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
Waiting for Steam Deckard to pants meta in front of the class
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.
Well, they have changed the world, they have ruined the perfectly good term metaverse with their failed product.
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?
Despite their company name, they have nothing actually called metaverse. Their entry in the metaverse category is called horizons.
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.
Apple is helping a lot, though.
How so? They’re shockingly late to this party.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Inside-out standalone HMDs were getting developed with or without Facebook. AMD’s “Sulon Q” was previewed in early 2016.
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.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.
Look at this old fucker yelling at clouds again.
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 problemWhat 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”
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”
Fair 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
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.
I remember when I first heard about Oculus on I think kickstarter… I thought it was cool.
Then I heard Facebook was buying it and I just wrote it off and knew I’d never have interest in it again. Bought by the wrong type of company
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
I mean, it changed the world the way I expected- not at all.
It ruined Oculus, that was a change.
And that was 100% of the changes that were expected, not sure what this article is going on about.
Yup, I was about to but an Oculus Rift years ago, but once they were bought out by Facebook, I swore them off forever.
I’m still waiting for a decent, privacy respecting headset that’s not too expensive and works well on Linux.
You can get 2/3 with the Valve Index, but I don’t think you’ll ever get all 3.
Yeah, I’ve been debating getting one, but it’s a bit expensive for how much I’d actually use it (like once/month or so). I’m happy to throw $500 at a toy, but not $1k+.
You should be able to but a used set in very good condition for that price.
Is there a valve index 2 on the way?
I would hate to finally get it only for the 2nd version to release a year or two after.
Facebook (or Meta) sends me threatening emails every week about my Oculus account being deleted if I don’t bow down to Zuckerberg and link my Facebook account to it.
I havent touched either in years.
I was going to buy one, but when they got bought out it made the Vive an obvious choice for me. No regrets, it still works great.
I’ve heard good things, but they seem to be discontinued at this point and I’m worried about parts availability and whatnot if something breaks.
I’m casually looking at Valve Index. It seems Valve is looking into a successor, so I might wait a bit to see what that looks like. I’m in no hurry.
Vive would be OK if you’re on a budget, you could probably get good deals on used stuff but if you wanted something new, it might be a good idea to wait a bit to see what Valve does.
I love my index sooooo much
I got a cv1 before Facebook bought them. It’s been downhill from there. Not to mention the lack of linux support which forced me to keep a windows partition just for it.
It’s in storage now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to reinstall it when I put my machine back together in a few months.
All in all it’s was a fine piece of kit killed by, I’m not even sure, greed probably.
The bright side? Shows how much we hate meta
