Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality

From that Ars article:

But Quest's overall revenues will have to get a lot healthier to justify the massive investment Meta has made in the hardware line. The company's Reality Labs division has lost $21 billion since the beginning of 2022, over and beyond the $2 billion it spent on the company then known as Oculus in 2014. Quest software and hardware would have to start selling orders of magnitude better than the Wii U to make up for that kind of continuing investment in the technology.

Zuckerberg bet the company on the metaverse, as the company name change suggests.

But how long will they pour money into the platform? The company’s stock price rebounded this year because of online ad sales — and maybe general hype about AI.
 
investing in immersive sports video or whatever you want to call it.
Is this like what I was saying was needed to hit mainstream above? being able to watch sports events via VR from the side of the field/track? If it is and they nail this first i'm gonna finally have to buy a bloody apple device, incredible lol.
 
Is this like what I was saying was needed to hit mainstream above? being able to watch sports events via VR from the side of the field/track? If it is and they nail this first i'm gonna finally have to buy a bloody apple device, incredible lol.

I don't do the sports, but they have deals with MLS and MLB. Disney showed off a courtside basketball demo for Reality Pro. Apple also bought NextVR, which do NBA streaming alongside concert stuff.
 
Terrible trailer. Anyone who's not tried VR will wonder why there's laser pointers and crap cartoon characters floating infront of their favourite sports things!

Totally agree. All they need is the camera view into the sports arena that is sufficiently high resolution and has sufficieny wide fov that the user feels reasonably close to being there.

Problem is the resolution and thus bandwidth requirements to stream that are still out of reach for most internet connections I would assume.
 
Quest 3 isn't moving VR/MR on as 'the next com


Hard not to see Apple absolutely trouncing Meta when the Reality Non-Pro appears. They're actually building the 'best screen you can own/next computing platform' and investing in immersive sports video or whatever you want to call it.

Other than having what looks like compelling XR 'desktop', Apple also have the huge advantage that phone/apps come into that space. Meta are still asking people to choose between their phone and VR. It's a losing proposition.

Even Apple don't think there's a large market for VR. At least with what they are capable of building currently. At least Apple's internal sales projections don't have them trouncing anyone anytime soon. There's a large reason they aren't launching a non-pro device. There's just not a real market for an Apple priced non-pro headset with the size, weight and ergonomics of what Apple could currently have manufactured. Thus they are going for the super high end super enthusiasts with the pro device. Small manufacturing run with a very large profit margin attached to each device.

I'm also not sure sports is the killer app. Sports for a lot of people is all about the shared social drinking experience. A room full of drunken people wearing VR headsets doesn't seem like a huge draw. ;) Well, maybe not for something like Tennis, but for soccer/football, basketball, baseball, rugby, etc. sports is almost as much about the social drinking experience as it is watching the actual sporting event.

Regards,
SB
 
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Rather than trying to get the normiest of normies into VR, I think effort would be better spend getting the less geekier of geeks and more easily motion sick geeks into VR.

A missing link in VR is cheap motorized swivel chair. As Carmack said, swivel chair/stand or don't play ... but most people don't want to stand and even having to swing your legs around to turn is too much effort :p What they need on top of wireless headsets is motorized swivel chairs (wired was always a dead end and should have NEVER made it beyond Occulus prototypes, the VR industry fucked up). I imagine something like RotoVR elite, a motorized base you can put your own swivel chair seat on top ... though I'd add foot controls for turning.

RotoVR is trying to make a second go of it, but it's hard to make something like this in small numbers. There's just too many large/complex parts. With say Meta behind it though, that's a different matter (Apple even more, but I'd really prefer if Apple didn't launch this first). A motorized base could probably be sold for a couple hundred bucks at a profit at their size.
 
will be interesting to see if the release of the Apple headset leads to a surge in sales of other VR headsets, as it could get new people interested in VR but not having the budget to buy the Apple one.
 
will be interesting to see if the release of the Apple headset leads to a surge in sales of other VR headsets, as it could get new people interested in VR but not having the budget to buy the Apple one.
Could be very possible. It is going to be really itneresting to see what happens with their headset.
 
It seems to look quite a bit better but that Quest 2 recording is a mess.
 
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I searched for the console version of AC which is set in Venice.

Was it AC2? Here is a video of a gameplay from the remastered version for the PS5.


OK better details and lighting as you'd expect than this VR video. However the VR version seems like Venice as an open world so you can explore?

The AC2 remaster doesn't show climbing the buildings, though maybe Venice isn't the best place for climbing.
 
Ass creed VR is not really open world. There are 3 environements with 3 protagonists. Each zone is pretty big, but not as massive an a classic AssCreed game.

It actually is. Your free to complete missions in any order. Being as big as the old AC games is not a definition of open world.

This is the definition of an open world:

In video games, an open world is a virtual world in which the player can approach objectives freely, as opposed to a world with more linear and structured
 
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