Facebook owner Meta loses a billion per month on its AR/VR division, but believes it will be worth it

[Shifty Geezer]

Facebook owner Meta loses a billion per month on its AR/VR division, but believes it will be worth it

Meta is continuing to plough billions of dollars into its AR/VR division Reality Labs, despite losses of more than $1bn…

www.eurogamer.net

That's one heck of an investment!

 

[iroboto]

It’s understandable. But perhaps they are too early to it.

A) if they can make an OS that is incredible, then all they need to do is shrink AR/VR to the point where more people would rather wear glasses than walk around with a mobile phone. You would replace laptops etc. because all your screens would be massive in your eyes.

B) assuming the above, to get it to shrink really small, they need to offload processing to the cloud; and that part is trickier. To have massive, real-time graphical computation with high interactivity and low latency would require essentially a cloud game streaming service with low latency everywhere. Sound familiar? MS is owns a large portion of meta, so this doesn’t surprise me. But there is reason for the Si valley companies to all want to jump in here. We are looking at Meta developing the “tablet” before the iPad came along and showed people how it is done.

C) MS would be happy to own the backend with Meta taking the front end, as MS missed the mobile boat big time. Ideally MS would own the backend for all the future devices that need to offload processing in realtime. Not sure if they are going to succeed, but this is why I believe they are invested in gaming so much. They need to fund their own R&D to use it elsewhere.

 

[cheapchips]

It’s understandable.

That's an incredible amount of cash to be burning given their output. They're too focused on far flung R&D and not enough product delivery.

 

[iroboto]

View attachment 11194

That's an incredible amount of cash to be burning given their output. They're too focused on far flung R&D and not enough product delivery.

Haha you’re right wrong language on my half. It’s a big risk for a big reward if you can claim all devices moving forward. But not necessarily understandable because they are far from making it. A mad sprint at the start of the race, where this level of investment is better at the end.

They are more than happy to spread misinformation to fund this though.

 

[Seanspeed]

I dont think it's gonna work out for them in the long run, at least in terms of what their own goals and expectations are. They're throwing like military levels of inefficient spending at this and we are still too far away from the kind of form factors, unobtrusive ease of use, and sheer practical daily value for it to become this giant mainstream thing anytime remotely soon. Plus I think their whole specific vision of the 'metaverse' is straight up misguided.

I commend them for their huge ambitions and willingness to use their high profitability to spend big on their long term, revolutionary vision, especially as a fan of VR. But reality will set in at some point that they cant keep this up without more clear steps forward in growth and ROI.

Quest can probably be kept going as a pretty great VR platform without all the ludicrous spending, it's just gonna be a case of whether Facebook wants to continue if they realize they wont ever achieve the bigger goals they're chasing.

 

[Davros]

Sort of reminds me of the discovery of electricity, Michael Faraday was giving the prime minister a demonstration of it by giving people electric shocks, making peoples hair stand on end and making frogs legs twitch
the PM asked "that's all very entertaining but of what real use is it"
to which the scientist replied "trust me one day you may tax it" *

*may not of actually happened....

 

[digitalwanderer]

Facebook owner Meta loses a billion per month on its AR/VR division, but believes it will be worth it

It won't be, did the VR "boom" teach us nothing?

 

[eastmen]

It won't be, did the VR "boom" teach us nothing?

The devices keep getting smaller and easier to use with higher resolution and better performance. Its only a matter of time until they are viable for every day use

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The devices keep getting smaller and easier to use with higher resolution and better performance. Its only a matter of time until they are viable for every day use

The current principle won't be good enough. We need a completely new tech to put VR into sunglasses for it to become mainstream IMO. When Oculus kicked off, it was the time when tech had gotten smaller and easier (and cheaper) to use, and so VR was suddenly viable. But now with years of real-world experience, it turns out there are a lot of barriers no-one had anticipated at that revolution. An evolution of this present evolutionary dead-end won't cut it IMO. It needs something as new and disruptive as the first Oculus.

 

[Davros]

We need a completely new tech to put VR into sunglasses

Have you seen the focus in Horizon Zero Dawn

Newsflash Ladies and gentlemen Davros presents his latest invention the VR Hat - Just stand in front of a wall or any flat surface for an incredible experience


Coming soon major Celebrity Endorsement


Use Your illusion

 

[digitalwanderer]

The devices keep getting smaller and easier to use with higher resolution and better performance. Its only a matter of time until they are viable for every day use

The high costs are still the biggest problem and until it gets affordable it just will not be adopted in my opinion.

I want a focus, that would be perfect. Davs nailed it.

 

[eastmen]

The current principle won't be good enough. We need a completely new tech to put VR into sunglasses for it to become mainstream IMO. When Oculus kicked off, it was the time when tech had gotten smaller and easier (and cheaper) to use, and so VR was suddenly viable. But now with years of real-world experience, it turns out there are a lot of barriers no-one had anticipated at that revolution. An evolution of this present evolutionary dead-end won't cut it IMO. It needs something as new and disruptive as the first Oculus.

I mean this is what headsets can be now

0.204Kg Bigscreen
0.758kg valve index


Oled quality blacks, 2560x2560 - 6.5m pixels per eye
Ps v 2 is 2000x2040 and only 4.08m pixels per eye


I have used this headset and its pretty amazing for its weight and size. Once the big boys like Meta/Valve/ Sony and so on start using this type of tech we will see a jump forward in adoption of vr and this is tech avalible this year.

Sun glasses would never work as you don't want light entering for a vr experiance.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's getting there. I don't mean exactly like sunglasses but with the convenience and comfort of that. The main issue here is the unit has to be custom made, to account for specs wearers to have optical inserts. Units that are a one-size-fits-all get a load more complex and cumbersome.

 

[Pjotr]

Yeah that headset had some awesome specs and weight. But it does not have inside out tracking which will add friction to the end user. It's face mask is also custom fit which makes it hard to mass produce and sell. And it's pc-vr, I don't mind but most people don't have a good enough pc to run pcvr headsets at that resolution.
None the less, it is a good showcase of what can be achieved and a good benchmark for weight and comfort.

 

[Davros]

Heres something in a way similar to the focus we just need higher res, full colour and an improvement all round imho, but it's a start (note: i'm only referring to the projection, camera and U.I tech)

 

[eastmen]

That's getting there. I don't mean exactly like sunglasses but with the convenience and comfort of that. The main issue here is the unit has to be custom made, to account for specs wearers to have optical inserts. Units that are a one-size-fits-all get a load more complex and cumbersome.

Sure it needs to be custom made for people who need glasses and don't want to use contacts. For the rest of us we can just use it as is.

Yeah that headset had some awesome specs and weight. But it does not have inside out tracking which will add friction to the end user. It's face mask is also custom fit which makes it hard to mass produce and sell. And it's pc-vr, I don't mind but most people don't have a good enough pc to run pcvr headsets at that resolution.
None the less, it is a good showcase of what can be achieved and a good benchmark for weight and comfort.

Sure for those who want inside out tracking it might. But like I said thsi is a small company making it. So the tech is there for larger companies to exploit.

 

[Seanspeed]

The current principle won't be good enough. We need a completely new tech to put VR into sunglasses for it to become mainstream IMO. When Oculus kicked off, it was the time when tech had gotten smaller and easier (and cheaper) to use, and so VR was suddenly viable. But now with years of real-world experience, it turns out there are a lot of barriers no-one had anticipated at that revolution. An evolution of this present evolutionary dead-end won't cut it IMO. It needs something as new and disruptive as the first Oculus.

Ya know, I dont think the tech barriers were really unforeseen. I think there were fairly realistic ideas about what needed to be done to achieve progress here. It's probably taking a bit longer than initially expected, but I think in the ten years since the Oculus DK2(which I consider the first properly thought through VR headset made by a company with any kind of real money), few of those earlier pioneers working at Oculus and Valve and whatnot would be totally shocked by today's hardware and any supposed lack of progress.

I expect some might have preferred to see a slightly different direction, like stripping out all the hardware required for standalone VR to focus on making the smallest and lightest headset possible. But at the same time, many also did think standalone VR would be the future quite early on. And knew that making it affordable would be key, which would mean compromises.

Honestly, I dont think there's any sort of tech revolution that's going to change this. I think VR is fundamentally going to be limited by the opportunity cost of game developers having to decide whether to make a traditional game or a VR game, and the fact that the answer to this is pretty much a no-brainer in almost every situation, especially for any larger developer/publisher. This 'chicken or the egg' problem VR has had from the beginning seems to something quite insurmountable. Should somebody release a headset next year with 4k per eye, 150 degree FoV, the size and weight of some basic goggles and all for $200, this calculus still doesn't really change.

I think that aspect is probably what was most 'unforeseen' and what everybody got wrong in terms of their predictions of VR's potential. Just the completely basic financial reality of VR game development.

Now, AR could be a different story. I still think AR is gonna be a genuinely mainstream thing at some point in humanity's future, whether it be 20 years or 50 years or whatever.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Ya know, I dont think the tech barriers were really unforeseen.

I meant non-tech barriers. The tech was apparently solved from the original 1990s efforts by Oculus, but getting a headset down from two TV screens strapped to your head to just a visor wasn't enough to enable VR and the VR revolution didn't happen. Usage barriers like motion sickness surprised everyone. There's comfort issues and practicality issues. How do you design a game for room-scale VR when some people's rooms are barely big enough to fit a person in? How do you target your VR game when you've no idea what the users might have access to?

The more the current tech progresses, the more we are confronted with other limitations like focal distance. Two screens at fixed distance isn't really a suitable substitute for natural vision and you'll be deterring people until we find a tech that works much better IMO.

 

[cheapchips]

Two screens at fixed distance isn't really a suitable substitute for natural vision and you'll be deterring people until we find a tech that works much better IMO.

That particular issue is already solved in various ways in the lab though isn't it? A solution just needs to reach mass production. It's just a case of riding the learning curve hard enough for it to become affordable.

 

[Seanspeed]

I meant non-tech barriers. The tech was apparently solved from the original 1990s efforts by Oculus, but getting a headset down from two TV screens strapped to your head to just a visor wasn't enough to enable VR and the VR revolution didn't happen. Usage barriers like motion sickness surprised everyone. There's comfort issues and practicality issues. How do you design a game for room-scale VR when some people's rooms are barely big enough to fit a person in? How do you target your VR game when you've no idea what the users might have access to?

The more the current tech progresses, the more we are confronted with other limitations like focal distance. Two screens at fixed distance isn't really a suitable substitute for natural vision and you'll be deterring people until we find a tech that works much better IMO.

I mean, you're mostly talking about tech barriers here.

The motion sickness thing wasn't unexpected at all. Even from the DK2, the usage of low persistence screens was mainly to help with this very known problem, creating much smoother head tracking. Increasing the refresh rate to 90hz+ was done for a very similar reason, helping most people cross a flicker fusion threshold to where head motion felt real(anything less can cause or exacerbate nausea). The problems of nausea caused by locomotion in games was also very known and lots of talk went on in early stages about best practices for developers to help with this.

The room scale thing is something I vented on tons early on when people(aka Vive fanboys) were making it sound like it was the end all be all of VR experiences, when it was clearly highly limited and that artificial movement would still need to become the predominant way to move around in VR.

How do you target your VR game when you've no idea what the users might have access to?

Oculus very much addressed this back with the CV1 where they included a 'minimum spec' PC and Valve similarly came out with a VR benchmark test for users to see if it was good enough.

Either way, it's hardly any different a problem than traditional game developers face.

The more the current tech progresses, the more we are confronted with other limitations like focal distance. Two screens at fixed distance isn't really a suitable substitute for natural vision and you'll be deterring people until we find a tech that works much better IMO.

Also a known problem from fairly early on, and variable focus lenses are something Oculus have already shown off, showing they're working on it.

Again, I think even if all these things are completely solved, it's still not gonna be enough.