You can really understand here that Zuckerberg really understands his business. He knew in 2015, that if Facebook didn't have a platform it controlled, it would suffer down the line. We are almost a decade out, but what he predicted has come to pass and Apple is now squeezing the juice out of Meta.
I don't think Zuckerberg is wrong about VR at a certain level. I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways. But instead of making Oculus the "XBox" of the future, Mark decided that it was the "everything" of the future. A sort of wishful thinking that these headsets would replace the cellphone.
The cellphone fits in your pocket, watches fit on your wrist, and earbuds fit in your ears. A VR headset would have to be sunglasses size and even then they'd still be less ubiquitous than the Apple Watch.
The problem is not the vision, but the amount of money being spent. If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.
> If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.
I agree with this. We would also have more competition because other players in the space wouldn't be as intimidated to go up against a business like Meta/Facebook.
I think a crucial miscalculation was trying to EEE the space. Zuck clearly states that he wanted Meta to "own the space" on every platform. Basically, he wanted to carve out a niche like Adobe managed to do with PDF, but on a scale that rivals full blown platforms like the Android ecosystem. Such an ambitious plan sounds great on paper, until you realize that you're trying to EEE the exact people who wrote the textbooks on EEE. When you sound a horn that loud, on a megaphone as big as the one Meta was using, you're only painting a target on your own back.
Another drawback to the path that Meta selected is they basically internalized the entire hardware industry that was just starting up. If Oculus had stayed independent I believe they would have had to partner with other hardware vendors to establish some sort of regulatory body for writing industry standard specifications. With one serious player in the field developing and harboring all the tech for themselves, this space could be barren for a long time if Meta folds. All the work by third parties that went into this proprietary technology and platform will basically be for nothing.
As a VR dev, the field would be barren in that future, but for entirely different reasons.
The "common" API to access VR does exist: OpenXR, and is not great and has remained that way for years. Oculus's APIs Just Work (tm) and SteamVR's are fairly usable and more open to accessories, if a bit jank at times. On top of that - a great deal of Meta's XR research has been/is released to the public. We could do better...but we could do worse too.
Low-hanging fruit such as controller offsets have been incorrectly specified and remained incorrectly specified for years. Input latency and prediction are unacceptably high and/or incorrectly implemented by at least one game engine, in a way that screws up certain motion vectors unless you take some very much unspecified guesses about implementation and filter them appropriately.
I pray for the Khronos groups and members who are party to OpenXR to improve their support going forward, but it's going to require some risky bets on the part of game developers to adopt the APIs, and a lot of legwork from all stakeholders to tune and improve their platforms to something converging on acceptable. And where is Apple in this? Absolutely nowhere - so the platform convergence is guaranteed huge future divergence anyways.
So that explains that although there exists a standard platform that multiple hardware manufacturers can target - and have targeted - it has not yet achieved mainstream acceptance. It's just not good enough (yet), it's a pain in the ass to work with, it requires engine updates, and there's a high risk it will be majorly disrupted.
Additionally, it must be emphasized that there would be no VR market if not for the Quest 2; no other hardware platform has paved a way to a sustainable consumer ecosystem, from end to end: low priced hardware, high baseline quality of developer experience for something this early in its lifecycle (it bootstrapped developer experience based on very polished developer workflows), consistent install base to target and optimize for.
> We would also have more competition because other players in the space wouldn't be as intimidated to go up against a business like Meta/Facebook
I completely disagree with this. Competition is what drives innovation, not the absence of it. Other players did go against Meta/Oculus and their VR products were abysmal in comparison. They just didn't get what makes a desirable VR headset for the average gamers/consumers. And it's not all an issue of money. Sony, Google, Microsoft, LG, Apple, Samsung and other tech giants had equally deep pockets and hardware expertise to compete with Meta/Oculus in this field if they wanted to and if they knew the market. But they didn't.
If Meta wouldn't exist in the VR space, it doesn't mean their competitors would magically have better tech now. Their products would still be crap or not even exist today. Same how other smartphone makers with equally deep pockets to Apple like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola went against the iPhone and failed. If the iPhone wouldn't have existed it doesn't mean all their competitors would now be making better phones. Quite the contrary, the competition the iPhone bought helped move the technology forward, same how Meta's Quest moved the VR tech forward.
Just look at Sony's recent VR headset for the PS5, needing physical cables tethered to a separate console you need to buy, is just a no-go in 2022 VR technology. Meta/Oculus moved the goalposts so much with their cordless, self contained Quest 2 headset, especially at the ~400$ price point, that going back to expensive headsets tethered with cables to separate PC/consoles is just not gonna be a VR sales success going forward.
Up until the recent Quest Pro failure, it seemed Meta/Oculus really nailed the base recipe for what makes a desirable VR gaming headset with the Quest 2. All they had to do was improve on that, instead of pivoting to "professionals".
The problem isn't the amount of money either. It's that their product is bad.
I havent tried the recent Quest Pro but based on reviews I assume it's pretty good. Not great, not sexy, but pretty good. Their flagship application however, Horizons, embarrasses meta every time a screenshot gets shared. It is so dorky and uninspired that nobody wants to admit they even tried it.
Who exactly are they targeting with that thing? Adults? Children? Their messaging and pricepoint around the Pro seems to suggest they're expecting office workers to use it for virtual conferencing. Who are they kidding with that?
The cost is part of the forward-looking vision. That part makes sense to me. It's the product that baffles me. It just stinks.
you're looking at the wrong thing - it's the platform that meta wants, not the "product" they demonstrated (that looks childish from your POV).
It's like saying, back in the early days of the internet, that showing an ugly, unstyled text with pictures on a webpage is worthless. The platform has grown to become a cornerstone of human civilization!
Facebook wants to own something akin to that. _If_ their bet works out, they will be so very powerful. I think as a netizen, it's my duty to make sure their bet doesn't go the way they want. Platforms should not be owned, but be federated and compatible, and open.
My mother in law probably still thinks people play first person shooters but really the sense of characterization in modern games depends on the third person perspective. Bayonetta has legs and knows how to use them. The whole point of a Mario game is seeing Mario on the screen.
The third person view lets you experience a spectrum of identification with a character (I moe for Tamamo, I like Mario, I control Mario, I travel with Mario on his journey, I am Mario, ...) that you can't really experience from a first person view. Maybe you can put on the appearance of a character for other people's benefit in VR but you're going to have use your imagination (for better and worse) to put yourself into a character.
For now the VR game industry is driven by independents. Big game studios could make an AAA game but they won't because there aren't enough players with headsets to justify the investment.
I am betting on the first AAA VR game coming from a Chinese studio as they are taking big chances on new IP such as Genshin Impact from MiHoYo.
> I sometimes wonder if Zuck has ever read a novel or watched a movie because one way he is tone deaf is not understanding the possibilities of fiction.
He loves Ready Player One and has referenced it in interviews regarding the metaverse, but he's basically basing his business model after the main bad guy/group in the story.
Not really an answer to your second bit, but "Moss" is a lovely little game in VR that you play from third person (fixed camera). I wish more VR games did 3rd person, aside from Moss it seems exclusive to strategy games.
People still do play first person shooters (and other first person games) plenty. And in modern ones, you can generally look down and see your character's body etc.
A game whose popularity & longevity has become a cliché, Skyrim, is usually played in 1st person. Myst & Doom were both known for their ability to engage players in a flow state in their heyday.
I take your point about narrative, but I think first-person games are giving players a different experience -- agency & flow -- compared to the identification you experience in a 3rd-person game.
I'm still very unconvinced that gaming is going to be the thing that drives VR adoption. I think primarily social apps will dominate VR in the future and secondarily experiences that you can't have anywhere else like experiencing a nuclear explosion https://youtu.be/pfTCHHy_ukY?t=85
> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.
No, I don't think it does; if you look at history, VR has been around for a long time in different forms, think also Sony and Microsoft's console AR solutions. If you look at today, VR is available everywhere at console prices, but it's only a niche to the gaming market, an extra.
The BIG change in gaming in the past 10, 15 years, which Facebook has been partially responsible for, was actually scaling DOWN - think mobile games, simpler games like farmville on FB, etc. Nowadays, the hierarchy is mobile gaming > cynical live service games (lootboxes) > regular video games & consoles > indie games > VR (my opinion / take, I don't have sources because I'm too lazy to look them up).
But you're right about the other things, he definitely overestimated VR's impact on the world. 2015 was a year or two after Google Glass, which was the first major party to try AR as envisioned by Zucc - and it didn't work out for various reasons. A big one was social, but I can imagine the big tech companies figured that society needs a bit more time, like they did with mobile and later smartphones.
I can't see always-on HUD work just yet, society doesn't want that. Nobody wants to have a conversation with someone only for their eyes to go elsewhere because a notification is coming in. Although on the other hand, people will probably talk to someone and see them looking at their phone / watch while talking to them.
100% agree on Zuckerberg really understanding Facebook and where it needed to go.
The most interesting part of the email to me was seeing his support for aquiring Unity. Not being able to land that acquisition almost feels like the critical reason Meta doesn't have much to show today, after all this effort. And it doesn't look like the aquisition failed due to lack of trying! ironSource ended up doing a merger acqusition that finally closed just a few days ago.
For years I have wondered why all the big names pushed Unity in favor of Unreal Engine. Even before UE5 and before Fortnite, UE4 had better tech. than Unity.
I've used Unity and I'm still working on a solodev VR game with it. Unity has a lot of areas where it could improve. Meta seriously could have developed their own engine. With truly passionate people they could've used their capital to elevate an ECS engine like Bevy
Buying Unity would have been a huge mistake. They should keep their focus on their core competency which is handling lots of concurrent users and providing an identity system. Let people use whatever engine they want to develop VR apps.
Could replace the laptop. If we can get unlimited virtual screens and accurate enough hand tracking to replace the keyboard, I could see people carrying the headset around instead.
I think thats what Mark is saying in this. VR/AR could eventually replace: Desktops, laptops, TV, AND cell phones. Thats a lot of stuff. Literally owning eyeballs.
you basically hit the spot. He never realized the phone with it's size and fit factor in everyday life cannot be replaced by a headset that is so intrusive. It's good for games but anything else likely a hassle to the norm.
Cellphones used to be massive. VR headsets will eventually be tiny. Now is Motorola - the original cellphone pioneer the top producer of cellphones today? Fuck no.
Sometime by 2035 a company will build light field display glasses than can translate language, operate industrial drones, and operate remote chat. It probably won't be meta
I think he's limited by the technology of our times, but I'd still agree with him that this is _the future_ (not sure how soon), and they probably want to be at the forefront when that happens.
it's intrusive today; ultimately they'll look like a pair of regular glasses. Just like cell phones went from clunky beasts you couldn't even fit in your purse much less pocket, to a watch.
If I had to take a guess what will replace the iPhone it will likely be new sci-fi tech that makes the cell into a piece of see through slab of glass that is touch based. If this is possible to do in the future, I think people will start buying that. Until then iPhone will reign supreme!
In Zuckerberg's defence, if they somehow create a wearable headset with the proportions of a pair of glasses, they'll absolutely dominate. A sizeable chunk of their spending spree is R&D. If their work results in VR/AR glasses which are cheap, ubiquitous, stylish, and functional, I will be first in line to say "good job."
I actually think that no matter how good their hardware is, their effort to completely control the software platform will sink them.
My best hope is that Facebook develops a lot of neat tech and then fumbles and fails, and finally exits the space, and in the vacuum companies like Samsung and others drop more general purpose platforms that allow freedom on the software side.
>In Zuckerberg's defence, if they somehow create a wearable headset with the proportions of a pair of glasses, they'll absolutely dominate.
How would they do that though? The technology to pack the VR processing power of ~4k display per eye @ 90-120 Hz, cooling, power efficiency and big enough battery plus lens technology into a regular frame of glasses that doesn't look weird, is some Sci-Fi, Iron Man level technology, that just isn't here yet and it won't be for many years to come, if not decades, considering the slow down of Moore's law, and when it will be here, it will be prohibitively expensive.
Imagine the challenges of having to cram an RTX 4090 into a pair of Raybans and being able to run for hours on the battery of a smartwatch. We're very, very far away from that, probably decades of optics, semiconductor fabrication and battery chemistry advancements are needed before this reaches consumer tech and pricing.
Once Meta goes down and takes Oculus with it, we'll probably see another VR winter, until the tech improvements reach a level that makes it desirable again.
That's more of a 20 year timeline goal for anyone. They can still dominate VR in the meantime by staying at the leading edge in hardware. If they want to secure their future they'll have to continue to invest a lot in developing the systems and apps that people want to use.
The fundamental problem with VR is the "VR illusion" which makes the eyes focus on objects apparently in the distance that are actually on a screen very close to the eyes. This gives users headaches thus making mass appeal impossible. Solving this, if it is solvable at all, is challenge #1.
Focal distance is dependent on the lenses used. Most VR headsets have a fixed focal distance of 1.3m or 2m. Those interested in the literature can use the keyword "vergence-accomodation conflict" (VAC) for more information on this.
This is a well known problem, and there are quite a few potential solutions - Doug Lanman, the lead of Display Systems Research @ FRL made a bunch of nice presentations on a variety of different approaches a couple years ago (all on YouTube, well worth watching one [1] for anyone with a passing interest in the really cool developments going on).
While I think varifocal is going to be the near-term solution, I do have a soft spot for the various light field displays I've seen.
As I understand it, due to lens setup this shouldn’t actually be the case. Iirc the view for say a Valve Index ends up at something like 60cm.
Here’s some actual problems that are harder:
* while your eyes remain accommodated to focus on that distance, it no longer corresponds with the way they track objects close or far away, by pointing closer together etc
* lack of correspondence between movement on screen and in the real world (usually translation, rather than rotation which tracks head position) for non-roomscale content (i.e. games where you move around larger scenes) causes motion sickness.
I got a Quest to try out VR, connected it to the internet and took it off to let updates install, and instantly felt sick as soon as it was off. It lasted all day and I've never put it back on. It was super cool for the 3 minutes I spent connecting to wifi.
Empirically I would say this affects only a small minority of people. Maybe 5-10% at most. It's a barrier to certain types of adoption but not nearly the showstopper you are making out I think.
> He knew in 2015, that if Facebook didn't have a platform it controlled, it would suffer down the line.
People say this but Amazon is doing just fine in the retail
space.
In fact for Facebook and Amazon, their biggest follies are trying to own the platform (Metaverse and Fire Phone).
We have seen that owning a platform doesn’t mean owning everything and yet, perfectly good businesses waste a ton of time and money assuming that is the case.
I'm going to disagree here on Amazon. They did succeed in building/acquiring two hardware and OS level platforms. They were so successful you didn't even notice
One is called Alexa and the other is called Ring. At the same time Amazon is a website that doesn't rely as heavily on your phones privacy setting (which Apple is currently using to mine your data btw!)
Within the next 5 years I expect folks to be able to order things from their doorbells and Ring home security drones
> "VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways."
Far from it. VR is just a new type of game. Regular display technology is too good now. From ultrawide to laser projection, to high density mobile screens, to folding screens... ALL getting better and cheaper. Above all, the friction and ergonomic shift of VR is too great to expect obsolescence to come knocking on regular gaming's door.
His idea for the mobile phone to be replaced with VR/AR is crazy. Phones are little hubs in our hands, with amazing cameras and nice screens for flicking through information with your finger. Agreeable ergonomics for our brains to absorb "chunks" of content or information, about the size of a phone up to tablet/A4 paper size. Something in our brains likes the compartmental properties of a page. Like since humans started reading and writing. The "size" of a virtual bubble or layered world floating in front of our faces, isn't tangible or agreeable enough for daily driving brain activity IMHO. Great for after hours fun though!
I think you are looking around you not in front of you. The path now is to a thinner ski goggles looking form factor that supports AR through a passthrough video of where you are but with the ability to turn anything into an iphone or iwatch or 60" TV screen (try carrying that arround in your pocket). Wearing goggles will not be any more inconvenient or disconnecting than pulling out your phone at the table. One Apple leak hinted at an LED outward facing screen so people around you don't feel as strange including you in the conversation. The form factors will iterate towards human centered simplicity just like the possibility space of spatial computing enabled by these devices will iterate towards a more natural interface where information systems will conform to our world as it is in 3D rather than us being forced to deal with them through keyboards and mice and touch screens in our pocket.
But you have to also keep in mind that no one (except maybe Zuckerberg) wants to look stupid. Walking around with ski goggles would look so incredibly stupid to any normal human being, so you'd have to carry the goggles around in a case or a backpack. Even with a device the size of ski goggles (which none of the current tech can even come close to given battery sizes) AR/VR still won't displace cell phones or apple watches.
I don't think the form-factor is something they can iteratively approach for too long, given the absurd amount of investment Meta is already throwing in to building the next generation of still insufficient AR/VR. Investor appetite will not last long enough to realize the pipe-dream.
VR is too early to be the meta of the future because of the fact we would need something that is completely standalone , have the performances of the valve index including the computer that goes with it and the price of the Oculus Quest 2. If they instead attempted to only focus on software similar to how Google made Android it could have gone better but his strategy was too early to execute . Also, I think that it’s just that they don’t have a platform it’s also that they have basically everyone that could see an advertisement that has signed up with Facebook / WhatsApp and Instagram so they don’t have the ability to grow their advertisements. This is something he had to do which was to give internet to places that didn’t have it but you would have the ability to access Facebook for tree.
So what did he do in 7 years? Ideas are cheap. Maybe the company didn't execute so well due to the bloat and inertia, or maybe the brand itself had other vulnerabilities which are missing from this vision.
It's pretty obvious to everyone so I wonder what really happened. Once people received this mail did they tell him to his face that he was partly wrong? Or decided to just support his vision? Because among tech people I talk to, there is no single person who believes VR is the future, unless a major breakthrough happens that would eliminate all heavy inconveniences that make it almost unusable for the majority of population for more than half an hour.
AR is a vastly different beast as you need to move in the real world and receive sensory input from your device. People have been using Google Glass for over a decade and already have a feeling of what this entangles if you take just vision into account. To eliminate all awkwardness you'd basically need an advanced implant that wouldn't stand out - but I'm not sure anyone would want such a thing.
> I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways.
If this was ever going to happen it would have already happened in the last (or is it still 'current'?) VR hype cycle. Maybe in the next cycle 15..20 years down the road or after some massive gaming crash it's worth another shot.
It will never make gaming in current form obsolete. Not in 50 years. Just for the fact that you need to put something on your face..
Maybe some people will use a VR set instead of a Wii U for activity / family games but thats it.
What VR is doing is it makes some genre of games a lot more attractive: Sim-racing and flight-sims. The cockpit games in VR are really immersive. Combine it with some good hardware (rig, stick, wheel, etc) and you feel like you're really in the car or plane.
Once smart glasses are the same weight and experience as wearing regular glasses I believe like many they are the next iPhone. The amount of innovation that can happen with smart glasses will be so cool and useful. I was just at a zoo looking for the small animal blending into it's environment in their glass cage ... I wished I had smart glasses that pointed out where in the cage the animal was.
While I was playing ping pong I wished I had smart glasses that kept score of the game.
Tons of ideas that many to millions will find very cool and useful! I can see why Zuckerberg is betting the farm on smart glasses! I don't think Meta will create the next iPhone/smart glasses, but good for him on trying.
The sheer cost of VR platforms would make it non-ubiquitous. People in developing countries use mobile because it is that versatile, and that is why mobile is the king currently. I don't see how AR/VR platforms will ever replace that in next 10-15 years.
I don't believe for a second that smartphones in their current black-mirror form is going to stay, maybe for the forseeable future, but I'll be surprised if we're still rubbing our greasy meat-sausages on glowing plates of glass 10 years from now.
For how much FB subsidized VR headsets, they should have double down on Android phones with their own appstore. At least they seem better positioned than Microsoft who had to get OS to comport with Windows and Amazon.
A lot of the big CEOs repeat a mantra that they are really on the edge of destruction. I've heard that from 2010s Google. It is just a motivating chant.
In my experience "dead wrong" is also wrong. I don't believe VR will ever obsolete some swaths of gaming, but there are certain VR experiences that leave the conventional-gaming alternative feeling utterly worthless by comparison. The feeling of "actually" jumping into the cockpit of my spaceship in Elite Dangerous during the COVID lockdowns was intense, joyful, and freeing in a way no picture on a monitor could ever replicate.
However VR is still an emerging and expensive medium; I'm very lucky to be able to afford the gaming rig, headset, controllers etc required to have that experience. As those barriers to entry lessen, VR will absolutely obsolete certain traditional gaming experiences as much as television murdered the ubiquitous living room radio.
That statement is way too definitive. VR gaming and sales are low because content is low. It's plagued with the cold start problem of all new platforms where publishers won't target VR because it's a small market, and VR won't grow because the game selection is very limited. When a major publisher pushes something to VR, it's usually an half-assed port that fail to leverage the completely different user interface.
If we had 5 games with the polish of Half-life Alyx in VR the sales would probably be higher, but as it is we don't so everyone I know with a headset enjoyed that one game then promptly put their headset back in storage and only take it out for the occasional beat saber game.
Sales don't say everything. I'd buy a steam headset if I could afford it at the moment. The main blocker is my lack of space and lack of GPU power.
I would buy the quest, but doing any kind of business with Facebook feels dirty to me, I'd rather wait and get something from a company I respect.
Not really the worst strategy. You can totally see where he was coming from. He just vastly overestimated how far VR could go in even 10 years of heavy investment, if ever. No amount of heavy investment, even for 10+ years, is going to make AR or VR as ubiquitous as mobile.
You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses. It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. And, he is correct, it needs to have apps so compelling that people find hard to participate in society without one.
It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035.
Another requirement that seems to get ignored is that you need to have the overwhelming majority of the public not feel sick when you use it. I recently had a friend bring a VR headset to a party for people to try out. About 15% of the people who tried it felt dizzy or nauseous after using it. (I did not try it because I know from experience I'll have a headache and be dizzy for hours afterward.)
Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!)
And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform.
Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.
Most of the VR software I've tried have anti-nausea features like teleportation and unmoving frames of reference, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that no one's talking about it.
I think the hope was that some combination of hardware and software would solve the problem.
I haven't suffered from this but anecdotally proper calibration as well as better tracking and frame rate do have a significant effect on whether people suffer such side effects. The Quest series (which if it was bought to a party is my guess on what was used) are great value for money and are competent VR devices (and leading in some ways) but they make compromises to achieve this and I wouldn't rule out the ability to comfortably use VR based on a bad experience with such a device.
Having said that I'd agree network effects for personal uptake are killed by "Just spend 3x as much on the headset and peripherals and have a computer that cost 4x as much and you can use it in a dedicated room you've set up your tracking lighthouses in".
I agree. I get motion sickness from playing FPS games. The symptoms improve, but it takes a while to adjust. Some people have no problem with it, whereas for some it is completely impossible to overcome. It's hard for me to see broad adoption of VR with the current technology.
Nausea is definitely in the spotlight for John Carmack who’s the progenitor of a shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines, starting with Doom. He’s a performance tuning genius and nausea has been one of the biggest engineering issues he and his team have tackled. A brilliant CTO cannot make a hard problem go away, but he and his team have been able to move it to a far better place than where it was back when I tried the DK1.
You raise excellent points and it’s plain to see that John’s work has put him at the fore of violent masculine tropes as entertainment. The whole idea of endless slaughter of “evil” humanoids feels a bit more wrong than it used to, and certainly wouldn’t be the mark I want to leave in the world. I’m not calling him an infamous misogynist, but he’s no infamous feminist either. I hope that people keep holding people to account, and I hope for their sakes they don’t intend on leaving behind 15%+ of their market simply due to malicious or incidental ignorance. I hope a lot of things for them though lol.
I did some brief fact checking for this and came across an ancient 4chan screenshot. I debated sharing it but I think it’s good evidence that these discussion has been in the public conscience for a long time:
If some make decision maker forced an organization to adopt VR and it’s women found it unusable, I would think that ADA would be a route through which there should be grounds for protections and accomplishments.
Frankly, it’s not fully fixed, and it might not be fixable. Our bodies are far more clever than the gods of gaming have presumed. We do proprioception with our toes and ears and sense our surroundings with the tiny hairs on our arms. As long as VR creates dissonance for processing info from the nervous system the more the cerebellum starts to get cranky, and tipsy.
Additionally, as someone with very small pupillary distance, none of the existing headsets on the market are applicable to me. At this point I've written off VR entirely as I don't think any company will ever design for someone like me.
We had a VR excitement 'bubble' in the 90s. Loads of headsets came out, games supporting them, etc. It all died out within a few years. I guess people like Mark thought the reason for the die out was that the tech wasn't there yet. But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset. But that seems to be what Mark is working towards. He's thinking people will choose to work together via VR rather than just plain old video conferencing.
> But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset.
I think you're wrong.
From this[1] great essay about mainframes:
> Ultimately, there are only two natural kinds of computers: embedded systems and mainframes.
And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
Of course, not all tasks are suitable to be done on a phone or a watch. But one way to think of VR is a desk setup with huge monitors that happens to be extremely portable. Of course the promise of VR is much greater than that, but that is a pretty important use case - a use case that would obviate the need for laptops and desktops for many if not most tasks.
2. This isn't to say that the shift has been complete at all. Many people, including me, continue to use a desktop setup. And laptop use is still quite strong. But the derivative is ultimately what matters.
> But the reality is that VR is not the future, people just don't want it. Nobody wants to live their entire waking / working life in a VR headset.
This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are...
In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
Video conferencing sucks. It's so much worse than a conversation with physical or simulated physical presence. I'd much rather have that sense of presence and having experienced that in VR I can say if the tech improves people will likely go for it.
You lose so many cues, tells and deep interactions that you get with a physical presence via video call. I have seen VR start to solve some of these and I think it will be pretty big if we get to the point where the cartoony graphics are ditched.
It's interesting that you have identified exactly the same shortcomings that mobile had when the first commercial mobile phones came to market in the 80s:
- size
- weight
- battery life
- heat
- network reliability
- cost
These were all eventually overcome, incrementally. However, it did take about 30 years for that to happen, so 10 may have been a bit optimistic.
Another required quality that might be surprisingly tricky to get right is durability. Sunglasses are notoriously brittle, and I can't for the life of me keep sunglasses in good shape for more than a few months. I don't know if there is any great solution besides fundamentally altering the form.
The majority of durability issues of glasses are the hinges. So as long as you can make that part of the frame repairable, I feel like it could be manageable.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of other issues for every day wear. (I wear contacts for vision correction because I find glasses very annoying).
If you wanted to you could make a pair of sturdy sunglasses, I think they are designed to break right now.
With regard to AR glasses, I would put the expensive part in my pocket like a phone, and the glasses would be just like the wireless earbuds, easily disposable / replaceable.
The counter argument is that they have sank billions into this with top tier optoelectronic engineers working on realizing the vision. It is about as good an effort as you can reasonably get. If they want to go further, they will have to start building out their own exotic semiconductor basic research labs. Perhaps their only mistake is not scaling up the hardware R and D earlier.
One potential play is a joint venture with Apple, unpalatable yes, but they are the only other large scale consumer electronics company with the EEs
and hardware talent needed to execute this. I doubt even the military and government research labs can do a better job.
If there was something like a join venture between Apple & FB, it would be incredibly compelling as a software engineer interested in AR/VR to go work for them on it.
I don't think that's true. We were imagining them, and even trying to build them -- the hardware just wasn't capable of it. Newton, Palm and Handspring showed us the way, and those platforms died on the journey there. Apple arguably only added capacitive multitouch to the mix, apparently the last big piece of the puzzle to make mobile devices natural and fluid (OK, wireless networks weren't quite there when the original iPhone came out).
I'd argue that there are many, many puzzle pieces still needed to begin imagining an AR future. While the Newton showed an incomplete vision of its future, it begged all the right questions. My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
That's because the form factor of an iPhone is not fundamentally different from a 1998 Jornada.
All we had to do is keep putting different stuff in the box.
What if we changed the rules altogether? Suppose we demanded a phone that was a slab of glass. Literally. A rectangle of glass that you could see through. No visible antennae, no visible battery, no visible circuitry. when you activated it, you saw the same hi res and bright screen you see today on your ios or android device. Now the battery has to be clear. The antennae have to be clear. All the circuitry have to be clear.
Could we get that in the 20 years from 2002 to 2022? Probably not.
And AR glasses would represent a leap that goes even further than that. I'm not saying it can't be done by 2035. I'm saying they would have to get extraordinarily lucky with battery chemistry and display tech to have any chance of making an AR glasses product that did not have serious drawbacks by that date. They'd have to get so lucky that I would feel comfortable betting against it.
That’s a little bit of an overstatement don’t you think?
From the top of my head I can think of GURPS, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk all imagining very thoroughly things that both Mobile and VR gave or can give us, just to mention games that have been highly influential to the generation of people working on these technologies.
There are also loads of books, Asimov’s works have probably been the most influential, almost prophetically, in the creation of today’s Information era.
I'd argue 20 years of mobile development has given us a more powerful Palm with a SIM card and apps including ICQ with encryption, Skype but viable on a handheld device, email with office apps on a small screen, networked games instead of single player, maps, destruction of privacy from use of spyware on apps reporting every swipe, view of contact one has.
I'd argue most enabling changes exclusive to mobile have come from video, which was already a concept, location, which was already a concept, real-time status (which is mainly Twitter and Twitter-likes) and bandwidth. The 'killer feature' at the outset being syncing music and a web browser with sufficient adoption to make saying no to IE 6's vision of the web, and Flash, viable.
But I'm keen to know what was barely imagined back in 2000. Is it shift to mobile devices for a consumption?
Everyone have a look at the NReal Air demo videos and tell me this isn't possible in 20 years of development. It's a bit rough, but it's a product you can buy today, and not at all vaporware.
Cramming a Raspberry Pi worth of computing power and battery into the glasses frame doesn't seem nuts for 20 years of development.
That's an unrealistic expectation based on a faulty view of recent history.
I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003. By 2009 I had a device in my pocket that could almost replace my PC at both work and home and didn't spy on everything I did. In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device that constantly sends data back to the mothership.
While unlikely it is certainly possible that hardware will advance to meet the need but the problem lies in how we do consumer software now. Because the hardware isn't the real product anymore predicting how it will develop gets much sketchier.
Either way, imagining that one change means another is possible or likely is silly.
In 2000, Moore's law was still going strong and had been for the past 40 years (Dennard scaling not ending until around 2005). At that time it was actually more difficult for people to imagine a future that did not include practically unlimited computing capability. I'm not just talking about the unwashed masses, even many experts and leaders in the silicon industry did not see what was coming - Intel released the Pentium 4 in 2000 and was saying it would scale to 10GHz+ in a few years (https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6).
This reminds me of how the public viewed computers before Windows 95, or when the iPhone just came out. The flaws are many and severe, but you’d be shortsighted if you couldn’t see the potential
There's a quip somewhere about how the essence of futurist misprediction has been confusing unlike-in-quality and unlike-in-capability.
Unlike-in-quality is the same thing, only better. It rarely changes the world, because it's not an infinite value proposition.
Unlike-in-capability, on the other hand, is offering something that literally didn't exist before. It approaches infinite value, because it has the capability to reshape the world into one that requires its existence.
Mobile internet was unlike-in-capability.
I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality.
Maybe the only thing that gets me there is persistence, but the rub of that is that its requirements all require bulky physical configuration and/or isolation.
At its worst, earliest form, a brick cell phone was still portable, and didn't isolate the user from the world around them.
The current VR headsets seem more akin to the car phones or those huge brick mobile phones of the 70s/80s rather than smartphones. Lots of people saw its potential. But it was not ready for the masses.
Even with 'perfect' glasses, batteries, networking and tracking, you're still faced with the problem that the virtual world is populated by intangible apparitions while real-world obstacles remain very tangible. And conceptually, none of the solutions to those problems are ever going to become cheap or convenient, because they're problems with basic physics.
> It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission.
The first AR glasses will be close to dummy terminals. For them to become feasible, wireless networking infrastructure has to become low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput – but not necessarily ubiquitous. There's no need to have powerful compute in a small form-factor if that can be outsourced to nearby servers, and this is something that could be possible in the confines of a major city, and the hardware would be rolled out much like another mobile carrier.
>You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses
Why? You don't have to transport VR. VR is the complement to mobile phones: mobile phones are used when you leave home, VR is used when you don't leave home.
The big question is: Are people going to leave home or are they going to stay home?
My guess is that it depends on how much energy is available. If there is no infrastructure worth visiting for billions of people, then VR will become a success.
>It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one.
If work happens in VR, then employer will finance the hardware for their employees.
With Apple allegedly joining the space in less than 2 months, and multiple sunglasses-sized devices out there already (nreal, rokid, etc), I think we'll know very soon whether XR has a chance of going mainstream this decade
I read this one of the previous times it was posted. I don't have a strong opinion about the metaverse either way.
However, this email on strategy is an example of something I haven't seen in any startup I have ever worked at. Usually the information is available in pieces in various places, PRD's, value statements, mission statements, whatever.
The pessimist in me also believes that most of the people I have worked with wouldn't even take the time to read such an email.
Anyway, all of this to say, I appreciate that it leaked and learned that there are people communicating in a way I wish companies I had worked for communicated.
Where is the end user? Where’s is the joy? Where is the reason why people are going to love this technology? Where is the practical example?
Instead it’s all business, but that business is worthless if you don’t start with the reason people want to use, embrace and even love your product or service.
On point.
He's trying to make a product for his business instead of the user.
Edit: In addtiton it's amazing how early he identified his business weaknesses (platforms dependency and lack of innovation) yet decided to solve them in such a strange if not wrong, at least very risky way.
How all those investments in AR/VR would improve innovation problems in the core business? Apple is able to innovate in his core business so it's not a company size or age problem. Instagram, whatsapp, snap and tiktok are all proofs that there's room for innovation in facebook family of apps. Moreover if you already struggle with innovation and your growth comes from the network effect of your platforms is it really a good idea to bet on such ambitious projects?
Yep, all business talk and generic tech hype. It's no surprise that it is failing if they approached this problem from a business and tech orientation, rather than looking at it from the customers point of view.
What problems does VR/AR solve that would want to make one wear an AR headset all of the time? Why do I want to wear one while changing my daughters diaper, or walking my dog after work? I see no problems that it solves.
I hadn’t seen this emails before. I’m surprised by how outward looking and myopic at the same time Zuck’s emails are, this one particularly so (the one about chat bots also comes to mind).
Ask yourself where you were in 2015 and see if you can get their take on VR or AR. For me it felt like magic. Like using an iPhone for the first time. Yes, VR and AR is absolutely the future. But social communication and media communication is just a myopic view on what the possibilities are! Interactive consumption is / was where it is at. A hybrid of games + educational experience was for me the quintessential experience a la Assassin’s Creed meets walking simulator.
I would love to just learn about places where I go passively with AR. I’d love to meet people and have fun stories shared via AR (as I proof read this, I’m not so sure about this but there’s potential).
Facebook absolutely should have built the platform first and if they did that developers would have come to build the apps. I’m surprised with 40k to 80k on staff they weren’t able make much headway into this until the past year.
Somewhat relatedly, did Zuck really write these emails in 2015? The color of the text for the date is highlighted weird. I’m surprised that the chat bot effort happened after this email. Perhaps, he figured chat bots would be a gateway to AR?
I think Zuck was focused too much on the control Apple and Google have on the average person’s eyeballs / pocket and on Facebook itself. The Facebook phone was an obvious attempt at trying to pry loose but they should have just kept at it. They could have built a Google Daydream like experience around their own Facebook phone.
All for the best I guess. I’m glad Facebook is failing. They have harmed more relationships with their algorithms imo than helped keep them together. The world might have been a better place if Facebook’s feed wasn’t trying to be so “engaging”.
If there's a good AR headset you'd have to be able to stop me (and a million other people) from forcing wikipedia onto the device. That might be a harder technical challenge than actually making the AR headset.
I really like Ben Thompson's position in VR adoption - he compares it to the PC adoption. It was enterprise first, then consumers. Users learned how to use a PC at work, and once the price drops enough, they bring one home.
Thompson was high up on the Microsoft / Meta VR deal.
IMO Zuck has a great grasp of the trajectory of VR/AR in 2015. Meta is singlehandedly trying to will it into a common place. To some extent, they had succeeded way more than a lot of other commenters give them credits for. VR is way far prevalent than it was 2-3 years ago.
Oculus Quest 2 certainly wasn't driving the instant paradigm shift like the introduction of an iPhone in 2007 (15 or so years ago). Though you'd argue that precursors to iPhones were WAP phones, Blackberry's. They laid the ground work (Blackberry was also an enterprise-first adoption). As an interface, handheld devices are much closer to our familiarity with PC so the jump wasn't huge. Plus it has a killer use case -- everyone needs a phone.
I am very impressed by the clear vision in 2015 that we're still seeing it play out in front of our eyes in the VR/AR/Mixed Reality space. What hasn't happened or wasn't mentioned the killer use case -- the utility why people would need to be in VR/AR/XR mode.
The web and smartphone landscape in 50 years might very well look quite similar to what we have today. VR will remain a niche and most people will carry around a smartphone with even more capabilities.
This email makes such a bold assumption - that VR will play out like a repeat of smartphones. Or that some "next big platform" will. Is that guaranteed? Cars, houses, aircraft, boats, bicycles - all have mostly kept their basic form factors for decades, once developed and optimized.
I'm dubious that VR will ever be much more than a game platform. Certainly not a substitute for physical life.
Things you can't do in VR:
- have a normal tactile response to objects
- feel the acceleration of a vehicle
- feel the warmth of a fire
- eat a good meal
- eat a good meal with friends
- buy a coffee and get a buzz
- enjoy the smell of caramelizing onions
- get a lifesaving surgery
- have sex
- feel a comforting arm on your shoulder
- do something intricate with your hands and fingers, like carving something into a piece of wood with a nail; even picking up the nail in VR will be hard, let alone the subtle movements, grips and holds, and tactile feedback we take for granted
- experience nature, animals, ecosystems, and interact with them (as they really are, not cutesy programmed versions)
It’ll be full VR. With the headset on you’ll be Hugh Hefner, but with the headset off it’s just you, this (https://youtu.be/qobhDJ_vEOc), and the advertisers selling anti-depressants.
This is wrong, I know of a project where you sit in the backseat of a car, put a VR headset on that's connected to the car. There is a driver and you are on a special track in real life. Acceleration is real, but on the VR thingy you are elsewhere. Not sure if it was ever released.
I think the fundamental problem they'll face is that VR won't be accepted beyond temporary engagement. You just can't expect people to exist in a virtual environment and ignore their actual physical reality for any length of time.
I would think our brains trying to maintain a virtual and physical reality at once for any length of time must get quite stressful. The virtual environment will be first to go (yes even augmented reality).
People want to still be connected to 'reality' and Mark's virtual goals create too much friction with reality for the sake of his geeky wet dream, at least to meet his scale for success.
You see it this way because you are thinking in terms of an AR headset playing audio or visuals.
In a really well executed dystopian future, the AR glasses and headphones should not even exist and the thoughts should directly be injected in your brain.
You implant yourself a chip like Neuralink and Neuralink sends you electric impulses that gives you answers.
And then, Facebook and Google can directly read your mind and inject you ads.
Of course, they are going to respect your privacy "your thoughts never leave your local device" (except in the case of terrorism, and other related thoughts).
You are hungry, Google knows it, and suggests you a place to eat.
Given that Blizzard's biggest innovation in the MMO space in recent years is apparently a 'worse' version of World of Warcraft, I'm not even sure that's true. Seems like Old School Runescape is actually doing better than (or at least similar to) WoW in terms of active players, and that has even lower graphical fidelity.
I think that's a different scenario. Games are escapism, what Mark Z is proposing is another 'real' world through your goggles where others demand and control your attention. I don't think people want that tax.
I think perhaps WoW would fail in the same way with VR, where people start to realise the time spent in it really is more like work after a point.
Non-immersiveness is huge feature for casual phone use though. When browsing my phone I usually want to be aware of friends/family in the same room, to notice if my pet is getting into trouble, and be approachable if someone wants to speak to me. Putting a VR headset on blocks all of that out, which is something I absolutely don't want most of the time I'm on my phone.
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I don't think Zuckerberg is wrong about VR at a certain level. I think VR gaming makes regular gaming obsolete in many ways. But instead of making Oculus the "XBox" of the future, Mark decided that it was the "everything" of the future. A sort of wishful thinking that these headsets would replace the cellphone.
The cellphone fits in your pocket, watches fit on your wrist, and earbuds fit in your ears. A VR headset would have to be sunglasses size and even then they'd still be less ubiquitous than the Apple Watch.
The problem is not the vision, but the amount of money being spent. If Oculus had stayed independent, I can guarantee we'd have better (probably more gaming) oriented content.
I agree with this. We would also have more competition because other players in the space wouldn't be as intimidated to go up against a business like Meta/Facebook.
I think a crucial miscalculation was trying to EEE the space. Zuck clearly states that he wanted Meta to "own the space" on every platform. Basically, he wanted to carve out a niche like Adobe managed to do with PDF, but on a scale that rivals full blown platforms like the Android ecosystem. Such an ambitious plan sounds great on paper, until you realize that you're trying to EEE the exact people who wrote the textbooks on EEE. When you sound a horn that loud, on a megaphone as big as the one Meta was using, you're only painting a target on your own back.
Another drawback to the path that Meta selected is they basically internalized the entire hardware industry that was just starting up. If Oculus had stayed independent I believe they would have had to partner with other hardware vendors to establish some sort of regulatory body for writing industry standard specifications. With one serious player in the field developing and harboring all the tech for themselves, this space could be barren for a long time if Meta folds. All the work by third parties that went into this proprietary technology and platform will basically be for nothing.
The "common" API to access VR does exist: OpenXR, and is not great and has remained that way for years. Oculus's APIs Just Work (tm) and SteamVR's are fairly usable and more open to accessories, if a bit jank at times. On top of that - a great deal of Meta's XR research has been/is released to the public. We could do better...but we could do worse too.
Low-hanging fruit such as controller offsets have been incorrectly specified and remained incorrectly specified for years. Input latency and prediction are unacceptably high and/or incorrectly implemented by at least one game engine, in a way that screws up certain motion vectors unless you take some very much unspecified guesses about implementation and filter them appropriately.
I pray for the Khronos groups and members who are party to OpenXR to improve their support going forward, but it's going to require some risky bets on the part of game developers to adopt the APIs, and a lot of legwork from all stakeholders to tune and improve their platforms to something converging on acceptable. And where is Apple in this? Absolutely nowhere - so the platform convergence is guaranteed huge future divergence anyways.
So that explains that although there exists a standard platform that multiple hardware manufacturers can target - and have targeted - it has not yet achieved mainstream acceptance. It's just not good enough (yet), it's a pain in the ass to work with, it requires engine updates, and there's a high risk it will be majorly disrupted.
Additionally, it must be emphasized that there would be no VR market if not for the Quest 2; no other hardware platform has paved a way to a sustainable consumer ecosystem, from end to end: low priced hardware, high baseline quality of developer experience for something this early in its lifecycle (it bootstrapped developer experience based on very polished developer workflows), consistent install base to target and optimize for.
I completely disagree with this. Competition is what drives innovation, not the absence of it. Other players did go against Meta/Oculus and their VR products were abysmal in comparison. They just didn't get what makes a desirable VR headset for the average gamers/consumers. And it's not all an issue of money. Sony, Google, Microsoft, LG, Apple, Samsung and other tech giants had equally deep pockets and hardware expertise to compete with Meta/Oculus in this field if they wanted to and if they knew the market. But they didn't.
If Meta wouldn't exist in the VR space, it doesn't mean their competitors would magically have better tech now. Their products would still be crap or not even exist today. Same how other smartphone makers with equally deep pockets to Apple like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola went against the iPhone and failed. If the iPhone wouldn't have existed it doesn't mean all their competitors would now be making better phones. Quite the contrary, the competition the iPhone bought helped move the technology forward, same how Meta's Quest moved the VR tech forward.
Just look at Sony's recent VR headset for the PS5, needing physical cables tethered to a separate console you need to buy, is just a no-go in 2022 VR technology. Meta/Oculus moved the goalposts so much with their cordless, self contained Quest 2 headset, especially at the ~400$ price point, that going back to expensive headsets tethered with cables to separate PC/consoles is just not gonna be a VR sales success going forward.
Up until the recent Quest Pro failure, it seemed Meta/Oculus really nailed the base recipe for what makes a desirable VR gaming headset with the Quest 2. All they had to do was improve on that, instead of pivoting to "professionals".
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I havent tried the recent Quest Pro but based on reviews I assume it's pretty good. Not great, not sexy, but pretty good. Their flagship application however, Horizons, embarrasses meta every time a screenshot gets shared. It is so dorky and uninspired that nobody wants to admit they even tried it.
Who exactly are they targeting with that thing? Adults? Children? Their messaging and pricepoint around the Pro seems to suggest they're expecting office workers to use it for virtual conferencing. Who are they kidding with that?
The cost is part of the forward-looking vision. That part makes sense to me. It's the product that baffles me. It just stinks.
It's like saying, back in the early days of the internet, that showing an ugly, unstyled text with pictures on a webpage is worthless. The platform has grown to become a cornerstone of human civilization!
Facebook wants to own something akin to that. _If_ their bet works out, they will be so very powerful. I think as a netizen, it's my duty to make sure their bet doesn't go the way they want. Platforms should not be owned, but be federated and compatible, and open.
This VR enthusiast made a great video about the problems of VR games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZRvw7WTq8
My mother in law probably still thinks people play first person shooters but really the sense of characterization in modern games depends on the third person perspective. Bayonetta has legs and knows how to use them. The whole point of a Mario game is seeing Mario on the screen.
The third person view lets you experience a spectrum of identification with a character (I moe for Tamamo, I like Mario, I control Mario, I travel with Mario on his journey, I am Mario, ...) that you can't really experience from a first person view. Maybe you can put on the appearance of a character for other people's benefit in VR but you're going to have use your imagination (for better and worse) to put yourself into a character.
For now the VR game industry is driven by independents. Big game studios could make an AAA game but they won't because there aren't enough players with headsets to justify the investment.
I am betting on the first AAA VR game coming from a Chinese studio as they are taking big chances on new IP such as Genshin Impact from MiHoYo.
He loves Ready Player One and has referenced it in interviews regarding the metaverse, but he's basically basing his business model after the main bad guy/group in the story.
Not really an answer to your second bit, but "Moss" is a lovely little game in VR that you play from third person (fixed camera). I wish more VR games did 3rd person, aside from Moss it seems exclusive to strategy games.
There are 3rd person games for VR.
Best selling videogame Minecraft is first person.
Currently top selling game on Steam is first person. Most played is first person
No, I don't think it does; if you look at history, VR has been around for a long time in different forms, think also Sony and Microsoft's console AR solutions. If you look at today, VR is available everywhere at console prices, but it's only a niche to the gaming market, an extra.
The BIG change in gaming in the past 10, 15 years, which Facebook has been partially responsible for, was actually scaling DOWN - think mobile games, simpler games like farmville on FB, etc. Nowadays, the hierarchy is mobile gaming > cynical live service games (lootboxes) > regular video games & consoles > indie games > VR (my opinion / take, I don't have sources because I'm too lazy to look them up).
But you're right about the other things, he definitely overestimated VR's impact on the world. 2015 was a year or two after Google Glass, which was the first major party to try AR as envisioned by Zucc - and it didn't work out for various reasons. A big one was social, but I can imagine the big tech companies figured that society needs a bit more time, like they did with mobile and later smartphones.
I can't see always-on HUD work just yet, society doesn't want that. Nobody wants to have a conversation with someone only for their eyes to go elsewhere because a notification is coming in. Although on the other hand, people will probably talk to someone and see them looking at their phone / watch while talking to them.
The most interesting part of the email to me was seeing his support for aquiring Unity. Not being able to land that acquisition almost feels like the critical reason Meta doesn't have much to show today, after all this effort. And it doesn't look like the aquisition failed due to lack of trying! ironSource ended up doing a merger acqusition that finally closed just a few days ago.
Fortnite is the Metaverse currently.
We can probably expect VR/AR to take about that long if not longer. So Mark might not be wrong, he just might be way early.
Sometime by 2035 a company will build light field display glasses than can translate language, operate industrial drones, and operate remote chat. It probably won't be meta
My best hope is that Facebook develops a lot of neat tech and then fumbles and fails, and finally exits the space, and in the vacuum companies like Samsung and others drop more general purpose platforms that allow freedom on the software side.
How would they do that though? The technology to pack the VR processing power of ~4k display per eye @ 90-120 Hz, cooling, power efficiency and big enough battery plus lens technology into a regular frame of glasses that doesn't look weird, is some Sci-Fi, Iron Man level technology, that just isn't here yet and it won't be for many years to come, if not decades, considering the slow down of Moore's law, and when it will be here, it will be prohibitively expensive.
Imagine the challenges of having to cram an RTX 4090 into a pair of Raybans and being able to run for hours on the battery of a smartwatch. We're very, very far away from that, probably decades of optics, semiconductor fabrication and battery chemistry advancements are needed before this reaches consumer tech and pricing.
Once Meta goes down and takes Oculus with it, we'll probably see another VR winter, until the tech improvements reach a level that makes it desirable again.
This is a well known problem, and there are quite a few potential solutions - Doug Lanman, the lead of Display Systems Research @ FRL made a bunch of nice presentations on a variety of different approaches a couple years ago (all on YouTube, well worth watching one [1] for anyone with a passing interest in the really cool developments going on).
While I think varifocal is going to be the near-term solution, I do have a soft spot for the various light field displays I've seen.
[1] EI 2020 Plenary: Quality Screen Time: Leveraging Computational Displays for Spatial Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwMAl9bGNY
Here’s some actual problems that are harder:
* while your eyes remain accommodated to focus on that distance, it no longer corresponds with the way they track objects close or far away, by pointing closer together etc
* lack of correspondence between movement on screen and in the real world (usually translation, rather than rotation which tracks head position) for non-roomscale content (i.e. games where you move around larger scenes) causes motion sickness.
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People say this but Amazon is doing just fine in the retail space.
In fact for Facebook and Amazon, their biggest follies are trying to own the platform (Metaverse and Fire Phone).
We have seen that owning a platform doesn’t mean owning everything and yet, perfectly good businesses waste a ton of time and money assuming that is the case.
One is called Alexa and the other is called Ring. At the same time Amazon is a website that doesn't rely as heavily on your phones privacy setting (which Apple is currently using to mine your data btw!)
Within the next 5 years I expect folks to be able to order things from their doorbells and Ring home security drones
Far from it. VR is just a new type of game. Regular display technology is too good now. From ultrawide to laser projection, to high density mobile screens, to folding screens... ALL getting better and cheaper. Above all, the friction and ergonomic shift of VR is too great to expect obsolescence to come knocking on regular gaming's door.
His idea for the mobile phone to be replaced with VR/AR is crazy. Phones are little hubs in our hands, with amazing cameras and nice screens for flicking through information with your finger. Agreeable ergonomics for our brains to absorb "chunks" of content or information, about the size of a phone up to tablet/A4 paper size. Something in our brains likes the compartmental properties of a page. Like since humans started reading and writing. The "size" of a virtual bubble or layered world floating in front of our faces, isn't tangible or agreeable enough for daily driving brain activity IMHO. Great for after hours fun though!
I don't think the form-factor is something they can iteratively approach for too long, given the absurd amount of investment Meta is already throwing in to building the next generation of still insufficient AR/VR. Investor appetite will not last long enough to realize the pipe-dream.
From what I've gathered, this is the Meta AR target for the early 2030s. What we see now are intended to be the steps along that road.
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AR is a vastly different beast as you need to move in the real world and receive sensory input from your device. People have been using Google Glass for over a decade and already have a feeling of what this entangles if you take just vision into account. To eliminate all awkwardness you'd basically need an advanced implant that wouldn't stand out - but I'm not sure anyone would want such a thing.
If this was ever going to happen it would have already happened in the last (or is it still 'current'?) VR hype cycle. Maybe in the next cycle 15..20 years down the road or after some massive gaming crash it's worth another shot.
Maybe some people will use a VR set instead of a Wii U for activity / family games but thats it.
What VR is doing is it makes some genre of games a lot more attractive: Sim-racing and flight-sims. The cockpit games in VR are really immersive. Combine it with some good hardware (rig, stick, wheel, etc) and you feel like you're really in the car or plane.
While I was playing ping pong I wished I had smart glasses that kept score of the game.
Tons of ideas that many to millions will find very cool and useful! I can see why Zuckerberg is betting the farm on smart glasses! I don't think Meta will create the next iPhone/smart glasses, but good for him on trying.
I don't get dizzy or have to stand up and move around to "sit down and veg out" on Xbox/PS/etc.
Every couple of the years we get lighter headesets, the marketing cycle that now the adopting is finally going to take off, and then crickets.
Until we get something like Star Treck's Holodeck, the cycle will continue.
The changing of order is inevitable.
We're getting very close with products like Nreal Air.
However VR is still an emerging and expensive medium; I'm very lucky to be able to afford the gaming rig, headset, controllers etc required to have that experience. As those barriers to entry lessen, VR will absolutely obsolete certain traditional gaming experiences as much as television murdered the ubiquitous living room radio.
If we had 5 games with the polish of Half-life Alyx in VR the sales would probably be higher, but as it is we don't so everyone I know with a headset enjoyed that one game then promptly put their headset back in storage and only take it out for the occasional beat saber game.
You would need a headset so small and light it's not too far off from a pair of sunglasses. It needs a battery that runs all day. It needs to not get hot and burn someone's face. It needs to be fast and responsive in terms of both local processing and network data transmission. It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one. And, he is correct, it needs to have apps so compelling that people find hard to participate in society without one.
It's not even a guaranteed thing that such a device is even possible. Even if it is, no way would it be ready for 2025, maybe not even 2035.
Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!)
And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform.
Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.
I think the hope was that some combination of hardware and software would solve the problem.
Having said that I'd agree network effects for personal uptake are killed by "Just spend 3x as much on the headset and peripherals and have a computer that cost 4x as much and you can use it in a dedicated room you've set up your tracking lighthouses in".
You raise excellent points and it’s plain to see that John’s work has put him at the fore of violent masculine tropes as entertainment. The whole idea of endless slaughter of “evil” humanoids feels a bit more wrong than it used to, and certainly wouldn’t be the mark I want to leave in the world. I’m not calling him an infamous misogynist, but he’s no infamous feminist either. I hope that people keep holding people to account, and I hope for their sakes they don’t intend on leaving behind 15%+ of their market simply due to malicious or incidental ignorance. I hope a lot of things for them though lol.
I did some brief fact checking for this and came across an ancient 4chan screenshot. I debated sharing it but I think it’s good evidence that these discussion has been in the public conscience for a long time:
https://imgur.io/yDqMRxw
Research confirms your concern:
https://venturebeat.com/games/a-survey-about-vr-sickness-and...
If some make decision maker forced an organization to adopt VR and it’s women found it unusable, I would think that ADA would be a route through which there should be grounds for protections and accomplishments.
Frankly, it’s not fully fixed, and it might not be fixable. Our bodies are far more clever than the gods of gaming have presumed. We do proprioception with our toes and ears and sense our surroundings with the tiny hairs on our arms. As long as VR creates dissonance for processing info from the nervous system the more the cerebellum starts to get cranky, and tipsy.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Oculus.
I think you're wrong.
From this[1] great essay about mainframes:
> Ultimately, there are only two natural kinds of computers: embedded systems and mainframes.
And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
Of course, not all tasks are suitable to be done on a phone or a watch. But one way to think of VR is a desk setup with huge monitors that happens to be extremely portable. Of course the promise of VR is much greater than that, but that is a pretty important use case - a use case that would obviate the need for laptops and desktops for many if not most tasks.
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1. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
2. This isn't to say that the shift has been complete at all. Many people, including me, continue to use a desktop setup. And laptop use is still quite strong. But the derivative is ultimately what matters.
This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are...
In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
You lose so many cues, tells and deep interactions that you get with a physical presence via video call. I have seen VR start to solve some of these and I think it will be pretty big if we get to the point where the cartoony graphics are ditched.
- size
- weight
- battery life
- heat
- network reliability
- cost
These were all eventually overcome, incrementally. However, it did take about 30 years for that to happen, so 10 may have been a bit optimistic.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of other issues for every day wear. (I wear contacts for vision correction because I find glasses very annoying).
With regard to AR glasses, I would put the expensive part in my pocket like a phone, and the glasses would be just like the wireless earbuds, easily disposable / replaceable.
One potential play is a joint venture with Apple, unpalatable yes, but they are the only other large scale consumer electronics company with the EEs and hardware talent needed to execute this. I doubt even the military and government research labs can do a better job.
20 years of mobile phone development gave us things that we could barely have imagined back in 2000 or so.
I'd argue that there are many, many puzzle pieces still needed to begin imagining an AR future. While the Newton showed an incomplete vision of its future, it begged all the right questions. My kids Occulus Quest, on the other hand, just makes me feel motion sick...
All we had to do is keep putting different stuff in the box.
What if we changed the rules altogether? Suppose we demanded a phone that was a slab of glass. Literally. A rectangle of glass that you could see through. No visible antennae, no visible battery, no visible circuitry. when you activated it, you saw the same hi res and bright screen you see today on your ios or android device. Now the battery has to be clear. The antennae have to be clear. All the circuitry have to be clear.
Could we get that in the 20 years from 2002 to 2022? Probably not.
And AR glasses would represent a leap that goes even further than that. I'm not saying it can't be done by 2035. I'm saying they would have to get extraordinarily lucky with battery chemistry and display tech to have any chance of making an AR glasses product that did not have serious drawbacks by that date. They'd have to get so lucky that I would feel comfortable betting against it.
From the top of my head I can think of GURPS, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk all imagining very thoroughly things that both Mobile and VR gave or can give us, just to mention games that have been highly influential to the generation of people working on these technologies.
There are also loads of books, Asimov’s works have probably been the most influential, almost prophetically, in the creation of today’s Information era.
I'd argue most enabling changes exclusive to mobile have come from video, which was already a concept, location, which was already a concept, real-time status (which is mainly Twitter and Twitter-likes) and bandwidth. The 'killer feature' at the outset being syncing music and a web browser with sufficient adoption to make saying no to IE 6's vision of the web, and Flash, viable.
But I'm keen to know what was barely imagined back in 2000. Is it shift to mobile devices for a consumption?
Cramming a Raspberry Pi worth of computing power and battery into the glasses frame doesn't seem nuts for 20 years of development.
I had my first 'smartphone' in 2003. By 2009 I had a device in my pocket that could almost replace my PC at both work and home and didn't spy on everything I did. In 2020 I had a device that was utterly useless for work and had become little more than an entertainment device that constantly sends data back to the mothership.
While unlikely it is certainly possible that hardware will advance to meet the need but the problem lies in how we do consumer software now. Because the hardware isn't the real product anymore predicting how it will develop gets much sketchier.
Either way, imagining that one change means another is possible or likely is silly.
Unlike-in-quality is the same thing, only better. It rarely changes the world, because it's not an infinite value proposition.
Unlike-in-capability, on the other hand, is offering something that literally didn't exist before. It approaches infinite value, because it has the capability to reshape the world into one that requires its existence.
Mobile internet was unlike-in-capability.
I have a very uphill battle convincing myself AR/VR is more than unlike-in-quality.
Maybe the only thing that gets me there is persistence, but the rub of that is that its requirements all require bulky physical configuration and/or isolation.
At its worst, earliest form, a brick cell phone was still portable, and didn't isolate the user from the world around them.
--Carl Sagan
I could see criticizing Mark for betting the entire farm on it.
The first AR glasses will be close to dummy terminals. For them to become feasible, wireless networking infrastructure has to become low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput – but not necessarily ubiquitous. There's no need to have powerful compute in a small form-factor if that can be outsourced to nearby servers, and this is something that could be possible in the confines of a major city, and the hardware would be rolled out much like another mobile carrier.
Why? You don't have to transport VR. VR is the complement to mobile phones: mobile phones are used when you leave home, VR is used when you don't leave home.
The big question is: Are people going to leave home or are they going to stay home?
My guess is that it depends on how much energy is available. If there is no infrastructure worth visiting for billions of people, then VR will become a success.
>It needs to be inexpensive enough that everyone on Earth who currently has a smartphone can afford one.
If work happens in VR, then employer will finance the hardware for their employees.
However, this email on strategy is an example of something I haven't seen in any startup I have ever worked at. Usually the information is available in pieces in various places, PRD's, value statements, mission statements, whatever.
The pessimist in me also believes that most of the people I have worked with wouldn't even take the time to read such an email.
Anyway, all of this to say, I appreciate that it leaked and learned that there are people communicating in a way I wish companies I had worked for communicated.
Where is the end user? Where’s is the joy? Where is the reason why people are going to love this technology? Where is the practical example?
Instead it’s all business, but that business is worthless if you don’t start with the reason people want to use, embrace and even love your product or service.
Edit: In addtiton it's amazing how early he identified his business weaknesses (platforms dependency and lack of innovation) yet decided to solve them in such a strange if not wrong, at least very risky way. How all those investments in AR/VR would improve innovation problems in the core business? Apple is able to innovate in his core business so it's not a company size or age problem. Instagram, whatsapp, snap and tiktok are all proofs that there's room for innovation in facebook family of apps. Moreover if you already struggle with innovation and your growth comes from the network effect of your platforms is it really a good idea to bet on such ambitious projects?
What problems does VR/AR solve that would want to make one wear an AR headset all of the time? Why do I want to wear one while changing my daughters diaper, or walking my dog after work? I see no problems that it solves.
Ask yourself where you were in 2015 and see if you can get their take on VR or AR. For me it felt like magic. Like using an iPhone for the first time. Yes, VR and AR is absolutely the future. But social communication and media communication is just a myopic view on what the possibilities are! Interactive consumption is / was where it is at. A hybrid of games + educational experience was for me the quintessential experience a la Assassin’s Creed meets walking simulator.
I would love to just learn about places where I go passively with AR. I’d love to meet people and have fun stories shared via AR (as I proof read this, I’m not so sure about this but there’s potential).
Facebook absolutely should have built the platform first and if they did that developers would have come to build the apps. I’m surprised with 40k to 80k on staff they weren’t able make much headway into this until the past year.
Somewhat relatedly, did Zuck really write these emails in 2015? The color of the text for the date is highlighted weird. I’m surprised that the chat bot effort happened after this email. Perhaps, he figured chat bots would be a gateway to AR?
I think Zuck was focused too much on the control Apple and Google have on the average person’s eyeballs / pocket and on Facebook itself. The Facebook phone was an obvious attempt at trying to pry loose but they should have just kept at it. They could have built a Google Daydream like experience around their own Facebook phone.
All for the best I guess. I’m glad Facebook is failing. They have harmed more relationships with their algorithms imo than helped keep them together. The world might have been a better place if Facebook’s feed wasn’t trying to be so “engaging”.
It won't go down this way. Wikipedia for AR will never happen. More likely it'll be thousands of ads and other crap.
Thompson was high up on the Microsoft / Meta VR deal.
IMO Zuck has a great grasp of the trajectory of VR/AR in 2015. Meta is singlehandedly trying to will it into a common place. To some extent, they had succeeded way more than a lot of other commenters give them credits for. VR is way far prevalent than it was 2-3 years ago.
Oculus Quest 2 certainly wasn't driving the instant paradigm shift like the introduction of an iPhone in 2007 (15 or so years ago). Though you'd argue that precursors to iPhones were WAP phones, Blackberry's. They laid the ground work (Blackberry was also an enterprise-first adoption). As an interface, handheld devices are much closer to our familiarity with PC so the jump wasn't huge. Plus it has a killer use case -- everyone needs a phone.
I am very impressed by the clear vision in 2015 that we're still seeing it play out in front of our eyes in the VR/AR/Mixed Reality space. What hasn't happened or wasn't mentioned the killer use case -- the utility why people would need to be in VR/AR/XR mode.
The web and smartphone landscape in 50 years might very well look quite similar to what we have today. VR will remain a niche and most people will carry around a smartphone with even more capabilities.
I'm dubious that VR will ever be much more than a game platform. Certainly not a substitute for physical life.
Things you can't do in VR:
- have a normal tactile response to objects
- feel the acceleration of a vehicle
- feel the warmth of a fire
- eat a good meal
- eat a good meal with friends
- buy a coffee and get a buzz
- enjoy the smell of caramelizing onions
- get a lifesaving surgery
- have sex
- feel a comforting arm on your shoulder
- do something intricate with your hands and fingers, like carving something into a piece of wood with a nail; even picking up the nail in VR will be hard, let alone the subtle movements, grips and holds, and tactile feedback we take for granted
- experience nature, animals, ecosystems, and interact with them (as they really are, not cutesy programmed versions)
Let's be honest, they're totally gonna make AR glasses that deep-fakes your wife into your favorite waifu while you have sex.
This is wrong, I know of a project where you sit in the backseat of a car, put a VR headset on that's connected to the car. There is a driver and you are on a special track in real life. Acceleration is real, but on the VR thingy you are elsewhere. Not sure if it was ever released.
I would think our brains trying to maintain a virtual and physical reality at once for any length of time must get quite stressful. The virtual environment will be first to go (yes even augmented reality).
People want to still be connected to 'reality' and Mark's virtual goals create too much friction with reality for the sake of his geeky wet dream, at least to meet his scale for success.
In a really well executed dystopian future, the AR glasses and headphones should not even exist and the thoughts should directly be injected in your brain.
You implant yourself a chip like Neuralink and Neuralink sends you electric impulses that gives you answers.
And then, Facebook and Google can directly read your mind and inject you ads.
Of course, they are going to respect your privacy "your thoughts never leave your local device" (except in the case of terrorism, and other related thoughts).
You are hungry, Google knows it, and suggests you a place to eat.
What a lovely future.
People spend hours and hours playing world of warcraft. A better version of that would be even more popular.
I think perhaps WoW would fail in the same way with VR, where people start to realise the time spent in it really is more like work after a point.