Shutting down AltSpace should be a loud warning bell for Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Horizon is basically a badly executed AltSpace.
AltSpace was super niche, but some artists and marginalized people seemed to find a home there. It was like an odd cross between a digital Burning Man and a BIPOC LGTBQ+ neurodivergent support group. I had a memorable conversation during the height of the pandemic with an older gay man whose husband had recently died of cancer. VR can be a kind of ultimate safe space for people who are hurting. No one can touch you, you put on a disguise, and you can leave at any time.
It had something going on, but was a Grand Canyon away from mass market appeal.
I suspect Microsoft knows full well that 343 wouldn't be capable of producing a "metaverse". Activision though? With a sort of contiguous open world standardize "game engine" used by all the properties? Now we're talking real metaverse tech.
Whoever buys VRChat will impose publicly-traded-tech-giant-“can’t upset the investors, Washington, or the media” guidelines/DMCA to it, and ruin it in the span of two years.
It’s popular because you can do whatever you want, which is the antithesis of companies like Alphabet/Microsoft/Meta.
Yup. They both have social and game/physical aspects but each excels at the opposite. It's interesting to compare the Among Us and Fall Guys implementations in each.
Together they basically make up a basic Meta Verse already.
AltSpace and many others were actually pretty comparable technically, for a time anyway. Just never hit critical mass
Look at the last graph which compares the total vrchat player count to the steam player count. All non Steam users are Quest users. There are more Steam users than Quest users even that the Quest is a much bigger VR platform than PCVR. The Steam player count is so high because it is counting desktop users who do not use VR.
This data does not support my argumunt that most vrchat players play on desktop. I would be curious about focusing on just the Steam users and seeing what percentage of them used VR.
OK. So there's a lot of assumptions there. I won't get into whether I agree or disagree with your conclusion but I would say your original statement made it sound much more factual than it turned out to be.
No one can touch you but they can hurt you in the same way people hurt others online all the time. Verbal abuse, name calling, derogatory remarks, unwanted solicitation, etc...
Yes, VR is online, but it’s a weird embodied immersive presence version of online that can feel a bit like hanging out in meatspace. And it has a off button.
Were we talking specifically about corporate work? There's more to meetings or meetups than just your job.
That said, I think VR/AR may eventually be a way to enhance online work meetings. It doesn't seem like it's there yet overall, but eventually I could definitely see it working.
Can you elaborate on how VR would enhance meetings? I really don’t see the point myself. I don’t want to meet some avatar in a virtual room and I don’t know anybody who would.
There are tons of accounts of how you feel a sense of 'presence' in VR. The head tracking fools your lizard brain into thinking you're actually there in the virtual world.
If you're reading this site I'm guessing you have access to $400. Just go buy a Quest 2 and try it out for 10 minutes, and you'll see what I mean.
Compared to standard video calls, there'd be a much greater sense of presence. Head movement, hand movement, and eye contact (once that's standard) would increase how close it feels to IRL meetings.
Which is a solution that scales extremely poorly in a global environment with potentially billions of people you might want to mute. More so in an environment which supports anonymity, so that they can just keep creating new accounts.
Kind of like spam you can heuristically figure out who is hurling abuse at people and ban/shadowban/automute their communications to people they are attempting to abuse.
I can imagine that the same way you have a shared list of undesirables. Essentially an assholeblock instead of adblock.
This would be a good idea but people can just make new accounts. It would also be open to abuse so it would need an appeal system and some sort of judiciary.
I don't understand why reputation isn't a solution offered for spam and bad people. Why not make users on the internet build trust.
For egregious breaches you don't need to give them an appeal just ban them. For less egregious situations client side filtering like adblock doesn't get one either by virtue of people not owing you their time.
Nah, Microsoft and Meta are obviously partnering up. This is likely just a symptom of that with Meta getting buy in from Microsoft to use Meta's VR platform. I agree that Horizon is the worse of the two but that doesn't mean they'll fail. Worse is better sometimes. The lynchpin will be if Meta is really married to Unity, Unreal Engine is eating Unity's lunch with adoption and features. If Meta makes the jump to UE they'll win a bigger share of the market with a far superior engine. It waits to be seen.
It's more that the industry is bearish on long bets in a tight financial climate. The tech for VR/AR is too clunky to seamlessly integrate into peoples' daily lives like mobile phones and smart phones did. There will need to be an iPhone-like leap in affordable and portable vision tech before VR/AR becomes a feasible marketplace.
Iirc there was some face-punching resistance to people recording discreetly. I suspect that may have subsided some in many areas due to the longer them of high-res-video-recorder ubiquity.
don't disagree, i find it interesting that people get unbelievably angered when individuals record them in public, but could care less when business do. I could understand some difference in reaction between the two, but the actual gulf displayed is astounding.
The pizza place's security camera isn't going to prank me or ask me about a sensitive topic and then same day blast my reaction on 7 vertical format video platforms as an out of context meme with sensationally misleading captions.
I’m not familiar with the google glass incidents but surely people have good reason to feel differently about being singled out and clandestinely recorded by an individual compared to a business that automatically records everyone who enters. I don’t think carrying a camera down the street would get you punched.
I never understood why they didn't let the camera flip up (to give visual appearance you weren't recording directly ahead). A simple physical move could have helped it gain acceptance
I don’t think Google Glass provides any augmented reality functionality? It’s just a mobile head-up display. You need a lot more processing power (and clunkier hardware) to be able to do augmented reality
On the price point, the original iPhone retailed for $499USD which in inflation adjusted dollars today would be $714USD. The Quest 2 is significantly cheaper than that as a standalone device. The Quest Pro is much more expensive but is targeted at businesses, watch Zuck's intro of it if you doubt that. The biggest barrier is that for really good performance on any headset you need to tether to a gaming PC. That's a lot more cost and complication for non-technical people. That said, the hardware is there and capable of delivering outstanding visuals and inside out tracking. The compute and networking are lagging behind, we really need a small, user friendly and powerful device that anyone can go buy, plug in and then connect their VR headset to with 0 frustration. That would free up headsets to only worry about the displays and tracking.
I don't think the future of VR is portable. I have an aversion to lumping AR in with it since they are fundamentally different. If it makes it easier, VR is desktop, AR is mobile. Similar but not at all the same. The way I envision the future of VR is that it does for your physical experiences what computers and the internet did for your paperwork and documents. Thinking about VR as a cellphone is the wrong mental model, it's not a peripheral that exists in your physical environment. It is a replacement for your physical environment or more congenially, it is another physical environment to which you can travel in addition to the places you currently go to.
I am afraid you are not paying much attention to the xr dev community which is overwhelmingly Unity vs UE. Both have their shortcomings but the new UE features like Nanite don't work out of the box double rendered and thats just one reason.
Yes, Alex and his team(s) are out there in the front pushing what's possible but its not off the shelf he has a lot of talent. Big fan of his Heavenue work on live rendered VR/XR/3D shows & the one they did for A Christmas Carroll is still state of the art theater.
I've also played a few indie VR games that are using it. It's not like you have to be some technical wizard to enable it, you just need to make sure you aren't stomping on your FPS with a bunch of other stuff at the same time.
Sounds a lot like chat rooms on early community websites. Just a bunch of people (who in my case loved a specific set of books), chatting about whatever under a handle and without needing to carry around your real self - but nor with any fear to hide anything.
I dunno, I cannot see anything like that ever surviving mass adoption
It's funny I keep thinking about how the same people might work on the same thing but with different terms. As a W2 employee you make great money, but your upside is capped. Your downside is never capped, of course. As a founder you make okay money, you have better upside. But the same corp that fired you will invest that money with the VC that funded you. So, either way, the capital flows through the corp to you, and the profits flow from you to the corp. There are a few that "make it" and become a corp themselves, but that's the rare exception that follows a power-law distribution.
Of course, this is only true for capital intensive startups. My sincere hope is that this wave of layoffs leads to a thousand bootstrapped, customer focused, non-scaling companies, like 37signals. Or kickstarters like the Framework laptop. I believe we need more companies like that, and far fewer moonshots that mostly fail and leave workers broken.
I agree. I think the next 5-10 years will see a massive wave of new companies come out of this.
There's been so much talent locked up in bigtech for so long. The amount of talent in these companies that have had golden handcuffs forever due to the continual rise of their stock grants is staggering.
Now suddenly bigtech stock is down 50%+, and they can't issue enough RSUs to cover the compensation gap. Moreover, there's layoffs coming. All of the sudden these extremely talented people, many of whom have a small fortune in savings due to a decade+ of bigtech stock grants, are unleashed on the wider industry, some with 6-12 months of paid severance. They could easily start up a new business with minimal personal financial risk.
> the next 5-10 years will see a massive wave of new companies come out of this
I want this to be true, but I don't see how.
Good talent is still locked up in BigTech.
Talent that got freed up was working on things BigTech had no way of make money off of, even long term.
On the other hand, SmallTech offers now have a better chance, and seem attractive, to said talent. That must count for something.
This round of layoffs is proof that BigTech safety net is a lie. But not enough to push people with dependents to take on the pain and uncertainty that starting up ensues.
Many startups that launched in the last several years did not have a proper business model, were not profitable and were reliant on VC money. It was all about growing quickly enough to get to IPO to give early investors liquidity and dump the liability on general public (like Uber).
As free/cheap money goes away it should force entrepreneurs to build real businesses rather than VC fueled money pits.
On the other hand, it seems most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked over the last couple decades. What is left for a random small business with software talent to do?
I actually strongly disagree -- the amount of business potential for software that isn't trying to becoming a billion-dollar unicorn is massive, and has been extremely underserved during the past decade as most of the money (and talent) chased after the billion dollar moonshot bets, either in B2C businesses or very generic B2B software (think Atlassian).
It's harder to find the business potential because the opportunities are much more closely coupled to optimizing specific processes in specific industries. But if you can find the right niche, the business opportunities are there.
Isn't the opportunity to make "fuck you money" the motivation for the risk of working as a startup? Without that people are probably better off working at a corp.
Yes and no. Its helpful to see the word "startup" as meaning two distinct things.
The "current" use of the word implies VC capital. As in "I joined a startup and we raised..."
However in the past it referred to literally "starting a business". Someone sees a gap in the market, builds a product, and looks to fill that gap one customer at a time. Since there is no incoming capital, it has to be revenue positive, well enough for the owners to survive.
This sort of business is (somewhat perjorativly) called a "life style" business. In that it provides salaries to some number of people, and provides a (good?) living.
The reasons for starting such a business are numerous, and while maybe some do with the goal of being mega-rich, in reality the successful ones end up being merely "rich".
But there are a _lot_ of upsides other than money. I'll offer a few from personal experience, but really they offer any goal you like.
A) freedom to work on what you want, when you want, where you want, how you want. Yes, of course you are constrained by actually delivering (or you don't get paid) but the mechanics of delivering are up to you.
B) job security. It takes time to get to this point, but once a business is profitable the owner has a job for life. (he is literally the last person to get laid off) [1]
C) a lack of corporate bullshit. No endless layers of managers. No endless meetings. If you need a new PC you go buy a new PC. (equally true, if you report directly to the owner, decisions get made quickly. If you need a new PC you only have to convince one person.)
D) while on the topic, being employed by a small business has huge benefits as well, but to need to move the income needle for the job security.
I could go on but I think you get the point.
[1] ironically when getting person credit, like a mortgage, ticking "self employed" leads me to a lower credit score, despite the fact that 40-odd people get laid off before I do :)
[2] about 5% of new (bootstrapped) businesses make it to 10 years old. I'm not suggesting this route is easy, but it is desirable.
I think there is a huge amount of areas that are less visible to technologists that are underserved. I sometimes think about either partnering or purchasing a small business and just automating the shit out of it. You either become dominant die to the advantage or you start selling the software to competitors. This was mostly spawned by observing a friend's struggles with his property management company while we were on vacation together. Everything they fucked up or for which he had to make phone calls to them could have been triviality automated.
I bet there are lots of sectors out there that could be totally disrupted or made more efficient if they got attention from high-caliber developers and UX folks.
Plenty of things I'm sure. It seems quite cyclical in that the old products get weighed down by features and stuck, then new ones come along that are slimmer faster and that allows them to explore new ways of working. Its much harder to update the older products.
Example: When Jira was the new kid it was all snazzy and sleek and interesting. Over the last few years a lot of alternatives have appeared. Although Atlassian has made some changes, they can't just bring in what makes those products different unless they write a whole new product, and large companies can't make new products.
Currently I think we're at or just past a high point. The current lineup of Jira alternatives will probably wittle down, the best ones will get bought, made part of some enterprise lineup, that way of working becomes a standard, they'll get big and bloated and unable to innovate. The cycle will get to a low point and then we'll see another explosion of alternatives.
One example. It is my personal belief is that social media is ripe for disruption in ways we have not imagined yet. Clearly centralized, ad-revenue driven psuedo-monopolies are a big problem. I actually believe there is a parallel problem with software engineering that has focused on larger piles of cloud-hosted complexity that has far outstripped the ability of anyone to hold it in their head. These two things are, I believe, deeply intertwined and so the solution will be at both levels too. Of course, I'm not the only one who sees an opportunity here. I love seeing all the ideas in this space; most of them won't work, of course, but that's the nature of experimentation.
> Clearly centralized, ad-revenue driven psuedo-monopolies are a big problem.
Financially, it's the exact opposite of a problem; it's too profitable. There will always be big market for companies that manage to lock up an audience within its walls.
A big problem for society. The algorithm is bad for people's mental health, and bad for democracy. These are the externalities of that great profitability.
Are they really laying off their best people though or just Leetcoders? Also as far as I am aware, only Twitter really thinks it should be a 200 person company or whatever, whereas these companies actually super overhired during the pandemic predicting a bigger long term trend than turned out to be. That's why these layoffs aren't really that big news all in all.
So far we're looking at ~200,000 layoffs, a far cry from the 1,000,000 laid off in the dot-com bubble. And nowhere close to the capital bonfire of the 2008 housing collapse.
Of course your downside is capped. You're never going to wake up one day and owe Microsoft a billion dollars.
A real example of uncapped downside is when you sell call options on a stock, or short a stock. You actually can wake up one day to your broker telling you you need to find millions of dollars right now because the market moved against you. And it can get worse and worse, the downside is truly uncapped.
Startups will be out of reach of many in the US until we have a much more robust baseline of public services. First and foremost being health insurance of course.
I would love to start the kind of lifestyle (or "non-scaling" as you put it) business, but right now it's a complete non-starter for me because getting a health insurance policy for my entire family would be comically expensive.
It's even been harder for me interviewing with smaller startups because compared to single people, my insurance premiums are bonkers.
It’s anecdotal but, I’ve personally known multiple high 200-400k a year earners who went bankrupt or near bankrupt over only medical bills. I myself nearly did.
The cost of catastrophic situations is still ultimately too high in the US without or with insurance.
> I thought health insurance puts a cap on how much you can get charged.
Instead of annual out-of-pocket maximums that are mandatory under the ACA and make that unlikely, plans used to have kind of the reverse: lifetime coverage caps that particularly severe conditions could exceed. (This is one of the reasons premiums are higher for superficially similar—e.g., what services are covered and at what cost sharing rule befoee reaching caps—coverage under the ACA.)
I can't see how it can happen post-ACA, unless the condition as a practical matter requires services that are entirely outside the scope of coverage.
Isn’t it the same for the people “risking” their money? The only “risk” is that they lose their bet, meaning they have to go find a job like the rest of us.
Let's say you have $50k in savings and an offer in hand for Microsoft or a startup idea of your own.
If want to work on your idea, but you don't already have connections to tap for immediate VC funding, any work you do on it is earning $0 income while you're still having to pay the bills. Your downside risk is that after X number of months or years, you've lost $Y dollars of your starting savings.
If you take the Microsoft offer, your downside risk is that after X number of months or years, you get laid off, and have to look for a new job, but your $50k is still there, and quite possibly a bunch of new savings as well.
No, it's not the same. An uncapped downside would be something like shorting stock. The price of the stock can be unbounded, and you owe the difference between the current stock and the price you opened your short position. So you can literally lose an unlimited amount of money.
W2 work feels more stable and secure than startup land. If you worked for Google for 20 years you don't expect to be let go with no notice by an automated system. But that is exactly what happened to thousands of people just now. You kind of expect this kind of thing in startup land. Recent events show this downside is not unique to startups, and can affect any worker anywhere. It's chilling, and it should take some of the glow off of W2 work in comparison to startup work. But like I said, there is a third alternative which is, IMHO, far more fullfilling and grounded anyway, which is bootstrapping and working directly with customers.
> If you worked for Google for 20 years you don't expect to be let go with no notice by an automated system.
Why? From the executive's perspective at megacorps like Google, employees are completely replaceable, and even for a megacorp, Google is incredibly scared of discrimination. The safest way to conduct layoffs is to do so completely randomly.
> You kind of expect this kind of thing in startup land.
No. In startup land, you should expect that there is a good chance that your entire company is dissolved. Your equity is completely worthless. You have no 6 month severance. You have nothing to show for the longer hours you worked besides a very sub-market salary.
I don't think you even implicitly touched upon what downside might mean in this context, aside from loss of income. Re-reading your comments, I still have no idea what downside you're describing. And certainly nothing explicitly addresses my comment.
Yeah, when I think uncapped downside, I think of shorting something that can go up any amount and being on the hook for that. When I think of losing a job, I think of loss of income (including benefits like healthcare (at least in the US) and stock grants), possibly loss of networking with colleagues (though social media exists), and not a lot more. So I’m with you. I have no idea what they’re talking about and would appreciate a detailed explanation.
I think the missing element from “we need fewer moonshots” is that the reason they’re moonshots in the first place is because they’re capital intensive not because the technology has a real story to be an $xbn dollar industry.
Like we don’t necessarily notice that any business that employs software developers has to be $5+mil/yr or on the way to it which is not true at all for like a restaurant.
That is an extremely misleading headline. AltSpace and the geospatial anchor teams have been axed. Lots of folks were reduced across MR and HoloLens, but the teams weren’t completely fired
Yes and even before this announcement, the story was about a shift from AltSpace towards the new Mesh for Teams product as in better world/room building will be part of Mesh. Mesh is being used internally and the project as far as I can tell is still the main program in their shift to XR software and backends and leaving hardware to partners.
I mean, these were cute and demos were a bit "wow" but the practicality seemed reduced, especially when most of the use cases they demonstrated would be covered by a phone call.
The big industrial use case I saw was to receive teleguidance to repair equipment, the ground reality is that most of the time if you don't know how to fix it... You're not allowed to try to fix it.
The coolest use-case I saw was controlling a humanoid robot to repair a pipeline in a hostile environment. Now we just have to wait till humanoid robot tech catches up.
There's another practical niche - museums. The Museum of the Liberation of Paris - General Leclerc - Jean Moulin (same museum, they couldn't decide on the name apparently) uses HoloLenses in the underground bunker that served as a command post during the uprising in Paris that led to it's liberation. It allows for a much more immersive experience than just signs and mannequins (they have both of those too). I can also see that working very well in e.g. natural history museums, with AR making fossils come to life.
Eh, I always viewed it more as having a guided reference manual on hand more then letting someone untrained perform a repair. A mechanic might know exactly how a car engine works, but they probably don't know the exact part numbers, torque specs, and disassembly / reassembly order to gain access to an specific area on repair for that specific model and year of car.
I don't know. The few technicians I know are already hardcore on having paper manuals, an iPad is already way too much into the BS. They'd never put that on.
I was considering getting into HoloLens development a few years ago. It seemed like they were still pushing developers toward UWP even when UWP was obviously nearly dead, and that killed any interest I had.
Did the developer story for HoloLens ever get better or did it just die a slow death?
It focused on using Unity, and MRTK is based on Win32 and Khronos XR standard.
The problem with Project Reunion (nowadays known as WinAppSDK + WinUI 3.0), is that it is clearly managed by people without big background on Microsoft UI stacks (watch a couple of community calls), and it is years away to achived parity to UWP, let alone what Windows Forms and WPF offer in API surface.
HoloLens 2 switched to <strike>Android</strike> ARM and UWP apps running on heavily modified Android, but imo the insistence on hand tracking as the primary interface still walled it off from the other Android XR developer communities.
Yeah y'all are right, I can't find anything to support the notion the HoloLens 2 uses an Android fork for its OS. (Possibly the person who told me this had it confused with Magic Leap...?)
It's a pretty big leap to look at the shutdown of AltspaceVR (which already has a successor) and MRTK and conclude that "HoloLens, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality are all but dead at Microsoft." There are a TON of other active teams/projects working in the area. This is likely the side effect of a consolidation/reorg in the division.
I really wanted to use HoloLens for remote support. Too bad they never really looked like they would support it for wider use.
We are a small company that sells very complex equipment to labs around the world. The users are smart / PhDs, they just need to be told what to do to fix things when they need an adjustment. This is large physical scientific equipment and the stuff requires 'hands-on'.
This is where the most promising applications have shown up (but not necessarily the money). It’s fantastic for things like assembling wiring harnesses for aviation where it can serve as a sort of interactive manual.
Looks like it's mostly related to Microsoft's inability to sell to the Pentagon, which seemed like a big use case and a way to make up for their costs:
"Microsoft won’t be getting more orders for its combat goggles anytime soon after Congress earlier this month rejected the US Army’s request for $400 million to buy as many as 6,900 of them in the current fiscal year. The rejection of the request, in the $1.75 trillion government funding bill approved in December, reflects concern over field tests of the goggles, which are adapted from Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets. The tests disclosed “mission-affecting physical impairments,” including headaches, eyestrain and nausea."
I have to imagine this will happen with other VR headsets, given theirs was more fleshed out than others.
It's sad to watch all these layoffs but canceling underperforming products/divisions completely makes a lot more sense than decimating the company as a whole.
Is HoloLens on a trajectory towards success, in your opinion?
Seems to me it's far too expensive for gamers, and not all that useful for business - all I can find online are mock ups of hypothetical business uses, like telling mechanics which way to turn a spark plug to tighten it. To me that doesn't seem very useful. What are the chances a job is done so rarely your workers don't know the procedure already; and yet so frequently it makes sense to build a detailed 3D-modelled instruction pack to replace the normal paper instructions?
Congress just gave the military something like $75m-$150m to award to Microsoft to improve the hololens for battlefield readiness. It started as a high end niche business product. Demo'd well for the military. Business device shoehorned into military didn't work. But, if they can get it "military good" those enhancements will trickle down to business and eventually consumer use cases.
I generally roll my eyes at Military > Consumer path companies, but in this case? Not so much. Business > Military > Actual Military Usefulness > Mass Market is an interesting trajectory worth watching.
The opportunity is in the first consumer grade smart glasses. If MS could get their hardware there first, they had a chance to disrupt the Google/Apple (bi)monopoly on mobile devices. The Hololens2 experience is quite good, what one would want in a pair of smart glasses.
In my use case the complex, scientific equipment is spread around the world. Low volume though. I planned to offer support remotely rapidly with HoloLens.
The reality is that it was always unlikely that Microsoft (or Meta, or Google, or Apple…) would be able to create disruption in AR, VR, etc. on the magnitude of the initial iPhone release. Better to keep their powder dry to acquire the startups that potentially can.
It seems obvious to me AI will be the next major disruption. Radically decreasing the need for human labor has an obvious productive advantage while there is no evidence people would prefer to leave reality.
Headsets might be a niche market, but "leaving reality" is a huge market if you count video games, movies, TV, novels, short stories, plays, musicals, ...
There's a story I love to recount on this topic. A dad asked his kid why they preferred reading books to watching movies. The kid said, "because they have better pictures."
(And yes, AI can write stories, so the markets aren't orthogonal.)
Tell someone in the 18th century that 200 years later 2 percent of the labor force will work in agriculture, and they would swear that we must have nothing to do.
Except AI plays to the strengths of Big Companies rather than small ones. So MAGA will be the first to capture the winds of AI. They don’t have to worry about an unknown AI company suddenly toppling them upside down.
yes it will be interesting to see if this signals a broader change in approach similar to their pivot to Android instead of their own in-house mobile OS.
Even if you criticise the logic in any individual case, you have to respect the discipline that it must take to drive decisions like this (if it does indeed turn out to be the case - remains to be seen). I have to think though that it is pretty toxic to their partner relationships ... who would deliver a new product based on WMR now?
Second Life is doing OK. User count about 60%-70% of peak. More concurrent users than anybody else in the virtual world space except Roblox. Profitable. The owner says "it's a cash machine". The business model is straightforward - free to play, charge to rent out virtual land, take a small commission on item sales.
It's about the only thing in this space that turns a profit. Roblox has a huge user count, but loses huge amounts of money. Since they did an IPO, everyone gets to look at their terrible numbers.
Every business will can projects in their portfolio when belt tightening. VR and its multitude of derivative just isn't a core competency of M$. If anybody is to win this space then it'll be Apple IMO.
Apple's spend in this area is totally unknown, other than everybody expects them to. To contrast, Meta has been spending so much in this area that they've bet the company on it. It's anybody's game right now, but Meta already has launched products and iterated on them.
Apple also spent money on cars too. They likely could have spent billions judging by their tell-tale hiring ads over the past decade. What they are good at is huge amount of cash to operate very clandestinely (just park other RnD in their guidance) and they rarely tell stockholders what they doing other than the mundane usual iPhone, iPad, Foxconn, MacOS news. Meta, Google and Alphabet do things very publicly whether they intentionally seek publicity or unintentionally leaked out (like their near santient AI - they must have it with firing of so many concerned scientists there - only 2 prominent one make it to news, there are others....and didnt released it with OpenGPT beating them)
Apple is built different as a tech company. They will keep everything a secret more closely guarded than the nuclear codes, then come out of nowhere with a mind-blowing product that leaves everything else in the dust, just like they did with the iPhone. A Quest 2 with an Apple Silicon CPU would, alone, be a game changer. There's probably some advanced head and eye tracking and SLAM AI in there too that makes Meta's stuff look like that clunky Virtuality gear from the 90s in comparison. Probably a thinner, lighter form factor.
You think I'm exaggerating, but Apple has the best engineering talent in the world, a commitment to deliver revolutionary products, and first bite at the supply-chain, er, tomato. Betting against them is a fool's move, no one else will be able to even TOUCH them.
Re: "They will keep everything a secret[...]then come out of nowhere with a mind-blowing product" - that was true (in spades) during Steve Jobs era. What mind blowing product did Apple launch since Oct 2011? Under Tim Apple iterated competently, magnificently, [insert your favorite adjective here] but no mind blowing product....
The Apple Watch was launched in the era of Tim Cook, though I suppose it’s more “ipad revolutionary” (nobody had done it successfully) than “iPhone revolutionary” (nobody had tried). I’ll also say the AirPods are the most quietly competent products I own.
One could also argue for the M chips, which were absolutely game changing when they came out.
I still remember the first time I heard about the iPhone. I was like "this is incredible". My friend in Romania asked me to buy him an iPhone - when I told him he would not be able to use it in Romania [1] he said it does not matter, he wants it it looks super cool. When I first saw the Apple Watch my reaction was between huh and meh.
[1] As far as I remember there was only one telecom in US that was working with the iPhone. My memory on this is fuzzy, but I clearly remember telling that to my friend and his answer.
Seems to me there's a lot more leaks about Apple than about Google. Where's the Bloomberg reporter dedicated to writing about new PRs on their search engine?
I greatly doubt it. Everybody already had a cellphone in 2007, and Apple pricing it at $200 with carrier subsidies tipped the scales in its favour when it came to rapid adoption. There are no such discounts likely with their headset; the estimates say it will be $1500 minimum. And unlike a phone, a headset is not an essential device that goes with you wherever. So it won't create the same kind of excitement the iPhone did.
> Meta already has launched products and iterated on them.
and the reception is lackluster. the tech is still not quite mature enough for the average consumer, and the fear of meta's tracking/coercive social networking component in the hardware is all but the most of die hard fans to even participate.
Surely, meta knows this. So what's their end game?
It's been proven again and again that privacy rights are not that important to mainstream consumers. VR's actual problem is there are no killer apps and the novelty wears off
It’s not like cutting other products will make the core offerings better. I’m sure they could double the Windows 11 team size and the start menu search would still take 10+ seconds to find the app I’m searching for. At least mixed reality was interesting.
“We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall”
This type of commerce is all useless nonsense. If his measure of Metaverse success is hitting some mark for how much money he intends to extract from a user it's not a winning strategy.
It's astounding how disconnected he is from reality, maybe having one hugely successful idea (FB in his case) drastically distort how you perceive the potential of succeeding of any other of your ideas.
Surely nobody really takes…whatever Meta has been doing in VR seriously?
Their VR demos look awful, last report I heard was employees didn’t even want to use it or touch it, oculus has done basically nothing except burn customer goodwill.
I have one friend who has a VR headset, and basically everyone who’s used it has gone “oh that’s neat” and enjoyed it for 30 mins, and then never had any further interest in it.
It’s fun enough, sure, but it’s heavy, sweaty, weirdly isolating and far too expensive for what it is. There aren’t enough games or utilities, and none of them are amazingly compelling. The controls are still janky. The idea of multiplayer is basically a no-go, as it requires everyone to have them (see price) and then have a computer powerful enough to drive it (see cost of GPU’s). A good chunk of my friends don’t have amazing GPU’s, let alone VR-compatible GPU’a plus a headset.
No, I mean Apple. There's such a vast number of Apple fans who will buy whatever Apple put out in this space, I reckon. If anybody can make it succeed then it's Apple. Facebook is distrusted by everybody these days so I don't think it has the wherewithal to make it as people value their privacy more than they let on.
I don't think even the loyalty of Apple customers will overcome VR. I own a VR headset and the drawbacks that cannot be fixed with engineering make them very uncool. It's not cool to have a sweaty acne-producing pair of goggles strapped to your head. It's not cool to need to use a UI to resume experiencing actual reality. The form factor of VR, even after hypothetical improvements, is still clunky and fragile. If Apple actually ships anything in this space, I'm convinced it will be a huge misstep.
Not op, and not to be rude but honestly sounds like you maybe haven't. Meta's bleeding right now. Their attempt at Metaverse is failing hard.
Meanwhile we've got Apple coming along with thier extremely efficient in-house chip architecture thats about to release a lightweight headset with performance that blows away anything Meta has, not to mention an existing ecosystem that it will slot right into.
Outside of Meta everybody knows the 'Metaverse' (i.e in the form as 'Meta' themselves describe it) is a truely awful concept that clearly is not gaining popularity or any kind of desire from the general public.
Based on the leaks we pretty much know that Apples already cracked full body tracking, eye tracking, has a SIGNIFICANTLY lighter design and higher battery life. Hardware wise it'll make everything Metas produced look pretty archaic.
Then it comes to software and app ecosystem. I don't think theres even a debate to be had here. Meta vs Apple would be laughably one sided.
Meta is investing heavily, not "bleeding". The true test of their plans will be in 12-24 months when all this investment is supposed to surface.
> Based on the leaks we pretty much know that Apples already cracked full body tracking, eye tracking ...
Based on the leaks we know that Apple has struggled to deliver a working product at all having repeatedly delayed then scaled back then canceled whole product areas. On the other hand, based on Meta's openly visible work at their labs (literally iniviting journalists to tour and try it out) we know they have cracked key areas that can potentially revolutionise the field in a few years.
I do think Apple's product is going to be enormously successful and state of the art. But the most likely outcome is what Zuckerberg is shooting for - a repeat of the iOS vs Android playbook but this time with him in control of the open OS but without being at the mercy of OEMs and without the horrific fragementation issues.
Congress chopped 90% of the Hololens budget for this fiscal year due in large part to poor results of the field testing. $400M turned into $40M. It's not dead but MS can't sustain the size of the program.
- The Magic Leap/Microsoft approach: Use semitransparent displays to create a virtual overlay.
- The Meta approach: Use cheap standalone VR with lots of external cameras, then mix camera/virtual environment.
It seems pretty clear by now that, if anything, only the second works, given the success (in terms of sales numbers) of the Oculus Quest. Moreover, the latter combines AR and VR, it's not a one trick pony.
The upcoming Apple headset is reported to basically copy Meta's approach, except it is expected to get very expensive and high-end. But I would side with Meta here: I don't see a big market in expensive VR/AR.
A headset is like a Gameboy, if anything people care that it's portable and cheap, not that it has the most impressive graphics.
In any case, Microsoft's HoloLens adventure was likely a dead end.
Fun fact. The military started using AR at the start of the Iraq invasion. Product was essentially Google Glass with facial recognition against a static/ local dataset (stored on device), but in 2004 - for identifying wanted suspects at checkpoints.
Was produced by a company called Osterhout Design Group. Ralph Osterhout also had the distinction of creating the PVS-7 Night Vision goggles in 3 months - still used to this day.
Ralph was a pioneer in waveguide technology that went into ODG's AR glasses. The display tech from the Hololens? Licensed from ODG. Time is a flat circle I suppose.
What’ll be interesting to watch there is the learning curve on what should go on an AR display in the middle of a firefight - various branches of the US military seem to follow a similar curve where they get very excited about technology and massively invest, only to find that 70lbs of networked infantry gear or a naval destroyer full of screens or a jet with no guns doesn’t actually enhance lethality the way the guys at General Dynamics said it would. Usually V2 is a bit more sane/practical, so I’ll be interested to see where they land on the HUDs.
Stop trying to put VR in business space. Its for entertainment, focus on that. Valve put out the best VR headset you can buy, and that was years ago, with a team of people without the grand influence of Microsoft.
These mega tech corps are so big they can just hemmorage money, sit on intellectual property, and do nothing. In a competitive market by all means MS should be bankrupt.
From technology point of view the few surviving .NET bindings to DirectX done by Microsoft own teams are now dead, thus re-enforcing the work from C++ teams.
Another example that technology many times dies not due to its technology capabilities, rather due to external factors.
Many XBox related studios were also affected by the layoffs.
To help make lemons into lemonade, we're hiring for folks into webgl2 for the next gen of our GPU client <> GPU cloud visual analytics engine used by analysts to investigate problems like cyber incidents, fraud, misinfo, global supply chains, etc. We're targeting another 10-100X scaleup through this effort. The first gen led to us writing Apache Arrow's JS tier and helped start Nvidia's popular RAPIDS GPU dataframe project, and we're expecting more hackery needed for this one again.
Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is readying itself to sell/splitoff its consumer products and focus on Enterprise and Cloud. That could also be part of the reason why they're trying to make the consumer version of Windows generate revenue streams. The only thing that might point the other direction is the acquisition of Activision. Why buy it if you're going to spinoff that division?
I'm genuinely curious here - how old are you? People bring up this theory time and time again - since judge Thomas Penfield Jackson decreed the same thing in 2000, which was overturned. Having been a former Microsoft employee working on enterprise to consumer stuff, this would be such an obscenely horrible move. There truly is a virtuous cycle between consumer and enterprise products influencing eachother. Modern Azure VM's are based off the VM segmenting of Xbox One that seperated the "app/ OS" stacks from "on the metal gaming VM". Hell, even Dave Cutler came back to work on the Xbox One VM partitioning which then folded into Azure.
There are limited opportunities to use the aware, this is true. This is most especially due to cost - $3,500 for the base model Hololense. But it works and is actually really cool. It's like the original Microsoft surface product - the table sized tablet thingy, not the laptop form factor - it was too expensive and never saw wide deployment, but it was very cool if you actually got a chance to use it. It's priced out of consumer use, which makes it invisible to most. I have no idea how many people have learned to be airplane de-icers thru Hololense-based training programs, if it's all a marketing gimmick, or if there's a new generation of them trained in VR. It certainly sounds cool, but if they were really making money, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft too have cancelled the project.
all is good. companies will be able to hire some good people with the compensation that was unthinkable few months ago. compensation convergence to the mean is the inevitable in the long run.
I was really surprised earlier today to see a product review video of a 3D printer that makes use of the HoloLens for the user interface. After making a huge splash when announced, it really does seem to have withered away, at least from the public eye.
AltSpace was super niche, but some artists and marginalized people seemed to find a home there. It was like an odd cross between a digital Burning Man and a BIPOC LGTBQ+ neurodivergent support group. I had a memorable conversation during the height of the pandemic with an older gay man whose husband had recently died of cancer. VR can be a kind of ultimate safe space for people who are hurting. No one can touch you, you put on a disguise, and you can leave at any time.
It had something going on, but was a Grand Canyon away from mass market appeal.