Ten years later, Facebook's Oculus acquisition hasn't changed the world as expected
Ten years later, Facebook's Oculus acquisition hasn't changed the world as expected
Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of
I don't think many outside the tech-money bubble thought this would work. Instead people mourned the loss of Oculus as an innovator when it was bought up.
Look at it now - it has slowed the VR market right down by delivering a low price but low quality experience. That has discouraged other manufacturers from the market.
The high end of the market has been held back as a result - the Valve Index and their like give a better experience but content growth is slow as a result of slow growth. The quest is a decent product but their teams are solving the problems constantly constrained by the cheap price point rather than building the solution and iterating it to the price point.
I think the market will converge on a Vision Pro like device at an affordable price but I think Oculus/Meta has slowed that down as people experience their product and think that's what VR is. Although in fairness there is also a tech problem - the vision pro shows how expensive it is at the moment to create something close to the ideal in terms of an untethered device without base stations and hand controllers. The realistic way for quality VR at present remains tethered to a PC.
We'll get there in the end but I think it may have been sooner of Meta hadn't thrown 100s of billions at buying market share with a lower quality version of what VR needs to be. The mobility is right, but the casual-gaming level of experience is way off, and it's damaged expectations.
Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least). That would be technically difficult but offloading as much of the graphics and game/program processing as possible may make a lighter device and an added battery may last longer or be lighter. Essentially a halfway house between an Quest and Index - the quest mobility but the index quality (which is already achieved by offloading to the PC). However it may not be feasible due to lag and it's still a compromise from the ultimate dream. But it'd probably be a good step on from full tethered if its doable.
That or economies of scale do make the Vision Pro or a future version of it affordable over the coming years. Doubt that will be Quest prices though - if people are paying £1k for phones then that seems more realistic for good quality VR imo.
After doing some Meta/Facebook VR development in my job the lack of popularity made increasingly more sense. In brief, they're both incredibly incompetent and transparently greedy.
I'm honestly baffled how they could spend so many tens of billions of dollars and have such bad software, it is completely bug ridden. You'll hit a bug, research it, and find out it's a major know bug for literal years they haven't fixed. They care so little that they couldn't bother to update the Oculus branding to Meta for over 3 years in various software tools and libraries.
Their greed might be more salient aspect preventing adoption, though. They transparently wanted to be the gatekeepers to everything "metaverse" related, a business model that is now explicitly illegal in the EU after years of being merely very sketchy. They are straight up hostile to anyone else trying to implement enterprise or business features. Concrete example: fleet management software, aka MDM. There are third party tools that are cheaper and much more featured than Meta's solution, but in the last year they've pushed hard to kick those third parties out of the ecosystem.
I could go on, but in short nobody in their right mind would build a major business on their ecosystem. They'd rather let Meta burn billions in R&D and come back later. Besides, not even Meta is able to make money in the area now.
I remember when I first heard about Oculus on I think kickstarter.. I thought it was cool.
Then I heard Facebook was buying it and I just wrote it off and knew I'd never have interest in it again. Bought by the wrong type of company
Zuck has never been an original ideas guy, every product Facebook has ever made they either copied or bought from somebody else (including Facebook), what he is good at is taking someone else's idea and squeezing every bit of money out of them via ads.
So what happens when Facebook finally runs out of other people's ideas to copy? Facebook and Instagram are both dying a slow death, because their core audience are leaving, and Tik Tok proved to be their toughest obstacle yet. Oculus was always meant to be a side project for Facebook, until suddenly it became the centerpiece of "Meta" out of the blue. It's no wonder then Oculus became what it is today, because putting ads and collect data from everything is the only trick Facebook knows.
It did change on thing for me: it made me drop support for Oculus in my game dev project.
I still own an Oculus DevKit 2. But after wildly succeeding with his Kickstarter, the founder has done nothing but jerk moves. First he silently dropped Linux support, then he funded a pro-Trump troll army on Reddit and finally he sold his entire VR company to Facebook/Meta, which then did its own jerk move by rendering everyone's hardware useless if they didn't sign up to Facebook/Meta. My Oculus account was forcefully obliterated just a week ago.
What a complete nosedive that was.
They had the nicer tech (Oculus uses infrared LEDs around the headset that are filmed by special cameras to track your orientation, i.e. it's steady state -- HTC Vive / Valve Index have light-sensing diodes on the headset itself and their lighthouses swipe light curtains horizontally and vertically through the room, with an annoying whining noise and all the wear & tear from constantly rotating parts), for a while, Meta even had John Carmack polishing the system.
I still hope VR will not completely die. Half Life: Alyx was fun, some archery, zombie shooting and climbing games were highly enjoyable and I could well imagine getting into sculpting / 3D modelling that way if only the tools were better.
But if, as the HTC exec in the article says, Meta has defined the "market perception of what this technology should cost" (and they're producing at a loss, too), then Meta has walled off most of the VR market to Facebook boomers (sorry, Meta boomers) and is hogging the more robust tracking tech for itself, too.
I tried the Oculus 2 and liked that it gave me a very physical way to game as opposed to sitting in a chair. Unfortunately the weight on my head and sweaty headpiece were ultimately a turnoff. The glasses style devices (XReal, Viture, etc) are a much better fit for me and mine has 3DOF motion tracking so it works as mouse view in most games without requiring VR support. It's much lighter and I can wear them for hours without the strain and sweat. Newer glasses are coming with cameras for 6DOF, hand tracking and eye-tracking is not to far off as well.
These glasses are powered by a phone or a pc with USB DP alt mode. This gets the battery and processor off the head and makes for an un-tethered experience (with a phone).
I mean, it changed the world the way I expected- not at all.
It sure would. Just not yet
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It evokes a flood of romanticized images of Homebrew Computer Club nerds soldering together circuit boards in South Bay garages.
Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”
Mark Zuckerberg is probably as guilty as any single person for perpetuating that perception, happily working his hardest to make the company’s Horizon Worlds platform synonymous with conceptions of the metaverse.
As an HTC Vive exec told me back in February at MWC, “I think Meta has adjusted the market perception of what this technology should cost.” Other companies can’t compete on price and content in the customer space, so the savviest of the bunch have moved over to enterprise, where clients have much deeper pockets.
Apple is targeting business customers at that price point, while Meta is far more committed to democratizing access by — again — losing money on a per-unit basis.
As we mark a decade since the Oculus acquisition, I find myself returning to the above Zuckerberg comment: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”
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