this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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It sounds like they solved some problems with mixed reality stuff that nobody else has been able to solve. Getting pass through to be perfect is a pretty big deal if you care about this stuff. It also sounds like the UI they designed is very good.
The price is completely outrageous, this thing is not going anywhere if they cannot get it down to 1k ish. And let’s be real, nobody really wants to be in a headset. And the culture is not going to accept people in headsets they way they did phones.
I guess hats off to them for making the best headset device on the market. But, I still think the headset market is a dead end.
I think it's more of a "willing to put in a consumer product" issue than that they're unsolved issues. Other brands don't have the automatic sales that a product with an Apple logo has at whatever price, even for a "Pro" product that can be more expensive. Meta just can't sell a $3500 headset no matter how good were to be.
Well said, and agreed. The headset market is a dead end for anything beyond niche. Their price point is ironically appropriate given the lack of mass appeal, so they have to go with a mind numbingly high ARPU to make that business unit work for them. Culturally such a product is a non starter, especially as people read about the isolating effects tech has had lately. The fever dream of the "Metaverse" is now mocked widely.
Things like the auto IPD are like a dream come true though, and then using the eye tracking as a mechanism for driving the UI/UX. That shit was fiction just ten years ago in Iron Man. I could just imagine how cool it would be to navigate the menus in a game like Elite Dangerous with something like that, but the engineering needed to develop that is a non starter for the lack of install base, not to mention the financial condition of companies that are not established like Apple is, app developers, etc.
I don't think they had any other choice than to make the eye tracking great. They don't make GPU hardware and the hardware they do make can't possibly handle the processing power its resolution requires. Other headsets have understood this limitation and weren't trying to design an OS. Again apple has no choice here. They don't have desktop machines to provide input to the headset and they are way too far up their own ass to allow input from a PC.
I think if other companies threw price limitations out the window like apple did they could have easily made something similar. Also the fact that you still need another headset to play the best parts of what VR already has is ridiculous. It's $3500 TV with no inputs.