Ten years later, Facebook's Oculus acquisition hasn't changed the world as expected
Ten years later, Facebook's Oculus acquisition hasn't changed the world as expected | TechCrunch
Well, they have changed the world, they have ruined the perfectly good term metaverse with their failed product.
They also ruined Oculus by not supporting my Rift S anymore, and forcing everyone to move over to Meta accounts.
I literally will never purchase an Oculus again. I owned a DK1 and a DK2, then skipped the CV1 for the Rift S. I am done with Oculus now, maybe I will look at HTC or some other HMD instead if I ever need to replace my Rift S.
Wait, so the original Rift is useless? Like, I can finally toss it out and stop trying to sell it to someone?
Despite their company name, they have nothing actually called metaverse. Their entry in the metaverse category is called horizons.
the idea that Oculus could change the world died the moment fuckerberg decided to buy it
It's just not ready yet. Vr in general is too awkward, inconvenient and expensive. The stuff that's available now can be a lot of fun, but it's a long way from where it needs to be, to "change the world". And yeah, I wouldn't want it for free since the acquisition.
No, the article title says expectations were that Facebook would change the world by buying Oculus. Which is obviously a stupid take, and even more obviously didn't happen...
They injected a ton of money into it. Hard to say where it would be now without that money. Sure alot of people don't want to buy a headset from them, but they are pioneering alot of tech that eventually proliferates. So even if you never buy a meta headset, VR as a whole did still benefit.
There are about 30 games alone that wouldn't have been made, or would have had to have been kickstarted, most of them are still some of the best VR games to have been made. But the games are only a very small part of the money they have spent. Their R and D for VR is nuts. Like 90% of what a modern VR headset is made of has come from their money. There is a reason every other headset feels like it's one generation behind all the time.
fuckerberg
I prefer Zuckerfuck.
Fuckerberg sounds like you hate ice bergs, and it's a "cute" pun.
Where Zuckerfuck where you clearly hate Zuckerberg so much, you want to say his name incorrectly out of spite.
Despite the Facebook hate the Quest really did revolutionize VR. It made entry level VR at a great price with no hassle. The Quest was $500 and worked without needing beacons and a headset tethered to a gaming PC.
VR went from a few million users before Quest to tens of millions after.
All my friends that got into VR all said the same thing when I asked them why they don’t play it more- it’s all packed away and setting everything up again is more of a hassle than it’s worth. The Quest really just made things dead simple- no wire, no lighthouses, use anywhere there’s a little bit of space.
This can't be overstated. VR is one hell of an investment, and there's not really any way to figure out if it's something that works for you in advance. I enjoy it for the discounted price I got a Quest 2 at last holiday season, but I would have been disappointed if I had paid a higher price.
How often does one actually use their Octopus?
Inside-out standalone HMDs were getting developed with or without Facebook. AMD's "Sulon Q" was previewed in early 2016.
VR went from a few million users before Quest to tens of millions purchasers after.
No one uses these things
FIFY
I don't think many outside the tech-money bubble thought this would work. Instead people mourned the loss of Oculus as an innovator when it was bought up.
Look at it now - it has slowed the VR market right down by delivering a low price but low quality experience. That has discouraged other manufacturers from the market.
The high end of the market has been held back as a result - the Valve Index and their like give a better experience but content growth is slow as a result of slow growth. The quest is a decent product but their teams are solving the problems constantly constrained by the cheap price point rather than building the solution and iterating it to the price point.
I think the market will converge on a Vision Pro like device at an affordable price but I think Oculus/Meta has slowed that down as people experience their product and think that's what VR is. Although in fairness there is also a tech problem - the vision pro shows how expensive it is at the moment to create something close to the ideal in terms of an untethered device without base stations and hand controllers. The realistic way for quality VR at present remains tethered to a PC.
We'll get there in the end but I think it may have been sooner of Meta hadn't thrown 100s of billions at buying market share with a lower quality version of what VR needs to be. The mobility is right, but the casual-gaming level of experience is way off, and it's damaged expectations.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least). That would be technically difficult but offloading as much of the graphics and game/program processing as possible may make a lighter device and an added battery may last longer or be lighter. Essentially a halfway house between an Quest and Index - the quest mobility but the index quality (which is already achieved by offloading to the PC). However it may not be feasible due to lag and it's still a compromise from the ultimate dream. But it'd probably be a good step on from full tethered if its doable.
That or economies of scale do make the Vision Pro or a future version of it affordable over the coming years. Doubt that will be Quest prices though - if people are paying £1k for phones then that seems more realistic for good quality VR imo.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least).
Don't we already have that? The Quest 2 could manage it, although I think people have more luck with a third party app (Virtual Desktop maybe?) doing it rather than the official software.
It does need a good Wifi 6 router though, as it's heavy on bandwidth.
Personally, I think VR needs to be able to have an HDMI input (or get rolled into the HDMI standard so controllers/head locations can be passed back through it), so people can at least use it as a large screen for non VR software, e.g. watching movies or just playing regular 2D games from any source.
What's really holding VR back is every company wants to be the king of VR, and none of them can be.
Streaming feels like the way to go, I already have a computer so all I'd really want out of a headset is the interface part, it doesn't need to be a self contained unit. And It'd be way easier to get into VR if the headsets were priced more like a monitor than a whole PC.
I have no problem streaming from my desktop to my Quest with a WiFi 5 router
Some better software to stitch it together and some higher res cameras, the Quest 3 could do what the Vision Pro does. The Quest 2 was just enough that you could get around the room. The Quest 3 you can actually read a book or a screen through. It's just a bit blurry and wonky from the panorama being stitched together and the fact the cameras aren't as good.
I think people would sacrifice a little bit of quality for an affordable product that can literally do all the same stuff. Actually, the Quest can do a bit more considering the software library for the Vision fuckin sucks and doesn't have much at all.
Then again, people also just want these things to be like putting on sunglasses and not strapping a literal computer to their face looking like a cyberpunk nightmare. And I don't think we are anywhere close to Google Glass form factors with Apple Vision Pro quality picture.
Some better software to stitch it together and some higher res cameras, the Quest 3 could do what the Vision Pro does.
they're definitely chasing apple on AR interaction and in some ways (ML trained hand tracking) I think Meta is ahead.
Still doesn't make me want to work with either meta or apple stuff though.
What? Who tf expected that!? They bought Oculus, enshittification happened, and their products are worse now.
i hate facebook as much as the next person but the products definitely aren't worse, I just figure that iteration on VR tech is really hard. The quest 2 and quest 3 are, genuinely, kind of incredible devices from a technological perspective, they're just hamstrung by faceook. that's bad but I don't think it's fair to say the products are specifically worse when oculus was acquired so early on
"enshittification" is an enshittification of the english language
After doing some Meta/Facebook VR development in my job the lack of popularity made increasingly more sense. In brief, they're both incredibly incompetent and transparently greedy.
I'm honestly baffled how they could spend so many tens of billions of dollars and have such bad software, it is completely bug ridden. You'll hit a bug, research it, and find out it's a major know bug for literal years they haven't fixed. They care so little that they couldn't bother to update the Oculus branding to Meta for over 3 years in various software tools and libraries.
Their greed might be more salient aspect preventing adoption, though. They transparently wanted to be the gatekeepers to everything "metaverse" related, a business model that is now explicitly illegal in the EU after years of being merely very sketchy. They are straight up hostile to anyone else trying to implement enterprise or business features. Concrete example: fleet management software, aka MDM. There are third party tools that are cheaper and much more featured than Meta's solution, but in the last year they've pushed hard to kick those third parties out of the ecosystem.
I could go on, but in short nobody in their right mind would build a major business on their ecosystem. They'd rather let Meta burn billions in R&D and come back later. Besides, not even Meta is able to make money in the area now.
I'm beginning to worry that FB's meta shit has retarded VR's development (slowed, not pejorative yo) significantly. The stigma of FB in the dev community is substantial and real, and tons of talent that I could recruit for PC driven VR projects (both training work and game stuff) who simply would not touch oculus hardware. It took dwindling job opportunities to drag me into quest dev. HTC had a fantastic opportunity to be a bigger name with the vive but dropped the ball so many times that devs I know kinda shrugged and moved on.
I was hoping that Apple would knock this out of the park. In fact, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in so many ways it's depressing.
VR will continue, this is not the end. Just a slowdown.
For all we know, that acquisition ruined VR.
Doubtful, while facebook does have a huge segment of the VR market, they're not the only relevant player, so dont have the ability to entirely control it, and while I'll certainly not be buying any headset of theirs given their extreme lack of trustworthiness even for a tech company, they have played a pretty big role in improving the tech and bringing the costs down a bit. I think some people just expected the tech to go from "blurry 3-d monitor strapped to your face" to "indistinguishable from reality the way its shown in fiction" in short order and have taken the gradual refinement of the tech instead of rapid leap as a sign that the technology has failed or something.
I mean, the acquisition did change VR from being a pretty open standard to being a walled garden where Facebook is paying devs to make their games not work with any other headset. I think without exclusivity there would be more interest in PCVR as a whole.
Zuck has never been an original ideas guy, every product Facebook has ever made they either copied or bought from somebody else (including Facebook), what he is good at is taking someone else's idea and squeezing every bit of money out of them via ads.
So what happens when Facebook finally runs out of other people's ideas to copy? Facebook and Instagram are both dying a slow death, because their core audience are leaving, and Tik Tok proved to be their toughest obstacle yet. Oculus was always meant to be a side project for Facebook, until suddenly it became the centerpiece of "Meta" out of the blue. It's no wonder then Oculus became what it is today, because putting ads and collect data from everything is the only trick Facebook knows.
Those of us whose hype withered the moment Facebook bought it were pretty spot-on in our expectations.
I at least was able to recoup a few bucks when they forced fb accounts. A friend was interested in buying a headset anyway so we worked out a price for my account and just migrated it to his fb instead of mine. Bought an index and it's pretty tight.
i felt the same way but i was gifted one recently... it's still pretty awesome, and it runs android so you can put it in developer mode and sideload whatever you want...
i expected it to be locked down like apple, but no it's pretty sick.
see also: original NES Legend of Zelda ported to oculus...
It did change on thing for me: it made me drop support for Oculus in my game dev project.
I still own an Oculus DevKit 2. But after wildly succeeding with his Kickstarter, the founder has done nothing but jerk moves. First he silently dropped Linux support, then he funded a pro-Trump troll army on Reddit and finally he sold his entire VR company to Facebook/Meta, which then did its own jerk move by rendering everyone's hardware useless if they didn't sign up to Facebook/Meta. My Oculus account was forcefully obliterated just a week ago.
What a complete nosedive that was.
They had the nicer tech (Oculus uses infrared LEDs around the headset that are filmed by special cameras to track your orientation, i.e. it's steady state -- HTC Vive / Valve Index have light-sensing diodes on the headset itself and their lighthouses swipe light curtains horizontally and vertically through the room, with an annoying whining noise and all the wear & tear from constantly rotating parts), for a while, Meta even had John Carmack polishing the system.
I still hope VR will not completely die. Half Life: Alyx was fun, some archery, zombie shooting and climbing games were highly enjoyable and I could well imagine getting into sculpting / 3D modelling that way if only the tools were better.
But if, as the HTC exec in the article says, Meta has defined the "market perception of what this technology should cost" (and they're producing at a loss, too), then Meta has walled off most of the VR market to Facebook boomers (sorry, Meta boomers) and is hogging the more robust tracking tech for itself, too.
They made VR headsets more people can afford that also don't suck major balls like the PSVR or Google Cardboard (the other affordable VR options). People just don't want them because they're Facebook/Meta. 😔
Still can't believe Tech companies don't realise: If you want the widest adoption, make something as open source, customisable, editable, codable, and anonymous as you can.
If you don't want something to be wide spread, demand everyone's data, make it a black box you can't edit, customise, or be creative on, and you have to link to all your other profiles.
Meta would have been best off had logins been entirely optional, and they're still trying to life that bad reputation three generations later.
That said the quest is a great product, and I use mine every day to stay fit.
I'm not even sure just how closed off a system it even is. Most of the things I run on it were installed through ADB from GitHub and not any official sources. I have access to the root system files. What's stopping someone who knows what they're doing from making a custom OS for 'em so you don't need to associate with Meta once you have the hardware in your hands?
I tried the Oculus 2 and liked that it gave me a very physical way to game as opposed to sitting in a chair. Unfortunately the weight on my head and sweaty headpiece were ultimately a turnoff. The glasses style devices (XReal, Viture, etc) are a much better fit for me and mine has 3DOF motion tracking so it works as mouse view in most games without requiring VR support. It's much lighter and I can wear them for hours without the strain and sweat. Newer glasses are coming with cameras for 6DOF, hand tracking and eye-tracking is not to far off as well.
These glasses are powered by a phone or a pc with USB DP alt mode. This gets the battery and processor off the head and makes for an un-tethered experience (with a phone).
This. Headsets are never going to take off. I'm somewhat surprised Apple launched the Vision Pro; I think Steve Jobs wouldn't have settled for anything less than lightweight minimally invasive AR glasses.
Waiting for Steam Deckard to pants meta in front of the class
Apple is helping a lot, though.
How so? They're shockingly late to this party.
What Apple actually brought was visibility and a sign that maybe it's not just for nerds anymore. Their headset doesn't have to be worth buying to do that, it just has to be worth making. Most people that try an Apple Vision pro end up buying a Quest 3. But the Quest 3 is surprisingly awesome, especially when you compare the price points. And I think with a bit more time on the market, the Apple Vision pro will steadily gain usefulness. It's mostly in a position of lacking software right now. They launched out of the gate in much better shape than any other companies first headset software-wise, but they had to of course, as they are playing catch up.
I do think they will catch up, and their second or third headset might be a real contender. Even though it can definitely be said that their first headset wasn't a revolution, it still needed to be made. You can only make software for unreleased hardware for so long, eventually you need some hardware on the market.
There are few things that boost inspiration and innovation quite like a competent competitor.
I mean, it changed the world the way I expected- not at all.
I expected it would lead to worse services, worse support, and worse privacy.
I've had so many VR fanboys going on and on about how it'll change the world, and I've always told them they were wrong because of the cost and tech limitations like battery life. Also the fact that people will think it looks stupid - even something as comparatively minimal as Google Glass was ridiculed, hated, and flopped.
Looks like I was right. Again.
I feel like glass was accidentally very beneficial for the industry.
It both drastically increased the general public's consciousness and awareness of the industry around AR/VR and then set the bar so low as to be trivial to exceed. People who mocked it know that bad AR with privacy concerns is not good, but when they try acceptable VR they are blown away by it.
It's mostly just the lack of the "killer app" equivalent that is holding us back.
Half Life Alyx?
tbf, google glass and similar are AR rather than VR. Honestly the technology has been improving over the last few years, though not in as dramatic a fashion as when it went from a rare lab or obscure tech hobbyist thing to something mainstream consumers could buy, if expensively, more in the same sense that things like computer gpus get a little bit more powerful each generation but stay fundamentally being the same kind of thing. The cost has also gone down a bit on the low end (though the higher end is still thousands, its possible to get a decent headset for the mid hundreds, or low hundreds if you get a refurbished or lightly used one). I dont think it will really revolutionize all that much, but I do think it will gradually become a reasonably significant area of the entertainment market, in the same way that things like video game consoles arent revolutionary technology beyond a certain segment of the entertainment market, but are still common enough to be economically and culturally relevant. With the current prices and use case, video game consoles are essentially what they are. Im personally exited to see where the tech goes, even though it probably wont be the next smartphone the way some claim.
It sure would. Just not yet
Since when have any of these tech companies done anything but change the world for the worse?
I know we are on lemmy so corporations are bad and capitalism is bad and so on and so forth...
But there is not one aspect of my life that hasn't been improved upon greatly by one or more tech companies over the course of my life.
There are new problems that I never would have expected to deal with that have come up as a side effect of this improvement, but it's way too reductive to imply that tech companies haven't changed the world for the better as well.
It’s a net sum to me. The harm they have done to our society and planet far outweigh and good that has come with it. Technology isn’t inherently evil but these tech companies that only care about profit at all cost are.
I got one. Your posture.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It evokes a flood of romanticized images of Homebrew Computer Club nerds soldering together circuit boards in South Bay garages.
Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”
Mark Zuckerberg is probably as guilty as any single person for perpetuating that perception, happily working his hardest to make the company’s Horizon Worlds platform synonymous with conceptions of the metaverse.
As an HTC Vive exec told me back in February at MWC, “I think Meta has adjusted the market perception of what this technology should cost.” Other companies can’t compete on price and content in the customer space, so the savviest of the bunch have moved over to enterprise, where clients have much deeper pockets.
Apple is targeting business customers at that price point, while Meta is far more committed to democratizing access by — again — losing money on a per-unit basis.
As we mark a decade since the Oculus acquisition, I find myself returning to the above Zuckerberg comment: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”
The original article contains 1,350 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Yeah, but I don't think that this is really Facebook so much as VR in general.
Pretty much. I'd never buy anything Facebook related but it's more that the tech just is not quite there yet. This fact not just causes some big caveats, but also drives the price up. Even the Oculus ones, which are considered entry level, are still fairly expensive kits. It's a big investment, and the actual support is still fairly limited.
There's some great tech & prototypes out there that are really interesting though. From very high-tech enthusiast gear to very small and lightweight solutions. I'm sure we'll eventually see a bigger market push for VR at some point that makes it more mainstream.
But everyone hates Facebook and meta do that narrative will prevail
It ruined Oculus, that was a change.
Yup, I was about to but an Oculus Rift years ago, but once they were bought out by Facebook, I swore them off forever.
I'm still waiting for a decent, privacy respecting headset that's not too expensive and works well on Linux.
You can get 2/3 with the Valve Index, but I don't think you'll ever get all 3.
I was going to buy one, but when they got bought out it made the Vive an obvious choice for me. No regrets, it still works great.
Facebook (or Meta) sends me threatening emails every week about my Oculus account being deleted if I don't bow down to Zuckerberg and link my Facebook account to it.
I havent touched either in years.
And that was 100% of the changes that were expected, not sure what this article is going on about.
The bright side? Shows how much we hate meta