The jobcuts will impact about 10% of Meta’s hardware division, including teams working on Quest VR headsets and the Horizon Worlds virtual social platform.
The last of the old cargo cult is finally converting to the new one.
Good now maybe indie developers can actually do something interesting with VR and begin the process of rehabilitating the destroyed perception it has gotten with the public.
There’s practically no moat right now for VR operating systems. Meta had the closest because of their studios. Wide open again for Valve and SteamOS/Linux
It still needs to get over the hurdle of VR headsets being heavy and therefore uncomfortable, and motion sickness. There are some technological solutions that can improve motion sickness, but they’re not currently practical.
It still needs to get over the hurdle of VR headsets being heavy
It’s not necessarily about weight, so much as balance. An unbalanced headset puts alll the weight on the wearer’s nose and cheeks. The Steam Frame addresses this by moving the battery to the back of the user’s head, making the headset significantly more balanced
In the VR modding scene for games (things like Minecraft Java edition being playable with an Index), SteamVR/OpenXR has become the defacto standard already, and in games like VRChat, the vast majority of high quality content needs a PC with SteamVR running to have it function.
VR will probably remain a dedicated niche for a long time, but innovation and embracing open standards will continue to happen :)
That doesn’t seem overly crazy to me. They were trying to quickly build out an immature platform of an immature technology. Doing that requires entire divisions for hardware, software, research, marketing, etc. and for each of those divisions there’s all the associated staff of managers, hr, administrators, etc.
300 people working on hardware, 300 people working on software, 300 people working on various smaller aspects like basic research, marketing, quality testing, etc., and 100 people in associated staff like managers, hr, janitorial, administrators, etc.
I don’t think that’s reasonable. 300 people full time to release 4 headsets in the last ten years? 300 people to build a custom Android version and a shitty VR chat clone?
You may not think it’s reasonable, but the evidence suggests that it is. If 100 people could do it then the market would be flooded with high quality standalone vr headset systems.
It says it’s multiple studios, which I assume were acqui-hired. So it’s not just “VR developers”, but also UI designers, concept artists, QA, PMs, HR, IT, tech writers, community managers, sales people — maybe even localization, reception, janitors… who knows. The structure of these things can vary wildly.
All headsets outside of Meta use the standard by default. OpenXR was designed to be easy to implement - Meta just took the Apple route of trying to have their own walled garden fueled by their money furnace separated from it. With that gone, there will be fewer reasons to use Meta’s ecosystem over OpenXR.
Good thing they kept the “Meta” name. Very fitting now that everyone knows they’re at the end of their existence as innovators and are just Meta-slaves to whatever bubble is blowing up next.
I don’t want any AI spy devices in my house… They focus on AI even though nobody wants it and we all keep saying it. I want to use it at work and for things that make sense to do. I don’t want it in my house because I know what its doing. Only if I actually could run my own AI thing self hosted focused on my own books and photos.
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The last of the old cargo cult is finally converting to the new one.
Good now maybe indie developers can actually do something interesting with VR and begin the process of rehabilitating the destroyed perception it has gotten with the public.
Actually when you put it that way, maybe Facebook can destroy all the hype around AI too!
Cant wait for your words to come true. Let’s go Mark you have got this AI thing
I feel like he’d be better at it because of personal experience as one
There’s practically no moat right now for VR operating systems. Meta had the closest because of their studios. Wide open again for Valve and SteamOS/Linux
It still needs to get over the hurdle of VR headsets being heavy and therefore uncomfortable, and motion sickness. There are some technological solutions that can improve motion sickness, but they’re not currently practical.
It’s not necessarily about weight, so much as balance. An unbalanced headset puts alll the weight on the wearer’s nose and cheeks. The Steam Frame addresses this by moving the battery to the back of the user’s head, making the headset significantly more balanced
If anyone’s ever going to be able to crack the secret to widespread adoption of VR, I think it’ll be Valve.
In the VR modding scene for games (things like Minecraft Java edition being playable with an Index), SteamVR/OpenXR has become the defacto standard already, and in games like VRChat, the vast majority of high quality content needs a PC with SteamVR running to have it function.
VR will probably remain a dedicated niche for a long time, but innovation and embracing open standards will continue to happen :)
There were over a thousand people working on it?
That doesn’t seem overly crazy to me. They were trying to quickly build out an immature platform of an immature technology. Doing that requires entire divisions for hardware, software, research, marketing, etc. and for each of those divisions there’s all the associated staff of managers, hr, administrators, etc.
Even then, I would think it would be in the low hundreds.
300 people working on hardware, 300 people working on software, 300 people working on various smaller aspects like basic research, marketing, quality testing, etc., and 100 people in associated staff like managers, hr, janitorial, administrators, etc.
Seems reasonable to me.
I don’t think that’s reasonable. 300 people full time to release 4 headsets in the last ten years? 300 people to build a custom Android version and a shitty VR chat clone?
You may not think it’s reasonable, but the evidence suggests that it is. If 100 people could do it then the market would be flooded with high quality standalone vr headset systems.
Valve did it with like 350 people in the whole company.
Valve’s system isn’t standalone, and wasn’t trying to create a whole new vr platform like fb was trying to do
It says it’s multiple studios, which I assume were acqui-hired. So it’s not just “VR developers”, but also UI designers, concept artists, QA, PMs, HR, IT, tech writers, community managers, sales people — maybe even localization, reception, janitors… who knows. The structure of these things can vary wildly.
Also kinda crazy, I don’t think it says that it was 100% of their employees who were working on VR.
So it could be considerably more!
They were taking taking turns jacking off Zuckerberg (metaphorically of course … or perhaps …).
They couldn’t even get the people making it to play it in their spare time
Over $100 billion in research and investment just to go “Nah, nevermind.”
Username checks out
Capitalism is the most efficient system!!!
Yes, it really puts into perspective how bad other economic systems are
Or it’s a great way to cover up where 100 billion went.
when will they realize the real crypto is in virtualized ai?!
The real NFTs were the AI models we saw in VR along the way.
And now OpenXR/SteamVR shall become the dominant standard. Hooray!
Assuming we ever actually get a price. Still no word on that.
All headsets outside of Meta use the standard by default. OpenXR was designed to be easy to implement - Meta just took the Apple route of trying to have their own walled garden fueled by their money furnace separated from it. With that gone, there will be fewer reasons to use Meta’s ecosystem over OpenXR.
Meta headsets use openxr https://developers.meta.com/horizon/documentation/native/android/mobile-openxr/
Good thing they kept the “Meta” name. Very fitting now that everyone knows they’re at the end of their existence as innovators and are just Meta-slaves to whatever bubble is blowing up next.
I don’t want any AI spy devices in my house… They focus on AI even though nobody wants it and we all keep saying it. I want to use it at work and for things that make sense to do. I don’t want it in my house because I know what its doing. Only if I actually could run my own AI thing self hosted focused on my own books and photos.
Ironically Meta’s Llama model that ran well self-hosted. I’m sure Meta will get around to enshittifying it eventually.
Fetch™ didn’t happen so now they’re on to Fetch™ 2.0
This is what happens when Valve announces their new inside out tracking headset