He's _probably_ right that for the majority of people, the Quest would be better.
Towards the end, when he starts talking about the open vs closed model, I find it pretty depressing that meta is the "open" model in this case. I'm pretty sure you still require a Meta account to use the headset. Not sure I consider that "open".
I would love to have a headset that was running Simula (or something similar). I tried Simula with a Valve Index and the resolution was just too low for me. But I could definitely feel like it was "the future".
I travel a lot now and work on one laptop screen. Having a small(ish) headset that I could travel with and then have a VR workspace instead of a single laptop monitor has the potential to be game changing (maybe).
The Valve Index is nearly 5 years old now. And while I love my Index, the state of the art has moved forward a lot and I am excited by the next generation Index, if it ever comes.
I don't think VR/AR is the absolute future of all computing, but it provides an exciting direction.
That would be great. I will not buy a VR headset that requires an "account" in order to use. It's my own personal line in the sand that I am drawing. I would not accept any other peripheral like a monitor or a mouse that required an account to use, and so it doesn't make sense to accept a headset either.
Is the quest better yes for most people you basically won’t be able to afford it and the best selling point of the quest is the software library and games with the special controllers. This is what most people do with headsets right now regardless .
Will the quest ever really break into the productivity space with apples headset? Probably as a Chromebook like device and Apple controlling the high margin ground which I think is most likely .
The main problem with headsets is that the pass through isn’t as seamless as Apple’s and it can always get cheaper and faster .
I think it could easily surpass AVP as a productivity device if they added built in support for running a Linux distro on top of the Android kernel and there was a way to have free floating X11/Wayland app windows that are fully supported. You can already do a lot of this with Termux but you can't easily reposition windows and it's not as easy as it should be. There is also just weird limitations about resizing sideloaded apps in close distance mode.
Yes! That's exactly what I'm picturing. Running i3wm/sway (depending if I get X11 or Wayland) with N number of monitors laid out like I want.
Then the actual development happens on my laptop or maybe the cloud with something like codespaces or whatever the competitors are. I don't really know much about that space. In my head, I can imagine it being amazing.
On the other hand, I can't see myself ever using the AVP, because I'm sure Apple would lock it down too much. Right now, I'm pretty sure my girlfriends iPad pro would be good enough to replace my laptop. All the hardware is there, it even has usbc so theoretically I could hook up an external monitor and my keyboard. But the software is just too locked down to be of any use. I'm fairly confident that will be the case with the AVP as well (it definitely is today).
You would need a powerful system to tie that with. Even the Vision Pro deals with this by laptop integration . But the biggest problem in that is UI and UX. Also you can cast systems to oculus already but it needs a tether. Furthermore both solutions need a keyboard and mouse.
I don't know if it's the better product or not, but the release of the Vision Pro has probably been the best marketing for the Quest that Meta could hope for.
True. I picked up the Quest 3 after seeing a million AVP videos. I used to have a Quest 2 a few years ago and the Quest 3 is nice upgrade. I doubt I would have done this without all the AVP content everywhere I look.
A rising tide lifts all boats. Now that Apple has kickstarted the AR/VR hype to mainstream people, means the other device makers can piggyback on that free advertising the VR/AR industry is getting, and they also now have more competition and incentive to invest in them instead of thinking the market is dead and giving up on it.
See the Quest 3. Before the AVP people were saying $500 is too expensive for a VR headset, but the Zuck can now advertise it as a AVP alternative that's more functional and also 7x cheaper than what the AVP offers for the money, now that Apple set the market price point.
Apple joining the club is a win-win for the industry players and the consumers.
And really, there are some absolutely legitimate arguments included here. When I tried the AVP I found it somewhat claustrophobic compared to the Quest, owing to the narrower field of view. The "world feel" of the Quest is just better, though the heart yearns for the combo of that screen res and that FOV.
Which Quest, the 3 or the Pro? But I agree with you. The current crop of headsets has too narrow FoV, especially the AVP. They're less VR/AR and more like "binoculars vision" lol. They need to go wider before they get to replace our vision.
I've only tried the Quest 3, not the Quest Pro. I think the 3 even had a few deg more than the Quest Pro, iirc? It feels 10-15 over the AVP, from the gut.
I'm guessing: makes people potentially interested in a VR headset, but some of them will be put off by the high price and will look for another option, and the Quest 3 is kind of the obvious choice for most consumers.
Vision Pro is getting a ton of coverage right now, and a common comment is that the Quest 3 does all the same things for a fraction of the price. (can't speak to the claim, it's just what I've heard a lot of)
Likely that it was over 3x the price of the Quest 2 and while it had better hardware it mostly felt like an incremental update. Part of this is definitely because not enough software took advantage of the new hardware it had (i.e. eye tracking).
It also didn't help that it was released near the end of the Quest 2 life cycle and people could predict that a more consumer friendly version would be released in the near future.
The Quest 3 was announced ~6mo later and released a year after the Quest Pro.
Because it’s an interesting product that many new to VR users would be curious to try. It’s also so expensive that nearly no one will buying it. But they can experience 80% of a Vision Pro media and productivity experience with the Quest 3, plus a bunch of VR and gaming experiences that the Vision Pro can’t do.
And this video is basically "it's OK to buy a Quest 3, here's a few arguments you can tell your buddies to justify why you made the smarter choice - just do it now".
I have long been skeptical of the entire field of VR and AR and "mixed reality" stuff. At some point I can see AR being a useful thing, but only when it reaches a much higher level of unobtrusiveness.
I got a Quest 2 for my son, and having played around with it for a bit, I stand by my view. There are some neat applications, but for the most part it seems like something that will start gathering dust once the novelty wears off.
>I got a Quest 2 for my son, and having played around with it for a bit, I stand by my view. There are some neat applications, but for the most part it seems like something that will start gathering dust once the novelty wears off.
The exact thing will be happening to the AVP once the hype and novelty wears off. It's neat for a few apps and use cases, but nothing game changing YET for the entire consumer base to convince average people they REALLY need to go out and by one, other than that every tech youtuber and influencer has one to show off.
I think the big changes will come in the future once it becomes more mainstream and more killer aps come to them.
For two friends of mine it's BeatSaber for years running strong. I haven't explored that enough on my Quest 3 yet to say I'm hooked, but I can imagine it happening.
For me it's (3D) movies/shows: I generally don't watch movies, I am more a TV show guy. But I'm blown away by 3D movies. I don't like cinemas either, so for me the killer app is "home cinema". Also started to watch 2D movies/shows on it and the "huge screen" is amazing. Agreed an actual home cinema would give me the same effect, but the Quest is a lot more flexible, portable and smaller.
> I have long been skeptical of the entire field of VR and AR and "mixed reality" stuff.
Same. So far VR seems a solution in search of a problem. Developers are scrambling to find the killer app for it while it should have been the killer app. And headsets gather dust on shelves.
VR tech still isn't ready for truly mass adoption, but there's definitely cool stuff in there. It's just not for everyone. I think it'll get there eventually, but it's gonna take a long time.
> What is the "killer app" that people see here?
For some people (myself included), it's Beat Saber. Super fun rhythm game that wouldn't work outside of VR. Very useful for exercise.
In fact, VR is good for exercise in general. There's a lot of rhythm/fitness/sports games, or ones that aren't explicitly targeted at that area but still give you a workout, like Gorilla Tag. Having a big library of games-that-are-also-exercise that you can use at home is a big benefit. If you're the kind of person who likes games, this is probably a more effective use of your money than, say, a treadmill.
Of course, some people like various VR games for their own sake. Playing something like Blade & Sorcery or Dungeons of Eternity is certainly much more immersive than regular video games. I felt like a murderous sociopath when I first played B&S, and the graphics aren't even that good!
There's also people who want to use VR for productivity purposes, like having infinite screens, though I think for most people the comfort level isn't there yet.
Beat Saber is fun, sure. But it doesn't feel like a "killer app"; it's just a must-have game. It's isolating -- playing it around other people is just kinda weird, and you can share the screen but the timing is off by enough to make the game and the viewers out of sync (for a rhythm game that is just deadly). And the song library is very limited, and add-on packs are expensive. In the end, though, the replayability is not infinite.
I completely agree. As a consumer device VR is a dead end and that's before even talking about costs and inconvenience.
AR could have some uses but the tech needs to be so much better that it's a pipe dream for now.
I really don't get the hype for those things; I have tried many and never ever I really felt I needed or wanted one. In fact all the things I did in the headset I would rather do outside.
People talking about a gimmick game that exist in other forms on pretty much every platform are stuck in a fantasy world...
The Quest 3 and Vision Pro are entirely different products though, just look at the price points, the Quest starts at $499 while the Vision Pro starts at $3499. A person gets a Quest because they are into VR, a person gets the Vision Pro if they are rich and want the latest Apple Product.
Apple in a way is like Supreme, where the brand transcends the actual products. Folks stand in line to buy the latest Supreme merch even though it's just regular stuff with the Supreme brand written on it. In a way Apple has done the same with it's products where it's cool to buy it just because you like Apple as a brand and not necessarily because you need the underlying product. As a consumer I resent this sort of behavior but whenever I look at it through the lens of business, I always come away with the thought: "this is f** genius"
This is the same drive which gets people to buy Louis Vuitton/Gucci/etc., the added value does not lie in the product itself but in the brand recognition. Those high product prices are part of the brand appeal for those who want to advertise affluence.
It's kind of funny to see him pitch the Quest 3 as the open model to the AVP's closed model, as to my mind the Quest/Occulus was always the closed model to SteamVR's open model
Sounds like way more work than just not buying Facebook hardware.
It’s more than only just protecting the LAN, though. From their track record, I assume everything I do in Quest will be tracked, analyzed, and monetized in great detail. I might be convinced to trust Facebook hardware, or least not to care too much about my privacy, for gaming and only for gaming. I’d never consider it for anything else.
Future iterations of the Vision will be far more like the Quest than the other way around. Apple built a great VR headset but they go to ridiculous lengths to not call it that, so much so that they've engineered a bunch of impressive, but useless and expensive tech to support their marketing. Specifically, future versions will drop the expensive outside screen and drop the heavy and expensive glass and aluminum in favour of simple light plastic.
There's tons of ink being spilled today about "VR" vs "Spacial Computing", about how "lonely" and "alienating" the tech is, etc. But as these headsets become common everybody will forget this. Talking to someone wearing a VR headset will not require an external screen with weird eyes, it will be just like talking to someone wearing sunglasses, ie completely unremarkable.
I think the facts are mostly on Meta’s side, even when you remove price. Meta is on somthing like 8th generation VR. Apple is a newcomer. The impressive Vision Pro tech just can’t stand up to 10 years of iterative product development. It’s not a iPhone moment at all, though I think Apple will end up being very competitive if they stick to it for a few years. Great for VR, great for Meta.
Ask BlackBerry how that worked out. Apple is the newcomer, however as they design their own hardware & have the best companies to build cutting edge tech, they will continue to move forward. They needed to get a foot in the space and now they have. Time will ultimately tell.
The original Apple Macintosh only had 128k of RAM, and was thus pretty much useless for all but the simplest of applications. It also cost as much as two Vision Pros, accounting for inflation.
Yet it absolutely changed the world.
The Quest is a great system for gaming and toy applications. But it's a glorified game console, much like the Mac's contemporaries upon release like the Commodore 64; it didn't kickstart a revolution in how we compute. The Vision Pro did, we just haven't felt the full effects yet.
The Mac changed the world by influencing Windows, which became the big success rather than the Mac itself. Perhaps Meta copies some of those slick GUI ideas from VisionOS.
I think Vision Pro isn't really a product, it's for developers / early adopters to make apps that will then be available once a consumer version is ready.
Depends. There are other cases of expensive devkits, yes (Sony PlayStation at times, if I recall), but e.g. Xbox will rent them out to you for free or very cheaply.
In my industry the cost of a test bench is also higher, sure.
Honestly watching this video I went from "This damned weird ass alien dude" to still hating Meta and Facebook for Facebook but also feeling like he may actually be the more human of the billionaires. Surely beats out Musk... Meta has also been releasing somewhat open source models and new research... I'm hoping Zuck has realized his market is in open source and they continue to push their products in that direction.
Disclaimer: I am not saying that I'm a fanboy but at the very least videos like this take Zuck from "Alien Man who likes Sweet Baby Ray's" to "Well, he's not the _worst_ billionaire."
Glad people are starting to come around. Zuckerberg got a bad wrap for many years cause people HATE the facebook product, he's always been a good advocate for the underlying tech independent of product though imo. He's been probably the most important figure in increasing developer salaries (along with VCs looking to pump and dump software companies in a zero interest rate environment) the last 10 years as he bid aggressively for talent to build out FB, and showed it was worth it. Before he hit the scene the older big tech companies had an illegal no-poaching agreement to depress salaries.
I do wonder if this newfound respect/admiration is because he's one of the last founder/CEOs of software big tech and FB stock has more than doubled in a year.
A bad rap? Go back and look at his own words about those around him at the beginning. It was sociopathic. Facebook has been part of the problem of the decline of critical thinking and rational discourse, destroying families in the process.
I don't think Apple's intention/expectations were that the masses would buy the Vision Pro. At least not the first couple of iterations. If anything, its more likely a test bed to see if there is a future in it.
People said that about iPhones that cost $1500. Yet they still sell to the masses. The masses just decided they preferred to have a blue bubble than to go on vacation each year.
The fact that he is using someone basically as a tripod to film this and casually drops neural link as an input source is testament to how much he knows about what it means to be an average user
That’s reason number 1 why suggest friends never get Quest. “Take your most sensitive behavior, then run it through Facebook. What could possibly go wrong?”
The Apple Vision Pro integrates with iOS which is something the Quest will never be able to do. That's potentially worth the extra $3000 since there's no other way to do those things if you want to do those things.
You can already run Android apps on the Quest. Its more a matter of appstore library. If Apple does well enough, Meta and Google or even Amazon could end up signing a deal.
It's more of a business issue than a technical one.
Towards the end, when he starts talking about the open vs closed model, I find it pretty depressing that meta is the "open" model in this case. I'm pretty sure you still require a Meta account to use the headset. Not sure I consider that "open".
I would love to have a headset that was running Simula (or something similar). I tried Simula with a Valve Index and the resolution was just too low for me. But I could definitely feel like it was "the future".
I travel a lot now and work on one laptop screen. Having a small(ish) headset that I could travel with and then have a VR workspace instead of a single laptop monitor has the potential to be game changing (maybe).
[0] https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula