You could have, you know, not bought and ruined oculus, and destroyed the VR ecosystem.
I was at GDC the year of the acquisition. There were Facebook suits walking around the showroom floor writing checks to sign exclusivity deals with anyone showing off a VR game.
Facebook flooded the market with cash, but failed to secure any Killer App to get people on their product. I wouldn’t say they ruined Oculus so much as it continues to be an unsolved technology that wasn’t ready for this level of exposure. I still can’t use the damned thing for more than an hour without feeling nauseous, and Meta was trying to gear up Oculus headsets for mass adoption by office workers.
The games market isn’t what they’re fixated on. They want this to be standard hardware for excel-book jockeys.
I suspect that we’ll end up not with the gaming market being where this sticks, but entertainment. Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
My neck is already hurting from craning all the time. And I’m guaranteed to miss the best part of the movie because I was looking in the wrong direction.
u/chemical_cutthroat Reportedly Happy With How Much Money Meta’s VR Division Burns
Well, if I didn’t have to make a face book log in to use one. If not for that I would consider one to play in steam. Even if I had to have it tethered.
I am still so incredibly salty that my quest 1 is a paperweight because of this requirement.
It did not exist when I purchased the product. Full Stop.
When they introduced to that requirement with the quest 2 you were able to use the quest one without it with no issue. Sometime last year we tried to hook our quest one up to Steam Link and were met with a Meta Account requirement. There was no way within the UI to get around it.
In a moment of frustration, wanting to play some Beat Saber with the family, I went ahead and started the process of making a meta account only to be stopped several times along the way by various privacy layers on our network. It was insane. My PiHole about caught fire.
30 minutes in I gave up and dug out the Vive Cosmos and all 20 wires it needed. So disappointed meta is the only wireless headse with decent battery life. They ruined VR adoption for me.
I think they don’t require that anymore. It’s a “Meta login” which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
Welcome to the classic social media 100m dash. Become a popular dunk target on socials > get people to call such and such choice as a dealbreaker > stop doing such and such > it is now “not enough”, or “they’ll enshittify it later” or “a slippery slope”.
Which fine, whatever. I’m not saying Meta are “good guys” (no corporation is, honestly). What I will say is a) that is not a particularly productive or functional way to engage with pretty much anything, especially when there is no comparable alternative to a product, and b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible? People will give me crap for it regardless, so I may as well get to sell some sweet, sweet data.
FWIW, I’m skeptical of the ability of Meta to turn around the VR market as a whole, I don’t like many of their privacy and content moderation practices and I no longer use Facebook, Instagram or Threads. But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society, and I do have a Quest headset, which I agree is the best price to performance you can buy and works flawlessly with PC VR both wired and wirelessly.
I’m not reading anymore of this thread, but go move to the EU and request all the data those companies you mentioned have on you. You will see a truly staggering amount of your day to day info from some of them. Facebook and google are just advertising companies trying to get their thumbs in every pie they can convince enough people to buy into. Part of that is designing their products to require phoning home. The issue isn’t signing in. Signing in is just the trojan horse to make sure every bit of data they pull from you is tied to the right advertising account ID. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do that, even if they have enough money to lobby for its legality. Even if every single company on earth was freely doing it to the same degree people should still push for a change.
The business world is truly a slippery slope. Google made unethical digital advertising into a major market, and now even if they close shop somebody else will come fill the gap. The only way to put the power back in people’s hands is to regulate them out of existence but that will never happen if most people don’t even know it’s happening because you can’t even fucking complain about it on the internet without a hundred reply thread jfc
No, hold on, get it right, the 100 post thread is about somebody defending something tangentially related to them. Thread was nice and short with just complaining, it was when somebody pointed out that the requirement people were complaining about had been removed that the massive dogpile started.
And yes, by the way, I do know what data these companies have on me. I pulled all my Google data just last week, all 50 gigabytes of it. I agree that regulation is the answer to this. Absolutely. Everybody knows that, nobody is finding that via a rant about factually incorrect anecdotes about Meta’s VR headset, of all things.
But also, I have an Android phone. With a Google account on it. Do you not have a phone? Nobody is saying to not complain about abusive data mining or breaches of privacy, but you don’t have to performatively pretend to never engage with them or that the reason they get away with it in absence of regulation isn’t that they do make things people want or need.
This conversation boils down to whether it’s a moral imperative to turn your chosen cause into your entire personality at the expense of reality and beyond any nuance whatsoever. And honestly, in the current sociopolitical context, and despite being just about the most superfluous demonstration of this imaginable… man, it’s such a bummer.
Damn. Sorry to hear about that emotion a soulless corporation is having.
Good. Learning Facebook bought Oculus was fucking depressing as shit.
What they’ve done to it since has been worse than what most (if not all) of us expected.
Oculus was created by Palmer Lucky.
Palmer Lucky’s new company is making AI drones and roboos for the military.
Nothing of value was lost.
It felt better when VR was the hot new buzzword, right? Oh well, there’s the AI division also burning money, but at least it’s the current buzzword!
meta: makes vr division
also meta: is shocked it bleeds money
They didn’t make shit. They did what Google loves to do and they bought a highly successful, incredibly progressive company. And now it’s shit, just like alllll the others that got bought out by big names.
keep in mind meta didnt make occulus, they bought it out. Oculus is just on the list of silicon valley startups that suceeded in getting bought out and profited from. (of the 10x more that fail)
According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55 billion since 2019.
$55 billion in losses over ~5 years? That’s a substantial amount.
Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.
give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill probably have money spare for me and possibly descendants to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.
People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m for 27.8 years).
We should call billions thousand millions.
In a lot if countries a thousand million is a milliard and a million million is a billion. But somehow US English skipped the -liard numbers and it’s influencing UK English these days as well.
These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:
British usage: Billion has meant 109 in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.[12][13][43][15]
Before the widespread use of billion for 109, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.[16] The long scale term milliard, for 109, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.
I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.
Lemmy hates Meta but honestly the Quest 3 is a fantastic headset. I use mine semi-regularly for wireless Steam VR.
I couldn’t go back after using the Valve Index, though. Wireless or not, it’s too much of a compromise on quality.
Edit: sleepy typo
What about the Index is an improvement over the Quest 3 in terms of quality? Looking up the specs, the Quest 3 seems to be handily beating the Index, a 5 year old headset. Pancake lenses alone are such a massive jump in visual clarity that it’s hard to consider buying a headset that still uses fresnel lenses.
I would agree with you if we were comparing the Index against the Quest 2 for sure, but the Quest 3 sets quite a high bar.
For me, it’s actually the FOV, it covers more ground (130 degree vs 110). Going back to less FOV sucks. It’s also perfectly fine for clarity and frame rate, although I’d like an index 2 for sure. I’ve heard it also tracks better although I’ve never noticed the difference (I only used quest 3 at other homes).
Still surprised it’s been 5 years, though. But it’s not about what tech is available so much as the priorities valve put into their headset. They wanted it to be comfortable for a long play sessions. Just wish it wasn’t tethered, but it’s probably another reason why it still out performs in things like stability.
Thank you that’s definitely something to consider! I’ve had opportunities to use the Quest 3 at this point but not the Index yet. I’ve used other fresnel lens headsets in the past like the Vive and Quest 2, but neither has that kind of FOV.
I was very impressed by the way the pancake lenses can keep the entire image in focus instead of having to find the sweet spot and stare straight ahead into it, but an extra 20° of FOV is going to definitely make me question which I value more. I’ll have to find a place to try the Index so I can see.
No worries, I wish it had pancake lenses too but at least it’s not as bad as the vive. No screen door effect, but yes to the sweet spot thing. There’s a few other things going for the index, like those cool speaker headphones, but yeah… 5 years old, I guess valve is getting distracted by it’s steam deck success.
I haven’t looked into it, but I think there might be a mod to make it wireless now, too, but I haven’t looked into it since having kids. No time for VR when you have self destructive little ones existing in your vicinity.
[Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.
Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!
Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.
Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.
That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.
Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.
