https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/04/facebooks-oculus-acquisition-turns-10/
Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of
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.
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+.
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.
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 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.
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.
And that was 100% of the changes that were expected, not sure what this article is going on about.
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.
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.
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.
I may not have all the details perfect. But your take is that meta spending 25 billion dollars on progressing VR was unnoticeable and did nothing...
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?
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.
They forgot a comma.
Ten years later, Facebook's Oculus acquisition hasn't changed the world, as expected
The moment they made you use Facebook to sign in was the moment I decided I'll never buy one of those.
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.
Yes, I hate that part too. But creating an account for saves/billing is standard everywhere. You can't play Steam/Xbox/PS5 or even Switch without them asking you to sign up for an account.
Before you had to create a Facebook profile for the Quest to work.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 things
FIFY
I don't think many outside the tech-money bubble thought this would work. Instead people mourned the loss of Oculus as an innovator when it was bought up.
Look at it now - it has slowed the VR market right down by delivering a low price but low quality experience. That has discouraged other manufacturers from the market.
The high end of the market has been held back as a result - the Valve Index and their like give a better experience but content growth is slow as a result of slow growth. The quest is a decent product but their teams are solving the problems constantly constrained by the cheap price point rather than building the solution and iterating it to the price point.
I think the market will converge on a Vision Pro like device at an affordable price but I think Oculus/Meta has slowed that down as people experience their product and think that's what VR is. Although in fairness there is also a tech problem - the vision pro shows how expensive it is at the moment to create something close to the ideal in terms of an untethered device without base stations and hand controllers. The realistic way for quality VR at present remains tethered to a PC.
We'll get there in the end but I think it may have been sooner of Meta hadn't thrown 100s of billions at buying market share with a lower quality version of what VR needs to be. The mobility is right, but the casual-gaming level of experience is way off, and it's damaged expectations.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least). That would be technically difficult but offloading as much of the graphics and game/program processing as possible may make a lighter device and an added battery may last longer or be lighter. Essentially a halfway house between an Quest and Index - the quest mobility but the index quality (which is already achieved by offloading to the PC). However it may not be feasible due to lag and it's still a compromise from the ultimate dream. But it'd probably be a good step on from full tethered if its doable.
That or economies of scale do make the Vision Pro or a future version of it affordable over the coming years. Doubt that will be Quest prices though - if people are paying £1k for phones then that seems more realistic for good quality VR imo.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least).
Don't we already have that? The Quest 2 could manage it, although I think people have more luck with a third party app (Virtual Desktop maybe?) doing it rather than the official software.
It does need a good Wifi 6 router though, as it's heavy on bandwidth.
Personally, I think VR needs to be able to have an HDMI input (or get rolled into the HDMI standard so controllers/head locations can be passed back through it), so people can at least use it as a large screen for non VR software, e.g. watching movies or just playing regular 2D games from any source.
What's really holding VR back is every company wants to be the king of VR, and none of them can be.
Streaming feels like the way to go, I already have a computer so all I'd really want out of a headset is the interface part, it doesn't need to be a self contained unit. And It'd be way easier to get into VR if the headsets were priced more like a monitor than a whole PC.
They've literally had 2 of them. The Vive, built by HTC and sold by Valve on Steam and its sucessor The Valve Index. Anyone who would consider themselves even mildly interested in VR Gaming probably knows about at least one of them.
They're damned good examples of VR, too: they shipped the vive with actual vr inputs! and the index's Knuckles inputs are such a step up from 6dof inputs overall.
Some better software to stitch it together and some higher res cameras, the Quest 3 could do what the Vision Pro does. The Quest 2 was just enough that you could get around the room. The Quest 3 you can actually read a book or a screen through. It's just a bit blurry and wonky from the panorama being stitched together and the fact the cameras aren't as good.
I think people would sacrifice a little bit of quality for an affordable product that can literally do all the same stuff. Actually, the Quest can do a bit more considering the software library for the Vision fuckin sucks and doesn't have much at all.
Then again, people also just want these things to be like putting on sunglasses and not strapping a literal computer to their face looking like a cyberpunk nightmare. And I don't think we are anywhere close to Google Glass form factors with Apple Vision Pro quality picture.
Some better software to stitch it together and some higher res cameras, the Quest 3 could do what the Vision Pro does.
they're definitely chasing apple on AR interaction and in some ways (ML trained hand tracking) I think Meta is ahead.
Still doesn't make me want to work with either meta or apple stuff though.
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
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.
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 problem
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.
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"
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".
After doing some Meta/Facebook VR development in my job the lack of popularity made increasingly more sense. In brief, they're both incredibly incompetent and transparently greedy.
I'm honestly baffled how they could spend so many tens of billions of dollars and have such bad software, it is completely bug ridden. You'll hit a bug, research it, and find out it's a major know bug for literal years they haven't fixed. They care so little that they couldn't bother to update the Oculus branding to Meta for over 3 years in various software tools and libraries.
Their greed might be more salient aspect preventing adoption, though. They transparently wanted to be the gatekeepers to everything "metaverse" related, a business model that is now explicitly illegal in the EU after years of being merely very sketchy. They are straight up hostile to anyone else trying to implement enterprise or business features. Concrete example: fleet management software, aka MDM. There are third party tools that are cheaper and much more featured than Meta's solution, but in the last year they've pushed hard to kick those third parties out of the ecosystem.
I could go on, but in short nobody in their right mind would build a major business on their ecosystem. They'd rather let Meta burn billions in R&D and come back later. Besides, not even Meta is able to make money in the area now.
I'm beginning to worry that FB's meta shit has retarded VR's development (slowed, not pejorative yo) significantly. The stigma of FB in the dev community is substantial and real, and tons of talent that I could recruit for PC driven VR projects (both training work and game stuff) who simply would not touch oculus hardware. It took dwindling job opportunities to drag me into quest dev. HTC had a fantastic opportunity to be a bigger name with the vive but dropped the ball so many times that devs I know kinda shrugged and moved on.
I was hoping that Apple would knock this out of the park. In fact, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in so many ways it's depressing.
VR will continue, this is not the end. Just a slowdown.
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
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.
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...
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...
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...
Zuck has never been an original ideas guy, every product Facebook has ever made they either copied or bought from somebody else (including Facebook), what he is good at is taking someone else's idea and squeezing every bit of money out of them via ads.
So what happens when Facebook finally runs out of other people's ideas to copy? Facebook and Instagram are both dying a slow death, because their core audience are leaving, and Tik Tok proved to be their toughest obstacle yet. Oculus was always meant to be a side project for Facebook, until suddenly it became the centerpiece of "Meta" out of the blue. It's no wonder then Oculus became what it is today, because putting ads and collect data from everything is the only trick Facebook knows.
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.
They made VR headsets more people can afford that also don't suck major balls like the PSVR or Google Cardboard (the other affordable VR options). People just don't want them because they're Facebook/Meta. 😔
Still can't believe Tech companies don't realise: If you want the widest adoption, make something as open source, customisable, editable, codable, and anonymous as you can.
If you don't want something to be wide spread, demand everyone's data, make it a black box you can't edit, customise, or be creative on, and you have to link to all your other profiles.
Meta would have been best off had logins been entirely optional, and they're still trying to life that bad reputation three generations later.
That said the quest is a great product, and I use mine every day to stay fit.
I'm not even sure just how closed off a system it even is. Most of the things I run on it were installed through ADB from GitHub and not any official sources. I have access to the root system files. What's stopping someone who knows what they're doing from making a custom OS for 'em so you don't need to associate with Meta once you have the hardware in your hands?
I tried the Oculus 2 and liked that it gave me a very physical way to game as opposed to sitting in a chair. Unfortunately the weight on my head and sweaty headpiece were ultimately a turnoff. The glasses style devices (XReal, Viture, etc) are a much better fit for me and mine has 3DOF motion tracking so it works as mouse view in most games without requiring VR support. It's much lighter and I can wear them for hours without the strain and sweat. Newer glasses are coming with cameras for 6DOF, hand tracking and eye-tracking is not to far off as well.
These glasses are powered by a phone or a pc with USB DP alt mode. This gets the battery and processor off the head and makes for an un-tethered experience (with a phone).
This. Headsets are never going to take off. I'm somewhat surprised Apple launched the Vision Pro; I think Steve Jobs wouldn't have settled for anything less than lightweight minimally invasive AR glasses.
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.