I think they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche.
The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.
The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the product's value?
There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation was going to be bad.
As far as VR goes, it's further along. Quest is a quality stand-alone product, but VR is young and content is still lacking. Its also completely sold out, even before coronavirus. They aren't producing them in Sony/MS console numbers but its not a failure, just a stepping stone to success. Unlike the Rift or Vive, with cords hanging out of them and an appeal only to hardcore gamers, Quest is definitely on the path to mainstream, or mainstream-adjacent success.
It was a bad choice if they wanted a successful consumer product. But I think the simplest explanation here is that the company's real product was fancy demos for investors. $2.6 billion in revenue! In operation since 2011! Thousands of jobs created!
I'd call it great choice. They wouldn't have been able to make nearly as much money on a purposeful, targeted device, because nobody's put in that much money for a narrow market. Worse, it would have been much easier for investors to figure that the more modest product would fail. Much better to sell moonbeams, to sell the glorious possibility of AR just like they saw on Westworld and Black Mirror.
I mean sure, the wheels had to come off eventually. After a while, you run out of fools. But most startups fail eventually, and you have to admit that 9 years is a great run for something that never worked, and probably never could have worked.
While sounding slightly cynical, I have come to believe that your comment is a good description of the current state of "the latest buzzword" startups.
Wearable anywhere. AR's unique value is not big bulky things you play with at home, they're to be a nearly invisible accessory you wear everywhere. You get a few grams to hang off people's faces in the form of glasses, not a half kilogram. Otherwise, you're right - VR meets the need well enough.
Camera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.
I’m pretty impressed with the depth of field the Quest is able to develop in Passthrough+ mode just using the 4 wide field tracking cameras and a smartphone processor from 3 years ago. A residual, after-thought capability like that on a $400 device is pretty impressive, IMHO.
For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.
that's a fair point, but vision is such a high-dimensional and dynamic input that my feeling is the last 20% of super-fast autofocus, auto color balancing, high dynamic range, removing motion-blur, etc. will be very difficult to improve upon. it seems that just increasing brightness/fov by making better waveguides or MEMS will be much easier. that being said, magic leap's lack of success doesn't bode well.
I doubt that indicates that it's becoming mainstream so much as that they had trouble scaling production up quickly enough for all the techies that all decided at once to play with VR once they were stuck inside.
VR headsets have been sold out for months, now. I got an Oculus Quest, but only got one because I refreshed the product page (on multiple vendors) constantly for days.
I think VR is starting the mainstream (at least for gaming), and Coronavirus is encouraging this (as it’s making virtually all gaming platforms a boost).
no, not really. You can't get over the motion sickness thing for many people. And VR games will always need to mitigate that, which means they are going to be limited in significant ways compared to normal games.
This is a misconception borne of ignorance of the current state of VR tech.
Your statement was true for early VR seated games that used smooth locomotion or flight-sim-like games.
Roomscale VR games don't have motion sickness because of different locomotion methods (teleport, for instance... or they take place entirely within the room volume you have available). In fact, less motion sickness than you'd experience with a large monitor and something like a dynamic flight-based combat game. Unlike a monitor, your in-game view motion is mapped perfectly to physical head motion.
I've tried out about a dozen games, and the only time I had motion sickness at all was when I changed locomotion method from teleport to smooth in Rec Room.
Bingo. If the product works as advertised I could justify the cost just in replacing existing screens, I could have a dozen virtual terminals floating around, I could replace my large TV, etc. All with zero new content required.
The problem is it doesn't seem to work as advertised.
- VR headsets generally are similar to focusing on something further away due to the setup of the lenses. It's not literally focusing on a screen 1cm from your face.
- One direction for current VR work is dynamic focus via lens arrays.
The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences. You can't play Half Life Alex on a Quest, nor No Man's Sky, Boneworks, SkyRim, Lone Echo, etc.... You basically get a 3 or 4 mobile class experiences and then you're done.
Yes you can use the link, but then you need an NVidia 1650 RTX or better which means you're a high end gamer already and so were not this supposed "mass market"
PSVR is still top selling VR and while cable and setup wise it's arguably the worst it at least has quality content.
We just gonna ignore it runs Beatsaber and VRChat two arguably much more important and popular VR apps than that janky Skyrim port.
PCVR is an evolutionary dead end, few adults want giant PC towers in their homes anymore. Even when I demoed PCVR with amazing experiences like Lone Echo people lost interest when I told them no, it wont run on your macbook, you need a tower PC.
Yet I demoed them Beatsaber on the quest and a guy ordered one within a minute of taking the headset off, he demoed it at a family BBQ and two of his relatives bought it after.
> The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences.
It is, but it compensates by offering good enough experience while being untethered, self-contained and quick to start up. It may not matter for teenagers with expensive gaming rigs, but it matters for working adults with families, who otherwise don't have time and space to justify a VR gaming PC build.
You can make the same arugment for gaming on smartphones, yet it's a huge and growing market. The truth is, most people don't care about the latest and best technology. They care about great games, and often times the best games don't need the cutting edge hardware (see Minecraft, Fornite).
Meanwhile, I've been playing the Echo VR alpha on my Quest (not Link) and it's fucking great.
It's also untethered, which is a far bigger deal than you think. I tried playing tethered and really didn't enjoy it that much, but wireless? That gets used multiple times a week.
The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.