enough, a 50% lighter / faster one isn't going to make a difference.
Any movie depictions of VR are fully immersive - Ready Player One (at least the film) takes some liberties in depicting the game world as if it's immersive, even though the guy plays with VR glasses and force feedback gloves/suits, all current-day technology. Most others have a direct brain interface. Some (Star Trek) model a realistic immersive environment around the player, but both of those are very much science fiction still.
There's some brain / tech interfaces, but if I recall correctly the brain has to learn to handle the signals first, there's no way to create a perfect, instant link.
Games where you are stationary (racing simulation, mainly) are better suited to it. Gran Turismo 7 in PSVR2 with a Logitech racing wheel was a ridiculously immersive experience. I played through the whole game in VR and it was one of the best gaming experiences I've had and certainly the most immersive, particularly as a diehard car guy. But racing sims are fairly niche.
Outside of racing sims, it's still immersive, but any games with character movement give me immediate motion sickness, the movement is too clunky and disorienting.
If they can figure that out at a reasonable price point the demand will be there because the immersion is just night and day against a screen.
Many of us didnt. I wouldnt call low resolution and low PPI (significantly lower than desktop displays) "good enough." Not to mention terrible optics. I would use my current device a lot more if it could match the "viewable" resolution of my desktop displays, but currently, it can not.
Or maybe you think a headset doesn't add anything to the experience of viewing a space. If so, I'd have to ask whether you'd actually used one. Because if there's any inarguably uniquely appropriate use case for VR, it's "viewing architectural spaces"
> It says 96 million VR headsets will be shipped in 2020
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paullamkin/2016/02/17/wearable-...
Turns out they sold half as much.... in 5 years: https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-over-51-million-vr-he...
> the VR/AR market will reach $182 billion in revenue, including hardware and software/content, by 2025 and bypass television.
https://www.startbeyond.co/media/idcvrrevenuereport
Meanwhile: "The global virtual reality (VR) market size was valued at $16.32 billion in 2024"
I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
Stupid claims by people trying to pump investment hype have no bearing on my interest in the medium.
> I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
The people I know with an interest in VR are mainly artists and other forms of creatives. We must move in different circles.
On the other hand, I do. Isnt it crazy that like, different people have different experiences? Who would have thought!
No one "needs" to push for that bullshit metaverse, the real world isn't shitty enough, yet, apparently they're dead set and achieving that, for people to wish to live in a computer.
It’s a lot of money, but the WFP has spent more than that in the past 10 years on the problem.
A lot of the issues with world hunger aren’t easy solved by throwing more money at it. Politics, logistics, corruption etc. It can’t be solved without money either, of course.
Not to say that money couldn’t be better spent elsewhere than the metaverse.
They are not burning money, they are employing people like you directly or through 3rd party partner companies. The beneficiaries can decide themselves how to spend money. They can live a good life or help others.
Somehow Facebook getting a huge amount of money. They are distributing that money to a million people (directly or indirectly to employees, share holders, employees of 3rd party partners). Some people are getting billions and some are getting $100s.
Instead of handful of people in Facebook management deciding to be humanitarian, you now have a million people deciding what to do with their portion. It is that simple.
Seems like you are the one with an outdated model of how money works.
Over the last couple decades it has been moving up at an ever increasing rate instead of down.
But knowing a little bit about gaussian splatting, I can't think what manual steps requiring human assistance are even likely to be necessary?