Virtual Reality

[MartyG]

Meta overall didn't make a loss in 2023. They had net profits of $11 billion in the third quarter alone - whilst subsidiaries of the parent company may be loss-making, the parent company is not.

Meta has deep pockets, they wouldn't be investing in the billions if they couldn't afford to do it - they're investing more in server infrastructure than they are in VR; Meta has its eggs in a lot of different baskets, including AI.

If Apple had a separately reporting subsidiary for Vision Pro, that would be showing billions in losses too. Some investments are simply strategic.

[Lebowski]

Meta overall didn't make a loss in 2023. They had net profits of $11 billion in the third quarter alone - whilst subsidiaries of the parent company may be loss-making, the parent company is not.

Meta has deep pockets, they wouldn't be investing in the billions if they couldn't afford to do it - they're investing more in server infrastructure than they are in VR; Meta has its eggs in a lot of different baskets, including AI.

Which is why I said Reality Labs were negative 25 billion and not Meta which makes most of its money from advertising. They have said they dont expect Reality labs to turn a profit this year either.

If they didn't have reality labs their profits would have been 36 billion, so sometimes the fingers in many pies don't always play out, see also Xbox and Microsoft which is forever bailing out and propping up its console division with money from its other pies.

[MartyG]

I think Meta and Microsoft both know what they're doing business strategy-wise. Losses != unhealthy losses.

[Asura]

Yeah, worth remembering that for me, if Meta pour billions into solving all the problems in VR, then go bankrupt and cease to exist before they benefit from that... I mean that's just two thumbs up. I dislike their core business as much as anyone.

[wakka]

Which is why I said Reality Labs were negative 25 billion and not Meta which makes most of its money from advertising. They have said they dont expect Reality labs to turn a profit this year either.

If they didn't have reality labs their profits would have been 36 billion, so sometimes the fingers in many pies don't always play out, see also Xbox and Microsoft which is forever bailing out and propping up its console division with money from its other pies.

Agreed that the massive Reality Labs investment didn't work out at all. They invested way too much too quickly in an incredibly risky concept that no one could actually get their head round and which didn't have a hope of generating meaningful returns for decades.

But as a mega corp you have to actually spend the money you're making on something that you believe will generate growth. Simply sitting on a giant pile of cash will spook investors just as much as spending that money on a wacky moonshot like Horizons, because it indicates that management lacks solid ideas or plans for how to protect and grow the company in the future.

Now that Meta have reallocated investment capital, leaving a more sensible amount in Reality Labs and placing some of what had formerly gone into that division into the core business and AI, the stock price recovered because investors are okay with initially money losing propositions if investments are well balanced and eventual returns look feasible.

So to your point that Reality Labs won't generate a profit this year either, I think that's fine. I doubt that it will for a long time. Maybe it won't ever. As long as they're not chucking insane amounts of cash into it like they were previously, I think it has plenty of runway.

[Neon Ignition]

With Meta, I think the sad reality is less based on them sinking billions into VR and is more a case of fearing what will happen when the day comes that decide not to anymore. Without Quest I get the feeling that a major axe will fall over the VR sector that it won't recover from, that stream of casual sales being what drives most devs to remain in the game.

I think the Quest highlights where most VR hardware companies continue to go wrong too, the Quest might be very hard to position profitably but it shows that affordable VR does have an audience - albeit a restrained one. If you're focused on making high priced headsets then you might as well roll up your hundred dollar bills and smoke them. Getting VR affordable and into as many hands as possible is its only path to longevity and Quest is the only one really making anything resembling a worthwhile go of it at the moment. Valve's headset will be staggeringly niche given the far more widespread Deck isn't a mega-seller, other VR headset makers are barely in the same ballpark, Sony looks to be sideyeing the exit door and Apple, it's not even entering them into the discussion. Meta is awful and its metaverse focus is one of the most staggering, eye watering misuses of resources of time and money but it might accidentally be the lifeline the VR market has needed the next few years.

[MartyG]

But as a mega corp you have to actually spend the money you're making on something that you believe will generate growth. Simply sitting on a giant pile of cash will spook investors just as much as spending that money on a wacky moonshot like Horizons, because it indicates that management lacks solid ideas or plans for how to protect and grow the company in the future.

This is exactly right, and also bear in mind, just like the Apple Vision Pro, you're spending a lot of money up front before there's anything even remotely in a position to be put into the market. Even if Meta's vision of the Metaverse never sees daylight or makes a profit, that doesn't automatically mean the investment was pointless or indeed that 100% of that investment was wasted.

These are strategic investments by massively wealthy companies calculated by hundreds of analysts from the masses of big data they have access to, not because some CEO flipped a coin and it came up tails.

[Dogg Thang]

Quest might be very hard to position profitably but it shows that affordable VR does have an audience - albeit a restrained one. If you're focused on making high priced headsets then you might as well roll up your hundred dollar bills and smoke them. Getting VR affordable and into as many hands as possible is its only path to longevity and Quest is the only one really making anything resembling a worthwhile go of it at the moment.

Yep, I think this is exactly right. And VR is still early. Oculus knew this. Meta knows it. The thing is, if it truly takes off (and there is a big IF there, I guess), when that happens these people want to be there when it happens. They want to define it. To own it. I can see the logic in that. Often by the time something takes off, you're too late to start grabbing that market. But then I also wonder how that normally plays out in reality. Sony wasn't there to define consoles and it doesn't seem to have hurt the success of its consoles. I don't know.

But yeah, right now without the Quest I think VR would go back into hibernation for another fifteen years or so.

[Asura]

But yeah, right now without the Quest I think VR would go back into hibernation for another fifteen years or so.

And I think that would be a bad thing.

The Quest line only really came about because of several somewhat coincidental events.

The advent of mobile on-chip graphics hardware, largely pushed by mobile phone/tablet development. The existence of "retina" standard displays (and higher), which again was due to mobile phones benefiting from it. Enhanced spatial tracking hardware, which came from a few other sources. The camera stuff uses ideas developed from SLAM tracking that was being pushed hugely by (among others) NASA's Mars rover programmes. The gyro/accelerometer improvements I believe came from military applications. The hypersonic and lighthouse approaches were solutions for camera tracking in filmmaking.

This is one of the reasons the Quest 1 feels so much more rudimentary than the 2 or 3; it's much more the sum of a number of different technologies that progressed contemporaneously, but divergently.

Videogame consoles & gaming PCs are so powerful today is because those things evolved to not just be reactive to technology, but to push the boundaries of technology. They developed hardware to push the experience. I think to move forwards, VR needs to remain viable so that companies can do that, as we're probably past the point now where we're developing things (like pancake lenses) that are pretty bespoke to VR.

[Lebowski]

Meta is dominating the market supposedly owning 90% of the current sales of new headsets, with its quest 2 and 3, so yeah it would be a massively destructive to VR.

December steam charts shows meta is accounting for 63% of the headsets currently in use on steam with quest 2 accounting for 40% while the Rift and 3 making up the majority of the other 23%, what's also interesting is the Quest 3 is the only headset showing growth in december on steam with a 3.9% increase, whereas the quest 2 saw a 2% drop.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?ref=uploadvr.com

[MartyG]

This is one of the reasons the Quest 1 feels so much more rudimentary than the 2 or 3; it's much more the sum of a number of different technologies that progressed contemporaneously, but divergently.

This is a similar reason as to why AI has suddenly become such big news - it's nowhere near a new idea; the concept of neural networks going back to the 60s - I was looking at rudimentary NNs in the 80s and 90s, however, the sum of several different technologies (access to high-bandwidth parallel processing, cheap data storage and the availability of massive datasets), has allowed those thing to merge and produce the vast LLMs companies like Open AI are churning out.

[Asura]

December steam charts shows meta is accounting for 63% of the headsets currently in use on steam with quest 2 accounting for 40% while the Rift and 3 making up the majority of the other 23%, what's also interesting is the Quest 3 is the only headset showing growth in december on steam with a 3.9% increase, whereas the quest 2 saw a 2% drop.

That doesn't surprise me at all, honestly. I mean even anecdotally, I moved from Quest 2 to 3, so I'm part of that drop.

[Neon Ignition]

https://youtu.be/hdwaWxY11jQ

Vision Pro review. I know it will get a multitude of online defenders because - Apple - but it sounds utterly ****. Something that exists simply because Apple doesn't need to worry about knocking it together and wondering about how much money it will make. A handful of refinements (and a couple of steps back as well) for the minor $3000 price hike.

[MartyG]

I think he hits the nail on the head in the first minute - Apple has to say it's doing something new when we all know it isn't doing anything much new at all.

[Lebowski]

https://youtu.be/hdwaWxY11jQ
Vision Pro review. I know it will get a multitude of online defenders because - Apple - but it sounds utterly ****. Something that exists simply because Apple doesn't need to worry about knocking it together and wondering about how much money it will make. A handful of refinements (and a couple of steps back as well) for the minor $3000 price hike.

It's a fascinating piece of hardware, but also baffling at the same time really high quality components make this stand out from anything else on the market, but then maybe theirs a reason why people aren't using loads of Metal and Glass and that's because it makes your device really bloody heavy and forces you to put your battery on a wire to keep weight down. Every review I've seen goes into how it puts all the weight on your face and is uncomfortably heavy. Apple's inclusion of the second strap that offers more support but doesn't look as cool as the standard fabric one is apple hilariously letting you choose form over function.

This has first gen prototype written all over it too, all these failed ideals rolled into one, showing that Pass through even with the highest quality cameras and screen is still not good enough. That gesture controls and eye tracking are never going to replace physical inputs, as they're just not reliable or precise, enough. in the vid above the part where he's trying to select an option from a flat menu with buttons that are not big enough, and he says how easy it is to select the wrong thing brought back memories of the horror of gesture control on Xbox kinect menu and how frustrating they were to use