> 1.) Wearable VR becomes affordable, unobtrusive, and ubiquitous

This is way too early though.

They have first mover advantage but haven’t hit the target yet. So in practice they’re only a barely ahead of all the competitors coming from all sides.

I’d compare them to Microsoft during the Windows CE PDA area. They’re the major player in the field but it was so clunky that we were all waiting for the breakthrough. Perhaps MS could have renamed itself to “DigitalMobile” or something like that and put all its weight behind that wave, but I kinda don’t believe they would have pulled it off either way.

By the same token I think Meta’s vision is right, but I assume they are rushing ahead full steam because they clearly see it as an extremely tough race for them.

> This is way too early though.

It very likely is.

> I’d compare them to Microsoft during the Windows CE PDA area.

I completely agree. Smartphones turned out to be as much of a hardware issue (capacitive touch screens) as a software issue. AR won't go mainstream until someone releases something revolutionary, which will likely be an AR smart glasses device that looks like a pair of normal eye glasses. This could be Meta. My money is on Apple.

> By the same token I think Meta’s vision is right, but I assume they are rushing ahead full steam because they clearly see it as an extremely tough race for them.

I think it comes down to whether Meta's suite of applications (Facebook, WhatsApp, & Instragram) are still popular once consumer AR becomes viable.

I’m only a single point, but I have Oculus and an old Xbox. I spend much more time on the latter.

The Oculus is painful to wear for more than half an hour. I can only play when everybody has left the house or is asleep, lest I bump into them. I forget to charge it. The games are mostly mediocre. It’s difficult to show people what to do, even to put it on, especially if they wear glasses. Sharing is uncomfortably intimate.

I’ve found Oculus to be a novelty. It’s fun for the first 20 minutes, and after that, it gathers dust in a drawer.

> I’ve found Oculus to be a novelty. It’s fun for the first 20 minutes, and after that, it gathers dust in a drawer.

VR headsets likely aren't the answer. Unobtrusive smartglasses may very well be the answer.

Like I wrote in my previous post, Meta is a smart move if AR becomes ubiquitous. This will likely happen if and when smartglasses or something similar become a viable replacement for eye glasses.

If Apple Glasses takes off (who knows), Meta may look like a very prescient decision in a couple of years.

Meat - sorry, Meta - is going to be taken down by antitrust actions long before any of that becomes possible.

Ironically (IME) Facebook is mostly ignoring the one thing it's almost good at and which distinguishes it from TikTok - running the space that used to be filled by mailing lists and discussion groups.

The social element is more than a little half hearted now. And Second Life 2.0 isn't going to improve anyone's day any more than Second Life 1.0 did - smart glasses or no.

> Meat - sorry, Meta - is going to be taken down by antitrust actions long before any of that becomes possible.

I doubt this. There's no recent precedence for splitting apart a company of their size.

> The social element is more than a little half hearted now.

It doesn't matter. Meta is an advertising company. Augmented reality, if it takes up, opens up an unprecedented amount of advertising space for Meta or another company to target.

AT&T was at least as large and important than Facebook, probably more so.

Why would it take off, if it is treated as an "unprecedented amount of advertising space"?

> Why would it take off, if it is treated as an "unprecedented amount of advertising space"?

Imagine you're thirteen years old and have a choice between Apple's AR take on eye wear, or vanilla eye glasses.

I would be surprised if governments are any quicker on the regulatory uptake here than they were with social media advertising.

You underestimate the role of the previous generation. If I had kids they'd get a smartphone no earlier than 13 years old, for example. I know a good amount of families that periodically engage their kids in the real physical world so they're not constantly glued to screens. Those kids looks happier to me, compared to the constantly unhappy ones that always curse yet another "pay to keep playing" game while not realizing they are glued to a screen.

You are correct that if all the choices of a younger generation shepherd them to equally predatory places then they can't win. But again, don't underestimate the older people and their (sometimes) better perspective on things. They can show the kids that there are in fact other universes to explore.

The craziness that many corporations want to impose on us is passively resisted by many even now -- as in, they just avoid it.

This is something that the "growth hackers" miss in their so-called analysis: the passive resistance element. Many folks won't actively argue with you whether your super cool VR idea is good or not. They'll just shake their heads and leave.

You'd have to be a pretty wealthy thirteen year old for that to be a realistic choice. Also you'd have to be living a decade or two from now.

That space has been increasingly been taken over by Reddit. Only the hyperlocal invite-only stuff lives on in Facebook, and instant messaging group chats on Whatsapp etc are rapidly displacing those too.

My theory is that for VR/AR to become ubiquitous it needs to be cheap and the image needs to be sharp enough to replace monitors.

When I can just slip on a pair of VR/AR glasses and throw away my monitor is the moment I believe VR/AR has "made it".

> When I can just slip on a pair of VR/AR glasses and throw away my monitor is the moment I believe VR/AR has "made it".

They also have to last a good amount of time between charges (wired AR glasses are likely going to be a no-go outside of the office).

It's likely going to be a while before AR becomes viable as more than just a novelty. My guess is that Meta is banking on there being an intermediate commercial stage, where enough corporate customers come on board for visualization & remote work use that they're able to maintain engineering momentum.

It's also possible that a consumer oriented product is farther along the development pipe than expected. Apple is likely the only company at this point that could force mass-adoption with a first generation product. If they release something in, say, 2023 and it becomes widely adopted, Meta would be positioned better than most competing companies to capitalize off of it.

Zoom is bad enough. The day someone sends me an invite to a Meta meeting I'm retiring.

> Zoom is bad enough.

...have you met Microsoft Teams? Compared to that abomination Zoom is a work of art.

This has happened. You can pick up an oculus quest 2 for $150-$200 on Craigslist in most major US metros.

I think this speaks more to their decline and gimmicky quality than their ubiquity. People try it out VR, have fun, and are over it quickly.

If we look on Steam, less than 5% of users have a VR headset. And Steam users are outliers already.

There are probably more CRT monitors in use than VR headsets.

I don't know, I really think we're at an inflection point with VR. People have realized nobody will buy a tethered headset, so things are either streamed over wifi from your computer or compute is on board; both work really well. Screens are getting extremely high-res and high-refresh for not that much money. You don't need a very powerful computer to drive them unless you're gaming, and the real killer app is replacing your work setup.

I think of that photo of the dude from 1980 with all the electronics equipment - microphone, camcorder, disc player, mobile TV, boombox, etc. - things that are all replaced by a smartphone everyone carries in their pocket. I think it'll be the same with my home office: desk, chair, monitors, monitor stand, microphone, webcam, computer - all will be replaced by a VR headset. The only thing it doesn't replace are input devices like keyboard & mouse, and pointing devices might get replaced by eye tracking. A common prediction is that the majority of knowledge workers will be in VR full time by the end of the decade, which honestly seems reasonable to me.

I think before anyone will be spending a day in VR, they’ll need to solve the motion sickness problem. I know people who puke within 30s of being in VR, violently.

You could be right. It's just a little less obvious to me what problem VR solves, as opposed to the other technologies you mentioned.

Yeah people are very image conscious, as long as you look like robocop nobody is going to wear that stuff. It's fun to goof with, and maybe gamers will be okay with it in their basements and dens but it's not going to be "Ubiquitous until it's Inconspicuous"™.

> It's fun to goof with, and maybe gamers will be okay with it in their basements and dens but it's not going to be "Ubiquitous until it's Inconspicuous"™.

Or - hear me out - you could market the shit out of it until it's no longer goofy. Take Bluetooth headsets as an example - they used to be tacky and the users would appear obnoxious by default, until Apple made them white and expensive, and marketed them as aspirational products.

$200 is cheap enough, but it's still not sharp enough to replace a half-decent monitor.

It's plenty sharp. I'm typing this on the quest 2 right now. Hard to tell exactly but the virtual monitor seems to have resolution better than 1080p at least. I use 23" 4k monitors IRL so it's a downgrade in that respect, but the flexibility is interesting.

I'm also looking forward to UI innovations moving beyond the desktop screen paradigm. Like each window floating in 3D space, stuff like that.

Those are not glasses.

> 1.) Wearable VR becomes affordable, unobtrusive, and ubiquitous

I would agree, except that I don’t believe something that completely takes over your total range of vision can ever be “unobtrusive”.

3) You're trying to capture the next generation of content consumers and creators.

So many of the most popular apps on the Quest 2 are just swarming with kids. I think this is intentional.

Random question: how does VR work for blind people?

You don't even need to be fully blind for it to be untenable. There's a broad range of sight/eye issues and other issues that make VR a non-option for what I imagine is a not insignificant population. A lot of able looking people with 20/20 vision walking around with non-obvious problems that can be managed effectively in day to day life but strapping a self lit screen centimeters from the eye...

I'd like to read on that a bit, I haven't seen it talked about much.