I am so so glad Meta, or any company continue to invest in AR and VR. Not because I like AR / VR, to the contrary I am not a big fan of wearing a glasses to use it.
But it is the only thing that will move Low Latency Computing forward. Everything in modern computing is slow, we might have increased throughput by 1000 or 10000x over the course of 30+ years. But latency has gone backwards, from Apps to OS UI response. Decent AR/VR experience mimicking the real world would require sub 10ms results. And this should finally force developers to take latency into account.
I think VR would be completely dead by now if Meta weren't continuing to lose billions every quarter on it. Not many companies can endless sink that much money into a product
On the contrary, if Meta didn't acquire Oculus which hadn't poached Valve staff maybe the Steam Frame would have been out years ago.
It wouldn't have been touted at the "metaverse" and a revolution of having business meeting in a virtual room... looking like a boring office and maybe it would "just" be millions of gamers, but to stay we are in a better state because of Meta is questionable.
They did invest a ton and their products (if one can manage to make abstraction why they even exist in the first place) are actually well done but the line their brought on the entire industry created unrealistic expectation.
Is it good, is it bad, I'm not actually sure but I'm rather confident to say it's not obvious.
That seem plausible. As a gamer and 3d aficionado since 3dfx voodoo 1, I've never owned a VR set and that was partly because the good ones, at least on paper, all seemed to be Meta products. I don't use any Meta products, although I am probably _used by_ Meta products, which is part of the reason I don't use them.
Now I'm getting older and have less interest in VR, certainly don't want augmented reality glasses, even if they could be used for gaming. If anything I want glasses that subtract reality, as its a little too much at times.
VR is a great space now. Lots of competitors with great products. Meta has the best mass market option but many competitors with higher end displays like 4K per eye micro-OLED.
VR gaming has never been hotter. AI coding agents mean lots of enthusiasts can now turn their favorite flat games into VR. Huge community with that.
Meta burned all that money because Zuckerberg had just read something related to Snow Crash, not because he had a good idea for how to develop the sector.
I think for now games are the best use of VR, and Valve actually care about games, and Zuckerberg moving on to the next shiny thing leaves room for Valve to join Sony and Microsoft for the next PlayStation/XBox alternative.
If anything, when the Oculus Quest became the Meta Quest, it started feeling like regression rather than progress, with the games going from "wow!" to "did they port a phone game?".
I am not so sure about that. When it felt like Meta was abandoning the space we saw some resurgence of smaller projects that tried to innovate, but if you have a big player sucking out all the oxygen you can't build smaller scale projects
Unfortunately a couple of small start ups isn't enough to carry the industry. Even big players like Valve who have more money in the bank to take a hit couldn't bring their headset in below $1000
Worst thing that happened to humanity is the birth of Anduril thanks to Meta buying Occulus.. making that one slightly chipped person go think: "What to do with my Occulus exit.. hmm killing people isn't efficient, let me fix that."
Counterpoint: there are plenty of companies making VR hardware but they all remain niche and struggle because they can’t subsidize their hardware by taking both losses and user data as part of the price. Meta are better at killing competition more than they are at innovating.
Nonsense. VR was and still is sustainable as a profitable niche product for specific use-cases. Zuck spending billions to try and own a new mass market category has nothing to do with that.
The biggest issue with VR adoption currently is not VR hardware. Quest 3, Pico 4 etc are all great headsets which launched with amazing price points. The issue is that these standalone headsets are pretty much useless. Sure you can watch some videos, or play some extremely basic games which remind me of N64 graphics. But that's about it.
To get the most out of these headsets, you need a powerful PC. Driving in Assetto Corsa in VR feels amazing, you get actual realistic car physics and can drive in Tokyo with traffic around you which feels 'real'. VR in Microsoft Flight Simulator allows you to fly in any plane in any part of the world. VR in Elite Dangerous allows you to fly in outer space in a 1:1 scale Milky Way Galaxy. But require a beefy PC to run.
Apple, Meta and other VR companies just keep throwing more and more VR hardware with better lenses and form, but the issue is content. If someone is spending 1200 bucks on this headset and playing/interacting with N64 level content, the novelty wears off pretty fast.
So much to dissect in this post. By “N64 level” content I’m assuming that you refer to low poly geometry with low res textures and baked lights, correct? Well, I don’t know which VR games you are playing because even something as basic as Beat Saber would have been impossible to execute in the N64 era. I also find it interesting that you mention Apple being a VR company when they’ve only released one headset a few years ago and have not announced any major updates or successors in the last two WWDC. Meanwhile you ignore VALVe altogether who are about to release their second VR headset (third if you take the OG HTC Vive into account. And who developed and published what is perhaps one of the most immersive experiences on the medium: Half-Life Alyx. There’s nothing N64 about this game as they really pushed the technology as far as you could possibly do with the hardware limits of that time. No, you are not going to get GTA VI running on an untethered headset anytime soon and perhaps for good reason.
I have a different take on this: I bought a Quest 2 several years ago, spent some money and bought about 10 experiences/games/etc. for it, and it is good enough that I continue using it with no real desire to buy a newer model. My wife was watching me use it last week and she commented “isn’t there an upgrade for that?”
Wonderful toy, even though I only use it about 90 minutes a month it is worthwhile for me to own.
The three year old Quest 3 is still the absolute best thing you can buy in this space in terms of value per dollar. Especially the color passthrough is a feature I found to enjoy quite a lot and it prevents me from even considering the new Steam Frame. After the price hike I think Meta might now sell roughly at break even or perhaps even with some tiny margins, but before it was definitely at a loss. If mine fell down and broke today, I'd probably buy it again in a heartbeat, even though I only use it semi-regularly like you.
I bought my Quest 2 when it first came out, and I played it for a while, about 2-3 hours a week, peaking at about an hour a day when I found that Blade and Sorcery is a really good game for "exercise".
I bought the Quest 3 as an upgrade because I had noticed my Quest 2 started having intermittent input lag issues. I never pinpointed what was causing it, but my Golf clubs would fly out of my hand and I'd have to wait a few seconds for them to eventually find their way back to me. My controllers would drift out of view when navigating menus. I uninstalled everything, reinstalled it again. When that didn't work, I upgraded.
The issues persisted in the new version as well. So for about the last 20-ish months, I've averaged under an hour a month, most months I don't even pick it up. I might do some homemade PC VR "experiments" (still have access to mouse and keyboard for the game, and not the controllers) on some random claude code experiments. I have a "cyberpunk" mobius strip space station walking sim I've been working on, that will eventually hook into a treadmill.
I average about 2-3 hours per week. I’ve gotten into simracing and an average Le Mans Ultimate race is around an hour which I play a couple of times per week.
The native experiences are too barebones and I don’t even use it untethered
The nice thing for me is I was able to pick up a brand new meta quest 3 still with receipt and warranty for €200 second hand (buyers remorse I guess, there wasn't much they could do with it), and I was able to do all that stuff you mentioned with my beefy pc.
VR has been around for decades, and its always been a really niche nerdy thing, for the same type of people who will build a mock cockpit of a plane in their house for flight sims. I dont think that's gonna change no matter how much cash mega-corps pump into it, it will always be a niche nerdy hobby thing imo.
Wow I disagree with this. Even with Quest 2 the hardware was powerful enough to create interesting VR experiences. I think a bigger limiting factor is the comfort of the headsets and the quality of the source material (in the case of streaming).
Driving sims may not be peak running on a Quest, but I think that is a different realm from what I am talking about. There is plenty to do and see without photorealistic 3D graphics.
Standalone wireless headsets are great for fitness. Almost every game is a cardio workout. You won’t need to have a separate workout from playing video games.
Also the visuals got a big improvement with Quest 3. I’m sure that Steam Frame will also have decent visuals.
I am also very glad for Meta's investment into the future, so second your voice here. In a sense though it's Palmer Luckey who punched the tech into a defensible product. John Carmack surely tried to do the right thing, but I think part of why he left is that it's too difficult for any individual to make significant (risky) design decisions.
Do I have faith in Meta to 'win' in VR or AR commercially? Well... not really, but the technological advancements are real.
Nonsense. Embedded systems, often event driven, improved as did the rest of the computing landscape (perhaps at a tad slower pace). HST has been a major driver on low latency computing in the data center. And then there are of course robotics and military applications ...
VR is at the intersection of low latency, high throughput, high compute, flexibility and affordable prices.
Embedded systems are often not flexible. They are often designed to do just one thing, like driving an engine, and may run the exact same software for their entire life, which may be decades. They are often limited in term of general computing requirements too.
I don't know HST, but it seems to be similar to embedded: single, highly constrained application, maybe more compute, and I would guess that affordability isn't even on the menu.
Meta VR is consumer software, running on consumer hardware, it runs third party apps, with all the flexibility that is asked of PCs. You can't just put your own realtime OS and claim the entire system for your own specific application.
I just got swept up in this mass Threads suspension yesterday, despite not using it. I am locked out of Facebook and Messenger, and my Portal, Oculus, and Glasses are now bricked. I pay them $12 for Instagram a month, mostly to deter username thieves, and that was oddly not suspended, despite being linked, so the "safety" claims ring hollow. Be very careful about giving your money to Meta. They are quick to unperson with no recourse.
This is one of the reasons I would never purchase hardware from Meta. If I need a subscription or account to use my own hardware that will be a hard no.
Coming from Quest 3, everything about it sounds great BUT for that FOV. Even on Quest with 103 x 96, I sometimes feel like I'm looking around through a mask or binoculars. Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.
Hopefully it's not so bad.
Oh BTW they showed a new Beat Saber game, and among the logos I've seen Ace Attorney VR among a few others. Let's see if those come for Quest 3 and maybe even PCVR.
70 is crazy! I was thinking years ago that surely by this point headsets would be standardizing on a baseline of like 140+. Progress has really stagnated and over the past few years new headsets never seem to just be universally better than whatever they are replacing. It always seems to be pull one lever to improve one aspect while regressing somewhere else.
I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year and it got consistently better across the board every iteration.
It has progressed. The tech is just expensive and heavy and... all sorts of tradeoffs. Meta had a prototype (Boba) with a 180 horizontal and 120 vertical FoV
But it of course is large and heavy like the quest pro and expensive most likely. Things that when you market to consumers don't pan out.
So they are optimizing on the other dimension (weight) which of course trades of many other dimensions.
Pancake optics are really cool, very clear and lightweight without some of the light distortions you get from traditional optics. They are worth the tradeoff. But they don't work out beyond 100-ish degrees. I think the Steam Frame is really pushing the maximum the industry seems to be able to get out of them.
More niche manufacturers like Pimax have accomplished much higher FOVs but people keep returning them because they're expensive, heavy and uncomfortable (I think they're popular among people who lie down in cockpit rigs).
...with stray light coming in from all sides because glasses don't cover your face completely. So the best place to use them will probably be a completely darkened room?
Unless like Vision Pro there's a surroundings control that lets you go from total visibility outside the image to complete darkness — within the FOV — in any environment.
Edit: Since the FOV is only 70 degrees, that leaves 110 degrees outside the image, divided between the edges of the glasses and the rest of the room. So for sure in daylight outside light would destroy the theater effect.
From description I thought this is more 'View on a Virtual TV' rather than a full VR thing, I may be wrong. This is good, because I, honestly, find that a lot of my VR time is sitting or lying down.
I have a Vision Pro since launch and loved it, and it has a much more traditional, much wider FOV. However, when you do watch movies on it, it looks incredible but usually only a fraction of that full FOV is utilized -- you do see the theater, or environment, etc. My one wondering is if they'll somehow really deliver the experience of a virtual screen, non-occlusion of the real world, and make it so that the huge screen on the wall several feet away from you can be fully rendered on only this 70 degree FOV. To be sure this is a killer for this as an all-encompassing VR device, but I hope that maybe we'll be shown that it might just be good enough for more of a MR use. Or maybe its just cause I'm at least excited someone is trying and bringing products in this space and so I want to cheer this on
IMO, FOV is the biggest immersion killer in VR today, and doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's not so bad when you're relatively new to it as the illusion is convincing enough that you don't notice, but once the magic wears off a bit, it's hard to escape that binocular effect. I wish one of the bigger players would tackle that. I'm not willing to take a chance on Pimax.
Microsoft has a patent on a super cheap and easy way to improve FOV, but they cancelled Windows Mixed Reality so this solution will just sit in a vault forever.
TLDR, put LEDs all around the lens. They extend the scene even though they have zero resolution, you perceive the environment as extending to the full angular width you can see.
The default strap it comes with doesn't help either, I switched to a halo band type and have comfortably worn it for 6+ hrs multiple times (yes I have/had an addiction to IL2, flight sims (and racing games) are where it truly shines).
At the timestamp of the video, after the question she goes in length about the [mind boggling] settlement, limiting to 2h/day for under 18 years old is not too bad?
Yes, not too bad for a question the moderator didn't really ask. She's really good at diverting the topic to a less uncomfortable field. No wonder she's in charge of a platform with 3.07 billion monthly active users. Also note the tone and condescending attitude.
meh all of these mega corps do whatever they can to maximise profit. Apple used slave-like labour from China (or still use depending on who you ask) and turned a blind eye until it could no more. Which to me is worse than what Meta did. But they are not Americans so most don't care around these parts.
When you buy an iPhone that was made in sweatshop, you contribute to it. There are alternatives but most people really don’t mind having slave labor build their iPhone.
Same for kids wasting their life on screen, most parents don’t mind as long as it keep them busy and it’s one less thing to care about.
Correct, but that's also whataboutism. I know apathy can easily take over, but when you get laughed in the face just like that it feels really hopeless. No, it's not my first day on the internet and no, it's not the first time I see companies act like this, but something about this feels very wrong.
According to the influencer, the weight is 100 g. I have 25 g (+lenses) glasses I wear often, and even that is right on the upper edge of what's comfortable and needs almost-uncomfortable tight arms to stay steady when my head moves. And, that's all as somebody who's worn glasses all my waking hours since like age 10, complete with nose-indent calluses. Either those Meta glasses are clamping uncomfortably hard on the sides of your head all the time or they'll fall off the first time you lean forward.
Is it just me or do those angles deliberately obscure how thick it is lens-wise? I have a pair of X-real airs, 2 years old now, and they're pretty thick. They're 1/4th the price and basically work as a head-mounted display. Is that what this, but way fancier and more sleek?
Xreal style glasses use forms of "birdbath" optics with screens up top reflected through prisms. This likely use the regular concentric pancake optics used in many other VR headsets.
But yeah, the angles are to obscure thickness. It's not going to be as thin as it appear from a distance.
What problem does it solve? I see a bunch of potential uses but I don’t see any problems looking to be solved.
Will I like gaming better if I control the games with my hands instead of a controller?
Will I like working in my glasses better than my laptop screen? Or even a dual laptop screen like a ZenBook Duo? Or a cheap second portable display? Do these glasses fit better in a backpack than a laptop and a second portable screen? They can’t collapse flat.
Are these glasses more portable and convenient than a smartphone? What are the benefits to watching an NBA game on this compared to a phone or my TV screen at home?
I can’t believe Meta is blowing their money on this stuff still.
I think this is a big stopgap until an actual transparent AR glasses and an admission that Meta and the entire AR industry have no instant next quarter solution for shortcomings of Meta Ray-Ban Display.
The geometric waveguide technology used in the Display glasses is quite complicated and costly, the birdbath optic that Xreal uses is stupid, so to speak, and various holographic solutions used by Even Realities and likes is not so spectacular in light loss(IIUC the fancy term is "quantum efficiency"), as well as multi color feasibility(needs 3 layers with separate image sources).
Prior to now we didn't know if Meta will be doing a Display 2 or Quest 4, or if they plan to do something else. This is that something else.
Rumor is they are going to do a Quest 4 (late next year).
I agree that these seem like a stopgap short of the thing everyone wants - Vision Pro specs (ahaha) in a pair of regular glasses.
Personally, as a glasses-wearer, I'm not quite convinced it's the right target though - even my 20 gram glasses are uncomfortable to wear all day and I take them off whenever they're not needed. I'd rather have a ski-goggle device (similarly light, but with the weight more evenly distributed, and still with optical see-through) with fewer performance compromises. Of course that wouldn't let the manufacturer dominate "the next form of personal computing" or whatever.
Yeah, I've switched to ultra-light rimless glasses and I really do not want to go back. I no longer have sore nose-pad dents at the end of the day.
(I have a fairly strong prescription, so the literal glass in my glasses does weigh a fair bit more than for most people. Yay modern optional media! It's so much nicer than it used to be)
They had to get something out to undercut Snap finally formally entering the market with a consumer product. That's my read. Their entire strategy for years has been doing whatever they can to box-out potential XR space competitors.
I might consider them if I can wire it to my laptop. I use the meta quest for development because of infinite virtual screens and due to my apartment being so small I can't fit a proper desk and office chair. But still is a very niche usage, if I had space I would very likely get a desk with a dual or triple monitor setup. If the resolution is good, it is actually nice to have a very portable infinite screen setup if you travel a lot.
Thanks, i will check it out. I think I did a couple years ago but mac os support was bad at the time? I don't quite remember, but this seems great now. Do you have one? Any experience with using it for work on mac os with multiple virtual screens?
fwiw unlike the other person, I use it for hours with my macbook and have no complaints. you will like it if regular vr makes you feel claustrophobic/isolated, since you still see the real world while using it. I don't understand the obsession with extreme text crispness many people have.
Blurry text is horribly noticeable after a while, and it also creates eye fatigue from trying to focus your vision on it. It also means you can't use smaller font sizes, which is important for some people since you can have more text on screen.
Really? Did you ever try adjusting the text sharpness?
I've a pair of Nreal Air glasses (before the rebrand) and a pair of Xreal Ones. I have found the latter remarkably comfortable and sharp enough for coding, reading text, playing games, etc. for extended periods of time.
The new widescreen modes are a real treat too. Still waiting for Real 3D to get upgraded to 60FPS though.
I live in a small apartment too. Our setup for work from home is a monitor and desk pad that lives in our closet and we bring it out to the kitchen table.
This is a 4K monitor that cost roughly $500 along with a real keyboard and mouse.
As far as portable screen setups, we have a portable monitor, which slips into a backpack like a laptop. It’s about the size of an iPad.
I’m not saying any of this to criticize your setup at all. I agree that it’s a use case that probably works for some people.
Still, it’s clear that traditional alternatives exist, and they lack a lot of the downsides that VR has.
You can even buy laptops that already have two screens built-in like the ZenBook Duo.
Zenbook Duo is not an option for me unfortunately (company provides the laptop).
A nice large monitor not an option neither (well, if it was up to me, I would get 2 nice 4k monitors, but wife was very clear she did not want a bulky monitor and me occupying a good chunk of the dinner table lol).
But I am pretty sure she will be fine with a portable monitor, I didn't know these were a thing, and they fit my use case perfectly! Thanks a lot!
Related: I watched one (1) live NBA game on Vision Pro. It was terrible in all ways compared to watching on TV. Same with a live baseball game. Apple doesn't grok sports.
That’s interesting because I kept hearing so much about how its the ultimate movie theater.
If we really step back and think about how most people enjoy sports I think the whole idea of VR being a top tier option is a little silly.
Sports are very much community and family activities. How much fun are they to alone compared to watching with fans?
I see VR as something of a backup method like if you’re on a plane or something. And once we are thinking about that use case we might think to ourselves all the reasons why an iPad is better for that use case.
i thought it was incredible compared to watching on tv. the scale, the proximity, the fidelity. i even had my virtual desktop open so the "second screen" experience was pretty much intact
What made it less than ideal for me was the fact that I couldn't see the pitches en route to the batter in the big view — only in the much higher resolution inset "Jumbotron."
From the video they have on their site: watching movies in places where you normally would stare at a tiny screen; they also show folks using virtual floating keyboards in front of a VR desktop to work.
I have watched hundreds of movies with my 27" 4k monitor, or 24" 1080p monitor a few years back. Screen size is never something that bothered me. And I know people who watched more stuff on their laptop screen with terrible color accuracy.
I have a VR headset, but other than the one time I tried Skybox just to see what it looks like, it never occurred to me to take the headset out to watch a full length movie. It's just not worth it.
Makes me wonder how often people use it for "watching content on a gigantic screen at home", or it's just mostly theoretical in VR headset marketing material.
VR desktop: that's supposedly the "killer application" of Apple Vision Pro back in 2005 (and only usable on high resolution headsets like those). Guess what, these days nobody talks about it. I haven't seen anyone bringing it up on HN for a long time.
I received my Vision Pro on release day (February 24, 2004). After trying every feature and use case, today (2.5 years later) the ONLY times I use it are 1) To watch films like "Disclosure Day," "Crime 101," "Dune," etc. in 4k on a virtual 30 foot screen — at any time of day — since I can black out the screen surrounding with the control knob, and 2) Watch the short (10 minutes or so long) Immersive Videos that Apple releases more or less monthly. They're fantastic.
N.B. All use is while lying down flat with my head comfortably supported on a pillow, using Apple's Version 2 headstrap. Only the supine position enables even enough distribution of the device's weight across my forehead and under my eyes such that I can (for the most part) not be aware of the VP's weight.
Live NBA and MLB: FAIL
3D movies: meh
Working with virtual Mac screen(s): FAIL because 1) text is blurry, and 2) headset is just too heavy after 15 minutes or so.
In summary: 1) I would NEVER recommend the device to anyone, and 2) I'm glad I bought it because when in use it's like something that came from the future, the viewing experience is so detailed and enveloping and the sound so perfect.
You can also see this with the used eBay values. Vision Pros have depreciated unlike any other Apple product I’ve ever seen.
Under $2,000 for a device that retails brand new for $3500.
Imagine if you could hop on eBay and buy a pristine condition MacBook Air M5 for $600.
Regarding heavy weight and use case, I think Valve has the right product design going on with the Steam Frame. They’re taking a product and refining it for what its actually good at with proven utility: gaming, with real controllers, streaming from a powerful PC, and minimizing weight on your head.
Apple and Meta have already effectively disproven the other hypothetical use cases of the technology. The Steam Frame probably won’t even sell that well despite being the most focused product on the market.
I want a glasses-with-puck style like this with a great fov and resolution good enough for crisp text work and nothing else. for sound I just want it to be small enough to wear with headphones. It would be fantastic if I could run a real OS on it. I just want it for productivity, I dont care about the latest 3d gimmick movie or VR apps.
The closest thing so far is a Bigscreen Beyond 2 w/ a laptop if it wasn't for the fact that you need a base station for the damn thing.
I know my request is a fantasy right now, but I put this our there in case someone that could make it less of a fantasy reads this.
100% on the same page. I don't want a device to take me on a virtual rollercoaster of half-*ssed entertainment in exchange for my identity, I just want something that can at least substitute my monitors in a more compact way.
Same here. I've been looking for a way to bring my multi-monitor setup with me to work when I travel, VR glasses would be the most portable solution. But I won't buy it while it needs a subscription of any kind, I want it to work like my LG monitor: dumb, doesn't need software to use (drivers would be fine, 'apps' won't), haven't had any sort of mandatory update since I bought it years ago, I just plug it and it works.
I work with Rayneo Air 4 Pro - they have HDR/120fps displays (image quality is top-notch and they're bright enought to work even with direct sunlight). They don't have battery or software, it's plug-in-play USB-C external screen essentially. It's more than enough for travel, or for sitting straight while working cafe, for privacy reasons or working outdoors. I even tried them while walking in the forest (with laptop in the backpack and using voice input).
Drawback - they don't do 3DoF tracking, so the screen just follows where you're looking, you can't change screen size, and no multimonitor setup. They have IMU sensors, though. It's possible to create your own virutal monitor software (or use someone's else like RealWarp), but IMU drift is hard to beat and experience is far from perfect. So I stick with 'just one high-quality screen' for now, and to be honest it was some quality-of-life improvement for me.
PS. Couple of weeks ago there was new release from RayNeo, which supposedly have 3DoF and same quality. Haven't tried those.
How clear and usable is the image for productivity? Is it comparable to a small laptop screen or more like a regular 24 inch screen or something else? Are the optics clear enough?
It's more like 27" screen. Most people (including me) don't see one of the edges clearly (it gets too far into periphery). Like 5% of the right and bottom edge can be hard to see without moving. With 3DoF you would be able to just move your head, but without there 2 options:
- somehow push glasses closer to the eyes (some reported that they replaced nose pads for that)
- just accept it (my case - I just make terminal screen slightly smaller in height from the full height, and it's fine)
Again, the screen is fantastic. Even overkill for text-related stuff (reading, coding, terminal, etc). It's FullHD HDR 10-bit OLED. I do edit videos Davinci with these glasses. They target it for gaming and movies.
It still seems weird to me when I hear people seemingly talking to themselves as if hallucinating. It always surprises me until I realize what's happening.
I’ve used the Vision Pro in public. I don’t care what people think of me, but I did get annoyed at people tapping me on the shoulder and asking about it.
Looks like superb hardware, and contrary to many others the use cases this is designed for look actually worth it. "AVP but lighter and cheaper" or "looks designed for trains or planes" . . . well, obviously.
The key problem is it's Meta. People don't even trust other people near them to use Meta hardware, and the way they dealt with Oculus users was just grimy. From basically any other company this would be a very welcome device. Zuckerberg needs to fix the company first, because there's no such thing as a killer product good enough to overcome this hurdle.
HN constantly under-estimate how much the mass forgives a company as long as they release a cool product (barring a few holdouts that really don't matter to 3B DAU company)
anyone know whats going on with muse. twitter has gone crazy with fake things ppl've supposedly achieved like getting airline to refund 4k, negotiating 45k furniture to 5k, booking flights for 20 dollars. These are the same ppl that were hyping openclaw, not sure what happened to that.
and how muse topping charts. Its all befuddling to me.
Honestly, I think at this point in order to fix Meta Zuckerberg needs to go. People will never trust a company with him in charge, without him they could start to rebuild trust with people.
I hate Meta with a passion but I think the real problem is not embracing Web XR and an open ecosystem.
I love the Meta Quest 3 in terms of hardware but I haven't put the Quest on in 6 months because I don't play games so there is so little content.
This solves nothing in terms of what I don't like about VR. The headset weight was no issue at all for me.
Then trying to develop with the unreal engine and the Quest 3 was a complete joke.
The best thing I seen in VR was the unreal engine VR demo. Everything else looks like a cartoon after that.
What is the point of building this nice hardware and then a metaverse that isn't even up to 90s POVRAY standards.
Like focusing on building a better web browser without the web.
I thought Meta's approach to AR was pivoting towards transparent glasses with displays in the vein of Ray Ban Display and Orion (I realize that "VR" is in the title, but almost all the images show AR use cases). Their original vision for AR was to have people walking around with quest headsets in passthrough mode. But that's just too weird for the vast majority of people. I can't imaging walking around in public and ordering coffee with my eyes totally obscured behind a device. I saw a couple co-workers walking around wearing headsets like this when I worked at Reality Labs, but it was obvious to me and all my teammates that vanishingly few people would actually do that in public.
I guess the approach here is to shrink down the VR glasses and make them look more like normal glasses from a distance. But I still don't think I'd wear one of these walking around the mall or airport. Reduction in FOV is also a big negative. I'm not really sure where one would use this device over a Quest or the Ray Ban Display. It occupies this awkward middle point where it's not a transparent glass display, but it's also makes a lot of compromises compared to the rest of the VR line.
Sunglasses are semi-opaque yes, but they aren't completely opaque with a set of front facing cameras like you're walking around with night vision goggles.
Glad it's using the Meta XR SDK - it's a closed ecosystem but at least it IS an ecosystem.
The Ray-Ban Metas had no ecosystem. No SDK, no app store, just apps made by Meta. They finally announced an SDK in 2026 but why would I support a device that was so anti-developer for years?
I'm curious what your closest analogous device with an SDK is so I can understand how you're viewing the product.
I see Ray-Ban Metas as basically fancy airpods with a camera. Airpods don't have an SDK, or an app store. Nor would it make sense to have one. So it doesn't rub me the wrong way.
What kind of SDK would you like to see? Are you wanting them to be more like an Alexa, and expect an Alexa style SDK/marketplace with custom integrations?
I had an Oculus Quest and it was a really great device. After the "Meta" rebrand, the quality rapidly decreased and now it wants me to upload my ID to Meta to keep using it. Absolutely not! Zuckerberg already has way too much information on me, uploading my state issued identification to them is such an insane ask, I will never do it. While this looks like interesting hardware, the company behind it has unacceptable and user-hostile practices, so I'll pass.
I think the software kept getting better except for the latest UI redesign intended to mimic Apple which is indeed terrible. I hate the heavy use of double clicking on the controllers. The older UI was better (though even before this they constantly redesigned it every 6 months or so)
But they've only improved things over time. The quest 1 shipped without passthrough or hand tracking. By the end of it's support it had both. The quest 2 and 3 also continue to receive new features like higher frame rates, keyboard view etc.
If you already had a long standing fb profile you were probably good. But if you had to make a new one just for Quest, you could sometimes end up having to go through all kinds of hoops to prove you weren't making a spam bot account. Or if you tried to access a long forgotten account.
All of the social media have this issue: the fraud detection algorithm become oversensitized and starts flagging every new accounts. But it's not the policy, so the company won't admit to mandating ID submission.
Not that I am comfortable uploading ID or that I even consider Quest, but that is how it starts.
Facebook is the only social media I've ever had this kind of problem with. Every few years I find some group or community that only exists on Facebook that I want to join (in the most recent case it was a local DnD meetups group; in a previous case, it was a gardening group that was my only reputable lead on seeds for an uncommon variety of heirloom tomato I was searching for). It always ends in my new account getting banned within a few days for suspected fraud with no real reason or opportunity for appeal. No other social media has that problem as far as I can tell, it seems like it's primarily a Facebook problem, and clearly I'm not some unique case considering how common a story it seems.
Perhaps it has something to do with if you had an old account you deleted a decade ago; maybe Meta assumes that any person who ever deleted their account will never ever want to make a new one, so anybody using the same email or name or face or ID or device as anything that has touched a deleted account is by definition fraudulent.
No I didn't. During the time when it was required to couple one I just made one with a fake name. But since that passed i decoupled it again and deleted the Facebook one.
Exactly where I am. Was all-in on Quest 1 and Quest 2, but had to offboard due to Meta's wild policies (that ended up locking me out of my account with little recourse -- some bug with the Oculus standalone account merge with FB and then re-split).
As much as I'm a proponent of VR, I won't play by Meta's rules.
I was so excited by Oculus’s technology, and then Facebook of all companies bought them and it was such a let down. It felt like finding out that Charles Manson likes the same TV show as you. Yuck!
Game console developers always had to (and still have to) pay for their dev kits. That doesn't really make them products in the typical sense of the word, though.
The stronger argument for it being a product is that it was available to the public.
Yeah, sure, my point is that obviously the original comment excluded the dev kit in their definition of product, and arguing over it is just splitting hairs.
They have Meta accounts now, which are also not Facebook accounts. I went straight from an Oculus account to Meta account. Might be location based, but I most certainly haven't been asked to upload any ID.
And I was pointing out that they are one and the same but the "Facebook" name was so tarnished by their terrible privacy practices they had to change it to save face.
But I guess if people like you are able to ignore that to make yourself feel better about giving your personal information to Zuckerberg's advertising company then anything is possible.
Phwoar! Thank you. It's 2026, and had it not been for your high quality informative comments. I would have not known anything about this them there Facebook. You saved me.
I don't know what conversation you think you're having here, but it's not that.
If you'd bothered to read... and then ready for it... stop, take a breath, and process the information. You'd have noticed I was pointing out you can use a Quest headset WITHOUT providing them your personal ID OR having a Facebook account. Almost as if, you know, I was highlighting that giving the company your personal info isn't required. Woe me though for pointing that out.
I'm sorry for interrupting the indignant rants. Please continue.
Game console dev kits are typically _more_ expensive than the consoles they're for. So "full price" isn't a good argument. (The fact that they were available to the public is a stronger argument.)
Game console dev kits usually cost more than the consoles they're for, not less. They're not mass produced at the scale that the consoles are, and they're sold or leased to companies expecting to make several orders of magnitude more back off the products they create with the dev kits.
There isn't a very direct comparison of Oculus products to game consoles like PlayStation, Nintendo, XBox, or those in the distant past. It is interesting, and they have a lot of the same market forces at play, but I don't think they behave by the same rules.
Regardless the acquisition took some time to bring down the quality of the products. It doesn't matter if their first few products were sufficiently far ahead that they weren't enshitified immediately when Facebook bought Oculus.
This is why he buys anything. I can't speak to Whatsapp but Instagram is horrific now precisely because he doesn't give a damn about making a good product. All he wants is to own the network effects, and credentials, and data
It’s rather astonishing to me how the vampire squid of world domination has apparently worked out just how to neutralize any sense of self-preservation, and manipulate and gaslight anything into place if they have enough time and are patient.
Everything from “freedom sticks” to get women to breath in smoke and ash like the foolish men, to going from “government IDs are just conspiracy theory” to “you have to show your papers to see information and communicate with other humans on the only method that is still widely possible; it’s all just been slowly salami sliced and microdosed into our societies. Worse yet, still a large chunk of society seem utterly oblivious as long as they can consume their particular customized and personalized opiate of the masses.
They recently managed to crack open the bootloader, most of meta stuff can be bypassed now.
I despise how it went from a great device to almost a paperweight with just horrible software updates (as it's the norm these days).
Because people are naive enough to think the huge privacy compromise will be worth the cost to society in order to protect kids.
The better question is why in 5yrs we will have to use ID to buy a product on some random ecommerce site or to play a video game or use Uber or post a comment on Reddit. It will be because people pushed for this for kids on social media and opened the door for the rest of the internet companies to demand it and therefore the government.
I really hate it when some vague "people" are blamed for this bullshit. those who do -- a minority -- do it only because they've been brainwashed by the relentless public opinion campaign ran jointly by the capital and the governments.
the vast majority of people would object to having a camera in every room of their dwelling. they just don't realize that having spyware on every piece of electronics they own is even worse.
They don’t care. Even if you explain everything in details, in a way they understand. We’ve been having that arguments since 2 decades, it’s now pretty clear they don’t care. They will complain about flock, then 2 minutes after sign up for Muse and share all their personal data with Meta, even if told what that’s used for
You shouldn't have to do this and I won't. I'll vote with my dollars and never buy another device from them. It's too bad because I genuinely liked it as well, but it's not worth the invasion of privacy and normalizing sending this type of information to any consumer company.
Think of the children … or are your a chomo? Now hand over your papers for access to information and communications more that all the books have been fed into the AI shredder and paper and writing instruments were done away with to save the planet.
Facebook/Meta has a system that decides if it thinks you are lying about your name or if it just isn't sure, if you get flagged for ID verification. These days it might also be because they think you are under 18, but the ID verification system existed long long before age checking.
If you haven't seen it, it's probably because your account is old and they have scraped enough contact lists to believe your name is real.
Odd. I’ve used a fake name with Facebook since about 2009 and now I have a meta quest and they’ve never flagged my account or asked for id verification.
The facebook "Real Name" policy is from like 2013. You just haven't gotten anyone's attention. Not using your real name is against policy and a bannable offense.
The aggressive push for ID verification is a direct result of massive government lawsuits regarding online child safety. As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.
Plus they already have all that data... Your ID is not private information. It's an identifier that they don't need or want.
Smaller entrants to the field cannot as easily comply with the law. It’s about raising barriers to entry. Trust in Meta might be low here, but to the general public, it’s higher than some small startup they’ve never heard of, so they won’t upload their ids there.
I linked to two articles describing Meta's fight to have age verification laws put into place (even before the settlement). The most obvious reason is to try to get some sort of law in place that they believe they can comply with _without_ having to make changes to their algorithms in a way that might hurt their business.
I don't think they particularly _want_ legal id (though maybe they do? who knows)... but it's obviously false that this was caused by the government when Meta itself was lobbying for such laws even before then.
Creates another expensive bar for prospective challengers to clear - regulation nearly always ends up favouring incumbents, especially if they have a hand in shaping it.
I'm honestly not sure. Often when companies lobby for regulation it's to avoid other types of regulation they would find more troublesome. I don't buy the popular narrative that Meta is lobbying for verification laws for the purpose of getting ID data because surely they have a lot of signal there already. At the same time I think it's backwards to say "Meta are behaving this way because of regulation" when they actively lobbied for it.
Obviously, none of us have any proof, but I'm on board with the theory that they've been lobbying for it to push things subtly. Specifically because it looks like a lot of these laws are being made to absolve the person creating the gate of responsibility and liability when the gate is there, even if it fails. The idea of the theory being that if they can push that part in then it's better off for them rather than if it's done in a vacuum where they can end up responsible.
Facebook was doing ID checks well before this because they want to stop ban evasion.
ID checks just came to the Quest because they forced facebook accounts which already had ID checks on it. They should never have made facebook accounts mandatory for playing games.
> As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.
Not for allowing you to use your own hardware, what utter nonsense.
It was their choice to forcibly link their hardware to their online account system despite it working fine without it. But it’s absolutely not true that the government requires age verification for using VR goggles.
Yeah, you beat me to this - I laughed at Meta needing any information considering shadow profiles have always existed and every company leaks data like a sieve xD
I mean, I'm quipping about it myself, because I personally don't have the space or budget for a VR rig anyway.
But that's different from whether it's important that Facebook has real competition, or that there's now a reference device for not just VR on Linux but a bunch of other compatibility tooling and infrastructure for Linux on ARM specifically.
Even if it tanks, I think the Steam Frame will be a big deal outside of VR, sort of like how if you're on Linux you're probably benefiting from the Steam Deck's existence regardless of whether you own one. (I also don't.)
I'm not sure that I could say that about any of Facebook's headsets. They're big for their niche, but making a Para Para game semi-mainstream isn't really the same magnitude for everyone else as enabling you to play PC games on your phone.
Even when the Steam Deck was $319, far more people still bought Switches, of course.
Doesn't matter. Check out Proton's current stats, and see the Deck's impact on everyone who didn't buy one: https://www.protondb.com
Anyone who cares about Windows->Linux compatibility layers, x86 emulation on ARM, or VR will benefit greatly from the Steam Deck/Machine/Frame ecosystem, due largely to Valve's reported 100+ developers they have making open source contributions in applicable areas.
From SteamVR to Mesa to Proton to SteamOS to FEX, Valve's easily one of the most important Linux contributors these days.
> The only thing people are spending that much on are phones. But that's something people use all the time for years.
Phones, that can now run your Steam games through FEX.
That's kind of my point. That this thing is important even if you don't buy one, because everything else that they had to build in order to enable it will trickle out into other places.
I hope one day a version of this becomes mainstream enough that it justifies developing for it. It's the ergonomics that prevent that from happening, and moving toward glasses is one of the most important stepping stones. (though if you saw someone wearing "glasses" like this you would probably say it's stretching the definition of glasses)
When someone gets this right I do think we're all gonna ditch the 2d screens and phones.
It doesn't even matter if it's Meta that instigates this, if money is smelled there will be more consumer friendly alternatives popping up overnight (e.g. see how quickly the industry copied the iPhone).
Some of the key specs cause the page is rather thin on details:
* Display Type: Micro-OLED
* Resolution: 2412 × 2288 pixels per eye
* Angular Resolution: 37 PPD
* Field of View: 70° × 66°
* Chipset: Snapdragon Reality Elite
* Memory & Storage: 12GB RAM with 128GB internal storage (expandable up to 1TB via microSD on the puck)
* Tracking & Sensors: 6DoF positional tracking, depth sensing, autofocus, 4-camera eye tracking, face tracking, and hand tracking
* Passthrough: Color RGB passthrough cameras at 26 PPD
* Price: $ 1300,- USD plus your data
Similar PPD to an AVP at, what I as a former owner of one (alongside a Quest 2 and 3, a Magic Leap, Xreal and Viture) would call is a far more appealing implementation for actual productive work.
Really wish Apple had gone down this route, have the puck incorporate an A series chip rather than shoving a M series one into the headset itself and heck, I could see such a design being doable for them back when they first launched the AVP if they hadn't forced that utterly ridiculous eye display and stupendously heavy metal body.
There is, unless I am mistaken, nothing here that isn't established technology as found in the AVP, all the fancy display and lens experiments from Starburst, over Holocake to Mirror Lake seem to remain in the lab, this seems to be "just" pancake lenses plus Micro-OLED once more.
70 degree FOV is such a deal breaker for gaming. That and the price. In a world where people already have tons of screens, monitors and TVs in their face - the practical use case for this is relegated to trains and planes. Very niche.
The form factor itself is also a killer. Couldn't imagine doing anything besides using it as large private display for 2D games. You aren't going to be moving your head around quickly with just pressure on your temples to hold it in place.
Not sure where this lands functionality wise. I feel like it's most direct competition would be as a cheaper Apple Vision. You would need to pair it off with a Windows system for heavier productivity work most likely. Even though their OS is "android", it doesn't have the Google ecosystem behind it, let alone matured on that front. Media consumption on the go seems to be the other use case.
So, compare them to either XREALs plugged into a laptop/phone, or Apple Vision Pro I guess.
What's worse is that, due to the motion tracking many of these devices have, you often have to enter a travel mode that disables some of the better features.
Steam Frame has black and white passthrough but it's not good enough for AR. They sell a third party's passthrough camera as an add-on though which is $130 I think and clips on the front. Since the Frame runs open Linux with KDE this is really interesting to me.
I have to point out that all of these are terrible options for the general mass who are remotely interested in VR. If you are an enthusiastic who don't mind dropping $1000 on something completely optional to your everyday life, great, but otherwise they are terrible in value considering what they provide.
> would call is a far more appealing implementation
Said the guy who has not checked this thing for head-turn-to-pixels-changed latency. That is the one metric that nobody has approached the AVP on -- the one that keeps me (and many others) from being nauseous.
You can, but the FOV is narrow so not great for multiple screens, and the focal length is probably around 4 ft so you're not going to be able to use a screen closer without eye strain.
I can't help but feel like all the tech glasses are basically a way to get more ai training data where they can get like a constant stream of human POV stuff.
Ah! That's actually exactly why I don't use WhatsApp, Google, etc anymore.
When Meta bought Oculus a decade ago I though "why the heck are they buying this VR company..." which prompted me to read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2018 Shoshana Zuboff's book.
The idea is precisely that they don't need more of the same data, they have enough (even though they do need to keep them up to date) but they instead need more KINDS of data to keep on earning money from selling ads.
They don't care for the technology itself, only for ways to distinguish needs better and that's exactly what a new digital medium provides.
If Apple released a product with the same form factor, it would likely be a winner. The issue with Meta is that its brand is tarnished for anyone older than Gen Alpha. I don’t have hard data, but I am guessing the majority of VR users are children under their parents’ meta accounts.
I’m still buying this for myself. I enjoy the private movie theater experience and turning every video game session into a decent cardio workout; I’ve lost 60 lbs with VR to date.
The list is too long, but essentially almost every VR game will force you to move since you’re no longer controlling an avatar with buttons. You are now inside the game instead of viewing it from outside of a box, so you’re going to be moving and punching.
For me the biggest calorie burners are boxing games. Beat Saber and others like Synth Riders are great too. Then there are fitness focus apps like Body Combat and even one for rowing machines.
Hopefully, Meta can convince HR firms that this is a fitness device that is eligible for FSA like benefits.
I have found VR an easy way to get moving in a fun/low friction way at the end of the day, instead of heading somewhere else. Depending on what you are doing, it isn't going to cover everything, but moving something is better than nothing.
Personally, I found Synth Riders a good way to queue up 60min continous activity that I enjoy.
Over the last years, being "online" has become so stressful and toxic that I just don't want to spend much time there anymore. 2016 me would be ecstatic about this product. 2026 me just want to be in the real world.
Not the parent commenter but I've found RSS feeds have replaced most of my desire to browse reddit, and other social media. You can even paste a YouTube channel into a feed reader to get a true channel subscriptions feed.
For starters, don't let other people control your diet of information. So get off social media, where random algorithmic feeds serve you slop you didn't ask for.
Instead, pick out your own internet information diet. Make it a project. If you're not afraid to use AI, it can help with this tremendously.
Then you need to build habits that replace your unhealthy browsing with healthy browsing. IMO it's best to just install tools that make it difficult or even impossible to do the unhealthy browsing.
He's the only one on the couch.
The only one at the sports game.
The only one at the movie theatre.
At the office, it was nice to see him put the glasses down and shake hands with the person who rocked up. If that person had arrived 'in VR' I think I would have been completely turned off.
I guess if you want to be alone, it's a good device -- but the best times for me with modern technology have been when it brings me closer to other people. Online games were better on LAN. Couch co-op as a genre is one of the best console experiences I think. Meeting people in real life, who I spoke to on IRC -- again, a great moment.
I'm not anti-tech, and the device form factor sure looks amazing -- but I can't imagine any moment I would use something like this at home while anyone else in my house was here.
The shared anchor tech exists and its honestly pretty awesome to play a shared XR game but with the cost and install base of these devices, you really can't invest in developing those types of things. Too bad because even a shared XR paint prototype is cool.
I think it's what makes the form factor doubly important. Not just for comfort, but because if your visor is just a pair of glasses you can wear it and remove it in a second and with just one hand, without even thinking. This easiness removes a lot of the feeling of isolation.
The other fundamental thing for me is to have visors that seamlessly and by default connect to the nearby ones so that experiences are shared.
$1300 for 70° × 66° FOV is pretty awful. Also, I wish they'd stop hyping these devices for productivity when they know the text isn't sharp enough. This will be good for watching stuff and that's about it. Is it good enough at that to justify tethering yourself to a brick? I suspect not for $1300.
I'm in VR a lot, mostly in bigscreen VR, and have had the Quest, Quest 2, and Quest 3. I don't see any reason to upgrade from the latter at all.
I use the Apple Vision Pro as my main display, programming for 8+ hours per day. Zero issues as long as you're willing to use larger screens! The PPD on this looks very similar, possibly a bit better due to its lower FOV.
> Also, I wish they'd stop hyping these devices for productivity when they know the text isn't sharp enough.
Agreed. When I tried the Apple Vision Pro, I was a little disappointed at the PPD (which is like, 34 to Quest's 25 or so), didn't expect to still be so sensitive to it.
I think they're calling them "VR" because they use camera pass-through for AR, whereas all their other AR products are see-through. (I think this is a reasonable place to draw the line - pass-through AR kind of sucks in my experience. Although maybe a third category would be appropriate.)
I've yet to see the first use case that makes it more than a party trick.
I tried pushing it for 3D configurators during sales, but sales people hate it with reason: you're missing out on the buyer's reaction and it breaks the sales journey.
As long as we can't see the user's eyes etc this will flop.
Neat demo video, but I see that gaming was not a focus, which is a shame because the reduced weight would be great in that regard. The reduced FOV, not so much though...
I have a Quest 2, and I only held off on getting a Quest 3 because I don't want to keep giving money to Meta unless they made something game-changing.
Given that rhythm games are the primary purpose of my Quest 2, I think this settles me on the Steam Frame as my next headset. It runs Linux and plays games I already own.
Unfortunately, the "watch movies one inch from your eyeballs", or "block out the world at a coffee shop to check your email", or "emotionlessly watch basketball in the middle of the court" are not good selling points for me.
Still same problem all VR has -- no killer use case. Outside of the problem that it is Meta doing this, the product in and of itself isn't that great. Ask all Quest users if they still use it all the time.... most of the oculus's are just collecting dust.
Some future date we will get there, but this isn't it.
I’d really like to use it as an extended monitor for work. The problem with previous versions has been inability for me to see my own keyboard or even inability to easily mirror laptop screens. This looks like it could do that.
Depends on how the device gets data from your computer and how it connects. My Xreal Ones present themselves as a monitor via DP Alt mode when I plug them into my work laptop, switch to ultrwide mode (32:9 is my fav), and I'm done.
To use most VR headsets that are also standalone devices, I would start by fighting with IT on getting some kind of security exception to use the necessary software on my laptop, then get started with streaming/connecting/sharing screens with it. Hopefully.
These finally have enough resolution to comfortably replace regular displays for productivity work, surrounding you with as many monitors as you want. Better PPD than Vision Pro, in a much better form factor. Apparently it supports DisplayPort over USB-C as well. I think they will sell a lot of these.
Depends on why you think the Vision Pro is so expensive. Maybe they just wanted extremely thick margins and to not sell many, but I'm guessing that they were actually trying. They could have called it a dev kit, but the indications are that they are trying to sell to consumers.
In America you can say and show basically whatever you want.
"Puffery" has made a mockery of the concept of truth in advertising. Judges will bend over backwards to insist that no "reasonable person" would assume that image is representative.
An additional factor is that the American consumer is just absurdly stupid and easy to take advantage of. If you put "No growth hormones" on your chicken you sell more, even though you also have to write "No chickens in the US can use growth hormones" right next to it!
"Made with 100% Real Cheese" is top line marketing in this world. It's pathetic.
After the "metaverse" hype of 5 years ago, VR clearly hasn’t really taken off.
I’ve personally always thought the headsets were simply too clunky, which puts off the average person from trying them, due to the hassle (and price).
This new design from Meta is the first I’ve seen that feels like something more people would actually want to try. Perhaps VR isn’t dead — maybe it’s just lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right hardware tech to bring it to the masses.
I really hope they’ll care a little more about using this for productivity. I wish the quest 3s would work offline eg. on a plane as my external monitor for my MacBook.
I get that there are people who are into this stuff, but honestly, I can't think of a single use for myself, unless the movie watching experience is really, really good.
I'm never going to wear a thing like this in public, and at home, I have my laptop and TV. The TV I'm usually watching with someone else, and this is worse than the laptop...so what's my use case?
Spring 2027 is eternity in the future from today. I love the concept they advertise but by then, there will be so many amazing products and releases.
If they could give me this today and worked somewhat like they promise, even though for $500 or so I can get glasses that do what I need them to do today, for more fidelity I would gladly pay 1k+ they are asking.
I am not sure what will happen till Spring or Summer next year.
I no longer bother watching movies or shows on my (very big) TV ever since I got an AVP. The experience (lying down on my bed, with gigantic movie screen floating above me) is unmatched.
For that use case, why would you choose wearing anything over just having a couple of projectors in the bedroom and living room? That is far more common than owning a vision pro because it's cheaper, more comfortable, more social, etc.
On the audio end of this, you can even throw in some properly righteous speakers in both rooms. All combined, this is still cheaper than or equal to the vision pro price for an objectively better movie experience. The projector image will always be bigger than your TV and speakers that expensive will rattle the walls with bass and shatter your eardrums. It doesn't matter how good earbuds get, there's no replacement for displacement (of air). Don't you like feeling the power?
I’m not saying AVP is cheap, I’m saying visually it’s better.
> more comfortable
Nothing could be more comfortable than lying flat on bed with head propped up just a bit, and screen floating at 45 degrees in front of me, which I can easily reposition and resize to perfectly hit my FOV.
> more social
Heh, I’m not looking to socialize while enjoying a movie at home
The only way a physical setup would win is righteous speakers. I suppose I could connect physical speakers, but that breaks the awesome immersion of enjoying a movie in perfect (to the rest of my family) silence.
But really all I can say is that the visual experience and physical comfort (when lying down) of a movie on AVP is unparalleled, and this is not at all why I bought it, and it’s probably something one really has to experience to understand.
The only thing I've consistently used VR on is virtual biking/walking videos for when I'm on my exercise bike, and a Google VR app called Wander. I don't have the space for anything that can't be done sitting down and I don't have the memory to run VR Chat.
I agree it's a novelty, it's never going to be the mainstream thing that replaces all existing interfaces and transforms the very concept of reality like some people want it to be. But it is fun within its niche.
I think what's holding it back is price more than anything. I'm still hanging on to my Quest because it just isn't worth the money for me to upgrade, even though half the apps no longer even work (fuck you very much DeoVR.)
Adults understand the Switch because it’s familiar, but they didn’t understand the NES because it wasn’t familiar (Atari was a failure)
One of the big complaints of online VR games is that it’s overrun by Gen Alpha children. The only mystery is why meta keeps targeting adults instead of Gen Alpha. It’s a marketing strategy that has already failed multiple times now. Judging from most of the comments here, it will continue to fail. IMO only Apple can breakthrough to adults and even they failed with AVP.
I actually realized that I did see kids on social VR games when I experimented with VR a few years ago. But no kids I've known or heard about in real life have seemingly used VR.
Somebody cited Gorilla Tag. I looked it up and it has 3 million monthly actives. I don't know how that measures for an online game, but that is pretty small for a social network. Roblox is at least 100x that.
It's a novelty because you had to put on a big uncomfortable headset that required wires up until recently went was really fidgety. Once you get the form factor fixed and comfortable everything will change. This looks like a big step in that direction. Too bad I don't want Meta looking through my eyes.
> Once you get the form factor fixed and comfortable everything will change
Will it? Even if you offer people AR glasses and smartphones at the same price, I'd expect most people to pick the phone. Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.
The VR/AR modality struggles when OEMs rely on unique native experiences as a selling point. There's no "killer app" for VR a even decade after the original Oculus DTK. Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.
> Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.
Nobody used their cell phone to take pictures, that's what a camera is for! And music came from a Walkman. But then the iPhone came out, and the rest is history. A pair of glasses that takes pictures could very well be the future. We won't know until after it's happened though.
No, actually people were taking photos the very second phones had cameras added, which was well before smartphones. I have photographic proof
Because the camera you have in your pocket right now was always better than the one you left at home.
People abandoned laptops as a primary computing platform for phones with small screens because the "masses" prefer convenience above anything else. Those phones eventually increased their screen size, but never got to laptop size of course.
People don't want to have to put on a headset to doomscroll.
I was going to say - you can't retcon feature phones to claim that camera phones and MP3 player functionality didn't exist. It did, and it was super popular!
VR/AR is not a "faster horses" problem. It's a "buy my 40-foot-tall horse with 9 legs" one. The market has several high-quality headsets to choose from, and none of them are selling like hotcakes. The people have spoken, even at $1,300 I expect Meta's glasses to be a flop.
Not sure where you live but everyone is wearing them in LA. And they are super popular in China, especially among children who use them in place of a phone.
There's plenty of reason to still be skeptical about the future of VR, or Meta's practices, but shoving all of that aside it does look like a big step toward the level of comfort that's going to be needed for VR to succeed. Not at this price point, but it's incremental progress.
you can't touch type without any tactile feedback. you just can't. there's no way to position your hands correctly relative to a keyboard you can't feel. that part of the "productivity" demo drives me bananas.
I see Disney+ 3D videos featured pretty heavily on the landing page.
I believe that launched as an Apple exclusive. I wonder if that means the millions of Oculus Quest headsets that have been gathering dust for years will finally have some immersive content worth watching.
As long as this is mixed reality and not a clunky VR-only headset like the previous Meta Quest devices, then this far exceeds what ever the Vision Pro hype was and any other XR device in the market.
This is XR for the rest of us and a worthy competitor to the Xreal.
Not sure what you mean. The marketing video shows pancake optical stacks and specs have mentioned OLED displays. While the marketing video attempts to play up an immersive fantastical reality, the experience will function like a Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro, where there are external cameras that then get projected onto the internal screens.
After my experience with the Quest 3's software, I'm not really interested in anything Meta. That's ignoring the privacy issues and other issues with Meta as a company.
I'm not a fan on Meta at all, but so glad that they did this to challenge Apple and hopefully would be able to keep on improving far better than Apple.
1) Blackout. Let me use them as a way to get complete pitch black when i want it
2) Amazing resolution. None of the existing products are good enough to replace my physical screens, but i'd love to.
3) Comfortable. Nothing has been comfortable enough to wear long term. Sure maybe an hour or two, but 8-10 hrs a day for work? Not even close.
1. It has an optional light blocker. 2. Better resolution than Vision Pro. 3. Should be the most comfortable VR device ever. Seems like it's addressing your concerns.
This feels closer to the quest 3, so maybe consider it a successor in a way? Since meta is moving away from VR gaming, it may end up cannibalizing sales in a "good" way for the company.
2412 x 2288 per eye (and horizontal FoV is around 70 degrees). Not sure it's really enough for monitor replacement, but certainly an upgrade over Xreal's offerings.
Meta could have something great, but I fear they will stand in their way. I have the oakley meta glasses, and the quality of the camera and sound is fantastic. But the software is horrible. It's a walled garden where only Meta-friends are allowed to play. So, Spotify yes, Tidal, Deezer or others, No. It supports Garmin, but not Corros, Suunto or Polar.
If they had the courage to open up their plattform for external developers like Apple or Android (not even talking about open APIs), they could have an amazing ecosystem. Currently, it feels like a car with a stuck handbrake.
When Orion was first revealed two years ago people figured they'd be able to reduce the bulk over time and release them in a form approaching regular glasses, like Meta Ray Bans. Now they've somehow become bigger and more VR headset-like? How is this tech going backwards?
I understand this is quite good, but I also have something like 20/12.5 eyesight. To me, using these things feels like looking through a coarse screen door.
E: For reference, I can comfortably count pixels on a 24.5" 1080p screen from a normal seated position.
I've been buying HMDs since the first Oculus, and I promptly sell them to somebody else. 37 PPD is a little more than halfway to "perfect" for someone with 20/20 eyesight
It is all a compromise. 37 PPD is well under the standard for normal "good" eyesight (aka. "retina" in Apple marketing), which is 60 (aka. 1 arcminute).
Doing more with a narrower field of view is easy, it is even cheaper. Doing more with the same or better field of view means you need more pixels and more computing power to drive them, so more expensive, heavier hardware that gets hotter and with less battery life.
People at Meta consitered 37 PPD to be a good compromise, and I kind of agree.
The compromise is forced by the current cost of denser panels above anything else.
This is mostly driven by the fact that even in the current optimal case where they can maintain the number of defective pixels per panel, multiplying the number of pixels tanks bins. And then the follow on effects of longevity based on heat/brightness vs refresh rate, which improves generation over generation much faster than the former. The shit they're doing to print OLED panels out like an inkjet is exciting because once it gets good enough they will no longer need to write off the failures and will be able to selectively remove or overwrite the defects, which is not something that can usefully be done with other screen types.
The operation of switching the pixels themselves becomes increasingly inexpensive as they get smaller. For a long time the biggest barrier holding progress back was consistently and reliably being able to deliver smaller and more precise voltage swings. Almost all of the increased power consumption comes from either how much less backlight can make it through (which also becomes heat, this is already enough of a problem that certain display types include a separate extremely tiny panel that sits there and displays nothing so that they can be measured to adjust the voltage levels and termination resistances), or how bright each individual pixel can be. That's why the first 6? generations of OLED panels have so many wacky and (IMHO goddamn abhorrent) arrangements of R/G/B/W shapes and subpixels.
I was vaguely okay with this when they started doing things like including yellow/magenta subpixels on TVs but anything other than a square pixel aspect ratio for computers is so gross. Even if you're willing to ignore the fringing or outright cannot see it, I can still tell one generation of iPhone apart from another consistently in books.app with the smallest white on black text, the leading/trailing edges of the letters have different rainbows.
And displaying fractionally lower resolutions onto high dpi displays does not incur much of a cost at all, retina displays existing at all on mobile phones is proof of this.
Apple used to be great when it comes to text, but lately their policy has been to use the worst possible software implementation and hope there's enough pixels to make it work.
In other words I bet that subpixel-aware or even just pixel-shape-aware text rendering could avoid that fringing but they don't want to bother.
About that, a well known problem in VR is that all current headsets have a fixed focal, usually optimized for long distances. The problem is that if you are showing something at a short distance, the eyes will then adjust the focus based on that distance, which is not what the headset shows, so it will look blurry. That's why it is hard to read a book in VR.
Several solutions have been proposed, like varying the focal mechanically based on where you are looking (Varifocal, see Half Dome prototype). There are some others, but the simplest solution is to get old!
With age comes presbyopia, which is the inability for the eye to focus on short distances, bad in real life, great in VR! Because the inability of your eyes and your headset to adjust focus cancel out!
So these are not actually "VR", right? They are the same fixed projected display cinema glasses that you can buy from half a dozen different brands today?
Recently, Meta closed my account, along with access to all my Meta Quest games, because I didn't verify my age in time. Because the account is closed, I can’t even contact support. I received a few emails about age verif. but first, I don’t want to provide my ID everywhere, and second, why automatically close an account with all my purchases on it? Why can't you wait until I log in? Super frustrating / terrible company.
oh man playing halo and jumping off the ship and falling through the sky will feel insane with this i imagine. i just hope people have enough open space around them when enjoying the limitless expansion of VR world. DOnt want people to hurt their knees and heads and knock off their furnitures all the time.
Too bad the software is going to be dogshit. Maybe it'll work in the beginning when they need to show it off to people a lot but will degrade into an absolute dumpster fire later. Like happened with Quest3. Or their sunglasses.
I had Meta Raybans for a while and liked them. Always refusing firmware updates. Everything I needed worked fine, normal headset for listening podcasts on walks, taking occasional picture, that's all I need! In this use case battery lasted a week outside of its case. Until recently it started prompting me with voice to update the glasses urgently every half an hour. And I did (to version 128, hey, even number!) and oh boy, Meta AI this Meta AI that everything is Meta AI can't do anything without it. Battery is drained in less than a day of me not wearing them, bluetooth audio breaks up all the time, connection getting lost. I was perfectly happy with the product and they had to ruin it to shove their AI garbage down my throat.
They recently added Meta AI sidebar to WhatsApp which you can't turn off.
So, hope you like Mark's AI because you'll sure have to use it with these.
Well I can appreciate continued VR development is it good thing in general, you couldn't fucking pay me to use anything from Facebook/Meta at this point. They need to be starved of attention until their doors close for good.
I had the oculus rift, sold it when they made me get a Facebook account (they might have backtracked on that). Bought a quest 2 thinking surely they have learned their lesson by now.
Nope.
Some of the decisions they made around ux are so insane I feel like ripping it off and throwing it across the room. I bet there are some properly talented people at meta, but someone senior is committed to making it suck. Wouldn't be surprised if it's zuck himself. So even though I'm passionate about it, I have no VR in my life because I can't afford another one
Looks fun, but it'll most probably need a Meta account, won't run open firmware, and most importantly wearing it in public instead of using my MacBook will make me look like an idiot. So: meh.
It's essentially a cheaper and lighter AVP without the Apple ecosystem. There's nothing revolutionary about this device.
Every time a major tech company comes out with a new headset, I check one thing: Does it have a light field display? (In this case, no it doesn't.) In 5-10 years, headsets are going to be much better. Your eyes will be able to focus on objects like they do in real space and you won't have to deal with the hassle of an external battery.
Its lighter form factor is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The AVP has some unnecessary extras such as the outward-facing display. If Apple wanted, it could make an Apple Vision Air with the latest A-series chip, a much lighter form factor and a much lower price - just like Meta VR Glasses.
More compact lenses are a constant improvement, but one of the main things here is just moving compute and power off of your head. Which many have done before.
Honestly I don't know why that's not more common. I've used puck-based ones, they're great - far less heat and mass on your face is a major benefit. They're also usually easier to plan upgrades for, as the two most costly pieces (which do very different things and have very different progress cycles) are separated.
I am so so glad Meta, or any company continue to invest in AR and VR. Not because I like AR / VR, to the contrary I am not a big fan of wearing a glasses to use it.
But it is the only thing that will move Low Latency Computing forward. Everything in modern computing is slow, we might have increased throughput by 1000 or 10000x over the course of 30+ years. But latency has gone backwards, from Apps to OS UI response. Decent AR/VR experience mimicking the real world would require sub 10ms results. And this should finally force developers to take latency into account.
I think VR would be completely dead by now if Meta weren't continuing to lose billions every quarter on it. Not many companies can endless sink that much money into a product
On the contrary, if Meta didn't acquire Oculus which hadn't poached Valve staff maybe the Steam Frame would have been out years ago.
It wouldn't have been touted at the "metaverse" and a revolution of having business meeting in a virtual room... looking like a boring office and maybe it would "just" be millions of gamers, but to stay we are in a better state because of Meta is questionable.
They did invest a ton and their products (if one can manage to make abstraction why they even exist in the first place) are actually well done but the line their brought on the entire industry created unrealistic expectation.
Is it good, is it bad, I'm not actually sure but I'm rather confident to say it's not obvious.
That seem plausible. As a gamer and 3d aficionado since 3dfx voodoo 1, I've never owned a VR set and that was partly because the good ones, at least on paper, all seemed to be Meta products. I don't use any Meta products, although I am probably _used by_ Meta products, which is part of the reason I don't use them.
Now I'm getting older and have less interest in VR, certainly don't want augmented reality glasses, even if they could be used for gaming. If anything I want glasses that subtract reality, as its a little too much at times.
VR is a great space now. Lots of competitors with great products. Meta has the best mass market option but many competitors with higher end displays like 4K per eye micro-OLED.
VR gaming has never been hotter. AI coding agents mean lots of enthusiasts can now turn their favorite flat games into VR. Huge community with that.
We know the speed at which Valve operate. There's no way they'd even come close to producing headsets as quickly as meta can.
Meta burned all that money because Zuckerberg had just read something related to Snow Crash, not because he had a good idea for how to develop the sector.
I think for now games are the best use of VR, and Valve actually care about games, and Zuckerberg moving on to the next shiny thing leaves room for Valve to join Sony and Microsoft for the next PlayStation/XBox alternative.
If anything, when the Oculus Quest became the Meta Quest, it started feeling like regression rather than progress, with the games going from "wow!" to "did they port a phone game?".
I am not so sure about that. When it felt like Meta was abandoning the space we saw some resurgence of smaller projects that tried to innovate, but if you have a big player sucking out all the oxygen you can't build smaller scale projects
Unfortunately a couple of small start ups isn't enough to carry the industry. Even big players like Valve who have more money in the bank to take a hit couldn't bring their headset in below $1000
They couldn't make that price on a high end standalone, without taking a hit, in 2026. And they choose not to take a hit so ability doesn't matter.
If they launched a year ago it probably would have been $600-700.
If they take a hint and make a version that can't do games standalone they might even drop the price in half.
Valve never sells at a loss. A significant slice of that is probably the RAM and storage, even at scale.
Worst thing that happened to humanity is the birth of Anduril thanks to Meta buying Occulus.. making that one slightly chipped person go think: "What to do with my Occulus exit.. hmm killing people isn't efficient, let me fix that."
The only people anduril drones have had a chance to kill are russians that are currently invading Ukraine.
Counterpoint: there are plenty of companies making VR hardware but they all remain niche and struggle because they can’t subsidize their hardware by taking both losses and user data as part of the price. Meta are better at killing competition more than they are at innovating.
Valve has annual profits in the billions, they invest in the future of VR too.
Nonsense. VR was and still is sustainable as a profitable niche product for specific use-cases. Zuck spending billions to try and own a new mass market category has nothing to do with that.
The biggest issue with VR adoption currently is not VR hardware. Quest 3, Pico 4 etc are all great headsets which launched with amazing price points. The issue is that these standalone headsets are pretty much useless. Sure you can watch some videos, or play some extremely basic games which remind me of N64 graphics. But that's about it. To get the most out of these headsets, you need a powerful PC. Driving in Assetto Corsa in VR feels amazing, you get actual realistic car physics and can drive in Tokyo with traffic around you which feels 'real'. VR in Microsoft Flight Simulator allows you to fly in any plane in any part of the world. VR in Elite Dangerous allows you to fly in outer space in a 1:1 scale Milky Way Galaxy. But require a beefy PC to run.
Apple, Meta and other VR companies just keep throwing more and more VR hardware with better lenses and form, but the issue is content. If someone is spending 1200 bucks on this headset and playing/interacting with N64 level content, the novelty wears off pretty fast.
So much to dissect in this post. By “N64 level” content I’m assuming that you refer to low poly geometry with low res textures and baked lights, correct? Well, I don’t know which VR games you are playing because even something as basic as Beat Saber would have been impossible to execute in the N64 era. I also find it interesting that you mention Apple being a VR company when they’ve only released one headset a few years ago and have not announced any major updates or successors in the last two WWDC. Meanwhile you ignore VALVe altogether who are about to release their second VR headset (third if you take the OG HTC Vive into account. And who developed and published what is perhaps one of the most immersive experiences on the medium: Half-Life Alyx. There’s nothing N64 about this game as they really pushed the technology as far as you could possibly do with the hardware limits of that time. No, you are not going to get GTA VI running on an untethered headset anytime soon and perhaps for good reason.
Half-Life Alyx is great, but it still requires a tethered headset and a beefy PC to run with high fidelity graphics.
Beat Saber is still quite basic graphics, I wouldn’t call it high fidelity.
Half-Life Alyx will run on VALVe’s upcoming frame completely untethered. https://vr.org/articles/half-life-alyx-standalone-steam-fram...
at 30 fps tho, its a joke.
30fps in VR is nausea inducing
I think it should be fine with async reprojection.
I have a different take on this: I bought a Quest 2 several years ago, spent some money and bought about 10 experiences/games/etc. for it, and it is good enough that I continue using it with no real desire to buy a newer model. My wife was watching me use it last week and she commented “isn’t there an upgrade for that?”
Wonderful toy, even though I only use it about 90 minutes a month it is worthwhile for me to own.
The three year old Quest 3 is still the absolute best thing you can buy in this space in terms of value per dollar. Especially the color passthrough is a feature I found to enjoy quite a lot and it prevents me from even considering the new Steam Frame. After the price hike I think Meta might now sell roughly at break even or perhaps even with some tiny margins, but before it was definitely at a loss. If mine fell down and broke today, I'd probably buy it again in a heartbeat, even though I only use it semi-regularly like you.
The Steam Frame has a $150 addon for pass-through.
For a total of $1200 I'd expect a bit more.
I bought my Quest 2 when it first came out, and I played it for a while, about 2-3 hours a week, peaking at about an hour a day when I found that Blade and Sorcery is a really good game for "exercise".
I bought the Quest 3 as an upgrade because I had noticed my Quest 2 started having intermittent input lag issues. I never pinpointed what was causing it, but my Golf clubs would fly out of my hand and I'd have to wait a few seconds for them to eventually find their way back to me. My controllers would drift out of view when navigating menus. I uninstalled everything, reinstalled it again. When that didn't work, I upgraded.
The issues persisted in the new version as well. So for about the last 20-ish months, I've averaged under an hour a month, most months I don't even pick it up. I might do some homemade PC VR "experiments" (still have access to mouse and keyboard for the game, and not the controllers) on some random claude code experiments. I have a "cyberpunk" mobius strip space station walking sim I've been working on, that will eventually hook into a treadmill.
I average about 2-3 hours per week. I’ve gotten into simracing and an average Le Mans Ultimate race is around an hour which I play a couple of times per week.
The native experiences are too barebones and I don’t even use it untethered
The nice thing for me is I was able to pick up a brand new meta quest 3 still with receipt and warranty for €200 second hand (buyers remorse I guess, there wasn't much they could do with it), and I was able to do all that stuff you mentioned with my beefy pc.
VR has been around for decades, and its always been a really niche nerdy thing, for the same type of people who will build a mock cockpit of a plane in their house for flight sims. I dont think that's gonna change no matter how much cash mega-corps pump into it, it will always be a niche nerdy hobby thing imo.
Wow I disagree with this. Even with Quest 2 the hardware was powerful enough to create interesting VR experiences. I think a bigger limiting factor is the comfort of the headsets and the quality of the source material (in the case of streaming).
Driving sims may not be peak running on a Quest, but I think that is a different realm from what I am talking about. There is plenty to do and see without photorealistic 3D graphics.
Standalone wireless headsets are great for fitness. Almost every game is a cardio workout. You won’t need to have a separate workout from playing video games.
Also the visuals got a big improvement with Quest 3. I’m sure that Steam Frame will also have decent visuals.
I am also very glad for Meta's investment into the future, so second your voice here. In a sense though it's Palmer Luckey who punched the tech into a defensible product. John Carmack surely tried to do the right thing, but I think part of why he left is that it's too difficult for any individual to make significant (risky) design decisions.
Do I have faith in Meta to 'win' in VR or AR commercially? Well... not really, but the technological advancements are real.
agreed. would be nice to see the size of the meta glasses and the reviews first before considering to purchase.
> Everything in modern computing is slow
Nonsense. Embedded systems, often event driven, improved as did the rest of the computing landscape (perhaps at a tad slower pace). HST has been a major driver on low latency computing in the data center. And then there are of course robotics and military applications ...
I have 5 programs open right now - Firefox, Visual Studio, Word, Photoshop and a terminal.
Out of these 5, only Firefox loads faster than it did on a 512MB Windows XP machine 20 years ago, the other 4 are at least a few times slower.
Maybe it's a Windows thing? My M1 Air is way quicker than my XP laptop of years ago was.
Though Vista on a cheap laptop was an epic peak of slowness where you could wait a minute for a right click menu to appear.
VR is at the intersection of low latency, high throughput, high compute, flexibility and affordable prices.
Embedded systems are often not flexible. They are often designed to do just one thing, like driving an engine, and may run the exact same software for their entire life, which may be decades. They are often limited in term of general computing requirements too.
I don't know HST, but it seems to be similar to embedded: single, highly constrained application, maybe more compute, and I would guess that affordability isn't even on the menu.
Meta VR is consumer software, running on consumer hardware, it runs third party apps, with all the flexibility that is asked of PCs. You can't just put your own realtime OS and claim the entire system for your own specific application.
I'm just glad the era of having to look down all the time will soon be over.
I just got swept up in this mass Threads suspension yesterday, despite not using it. I am locked out of Facebook and Messenger, and my Portal, Oculus, and Glasses are now bricked. I pay them $12 for Instagram a month, mostly to deter username thieves, and that was oddly not suspended, despite being linked, so the "safety" claims ring hollow. Be very careful about giving your money to Meta. They are quick to unperson with no recourse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wnkje9/my_inst...
Here is the creator of Kobo caught up in the same ban wave, who escaped only by knowing a Meta employee. https://www.threads.com/@mtamblyn/post/DdqEWIGAF1g
This is one of the reasons I would never purchase hardware from Meta. If I need a subscription or account to use my own hardware that will be a hard no.
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Coming from Quest 3, everything about it sounds great BUT for that FOV. Even on Quest with 103 x 96, I sometimes feel like I'm looking around through a mask or binoculars. Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.
Hopefully it's not so bad.
Oh BTW they showed a new Beat Saber game, and among the logos I've seen Ace Attorney VR among a few others. Let's see if those come for Quest 3 and maybe even PCVR.
70 is crazy! I was thinking years ago that surely by this point headsets would be standardizing on a baseline of like 140+. Progress has really stagnated and over the past few years new headsets never seem to just be universally better than whatever they are replacing. It always seems to be pull one lever to improve one aspect while regressing somewhere else.
I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year and it got consistently better across the board every iteration.
It has progressed. The tech is just expensive and heavy and... all sorts of tradeoffs. Meta had a prototype (Boba) with a 180 horizontal and 120 vertical FoV
But it of course is large and heavy like the quest pro and expensive most likely. Things that when you market to consumers don't pan out.
So they are optimizing on the other dimension (weight) which of course trades of many other dimensions.
Pancake optics are really cool, very clear and lightweight without some of the light distortions you get from traditional optics. They are worth the tradeoff. But they don't work out beyond 100-ish degrees. I think the Steam Frame is really pushing the maximum the industry seems to be able to get out of them.
More niche manufacturers like Pimax have accomplished much higher FOVs but people keep returning them because they're expensive, heavy and uncomfortable (I think they're popular among people who lie down in cockpit rigs).
> surely by this point headsets would be standardizing on a baseline of like 140+
They would be if they had gotten popular and competition had ramped up. But that didn't happen.
e.g. who's Meta competing with via these VR Glasses?
> I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year
That didn’t happen because you would need market demand for that. Only Gen Alpha likes VR as a demographic.
It's not a headset, it's glasses.
You can’t see through it. So it’s a small glasses shaped headset
...with stray light coming in from all sides because glasses don't cover your face completely. So the best place to use them will probably be a completely darkened room?
Unless like Vision Pro there's a surroundings control that lets you go from total visibility outside the image to complete darkness — within the FOV — in any environment.
Edit: Since the FOV is only 70 degrees, that leaves 110 degrees outside the image, divided between the edges of the glasses and the rest of the room. So for sure in daylight outside light would destroy the theater effect.
Apparently there is a flap you can place on them to block out light.
Then that website is completely misleading, showing those projections within their ambient environment, as if they were AR like Vision Pro.
It's a headset
> Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.
Ouch, that's a tough sell. Maybe useful for AR type stuff, but I wouldn't want to go from a Quest/Index/Frame/etc to that for VR.
From description I thought this is more 'View on a Virtual TV' rather than a full VR thing, I may be wrong. This is good, because I, honestly, find that a lot of my VR time is sitting or lying down.
So, xreal competitor?
I have a Vision Pro since launch and loved it, and it has a much more traditional, much wider FOV. However, when you do watch movies on it, it looks incredible but usually only a fraction of that full FOV is utilized -- you do see the theater, or environment, etc. My one wondering is if they'll somehow really deliver the experience of a virtual screen, non-occlusion of the real world, and make it so that the huge screen on the wall several feet away from you can be fully rendered on only this 70 degree FOV. To be sure this is a killer for this as an all-encompassing VR device, but I hope that maybe we'll be shown that it might just be good enough for more of a MR use. Or maybe its just cause I'm at least excited someone is trying and bringing products in this space and so I want to cheer this on
IMO, FOV is the biggest immersion killer in VR today, and doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's not so bad when you're relatively new to it as the illusion is convincing enough that you don't notice, but once the magic wears off a bit, it's hard to escape that binocular effect. I wish one of the bigger players would tackle that. I'm not willing to take a chance on Pimax.
Microsoft has a patent on a super cheap and easy way to improve FOV, but they cancelled Windows Mixed Reality so this solution will just sit in a vault forever.
TLDR, put LEDs all around the lens. They extend the scene even though they have zero resolution, you perceive the environment as extending to the full angular width you can see.
quest 3 is sooo heavy though
The default strap it comes with doesn't help either, I switched to a halo band type and have comfortably worn it for 6+ hrs multiple times (yes I have/had an addiction to IL2, flight sims (and racing games) are where it truly shines).
I'm very interested in Valve's approach, shifting some of the weight to the back.
i am not 1200 euro interested
I wish they just removed the SoC/storage/RAM/battery/cooling and gave me the PCVR part for 500
If you are going to buy one, this is the platform you support:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1618&v=qp2IbgJ5Z-8
I know you probably know that, but this is a new low, even for Meta.
At the timestamp of the video, after the question she goes in length about the [mind boggling] settlement, limiting to 2h/day for under 18 years old is not too bad?
Yes, not too bad for a question the moderator didn't really ask. She's really good at diverting the topic to a less uncomfortable field. No wonder she's in charge of a platform with 3.07 billion monthly active users. Also note the tone and condescending attitude.
meh all of these mega corps do whatever they can to maximise profit. Apple used slave-like labour from China (or still use depending on who you ask) and turned a blind eye until it could no more. Which to me is worse than what Meta did. But they are not Americans so most don't care around these parts.
When you buy an iPhone that was made in sweatshop, you contribute to it. There are alternatives but most people really don’t mind having slave labor build their iPhone.
Same for kids wasting their life on screen, most parents don’t mind as long as it keep them busy and it’s one less thing to care about.
Correct, but that's also whataboutism. I know apathy can easily take over, but when you get laughed in the face just like that it feels really hopeless. No, it's not my first day on the internet and no, it's not the first time I see companies act like this, but something about this feels very wrong.
Youtube video Meta released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyD_bmMy5nQ
And another random youtube influencer who tried it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8oIs1GA0o
$1300 price
According to the influencer, the weight is 100 g. I have 25 g (+lenses) glasses I wear often, and even that is right on the upper edge of what's comfortable and needs almost-uncomfortable tight arms to stay steady when my head moves. And, that's all as somebody who's worn glasses all my waking hours since like age 10, complete with nose-indent calluses. Either those Meta glasses are clamping uncomfortably hard on the sides of your head all the time or they'll fall off the first time you lean forward.
Strange complaint. 100 grams is extremely light compared to every other VR headset.
Most other VR headsets don't put their entire weight on your nose and ears.
According to reviews it feels very light.
strange comparing glasses to headsets
The capabilities are quite similar.
This is the sweet spot Apple's aiming for next year.
Maybe users will develop a distinctive posture.
For Meta, on their knees?
> Youtube video Meta released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyD_bmMy5nQ
That video is on the page itself as well, right top
Is it just me or do those angles deliberately obscure how thick it is lens-wise? I have a pair of X-real airs, 2 years old now, and they're pretty thick. They're 1/4th the price and basically work as a head-mounted display. Is that what this, but way fancier and more sleek?
Xreal style glasses use forms of "birdbath" optics with screens up top reflected through prisms. This likely use the regular concentric pancake optics used in many other VR headsets.
But yeah, the angles are to obscure thickness. It's not going to be as thin as it appear from a distance.
It’s HoloLens reinvented I guess.
What problem does it solve? I see a bunch of potential uses but I don’t see any problems looking to be solved.
Will I like gaming better if I control the games with my hands instead of a controller?
Will I like working in my glasses better than my laptop screen? Or even a dual laptop screen like a ZenBook Duo? Or a cheap second portable display? Do these glasses fit better in a backpack than a laptop and a second portable screen? They can’t collapse flat.
Are these glasses more portable and convenient than a smartphone? What are the benefits to watching an NBA game on this compared to a phone or my TV screen at home?
I can’t believe Meta is blowing their money on this stuff still.
I think this is a big stopgap until an actual transparent AR glasses and an admission that Meta and the entire AR industry have no instant next quarter solution for shortcomings of Meta Ray-Ban Display.
The geometric waveguide technology used in the Display glasses is quite complicated and costly, the birdbath optic that Xreal uses is stupid, so to speak, and various holographic solutions used by Even Realities and likes is not so spectacular in light loss(IIUC the fancy term is "quantum efficiency"), as well as multi color feasibility(needs 3 layers with separate image sources).
Prior to now we didn't know if Meta will be doing a Display 2 or Quest 4, or if they plan to do something else. This is that something else.
Rumor is they are going to do a Quest 4 (late next year).
I agree that these seem like a stopgap short of the thing everyone wants - Vision Pro specs (ahaha) in a pair of regular glasses.
Personally, as a glasses-wearer, I'm not quite convinced it's the right target though - even my 20 gram glasses are uncomfortable to wear all day and I take them off whenever they're not needed. I'd rather have a ski-goggle device (similarly light, but with the weight more evenly distributed, and still with optical see-through) with fewer performance compromises. Of course that wouldn't let the manufacturer dominate "the next form of personal computing" or whatever.
Yeah, I've switched to ultra-light rimless glasses and I really do not want to go back. I no longer have sore nose-pad dents at the end of the day.
(I have a fairly strong prescription, so the literal glass in my glasses does weigh a fair bit more than for most people. Yay modern optional media! It's so much nicer than it used to be)
They had to get something out to undercut Snap finally formally entering the market with a consumer product. That's my read. Their entire strategy for years has been doing whatever they can to box-out potential XR space competitors.
I might consider them if I can wire it to my laptop. I use the meta quest for development because of infinite virtual screens and due to my apartment being so small I can't fit a proper desk and office chair. But still is a very niche usage, if I had space I would very likely get a desk with a dual or triple monitor setup. If the resolution is good, it is actually nice to have a very portable infinite screen setup if you travel a lot.
You can do this already with xreal glasses for like 1/4 of the price
https://us.shop.xreal.com/products/xreal-xbx-a01
Thanks, i will check it out. I think I did a couple years ago but mac os support was bad at the time? I don't quite remember, but this seems great now. Do you have one? Any experience with using it for work on mac os with multiple virtual screens?
fwiw unlike the other person, I use it for hours with my macbook and have no complaints. you will like it if regular vr makes you feel claustrophobic/isolated, since you still see the real world while using it. I don't understand the obsession with extreme text crispness many people have.
Blurry text is horribly noticeable after a while, and it also creates eye fatigue from trying to focus your vision on it. It also means you can't use smaller font sizes, which is important for some people since you can have more text on screen.
This for me is the FAIL with both Vision Pro and XReal glasses: blurry text. Can't stand it from the get-go.
It’s terrible.
I’ve always wanted it to be better, but it’s just terrible. It’s like working on a projector screen where the pixels never line up.
Really? Did you ever try adjusting the text sharpness?
I've a pair of Nreal Air glasses (before the rebrand) and a pair of Xreal Ones. I have found the latter remarkably comfortable and sharp enough for coding, reading text, playing games, etc. for extended periods of time.
The new widescreen modes are a real treat too. Still waiting for Real 3D to get upgraded to 60FPS though.
I live in a small apartment too. Our setup for work from home is a monitor and desk pad that lives in our closet and we bring it out to the kitchen table.
This is a 4K monitor that cost roughly $500 along with a real keyboard and mouse.
As far as portable screen setups, we have a portable monitor, which slips into a backpack like a laptop. It’s about the size of an iPad.
I’m not saying any of this to criticize your setup at all. I agree that it’s a use case that probably works for some people.
Still, it’s clear that traditional alternatives exist, and they lack a lot of the downsides that VR has.
You can even buy laptops that already have two screens built-in like the ZenBook Duo.
Zenbook Duo is not an option for me unfortunately (company provides the laptop). A nice large monitor not an option neither (well, if it was up to me, I would get 2 nice 4k monitors, but wife was very clear she did not want a bulky monitor and me occupying a good chunk of the dinner table lol). But I am pretty sure she will be fine with a portable monitor, I didn't know these were a thing, and they fit my use case perfectly! Thanks a lot!
Yes! Those portable monitors are great, and extremely inexpensive.
I recommend getting one that’s above 1080p, probably marketed as 2K or 2.5K. 4K is probably overkill since it’s gonna be a pretty small screen.
I’ve also been of the mind that really only one external monitor in addition to the laptop screen is really helpful, but I know opinions vary on that.
You can wire it to a laptop. It supports direct DisplayPort over USB 3 input, which it will display on a large virtual monitor.
You can
Related: I watched one (1) live NBA game on Vision Pro. It was terrible in all ways compared to watching on TV. Same with a live baseball game. Apple doesn't grok sports.
That’s interesting because I kept hearing so much about how its the ultimate movie theater.
If we really step back and think about how most people enjoy sports I think the whole idea of VR being a top tier option is a little silly.
Sports are very much community and family activities. How much fun are they to alone compared to watching with fans?
I see VR as something of a backup method like if you’re on a plane or something. And once we are thinking about that use case we might think to ourselves all the reasons why an iPad is better for that use case.
i thought it was incredible compared to watching on tv. the scale, the proximity, the fidelity. i even had my virtual desktop open so the "second screen" experience was pretty much intact
What made it less than ideal for me was the fact that I couldn't see the pitches en route to the batter in the big view — only in the much higher resolution inset "Jumbotron."
From the video they have on their site: watching movies in places where you normally would stare at a tiny screen; they also show folks using virtual floating keyboards in front of a VR desktop to work.
So: no problems solved.
I have watched hundreds of movies with my 27" 4k monitor, or 24" 1080p monitor a few years back. Screen size is never something that bothered me. And I know people who watched more stuff on their laptop screen with terrible color accuracy.
I have a VR headset, but other than the one time I tried Skybox just to see what it looks like, it never occurred to me to take the headset out to watch a full length movie. It's just not worth it.
Makes me wonder how often people use it for "watching content on a gigantic screen at home", or it's just mostly theoretical in VR headset marketing material.
VR desktop: that's supposedly the "killer application" of Apple Vision Pro back in 2005 (and only usable on high resolution headsets like those). Guess what, these days nobody talks about it. I haven't seen anyone bringing it up on HN for a long time.
Your wait is over.
I received my Vision Pro on release day (February 24, 2004). After trying every feature and use case, today (2.5 years later) the ONLY times I use it are 1) To watch films like "Disclosure Day," "Crime 101," "Dune," etc. in 4k on a virtual 30 foot screen — at any time of day — since I can black out the screen surrounding with the control knob, and 2) Watch the short (10 minutes or so long) Immersive Videos that Apple releases more or less monthly. They're fantastic.
N.B. All use is while lying down flat with my head comfortably supported on a pillow, using Apple's Version 2 headstrap. Only the supine position enables even enough distribution of the device's weight across my forehead and under my eyes such that I can (for the most part) not be aware of the VP's weight.
Live NBA and MLB: FAIL
3D movies: meh
Working with virtual Mac screen(s): FAIL because 1) text is blurry, and 2) headset is just too heavy after 15 minutes or so.
In summary: 1) I would NEVER recommend the device to anyone, and 2) I'm glad I bought it because when in use it's like something that came from the future, the viewing experience is so detailed and enveloping and the sound so perfect.
You can also see this with the used eBay values. Vision Pros have depreciated unlike any other Apple product I’ve ever seen.
Under $2,000 for a device that retails brand new for $3500.
Imagine if you could hop on eBay and buy a pristine condition MacBook Air M5 for $600.
Regarding heavy weight and use case, I think Valve has the right product design going on with the Steam Frame. They’re taking a product and refining it for what its actually good at with proven utility: gaming, with real controllers, streaming from a powerful PC, and minimizing weight on your head.
Apple and Meta have already effectively disproven the other hypothetical use cases of the technology. The Steam Frame probably won’t even sell that well despite being the most focused product on the market.
This product line already exists for years. Meta is just entering it.
It's essentially the xr-glasses /vr glasses category. Plenty of options around on stores
> It’s HoloLens reinvented I guess.
Hololens was a transparent display with stuff drawn on top of it.
This has reality drawn on top of opaque display
I mentioned Jaron Lanier in another comment… I've been watching VR try to establish itself and fail for close to 30 years now.
I want a glasses-with-puck style like this with a great fov and resolution good enough for crisp text work and nothing else. for sound I just want it to be small enough to wear with headphones. It would be fantastic if I could run a real OS on it. I just want it for productivity, I dont care about the latest 3d gimmick movie or VR apps.
The closest thing so far is a Bigscreen Beyond 2 w/ a laptop if it wasn't for the fact that you need a base station for the damn thing.
I know my request is a fantasy right now, but I put this our there in case someone that could make it less of a fantasy reads this.
100% on the same page. I don't want a device to take me on a virtual rollercoaster of half-*ssed entertainment in exchange for my identity, I just want something that can at least substitute my monitors in a more compact way.
https://youtu.be/aGnMbKwP36U?t=164
Same here. I've been looking for a way to bring my multi-monitor setup with me to work when I travel, VR glasses would be the most portable solution. But I won't buy it while it needs a subscription of any kind, I want it to work like my LG monitor: dumb, doesn't need software to use (drivers would be fine, 'apps' won't), haven't had any sort of mandatory update since I bought it years ago, I just plug it and it works.
I work with Rayneo Air 4 Pro - they have HDR/120fps displays (image quality is top-notch and they're bright enought to work even with direct sunlight). They don't have battery or software, it's plug-in-play USB-C external screen essentially. It's more than enough for travel, or for sitting straight while working cafe, for privacy reasons or working outdoors. I even tried them while walking in the forest (with laptop in the backpack and using voice input).
Drawback - they don't do 3DoF tracking, so the screen just follows where you're looking, you can't change screen size, and no multimonitor setup. They have IMU sensors, though. It's possible to create your own virutal monitor software (or use someone's else like RealWarp), but IMU drift is hard to beat and experience is far from perfect. So I stick with 'just one high-quality screen' for now, and to be honest it was some quality-of-life improvement for me.
PS. Couple of weeks ago there was new release from RayNeo, which supposedly have 3DoF and same quality. Haven't tried those.
Yeah, seems like RayNeo GT Max have proper 3DoF tracking. Shoot, now I need these :)
How clear and usable is the image for productivity? Is it comparable to a small laptop screen or more like a regular 24 inch screen or something else? Are the optics clear enough?
It's more like 27" screen. Most people (including me) don't see one of the edges clearly (it gets too far into periphery). Like 5% of the right and bottom edge can be hard to see without moving. With 3DoF you would be able to just move your head, but without there 2 options: - somehow push glasses closer to the eyes (some reported that they replaced nose pads for that) - just accept it (my case - I just make terminal screen slightly smaller in height from the full height, and it's fine)
Again, the screen is fantastic. Even overkill for text-related stuff (reading, coding, terminal, etc). It's FullHD HDR 10-bit OLED. I do edit videos Davinci with these glasses. They target it for gaming and movies.
This is it then, right? You can connect a laptop to this. You don't have to watch movies on it. The FoV should be plenty for productivity.
Seeing a person at a coffee shop typing with his fingers on a table and moving his invisible mouse would be…interesting.
I can see value on a plane. But I’d rather use my MacBook then look like a crazy person pretending to work.
That's what people used to say about Bluetooth headsets
It's still creepy and weird to have a full conversation on a bluetooth headset in a public place where everyone can overhear your side of it.
Isn’t that the same without a headset?
No, talking into a phone feels more natural than talking to nothing in particular
Plus when you talk into a phone, your voice bouncing off the glass causes natural tendency to control vocal volume.
With buds, people just shout into the void... Or the bus...
Better than the people who walk around using speakerphone… which I see at least 3 people do on every trip to the grocery store.
It still seems weird to me when I hear people seemingly talking to themselves as if hallucinating. It always surprises me until I realize what's happening.
guess i'm old cuz i still feel like it's weird and antisocial
Surely you mean asocial?
I've been that guy, though with a portable keyboard and wireless mouse using my Xreal glasses with a Samsung device in Dex mode.
It is as close as Ive gotten to the cyberpunk dream so far.
I’ve used the Vision Pro in public. I don’t care what people think of me, but I did get annoyed at people tapping me on the shoulder and asking about it.
I’d mostly be concerned about getting robbed while having my vision obscured.
Luckily they can’t steal your invisible monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Looks like superb hardware, and contrary to many others the use cases this is designed for look actually worth it. "AVP but lighter and cheaper" or "looks designed for trains or planes" . . . well, obviously.
The key problem is it's Meta. People don't even trust other people near them to use Meta hardware, and the way they dealt with Oculus users was just grimy. From basically any other company this would be a very welcome device. Zuckerberg needs to fix the company first, because there's no such thing as a killer product good enough to overcome this hurdle.
People said the same thing about Meta Muse.
HN constantly under-estimate how much the mass forgives a company as long as they release a cool product (barring a few holdouts that really don't matter to 3B DAU company)
I dont thibk privacy conscious people are using muse, Im not.
i asked this in different thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49816481
anyone know whats going on with muse. twitter has gone crazy with fake things ppl've supposedly achieved like getting airline to refund 4k, negotiating 45k furniture to 5k, booking flights for 20 dollars. These are the same ppl that were hyping openclaw, not sure what happened to that. and how muse topping charts. Its all befuddling to me.
Well, Muse is essentially OpenClaw as a service for the general population so that tracks.
but openclaw was flop. Not many ppl using it after the initial hype.
the average person had no idea how to set up openclaw
Muse / Instinct were the first to do frictionless setup at scale (Poke was technically 'first' but not sure how large they got before acq)
no i am talking about ppl who had elaborate openclaw setups now they are hawking muse
people don't care about privacy; every post on snowden does well here but it's a fart in the wind to the general public
Is Muse popular?
Extremely. It's been top of the App store charts since it came out in the US.
Almost like it is a well funded marketing campaign.
"Everyone loves Meta Muse now, it is organic growth. My social media feed told me so!"
Have you tried it? It's pretty good!
No, I try to avoid products that continuously show a lack of respect for their users.
That means nothing, see
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662990
> I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots
It also tops Apple App store. Any similar tidbit about installs being bots for Apple?
don't trust this we've spent hundreds of dollars without any effect whatsoever in the statistics
My point is not the money spend but that bots not only create traffic on web sites but also app stores
https://www.avclub.com/meta-muse-ai-human-labor not for long.
Yes
I went to set up, it asked for email access.
Nope.
Then don’t give it email access
That's the whole purpose. It wants to pretend as if it was you, online.
Anything it does, you are responsible.
What's cool about giving all your life's data to Meta Muuuuse?
> Zuckerberg needs to fix the company first
First he needs to fix himself
I was going to say. It's not 'the company', it's him. He has majority voting rights on everything
Impossible.
Why? Does his model not get firmware updates anymore?
Zuckerberg needs to fix Zuckerberg first. Meta is going to remain as it is, otherwise.
Hardware looks good except the FoV is really bad, a huge downgrade compared to the Quest 3.
Honestly, I think at this point in order to fix Meta Zuckerberg needs to go. People will never trust a company with him in charge, without him they could start to rebuild trust with people.
I hate Meta with a passion but I think the real problem is not embracing Web XR and an open ecosystem. I love the Meta Quest 3 in terms of hardware but I haven't put the Quest on in 6 months because I don't play games so there is so little content. This solves nothing in terms of what I don't like about VR. The headset weight was no issue at all for me. Then trying to develop with the unreal engine and the Quest 3 was a complete joke. The best thing I seen in VR was the unreal engine VR demo. Everything else looks like a cartoon after that. What is the point of building this nice hardware and then a metaverse that isn't even up to 90s POVRAY standards. Like focusing on building a better web browser without the web.
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>People don't even trust other people near them to use Meta hardware,
Video, showing how random Meta employees don't like slightly creepy stranger obviously using Meta glasses to record them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHKhYL3is5o
Meta allegedly took down the video when it was uploaded to their own platforms.
I thought Meta's approach to AR was pivoting towards transparent glasses with displays in the vein of Ray Ban Display and Orion (I realize that "VR" is in the title, but almost all the images show AR use cases). Their original vision for AR was to have people walking around with quest headsets in passthrough mode. But that's just too weird for the vast majority of people. I can't imaging walking around in public and ordering coffee with my eyes totally obscured behind a device. I saw a couple co-workers walking around wearing headsets like this when I worked at Reality Labs, but it was obvious to me and all my teammates that vanishingly few people would actually do that in public.
I guess the approach here is to shrink down the VR glasses and make them look more like normal glasses from a distance. But I still don't think I'd wear one of these walking around the mall or airport. Reduction in FOV is also a big negative. I'm not really sure where one would use this device over a Quest or the Ray Ban Display. It occupies this awkward middle point where it's not a transparent glass display, but it's also makes a lot of compromises compared to the rest of the VR line.
Sunglasses that obscure your eyes have been around since forever
Sunglasses are semi-opaque yes, but they aren't completely opaque with a set of front facing cameras like you're walking around with night vision goggles.
Glad it's using the Meta XR SDK - it's a closed ecosystem but at least it IS an ecosystem.
The Ray-Ban Metas had no ecosystem. No SDK, no app store, just apps made by Meta. They finally announced an SDK in 2026 but why would I support a device that was so anti-developer for years?
I'm curious what your closest analogous device with an SDK is so I can understand how you're viewing the product.
I see Ray-Ban Metas as basically fancy airpods with a camera. Airpods don't have an SDK, or an app store. Nor would it make sense to have one. So it doesn't rub me the wrong way.
What kind of SDK would you like to see? Are you wanting them to be more like an Alexa, and expect an Alexa style SDK/marketplace with custom integrations?
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For money. There is barely any competition yet.
I had an Oculus Quest and it was a really great device. After the "Meta" rebrand, the quality rapidly decreased and now it wants me to upload my ID to Meta to keep using it. Absolutely not! Zuckerberg already has way too much information on me, uploading my state issued identification to them is such an insane ask, I will never do it. While this looks like interesting hardware, the company behind it has unacceptable and user-hostile practices, so I'll pass.
I've never needed to submit any ID?
I think the software kept getting better except for the latest UI redesign intended to mimic Apple which is indeed terrible. I hate the heavy use of double clicking on the controllers. The older UI was better (though even before this they constantly redesigned it every 6 months or so)
But they've only improved things over time. The quest 1 shipped without passthrough or hand tracking. By the end of it's support it had both. The quest 2 and 3 also continue to receive new features like higher frame rates, keyboard view etc.
If you already had a long standing fb profile you were probably good. But if you had to make a new one just for Quest, you could sometimes end up having to go through all kinds of hoops to prove you weren't making a spam bot account. Or if you tried to access a long forgotten account.
You don't need a fb profile for quest. I'm sure that you could use one but you can create a new meta account for which you just need an email.
All of the social media have this issue: the fraud detection algorithm become oversensitized and starts flagging every new accounts. But it's not the policy, so the company won't admit to mandating ID submission.
Not that I am comfortable uploading ID or that I even consider Quest, but that is how it starts.
Facebook is the only social media I've ever had this kind of problem with. Every few years I find some group or community that only exists on Facebook that I want to join (in the most recent case it was a local DnD meetups group; in a previous case, it was a gardening group that was my only reputable lead on seeds for an uncommon variety of heirloom tomato I was searching for). It always ends in my new account getting banned within a few days for suspected fraud with no real reason or opportunity for appeal. No other social media has that problem as far as I can tell, it seems like it's primarily a Facebook problem, and clearly I'm not some unique case considering how common a story it seems.
Perhaps it has something to do with if you had an old account you deleted a decade ago; maybe Meta assumes that any person who ever deleted their account will never ever want to make a new one, so anybody using the same email or name or face or ID or device as anything that has touched a deleted account is by definition fraudulent.
No I didn't. During the time when it was required to couple one I just made one with a fake name. But since that passed i decoupled it again and deleted the Facebook one.
Exactly where I am. Was all-in on Quest 1 and Quest 2, but had to offboard due to Meta's wild policies (that ended up locking me out of my account with little recourse -- some bug with the Oculus standalone account merge with FB and then re-split).
As much as I'm a proponent of VR, I won't play by Meta's rules.
Could you get a refund for the device? Obviously that wasn't what you paid for.
I was so excited by Oculus’s technology, and then Facebook of all companies bought them and it was such a let down. It felt like finding out that Charles Manson likes the same TV show as you. Yuck!
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oculus didnt ship a single product not owned by facebook.
That is certainly not true.
I had the Oculus Rift dev kit before they sold to Facebook. It was so amazing at the time
“Dev kit”
They called it that, but I just bought it on their website like a normal product. I didn’t write anything for it.
There was a site that you could download experiences that people created, which is what I used it for.
You had to pay for it (Kickstarter), so its 100% a product
Game console developers always had to (and still have to) pay for their dev kits. That doesn't really make them products in the typical sense of the word, though.
The stronger argument for it being a product is that it was available to the public.
I didn’t even get it from the kickstarter.
I just bought it on the website.
Yeah, sure, my point is that obviously the original comment excluded the dev kit in their definition of product, and arguing over it is just splitting hairs.
Non-devs were buying them to play games.
I was one of them.
I mean, I was/am a dev, but I had no plans to develop on it, I just wanted it to play with.
Correct, but you didn't have to log into the Quest 1 with facebook until ~2024. They had "Oculus accounts" at first.
They have Meta accounts now, which are also not Facebook accounts. I went straight from an Oculus account to Meta account. Might be location based, but I most certainly haven't been asked to upload any ID.
> They have Meta accounts now, which are also not Facebook accounts.
How gullible can you be?
I got some hate from pointing out WhatsApp is the same evil corp as Facebook recently. People don't want to hear that
Well, I was going to point out the distinction between products. But I guess if people like you are able to turn HN into Reddit, anything is possible.
And I was pointing out that they are one and the same but the "Facebook" name was so tarnished by their terrible privacy practices they had to change it to save face.
But I guess if people like you are able to ignore that to make yourself feel better about giving your personal information to Zuckerberg's advertising company then anything is possible.
Phwoar! Thank you. It's 2026, and had it not been for your high quality informative comments. I would have not known anything about this them there Facebook. You saved me.
I don't know what conversation you think you're having here, but it's not that.
If you'd bothered to read... and then ready for it... stop, take a breath, and process the information. You'd have noticed I was pointing out you can use a Quest headset WITHOUT providing them your personal ID OR having a Facebook account. Almost as if, you know, I was highlighting that giving the company your personal info isn't required. Woe me though for pointing that out.
I'm sorry for interrupting the indignant rants. Please continue.
Owner of DK2 here, well before Facebook acquisition. It was for developers, but it was a shipped product nonetheless.
Not really. Pre-release baked into the name.
Sold for a full price, so it’s a sold product.
Game console dev kits are typically _more_ expensive than the consoles they're for. So "full price" isn't a good argument. (The fact that they were available to the public is a stronger argument.)
i've never had the luxury of buying a cheaper dev kit. Ever.
It wasn't though, a full price would have been more, to cover not just components and assembly but the cost of R&D.
Game console dev kits usually cost more than the consoles they're for, not less. They're not mass produced at the scale that the consoles are, and they're sold or leased to companies expecting to make several orders of magnitude more back off the products they create with the dev kits.
There isn't a very direct comparison of Oculus products to game consoles like PlayStation, Nintendo, XBox, or those in the distant past. It is interesting, and they have a lot of the same market forces at play, but I don't think they behave by the same rules.
There's at least one way where there's a direct comparison: they both have dev kits.
Pretty sure DK1 shipped pre-acquisition.
DK2 also
Neither qualifies.
Why? They were for sale to the public, how were they not a product?
Because some people find arguing over semantics fun.
Regardless the acquisition took some time to bring down the quality of the products. It doesn't matter if their first few products were sufficiently far ahead that they weren't enshitified immediately when Facebook bought Oculus.
they shipped 3. DK1, DK2, CV1.
4 if you count the Latency Tester.. but yo.. Mark and Andrew.. pour these ARVR $$$ into CZI instead!!!
CV1 was as a Facebook subsidiary. Acquired 2014-07-21, CV1 announced January 2016 and released March 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/facebooks-acquisition-of-o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift_CV1
> oculus didnt ship a single product not owned by facebook.
The post you are replying to doesn't claim they did...?
They did change the branding in late 2021/early 2022.
Prior to that the product was called the Oculus Quest, after that it was the Meta Quest.
And Meta did start heavily enshittifying the product alongside the rebrand.
This is why he buys anything. I can't speak to Whatsapp but Instagram is horrific now precisely because he doesn't give a damn about making a good product. All he wants is to own the network effects, and credentials, and data
well a 200-day (dirtyfrag) just dropped yesterday. you can remove most of that
More info? Couldn't find anything about it and now the Quest communities are swamped with these glasses.
edit: https://github.com/Lumince/singularity
yea that. it works on latest fw
> After the "Meta" rebrand, the quality rapidly decreased
This has not been my experience at all and there are very few headsets I have not owned.
Everything else I can't really disagree with.
It’s rather astonishing to me how the vampire squid of world domination has apparently worked out just how to neutralize any sense of self-preservation, and manipulate and gaslight anything into place if they have enough time and are patient.
Everything from “freedom sticks” to get women to breath in smoke and ash like the foolish men, to going from “government IDs are just conspiracy theory” to “you have to show your papers to see information and communicate with other humans on the only method that is still widely possible; it’s all just been slowly salami sliced and microdosed into our societies. Worse yet, still a large chunk of society seem utterly oblivious as long as they can consume their particular customized and personalized opiate of the masses.
They recently managed to crack open the bootloader, most of meta stuff can be bypassed now. I despise how it went from a great device to almost a paperweight with just horrible software updates (as it's the norm these days).
That’s the bootloader of the original Quest
The one that needed it the most. Very excited to see what's going to grow out of this hack
How do they explain why they need your ID to use VR glasses?
Age verification.
Yes but why do you need to verify your age to use computer hardware?
Because people are naive enough to think the huge privacy compromise will be worth the cost to society in order to protect kids.
The better question is why in 5yrs we will have to use ID to buy a product on some random ecommerce site or to play a video game or use Uber or post a comment on Reddit. It will be because people pushed for this for kids on social media and opened the door for the rest of the internet companies to demand it and therefore the government.
I really hate it when some vague "people" are blamed for this bullshit. those who do -- a minority -- do it only because they've been brainwashed by the relentless public opinion campaign ran jointly by the capital and the governments.
No brainwashing needed, the vast majority of people don’t care one bit about privacy
the vast majority of people would object to having a camera in every room of their dwelling. they just don't realize that having spyware on every piece of electronics they own is even worse.
They don’t care. Even if you explain everything in details, in a way they understand. We’ve been having that arguments since 2 decades, it’s now pretty clear they don’t care. They will complain about flock, then 2 minutes after sign up for Muse and share all their personal data with Meta, even if told what that’s used for
They can't stand the idea you'd use it without a social media account. It's Facebook after all.
You shouldn't have to do this and I won't. I'll vote with my dollars and never buy another device from them. It's too bad because I genuinely liked it as well, but it's not worth the invasion of privacy and normalizing sending this type of information to any consumer company.
For the same reason you need to show ID to go into a bar/pub.
Think of the children … or are your a chomo? Now hand over your papers for access to information and communications more that all the books have been fed into the AI shredder and paper and writing instruments were done away with to save the planet.
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Facebook/Meta has a system that decides if it thinks you are lying about your name or if it just isn't sure, if you get flagged for ID verification. These days it might also be because they think you are under 18, but the ID verification system existed long long before age checking.
If you haven't seen it, it's probably because your account is old and they have scraped enough contact lists to believe your name is real.
Odd. I’ve used a fake name with Facebook since about 2009 and now I have a meta quest and they’ve never flagged my account or asked for id verification.
The facebook "Real Name" policy is from like 2013. You just haven't gotten anyone's attention. Not using your real name is against policy and a bannable offense.
Come get me zuck.
You don't need to use a real name on a meta headset. It was decoupled from Facebook years ago.
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What does your state ID have that Facebook can't already get?
I don’t believe Facebook has my full address. Yeah, they could probably get it but that doesn’t mean I want to help them.
I think you're underestimating Facebook if you think they don't know your address.
The aggressive push for ID verification is a direct result of massive government lawsuits regarding online child safety. As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.
Plus they already have all that data... Your ID is not private information. It's an identifier that they don't need or want.
I think the causality is a bit mixed up here given Meta have put millions of dollars into child safety lobbying
What's their motive there?
Smaller entrants to the field cannot as easily comply with the law. It’s about raising barriers to entry. Trust in Meta might be low here, but to the general public, it’s higher than some small startup they’ve never heard of, so they won’t upload their ids there.
I linked to two articles describing Meta's fight to have age verification laws put into place (even before the settlement). The most obvious reason is to try to get some sort of law in place that they believe they can comply with _without_ having to make changes to their algorithms in a way that might hurt their business.
I don't think they particularly _want_ legal id (though maybe they do? who knows)... but it's obviously false that this was caused by the government when Meta itself was lobbying for such laws even before then.
https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
https://thedeepdive.ca/who-pushes-age-verification-bills/
Creates another expensive bar for prospective challengers to clear - regulation nearly always ends up favouring incumbents, especially if they have a hand in shaping it.
I'm honestly not sure. Often when companies lobby for regulation it's to avoid other types of regulation they would find more troublesome. I don't buy the popular narrative that Meta is lobbying for verification laws for the purpose of getting ID data because surely they have a lot of signal there already. At the same time I think it's backwards to say "Meta are behaving this way because of regulation" when they actively lobbied for it.
Obviously, none of us have any proof, but I'm on board with the theory that they've been lobbying for it to push things subtly. Specifically because it looks like a lot of these laws are being made to absolve the person creating the gate of responsibility and liability when the gate is there, even if it fails. The idea of the theory being that if they can push that part in then it's better off for them rather than if it's done in a vacuum where they can end up responsible.
It makes it impossible for anyone except huge existing players to have a legal social network if there are enough hoops to jump through to run one.
Facebook was doing ID checks well before this because they want to stop ban evasion.
ID checks just came to the Quest because they forced facebook accounts which already had ID checks on it. They should never have made facebook accounts mandatory for playing games.
> As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.
Not for allowing you to use your own hardware, what utter nonsense.
It was their choice to forcibly link their hardware to their online account system despite it working fine without it. But it’s absolutely not true that the government requires age verification for using VR goggles.
Yeah, you beat me to this - I laughed at Meta needing any information considering shadow profiles have always existed and every company leaks data like a sieve xD
Upside: the Steam Frame's price is actually pretty competitive now.
Both of which are not appealing at all to the average consumer. Most people have better use for their $1k.
I mean, I'm quipping about it myself, because I personally don't have the space or budget for a VR rig anyway.
But that's different from whether it's important that Facebook has real competition, or that there's now a reference device for not just VR on Linux but a bunch of other compatibility tooling and infrastructure for Linux on ARM specifically.
Even if it tanks, I think the Steam Frame will be a big deal outside of VR, sort of like how if you're on Linux you're probably benefiting from the Steam Deck's existence regardless of whether you own one. (I also don't.)
I'm not sure that I could say that about any of Facebook's headsets. They're big for their niche, but making a Para Para game semi-mainstream isn't really the same magnitude for everyone else as enabling you to play PC games on your phone.
> Steam Frame will be a big deal outside of VR
It's delusional to think people are going to drop $1k on an optional, almost-single-purpose gadget when most don't even spend that much on a laptop.
The only thing people are spending that much on are phones. But that's something people use all the time for years.
Even when the Steam Deck was $319, far more people still bought Switches, of course.
Doesn't matter. Check out Proton's current stats, and see the Deck's impact on everyone who didn't buy one: https://www.protondb.com
Anyone who cares about Windows->Linux compatibility layers, x86 emulation on ARM, or VR will benefit greatly from the Steam Deck/Machine/Frame ecosystem, due largely to Valve's reported 100+ developers they have making open source contributions in applicable areas.
From SteamVR to Mesa to Proton to SteamOS to FEX, Valve's easily one of the most important Linux contributors these days.
> The only thing people are spending that much on are phones. But that's something people use all the time for years.
Phones, that can now run your Steam games through FEX.
That's kind of my point. That this thing is important even if you don't buy one, because everything else that they had to build in order to enable it will trickle out into other places.
I hope one day a version of this becomes mainstream enough that it justifies developing for it. It's the ergonomics that prevent that from happening, and moving toward glasses is one of the most important stepping stones. (though if you saw someone wearing "glasses" like this you would probably say it's stretching the definition of glasses)
When someone gets this right I do think we're all gonna ditch the 2d screens and phones.
It doesn't even matter if it's Meta that instigates this, if money is smelled there will be more consumer friendly alternatives popping up overnight (e.g. see how quickly the industry copied the iPhone).
Some of the key specs cause the page is rather thin on details:
* Display Type: Micro-OLED
* Resolution: 2412 × 2288 pixels per eye
* Angular Resolution: 37 PPD
* Field of View: 70° × 66°
* Chipset: Snapdragon Reality Elite
* Memory & Storage: 12GB RAM with 128GB internal storage (expandable up to 1TB via microSD on the puck)
* Tracking & Sensors: 6DoF positional tracking, depth sensing, autofocus, 4-camera eye tracking, face tracking, and hand tracking
* Passthrough: Color RGB passthrough cameras at 26 PPD
* Price: $ 1300,- USD plus your data
Similar PPD to an AVP at, what I as a former owner of one (alongside a Quest 2 and 3, a Magic Leap, Xreal and Viture) would call is a far more appealing implementation for actual productive work.
Really wish Apple had gone down this route, have the puck incorporate an A series chip rather than shoving a M series one into the headset itself and heck, I could see such a design being doable for them back when they first launched the AVP if they hadn't forced that utterly ridiculous eye display and stupendously heavy metal body.
There is, unless I am mistaken, nothing here that isn't established technology as found in the AVP, all the fancy display and lens experiments from Starburst, over Holocake to Mirror Lake seem to remain in the lab, this seems to be "just" pancake lenses plus Micro-OLED once more.
70 degree FOV is such a deal breaker for gaming. That and the price. In a world where people already have tons of screens, monitors and TVs in their face - the practical use case for this is relegated to trains and planes. Very niche.
The form factor itself is also a killer. Couldn't imagine doing anything besides using it as large private display for 2D games. You aren't going to be moving your head around quickly with just pressure on your temples to hold it in place.
Not sure where this lands functionality wise. I feel like it's most direct competition would be as a cheaper Apple Vision. You would need to pair it off with a Windows system for heavier productivity work most likely. Even though their OS is "android", it doesn't have the Google ecosystem behind it, let alone matured on that front. Media consumption on the go seems to be the other use case.
So, compare them to either XREALs plugged into a laptop/phone, or Apple Vision Pro I guess.
What's worse is that, due to the motion tracking many of these devices have, you often have to enter a travel mode that disables some of the better features.
exactly i dont see the appeal or use cases other than planes or trains and stuff.
meanwhile the Bigscreen Beyond 2:
* Display: also micro-OLED
* Resolution: 2560 x 2560 per eye
* Angular resolution: 32 PPD
* Field of view: 116°D, 108°H x 96°V
* Chipset: none lol plugs into your computer
* Tracking and sensors: needs base stations
* Weight: 107 g
* Passthrough: no
* Price: $959 (+$200 for eye tracking)
* needs base stations, a PC, and has a cable, and looks kinda like dorky swim goggles (but still pretty futuristic and cool)
meanwhile the Steam Frame:
* Display: LCD
* Resolution: 2160 x 2160 per eye
* Angular resolution: 20
* Field of view: 110 degrees
* Chipset: Snapdragon 8 gen 3
* Memory and storage: 16GB of ram with 256GB UFS plus microSD
* Tracking and sensors: inside out camera based tracking
* Weight: 185 g core headset, 440 g including strap, rear battery, facial interface, and audio
* Passthrough: idk
* Price: $1059 for 256GB, $1299 for 1TB
Steam Frame has black and white passthrough but it's not good enough for AR. They sell a third party's passthrough camera as an add-on though which is $130 I think and clips on the front. Since the Frame runs open Linux with KDE this is really interesting to me.
With bigscreen you also need to have 2-3 tracking stations ($500-750) with stands (another $100) you need to setup everywhere you want to use it.
I have to point out that all of these are terrible options for the general mass who are remotely interested in VR. If you are an enthusiastic who don't mind dropping $1000 on something completely optional to your everyday life, great, but otherwise they are terrible in value considering what they provide.
> would call is a far more appealing implementation
Said the guy who has not checked this thing for head-turn-to-pixels-changed latency. That is the one metric that nobody has approached the AVP on -- the one that keeps me (and many others) from being nauseous.
There was mention of a DisplayPort, so is there a way to just stream your MacBook into it?
Closing the lid and working in one of these would be great, but there's always a caveat that blocks this.
You can, but the FOV is narrow so not great for multiple screens, and the focal length is probably around 4 ft so you're not going to be able to use a screen closer without eye strain.
The Quest series supports both wired and wireless streaming, so I'd be surprised if that wasn't an option.
From my experience, wired streaming never really worked well even with the expensive fiber optic cable.
How is it powered? External battery? Or what's the built in battery life like?
Battery and computer puck. There are photos on the site
I somehow missed the pics where one of the arms had a cable attached to a battery
"100 grams" is the headline here
I can't help but feel like all the tech glasses are basically a way to get more ai training data where they can get like a constant stream of human POV stuff.
Proton published an article on that topic recently https://proton.me/blog/meta-smart-glasses-ai-robots
You should look up the story behind Pokemon Go.
The battery life on these devices is way too low for that
Ah! That's actually exactly why I don't use WhatsApp, Google, etc anymore.
When Meta bought Oculus a decade ago I though "why the heck are they buying this VR company..." which prompted me to read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2018 Shoshana Zuboff's book.
The idea is precisely that they don't need more of the same data, they have enough (even though they do need to keep them up to date) but they instead need more KINDS of data to keep on earning money from selling ads.
They don't care for the technology itself, only for ways to distinguish needs better and that's exactly what a new digital medium provides.
TL;DR: yes.
This is very cool. We finally have something that genuinely looks like glasses.
Now someone just needs to learn how to hack into these glasses remotely…and then we will have the Ghost in the Shell moment.
"we finally have something ..." maybe do a search first.
Ah my mind is lagging behind…
If Apple released a product with the same form factor, it would likely be a winner. The issue with Meta is that its brand is tarnished for anyone older than Gen Alpha. I don’t have hard data, but I am guessing the majority of VR users are children under their parents’ meta accounts.
I’m still buying this for myself. I enjoy the private movie theater experience and turning every video game session into a decent cardio workout; I’ve lost 60 lbs with VR to date.
What are you doing in VR for fitness?
The list is too long, but essentially almost every VR game will force you to move since you’re no longer controlling an avatar with buttons. You are now inside the game instead of viewing it from outside of a box, so you’re going to be moving and punching.
For me the biggest calorie burners are boxing games. Beat Saber and others like Synth Riders are great too. Then there are fitness focus apps like Body Combat and even one for rowing machines.
Hopefully, Meta can convince HR firms that this is a fitness device that is eligible for FSA like benefits.
Not sure how to date this list is, but here is one way to look at it. https://vrhealth.institute/vr-ratings/
I have found VR an easy way to get moving in a fun/low friction way at the end of the day, instead of heading somewhere else. Depending on what you are doing, it isn't going to cover everything, but moving something is better than nothing.
Personally, I found Synth Riders a good way to queue up 60min continous activity that I enjoy.
Over the last years, being "online" has become so stressful and toxic that I just don't want to spend much time there anymore. 2016 me would be ecstatic about this product. 2026 me just want to be in the real world.
You just have to put a bit of effort into curating what your online experience looks like.
How?
Not the parent commenter but I've found RSS feeds have replaced most of my desire to browse reddit, and other social media. You can even paste a YouTube channel into a feed reader to get a true channel subscriptions feed.
For starters, don't let other people control your diet of information. So get off social media, where random algorithmic feeds serve you slop you didn't ask for.
Instead, pick out your own internet information diet. Make it a project. If you're not afraid to use AI, it can help with this tremendously.
Then you need to build habits that replace your unhealthy browsing with healthy browsing. IMO it's best to just install tools that make it difficult or even impossible to do the unhealthy browsing.
I love social media, it's so much fun. The algorithms are awesome.
Then stay, if you're enjoying it! If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Install Cold Turkey site blocker; block all social media channels with a slop "feed". (Facebook, instagram, reddit, etc.)
Youtube subs only to Science, History, Cozy content. Aggressively unfollow click bait.
Discord only with close personal friends who are chill.
Play single player games, or multiplayer games only with close personal friends.
The internet doesn't have to connect you with hordes of terminally online droolers.
He's the only one on the couch. The only one at the sports game. The only one at the movie theatre.
At the office, it was nice to see him put the glasses down and shake hands with the person who rocked up. If that person had arrived 'in VR' I think I would have been completely turned off.
I guess if you want to be alone, it's a good device -- but the best times for me with modern technology have been when it brings me closer to other people. Online games were better on LAN. Couch co-op as a genre is one of the best console experiences I think. Meeting people in real life, who I spoke to on IRC -- again, a great moment.
I'm not anti-tech, and the device form factor sure looks amazing -- but I can't imagine any moment I would use something like this at home while anyone else in my house was here.
The shared anchor tech exists and its honestly pretty awesome to play a shared XR game but with the cost and install base of these devices, you really can't invest in developing those types of things. Too bad because even a shared XR paint prototype is cool.
I think it's what makes the form factor doubly important. Not just for comfort, but because if your visor is just a pair of glasses you can wear it and remove it in a second and with just one hand, without even thinking. This easiness removes a lot of the feeling of isolation.
The other fundamental thing for me is to have visors that seamlessly and by default connect to the nearby ones so that experiences are shared.
>I guess if you want to be alone
Probably a good bet looking at the numbers: https://www.readers.id/en/global-studies-reveal-post-pandemi...
>Couch co-op as a genre is one of the best console experiences
This! And it isn't close either.
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$1300 for 70° × 66° FOV is pretty awful. Also, I wish they'd stop hyping these devices for productivity when they know the text isn't sharp enough. This will be good for watching stuff and that's about it. Is it good enough at that to justify tethering yourself to a brick? I suspect not for $1300.
I'm in VR a lot, mostly in bigscreen VR, and have had the Quest, Quest 2, and Quest 3. I don't see any reason to upgrade from the latter at all.
I use the Apple Vision Pro as my main display, programming for 8+ hours per day. Zero issues as long as you're willing to use larger screens! The PPD on this looks very similar, possibly a bit better due to its lower FOV.
But won't the low FOV make it impossible to glance at other displays, even if the text is sharp enough?
> Also, I wish they'd stop hyping these devices for productivity when they know the text isn't sharp enough.
Agreed. When I tried the Apple Vision Pro, I was a little disappointed at the PPD (which is like, 34 to Quest's 25 or so), didn't expect to still be so sensitive to it.
The text should be sharp enough on this one. It's sharper than Vision Pro and Bigscreen.
These Meta “VR Glasses” seem suspiciously like AR glasses. They even used an image of a game rendered on an AR screen for their “VR” game section.
Yeah, I'm not sure why they're calling it that. XR glasses, maybe, but not VR if you can't actually have any immersion.
I think they're calling them "VR" because they use camera pass-through for AR, whereas all their other AR products are see-through. (I think this is a reasonable place to draw the line - pass-through AR kind of sucks in my experience. Although maybe a third category would be appropriate.)
I know the AVP is flawed - way too heavier - but Apple’s the only company I trust… enough. I’d never consider a product from Meta.
I've been in this space since Oculus DK1.
I've yet to see the first use case that makes it more than a party trick.
I tried pushing it for 3D configurators during sales, but sales people hate it with reason: you're missing out on the buyer's reaction and it breaks the sales journey.
As long as we can't see the user's eyes etc this will flop.
Neat demo video, but I see that gaming was not a focus, which is a shame because the reduced weight would be great in that regard. The reduced FOV, not so much though...
I have a Quest 2, and I only held off on getting a Quest 3 because I don't want to keep giving money to Meta unless they made something game-changing.
Given that rhythm games are the primary purpose of my Quest 2, I think this settles me on the Steam Frame as my next headset. It runs Linux and plays games I already own.
Unfortunately, the "watch movies one inch from your eyeballs", or "block out the world at a coffee shop to check your email", or "emotionlessly watch basketball in the middle of the court" are not good selling points for me.
Still same problem all VR has -- no killer use case. Outside of the problem that it is Meta doing this, the product in and of itself isn't that great. Ask all Quest users if they still use it all the time.... most of the oculus's are just collecting dust.
Some future date we will get there, but this isn't it.
I’d really like to use it as an extended monitor for work. The problem with previous versions has been inability for me to see my own keyboard or even inability to easily mirror laptop screens. This looks like it could do that.
Depends on how the device gets data from your computer and how it connects. My Xreal Ones present themselves as a monitor via DP Alt mode when I plug them into my work laptop, switch to ultrwide mode (32:9 is my fav), and I'm done.
To use most VR headsets that are also standalone devices, I would start by fighting with IT on getting some kind of security exception to use the necessary software on my laptop, then get started with streaming/connecting/sharing screens with it. Hopefully.
These finally have enough resolution to comfortably replace regular displays for productivity work, surrounding you with as many monitors as you want. Better PPD than Vision Pro, in a much better form factor. Apparently it supports DisplayPort over USB-C as well. I think they will sell a lot of these.
They should sell it to Apple. I wouldn't buy this from Meta, but I would buy it from Apple.
I'd guess Apple are already hard at work making something similar and better than this.
They probably are, but this is what vision Pro should have been. It seems that Apple are behind. By months? By years?
In any case, that transaction is not going to happen because Zuck thinks he can actually make it work. It's just what I think they should do.
You would pay three times as much for the same product?
Presumably Apple could do it cheaper than Meta, since they could assume higher volume and are more valued by suppliers.
I'm not going to buy it from Meta, but what I'm saying is that at the same price I would buy it from Apple. I'm far from the only one.
> Presumably Apple could do it cheaper than Meta, since they could assume higher volume and are more valued by suppliers.
They theoretically could, but they would never do it, as we see with the Vision Pro, which is, apart from being far heavier, also far more expensive.
Depends on why you think the Vision Pro is so expensive. Maybe they just wanted extremely thick margins and to not sell many, but I'm guessing that they were actually trying. They could have called it a dev kit, but the indications are that they are trying to sell to consumers.
These look like cool technology but coming from Meta is an absolute deal-breaker for me.
What are best competing products? My use cases would be productivity and watching movies; gaming, not so much.
With a 70x66 degree FOV, how is that Rogue One footage not false advertising? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyD_bmMy5nQ
They really try hard to hide the tether, it almost looks like it was added back in to the video afterwards.
Yes, when the guy takes the device off to greet the person, good luck seeing any cable. It's magic!
In America you can say and show basically whatever you want.
"Puffery" has made a mockery of the concept of truth in advertising. Judges will bend over backwards to insist that no "reasonable person" would assume that image is representative.
An additional factor is that the American consumer is just absurdly stupid and easy to take advantage of. If you put "No growth hormones" on your chicken you sell more, even though you also have to write "No chickens in the US can use growth hormones" right next to it!
"Made with 100% Real Cheese" is top line marketing in this world. It's pathetic.
After the "metaverse" hype of 5 years ago, VR clearly hasn’t really taken off.
I’ve personally always thought the headsets were simply too clunky, which puts off the average person from trying them, due to the hassle (and price).
This new design from Meta is the first I’ve seen that feels like something more people would actually want to try. Perhaps VR isn’t dead — maybe it’s just lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right hardware tech to bring it to the masses.
This as a fully open source device or at least from a company worth trusting would be a great product.
SteamFrame it is! As far as I can tell the SteamFrame lets you install a different OS.
Yeah I would love this form factor with Linux drivers…
I really hope they’ll care a little more about using this for productivity. I wish the quest 3s would work offline eg. on a plane as my external monitor for my MacBook.
In the keynote they said it supports DisplayPort over USB-C, so this should work great.
Yeah infinite office was vaporware, which made sense since prior meta device video res and ppd was too low for work.
Meta? No.
And if you use any Meta thingy close to me, get ready for a fight.
We need to face Meta with the same fear we face Flock. They're equally dangerous.
I get that there are people who are into this stuff, but honestly, I can't think of a single use for myself, unless the movie watching experience is really, really good.
I'm never going to wear a thing like this in public, and at home, I have my laptop and TV. The TV I'm usually watching with someone else, and this is worse than the laptop...so what's my use case?
hmm.. does this mean that the next version of apple vision pro will be spectacular?
Spring 2027 is eternity in the future from today. I love the concept they advertise but by then, there will be so many amazing products and releases.
If they could give me this today and worked somewhat like they promise, even though for $500 or so I can get glasses that do what I need them to do today, for more fidelity I would gladly pay 1k+ they are asking.
I am not sure what will happen till Spring or Summer next year.
Now when I saw their video... ufff, not for me.
I tried VR and, as many others have said, it's a novelty that wears thin quickly.
I'm amazed though at the amount of effort and corporate money that keeps being thrown at VR trying to make it a thing.
It feels like, to the public, it's like some tired The Beverly Hillbillies re-run that keeps popping up from time to time.
I no longer bother watching movies or shows on my (very big) TV ever since I got an AVP. The experience (lying down on my bed, with gigantic movie screen floating above me) is unmatched.
For that use case, why would you choose wearing anything over just having a couple of projectors in the bedroom and living room? That is far more common than owning a vision pro because it's cheaper, more comfortable, more social, etc.
On the audio end of this, you can even throw in some properly righteous speakers in both rooms. All combined, this is still cheaper than or equal to the vision pro price for an objectively better movie experience. The projector image will always be bigger than your TV and speakers that expensive will rattle the walls with bass and shatter your eardrums. It doesn't matter how good earbuds get, there's no replacement for displacement (of air). Don't you like feeling the power?
> a couple of projectors… it’s cheaper
I’m not saying AVP is cheap, I’m saying visually it’s better.
> more comfortable
Nothing could be more comfortable than lying flat on bed with head propped up just a bit, and screen floating at 45 degrees in front of me, which I can easily reposition and resize to perfectly hit my FOV.
> more social
Heh, I’m not looking to socialize while enjoying a movie at home
The only way a physical setup would win is righteous speakers. I suppose I could connect physical speakers, but that breaks the awesome immersion of enjoying a movie in perfect (to the rest of my family) silence.
But really all I can say is that the visual experience and physical comfort (when lying down) of a movie on AVP is unparalleled, and this is not at all why I bought it, and it’s probably something one really has to experience to understand.
I sometimes wish that I could read a book like that. But I think the reality is that it would make me tired and fall asleep.
The only thing I've consistently used VR on is virtual biking/walking videos for when I'm on my exercise bike, and a Google VR app called Wander. I don't have the space for anything that can't be done sitting down and I don't have the memory to run VR Chat.
I agree it's a novelty, it's never going to be the mainstream thing that replaces all existing interfaces and transforms the very concept of reality like some people want it to be. But it is fun within its niche.
I think what's holding it back is price more than anything. I'm still hanging on to my Quest because it just isn't worth the money for me to upgrade, even though half the apps no longer even work (fuck you very much DeoVR.)
I was just thinking, I hope meta/apple are hooking up with companies like Peloton, etc for cycling and rowing experiences
The younger generation uses VR a lot. It's like Nintendo in the 80s.
Who?
I have a teenager and a 9 year old and I've never heard this from anyone.
I think nintendo for that generation is nintendo switch. Or roblox.
Adults understand the Switch because it’s familiar, but they didn’t understand the NES because it wasn’t familiar (Atari was a failure)
One of the big complaints of online VR games is that it’s overrun by Gen Alpha children. The only mystery is why meta keeps targeting adults instead of Gen Alpha. It’s a marketing strategy that has already failed multiple times now. Judging from most of the comments here, it will continue to fail. IMO only Apple can breakthrough to adults and even they failed with AVP.
I actually realized that I did see kids on social VR games when I experimented with VR a few years ago. But no kids I've known or heard about in real life have seemingly used VR.
Somebody cited Gorilla Tag. I looked it up and it has 3 million monthly actives. I don't know how that measures for an online game, but that is pretty small for a social network. Roblox is at least 100x that.
Gorilla Tag alone has millions of monthly active users.
3 million. Roblox apparently has about 380m.
Must be younger than my (20's) daughters then. Their crowd would rather touch grass.
I'm sure they touch their phones a million times more than grass.
They dumb down their phones.
Touching grass is actually not that good for you. You get itchy or could have an allergic reaction.
Virtual reality grass is much safer, maybe that's what he meant?
Touch glass
It's a novelty because you had to put on a big uncomfortable headset that required wires up until recently went was really fidgety. Once you get the form factor fixed and comfortable everything will change. This looks like a big step in that direction. Too bad I don't want Meta looking through my eyes.
> Once you get the form factor fixed and comfortable everything will change
Will it? Even if you offer people AR glasses and smartphones at the same price, I'd expect most people to pick the phone. Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.
The VR/AR modality struggles when OEMs rely on unique native experiences as a selling point. There's no "killer app" for VR a even decade after the original Oculus DTK. Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.
> Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.
Nobody used their cell phone to take pictures, that's what a camera is for! And music came from a Walkman. But then the iPhone came out, and the rest is history. A pair of glasses that takes pictures could very well be the future. We won't know until after it's happened though.
No, actually people were taking photos the very second phones had cameras added, which was well before smartphones. I have photographic proof
Because the camera you have in your pocket right now was always better than the one you left at home.
People abandoned laptops as a primary computing platform for phones with small screens because the "masses" prefer convenience above anything else. Those phones eventually increased their screen size, but never got to laptop size of course.
People don't want to have to put on a headset to doomscroll.
I was going to say - you can't retcon feature phones to claim that camera phones and MP3 player functionality didn't exist. It did, and it was super popular!
VR/AR is not a "faster horses" problem. It's a "buy my 40-foot-tall horse with 9 legs" one. The market has several high-quality headsets to choose from, and none of them are selling like hotcakes. The people have spoken, even at $1,300 I expect Meta's glasses to be a flop.
You'd use it in conjunction with a phone, just like a smart watch. It wouldn't replace your phone.
Smart watches aren't particularly popular, even at the sub-smartphone price point.
Not sure where you live but everyone is wearing them in LA. And they are super popular in China, especially among children who use them in place of a phone.
I don't live in LA. People without a smartwatch outnumber smartwatch owners 50:1 here in the sticks, as far as I can tell.
> Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.
I too once abandoned a bowl of cereal for a steak dinner, but that says nothing about the quality of the cereal.
Luckey owned a cereal bar. He sold it to Zuck, who spent $46 billion and a business rebrand trying to make breakfast compete with dinner.
You could be right. But I also keep hearing that excuse (since the Jaron Lanier, power-glove VR days) so color me skeptical.
It really is a joke. Where are my AR contact lenses? It's 2026 for fuck's sake.
There's plenty of reason to still be skeptical about the future of VR, or Meta's practices, but shoving all of that aside it does look like a big step toward the level of comfort that's going to be needed for VR to succeed. Not at this price point, but it's incremental progress.
Blog post: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-meta-vr-glasse...
you can't touch type without any tactile feedback. you just can't. there's no way to position your hands correctly relative to a keyboard you can't feel. that part of the "productivity" demo drives me bananas.
I see Disney+ 3D videos featured pretty heavily on the landing page.
I believe that launched as an Apple exclusive. I wonder if that means the millions of Oculus Quest headsets that have been gathering dust for years will finally have some immersive content worth watching.
As long as this is mixed reality and not a clunky VR-only headset like the previous Meta Quest devices, then this far exceeds what ever the Vision Pro hype was and any other XR device in the market.
This is XR for the rest of us and a worthy competitor to the Xreal.
Not sure what you mean. The marketing video shows pancake optical stacks and specs have mentioned OLED displays. While the marketing video attempts to play up an immersive fantastical reality, the experience will function like a Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro, where there are external cameras that then get projected onto the internal screens.
Shame that it's Meta. Radioactive to all but the most sycophantic.
Steam Frame is the one you want.
Why? I'm under the impression that all VR products are shit. At least metas seem to be departing from the very boring gamer space.
It's so sad that Meta of all companies is leading this space.
Cool! Can I use them without any meta or facebook account?
After my experience with the Quest 3's software, I'm not really interested in anything Meta. That's ignoring the privacy issues and other issues with Meta as a company.
I'm not a fan on Meta at all, but so glad that they did this to challenge Apple and hopefully would be able to keep on improving far better than Apple.
That external compute block it comes with looks pretty chonky...
Reminds me of the Immersed team’s Visor vaporware.
I wonder why Apple did not do the same thing?
Shove all of the compute in the external unit, instead of having all of that weight in your face.
a few things id want from a product like this
1) Blackout. Let me use them as a way to get complete pitch black when i want it 2) Amazing resolution. None of the existing products are good enough to replace my physical screens, but i'd love to. 3) Comfortable. Nothing has been comfortable enough to wear long term. Sure maybe an hour or two, but 8-10 hrs a day for work? Not even close.
Hope they get there someday.
1. It has an optional light blocker. 2. Better resolution than Vision Pro. 3. Should be the most comfortable VR device ever. Seems like it's addressing your concerns.
yet to be proven imo..
Unfortunately the appeal for these glasses has dropped once someone dubbed them, "pervert glasses" and it stuck around.
That's not even the same product line...
Really lacking demo videos from the wearer's PoV.. wonder why.
Can't wait for a competitor to release a similar product so I can try it out!
It looks like a hardware, but I’ll never buy it because it’s associated with Meta. They have lost my privacy trust.
It will be interesting to see how this product is differentiated from the Meta Ray Ban Display. They now have the line up:
Meta Ray Ban Audio
Meta Ray Ban Display
Meta VR Glasses
Meta Quest 3
This feels closer to the quest 3, so maybe consider it a successor in a way? Since meta is moving away from VR gaming, it may end up cannibalizing sales in a "good" way for the company.
On the bottom of the page it says they are called:
and Which really grinds my OCD.Anyone know the resolution?
I have Xreal airs. And, while, I like them, they’re rather useless because 1080p just isn’t enough.
2412 x 2288 per eye (and horizontal FoV is around 70 degrees). Not sure it's really enough for monitor replacement, but certainly an upgrade over Xreal's offerings.
Meta could have something great, but I fear they will stand in their way. I have the oakley meta glasses, and the quality of the camera and sound is fantastic. But the software is horrible. It's a walled garden where only Meta-friends are allowed to play. So, Spotify yes, Tidal, Deezer or others, No. It supports Garmin, but not Corros, Suunto or Polar.
If they had the courage to open up their plattform for external developers like Apple or Android (not even talking about open APIs), they could have an amazing ecosystem. Currently, it feels like a car with a stuck handbrake.
That is what meta says they want, but their glasses are accessories on apples computer for now. Vr is more open you can sideload your own apks
Suddenly only positive comments in a Meta thread. As Musk would say: Hmm.
And still capturing audio where (in my state) you can't record conversations without consent?
> And still capturing audio where
This may come as a surprise, but most phones can capture audio these days. Has your state made them illegal yet?
Not yet! although its not legal to do so.
Sounds like you shouldn't use them in your state then? You can't open carry in my state... so I don't.
$1,299 - is expensive (I am not comparing with Apple vision pro) for a general consumer.
why did I get downvoted? for sharing my honest opinion?
FYI when Apple Vision Pro was announced plenty of posts were downvoted for perfectly legit doubts/criticism that proved to be correct
> Stream hundreds of games with XBOX Cloud Gaming
This might be the killer app if latency is low enough.
I do admire mark's tenacity
When Orion was first revealed two years ago people figured they'd be able to reduce the bulk over time and release them in a form approaching regular glasses, like Meta Ray Bans. Now they've somehow become bigger and more VR headset-like? How is this tech going backwards?
37 PPD is dogshit man.
I understand this is quite good, but I also have something like 20/12.5 eyesight. To me, using these things feels like looking through a coarse screen door.
E: For reference, I can comfortably count pixels on a 24.5" 1080p screen from a normal seated position.
I've been buying HMDs since the first Oculus, and I promptly sell them to somebody else. 37 PPD is a little more than halfway to "perfect" for someone with 20/20 eyesight
It is all a compromise. 37 PPD is well under the standard for normal "good" eyesight (aka. "retina" in Apple marketing), which is 60 (aka. 1 arcminute).
Doing more with a narrower field of view is easy, it is even cheaper. Doing more with the same or better field of view means you need more pixels and more computing power to drive them, so more expensive, heavier hardware that gets hotter and with less battery life.
People at Meta consitered 37 PPD to be a good compromise, and I kind of agree.
The compromise is forced by the current cost of denser panels above anything else.
This is mostly driven by the fact that even in the current optimal case where they can maintain the number of defective pixels per panel, multiplying the number of pixels tanks bins. And then the follow on effects of longevity based on heat/brightness vs refresh rate, which improves generation over generation much faster than the former. The shit they're doing to print OLED panels out like an inkjet is exciting because once it gets good enough they will no longer need to write off the failures and will be able to selectively remove or overwrite the defects, which is not something that can usefully be done with other screen types.
The operation of switching the pixels themselves becomes increasingly inexpensive as they get smaller. For a long time the biggest barrier holding progress back was consistently and reliably being able to deliver smaller and more precise voltage swings. Almost all of the increased power consumption comes from either how much less backlight can make it through (which also becomes heat, this is already enough of a problem that certain display types include a separate extremely tiny panel that sits there and displays nothing so that they can be measured to adjust the voltage levels and termination resistances), or how bright each individual pixel can be. That's why the first 6? generations of OLED panels have so many wacky and (IMHO goddamn abhorrent) arrangements of R/G/B/W shapes and subpixels.
I was vaguely okay with this when they started doing things like including yellow/magenta subpixels on TVs but anything other than a square pixel aspect ratio for computers is so gross. Even if you're willing to ignore the fringing or outright cannot see it, I can still tell one generation of iPhone apart from another consistently in books.app with the smallest white on black text, the leading/trailing edges of the letters have different rainbows.
And displaying fractionally lower resolutions onto high dpi displays does not incur much of a cost at all, retina displays existing at all on mobile phones is proof of this.
Apple used to be great when it comes to text, but lately their policy has been to use the worst possible software implementation and hope there's enough pixels to make it work.
In other words I bet that subpixel-aware or even just pixel-shape-aware text rendering could avoid that fringing but they don't want to bother.
Notably the standard resolution of 96 DPI at 28 inches is 47 PPD.
Just give yourself time and you’ll be the target customer then!
About that, a well known problem in VR is that all current headsets have a fixed focal, usually optimized for long distances. The problem is that if you are showing something at a short distance, the eyes will then adjust the focus based on that distance, which is not what the headset shows, so it will look blurry. That's why it is hard to read a book in VR.
Several solutions have been proposed, like varying the focal mechanically based on where you are looking (Varifocal, see Half Dome prototype). There are some others, but the simplest solution is to get old!
With age comes presbyopia, which is the inability for the eye to focus on short distances, bad in real life, great in VR! Because the inability of your eyes and your headset to adjust focus cancel out!
37PPD is triple the Index’s density.
What in the world are you using as your benchmark to call 37 “dogshit”?
Probably comparing something like a normal monitor at standard distance.
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The are quite careful from what angle they show the headset
Can't wait for literally any other company to make this!
And a more hackable device.
Same. Not touching anything Meta.
So these are not actually "VR", right? They are the same fixed projected display cinema glasses that you can buy from half a dozen different brands today?
Would like to have something like this, but will be Meta locked-in and die soon after it turns out only influencers seem to have fun with it
Recently, Meta closed my account, along with access to all my Meta Quest games, because I didn't verify my age in time. Because the account is closed, I can’t even contact support. I received a few emails about age verif. but first, I don’t want to provide my ID everywhere, and second, why automatically close an account with all my purchases on it? Why can't you wait until I log in? Super frustrating / terrible company.
Anyone else notice Zuckerberg say "Super Intelligence" multiple times during the Meta Connect keynote?
They've been using that branding since last June (with the reorg into "Meta Superintelligence Labs"), for better or worse.
oh man playing halo and jumping off the ship and falling through the sky will feel insane with this i imagine. i just hope people have enough open space around them when enjoying the limitless expansion of VR world. DOnt want people to hurt their knees and heads and knock off their furnitures all the time.
two weeks ago I basically punched my coffee table while trying to stab a guy on the floor in VR. My left hand still hurts.
So yeah, be careful of the play area. :)
Obligatory subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/VRtoER/
Why does every headshot of someone in a VR headset make them look like a dope?
I can and do wear my meta glasses in public. There's no way I can ever wear this in public
still worried about how much data this thing will collect about you
Too bad the software is going to be dogshit. Maybe it'll work in the beginning when they need to show it off to people a lot but will degrade into an absolute dumpster fire later. Like happened with Quest3. Or their sunglasses.
I had Meta Raybans for a while and liked them. Always refusing firmware updates. Everything I needed worked fine, normal headset for listening podcasts on walks, taking occasional picture, that's all I need! In this use case battery lasted a week outside of its case. Until recently it started prompting me with voice to update the glasses urgently every half an hour. And I did (to version 128, hey, even number!) and oh boy, Meta AI this Meta AI that everything is Meta AI can't do anything without it. Battery is drained in less than a day of me not wearing them, bluetooth audio breaks up all the time, connection getting lost. I was perfectly happy with the product and they had to ruin it to shove their AI garbage down my throat.
They recently added Meta AI sidebar to WhatsApp which you can't turn off.
So, hope you like Mark's AI because you'll sure have to use it with these.
Same thing happened to my Sony earbuds. A firmware update bricked both of them
Unfortunately, Meta's horrendous privacy policies precludes me from even considering purchasing one of their headsets.
Now this just makes me sad that Apple gave up on the lighter Vision Pro. I might actually use this... if it had a real OS
Well I can appreciate continued VR development is it good thing in general, you couldn't fucking pay me to use anything from Facebook/Meta at this point. They need to be starved of attention until their doors close for good.
I might try it for work if it weren't made by meta.
Meta VR Glasses... and where they will be banned next!
I'm more excited for the new Snap Specs. I want to see devs get on with exploring the possibilities of a decently capable set of AR glasses.
Bonus: No Facebook BS.
I had the oculus rift, sold it when they made me get a Facebook account (they might have backtracked on that). Bought a quest 2 thinking surely they have learned their lesson by now.
Nope.
Some of the decisions they made around ux are so insane I feel like ripping it off and throwing it across the room. I bet there are some properly talented people at meta, but someone senior is committed to making it suck. Wouldn't be surprised if it's zuck himself. So even though I'm passionate about it, I have no VR in my life because I can't afford another one
Very disappointing FOV specs for PCVR simulation fans (70 degrees: a downgrade from Quest 3). Looks like nice hardware though.
We’re upgrading from Pervert Glasses to Pervert Goggles, huh?
I think I am still going to stick with the Steam Frame lmao
Meta is back with another thing no one asked for
~ 65% of steam VR devices are from Meta:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Yes, because an entry price of $400 (just don't read the ToS) has no competition.
These are not $400 and therefore have competition. They also don't seem to be that great for gaming, because they have an exceptionally low FOV.
Smoked Metas
Looks fun, but it'll most probably need a Meta account, won't run open firmware, and most importantly wearing it in public instead of using my MacBook will make me look like an idiot. So: meh.
Although looking like an idiot is probably better than being one of those Meta Glasses perverts
Yuck.
erberg
i am going to buy this and root the shit (meta) out of it
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I'm sorry, just no. They look ridiculous.
It's essentially a cheaper and lighter AVP without the Apple ecosystem. There's nothing revolutionary about this device.
Every time a major tech company comes out with a new headset, I check one thing: Does it have a light field display? (In this case, no it doesn't.) In 5-10 years, headsets are going to be much better. Your eyes will be able to focus on objects like they do in real space and you won't have to deal with the hassle of an external battery.
"lighter" is the revolutionary bit.
A huge impediment to VR uptake is having to go through the process of strapping a brick to one's face.
This isn't quite the "just putting on a pair of glasses" experience, but it's much closer to that than the former.
Its lighter form factor is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The AVP has some unnecessary extras such as the outward-facing display. If Apple wanted, it could make an Apple Vision Air with the latest A-series chip, a much lighter form factor and a much lower price - just like Meta VR Glasses.
More compact lenses are a constant improvement, but one of the main things here is just moving compute and power off of your head. Which many have done before.
Honestly I don't know why that's not more common. I've used puck-based ones, they're great - far less heat and mass on your face is a major benefit. They're also usually easier to plan upgrades for, as the two most costly pieces (which do very different things and have very different progress cycles) are separated.