“Wow, what a ride it has been!” — no one at Meta in their XR department. Don’t get me wrong, Meta Quest 3 is a marvelous piece of hardware engineering, everything from screen to controllers is well made, nice package, fantastic price too. In fact what Meta sells you for $499 should be $2,499. So every time you see one of these, think of Meta taking $2,000 loss right there. We can see it because Apple decided not to subsidize their Apple Vision Pro, and the price tag is $3,500 rightfully. If I had to guess Apple sells it without any margins at all. By the way I can totally see someone buying Meta Quest 3 and refurbishing the hardware for something else, if of course that would be possible, you can make something like CommaAI self-driving computer. Stereo cameras, nice SOC, $500!
Regardless. I think this VR cycle is over and Meta Quest 4 is not coming. And will not be coming anytime soon. There is a slim chance that 4th generation will make it to the public, but one after — not likely.
Meta has started downsizing their XR department about two years ago. Then Meta Quest Pro came out and big nothing. Then it got steeply discounted about two or three month in. I believe starting price was $1,500. Then it came down to $1,200 or so. And then it got discounted again. Now it’s $999. Ouch. It wasn’t even half a year in. Red flags.
Early on people were complaining about hardware problems: LCD is not high enough resolution, FOV is small, etc. Meta fixed everything. I gotta say that Quest 3 has nothing in common with Rift 1 or Development Kit, these are just different devices. But problem was never is the hardware, it was only an excuse not to use VR.
How crappy and slow were first PC? Resolution was shit, yet people were glued to the monitors. Where I grew up kids would go to so call PC clubs just to play an hour or two with their buddies over LAN. I have Quest 2 and Quest 3 at home, personally I never use them outside of work. My wife doesn’t use them. Our friends asked us to bring it over to play some games one time and that’s it. Truly the most expensive dust collectors we own. But then even people who develop VR don’t use it.
Zuck probably thought if he’ll fix all hardware problems and discount it steeply people will buy it like hot pies. And oh boy how wrong he was.
There is barely any content in VR. And that’s the problem. Worst yet there is very few current use cases today where VR is better than a flat screen. It’s also just some cumbersome to put that thing on. Try developing something for VR, I’ll see the look on your face when you have to put it on and off fifty times a day. You know how real VR developers do it? You are behind the desk, you got your monitor or two, on the right side you have something like Quest 2 or 3, and on the left side you have a single controller. You then hit play button in Unity, grab a headset on top with your right hand in the middle and your thumb covering the proximity sensor between lenses, so it thinks there is a face. You take controller in the other hand, app starts and without even putting the headset on, you just look at the Unity game screen on your monitor.
Back to the content though.
The situation is bleak. There are just handful of games that are truly amazing and show VR’s best side, the rest is subprime experience. Best game in VR is not even available on Quest 3, so you’ll need a PC for that. I’m talking about Half-Life Alyx. I believe if there were more titles like Alyx VR might have had a better chance. Also more games without “ending”. Aka something you can play for years without a lot of plot, counter-strikes and dotas of the PC world.
Videos in VR are just bad. And how boring they are, go to YoutubeVR, it’s just pure sadness. The amount of investment that went into VR cameras and producing this content is staggering. Yet try watching any of them, VR format doesn’t make it more immersive, just more weird. You can watch VR porn though, the only decent thing in VR video world.
There are many issues with VR today, but I think the main one is that people don’t know how to use and what kind of advantages it would offer over regular flat monitors.
Meta has a tight grip on everything that relates to distribution, multiple rounds of reviews, also apps don’t get to the main store but go to sandbox where no one can find them except if user searches app’s name character to character. Who would develop games just to become a slave to Zuck’s ambitions? Developing for VR also sucks big time, Unity is not made for any regular interface development, bunch of hoops with rendering, plugins, textmeshpros and so on.
Maybe early PC’s sucked, but it was a free platform where no one told you how how to do things, anyone could publish a game and sell CDs. There was a sense of freedom, people were addicted to games, developers were happy to oblige. None of this exists in VR.
I’m truly sad to see that VR is not doing great, but you reap what you sow. Anyways, this was not the first cycle of VR, and will not be the last one either! We shall see much better VR perhaps when Neuralink-style chips will go mainstream, and then the spring of VR will come.