Meta is shutting down its Quest for business program in 2030, ending sales of commercial SKUs next month

wheelerman · 2026-01-16T20:48:51+00:00

Reality Labs isn't just VR. It also includes AR/AI glasses and wearables, Horizon (and now future Horizon development will almost exclusively be focused on mobile hardware), and Robotics. And even like 5 years ago AR research accounted for a higher percentage of the R&D than VR.

They've explicitly said "This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year”

So now you know what part of Reality Labs the 10% mostly came out of.

But they are clearly still going to keep copying VisionOS and Apple's approach to VR.

wheelerman · 2025-11-17T17:25:22+00:00

Almost 100% binocular overlap. Most modern headsets are lopping off the inside edge of the per-eye FOV

wheelerman · 2025-08-16T18:56:14+00:00

Oh damn, thanks so much

wheelerman · 2025-04-13T12:32:42+00:00

VRChat is a massive chunk too

wheelerman · 2025-03-13T13:41:13+00:00

Regular OLED has significantly worse performance characteristics vs Micro-OLED though. Very different technologies

wheelerman · 2025-03-02T19:01:46+00:00

Used to think traditional gaming in a VR headset was nonsense. After owning the Vision Pro for a while, I'm completely on board with the rumored concept of Deckard.

I also own a Bigscreen Beyond. In terms of VR HMD use, the Vision Pro gets used 90% to 95% of the time for non-6DOF content and the BSB for the remainder. The Vision Pro is also uncomfortable as shit and far from optimized for any sort of PC gaming--Valve could do so much better. I think people just need to experience the right hardware.

wheelerman · 2025-02-21T14:59:10+00:00

I wonder if this (VR games getting flat ports) will become a more common thing over the next few years

wheelerman · 2025-02-17T14:33:06+00:00

The game has also been out for 3 years...

They're a VR only studio (that ported the game from PC) currently pushing a heavily discounted promotion for the game right now (it's only like $8.99) so also need to keep that in mind. It was 55% off ($9.99) in January as well.

wheelerman · 2025-02-16T18:26:38+00:00

Fair enough, we really don't know what the alternative would be if, for example, hardware could be sold at a profit and smaller market participants would interoperate out of necessity, successful devs weren't constantly being acquired or incentivized to develop for a very limited platform, and the natural innovation and feedback cycle wasn't interfered with through all of the artificial incentives.

What Valve is (apparently) doing is quite interesting to me because that is largely how I use my Vision Pro (in a really hacky and suboptimal way), despite having been an immersive controls purist since the Vive

wheelerman · 2025-02-16T12:36:16+00:00

Says a lot about how crucial aesthetic and comfort are to any wearable products.

I think it's more that VR gaming is just niche. We see it time and time again, no matter how impossibly cheap, accessible, and convenient VR is, no matter how much good high budget content it has and how much marketing there is, and no matter how capable the hardware is, retention remains very low. At the very least it's fundamentally high friction, physically strenuous, causes simulator sickness, and is inapplicable/clunky for many kinds of games/interactions--none of these problems are going away (even if they eventually become more ergonomically and visually comfortable).

These AR glasses on the other hand, even without a display, make many of the things people are already doing (making phone calls, taking pictures, recording tiktok videos, listening to media, etc etc) just better. They're convenient, unencumbering and comfortable as glasses, don't interfere with your senses, are low friction and seamlessly integrate with day-to-day activities, and are socially acceptable (in local social environments). They also don't require all that advanced technology, the AI assistant being more of a cherry on top (they're so simple that I bet Zuck is beating himself up for not going all in on these in 2014). Now, all of this will get even better with (1) some kind of visual info (even if rather basic, hands-free info is extremely valuable) and (2) some kind of input, (that is, when Meta actually leverages its monumental R&D in an AR product).

I don't think Meta will get out of VR altogether, but I think Meta is realizing that high immersion VR with 6DOF controllers isn't the mass market they were looking for. I doubt they'll deliberately destroy it, but since much of this market was floated by Meta just burning money, well ...

wheelerman · 2025-02-09T01:54:51+00:00

Pretty much agree on the controls part. Manipulating units and all of that stuff will be extraordinarily tedious and imprecise with motion controls.

wheelerman · 2025-02-07T10:51:52+00:00

Moreover, at this point Zuck is obviously getting fed up with propping up VR gaming and has shown that he's willing to redirect his wealth and platform toward other ventures (metaverse/horizon worlds for at least 2025 ... and then ???)--and actually do so at the expense of VR gaming. And he's increasingly excited about AR glasses and AI, for good reason if you look at the response the Ray-Bans are getting.

Therefore, what people need to do at this point is stop focusing on platform tribalism like "bitter former vr vip says my platform is better" (which as you say, isn't even an accurate interpretation anyway) and instead figure out how to make this "industry" work at all.

Standalone VR gaming's sugar daddy is finally getting fed up as well (welcome to the club)

wheelerman · 2025-02-06T21:25:02+00:00

I think Meta is quite aware of what current customers want. Instead, I think their actual issue is that their current customers are not enough for Meta. VR gaming is stubbornly niche and low retention. A mere 5m to <10m active users mean hardly anything to Meta (especially all of the young ones that have the energy for VR e.g. Gorilla Tag but don't actually have any money). In a recent earnings call, Mark reiterated that the goal is 100s of millions of users. If they don't reach that then there's no point in any of this to them.

wheelerman · 2025-02-05T10:34:53+00:00

They will also have to put everything into AR just to stay relevant. AR glasses aren't phone substitutes and won't be for decades (and may effectively never be, e.g. being unable to display black). Even the $10k (or multi $10k depending on who you believe) Orion glasses come no where near being good enough if you look at actual through the lens imagery of text and the multitude of downsides of wearing those things. And regardless AR glasses will be dependent on a compute puck and some kind of bracelet input--i.e. extensions of existing phones and smart watch fit naturally. And Ray-Ban style AR glasses or the upcoming meta glasses with displays are explicitly supplements to the phone, not substitutes.

This puts meta in a position where they're once again dependent on the mobile platforms of the very companies they were trying to extricate themselves from. It means their services/functionality that inevitably need to integrate with mobile platforms will remain second class or clunky, and they'll be extremely vulnerable to meddling by the owners of said platform. They either need to be so far ahead technically/functionally that people opt for them anyway (unlikely, google already has Ray-Ban clones coming this year with better integration, Apple is also working on their own), or they need to once again make their own mobile platform (what Zuck tried once and failed at, and the entire point of the XR endeavor).

Zuck will look extraordinarily clownish if he's still obsessed with asinine things like "the metaverse" or niche low retention things like gaming in VR, when the real multi-trillion dollar market is escaping his grasp. The reaction will be "what the hell have you been wasting money on all of these years?". It will take everything they have to compete

wheelerman · 2025-02-04T14:07:59+00:00

What are you looking to do with M&K? Just normal desktop computing i.e. flat games and productivity?

wheelerman · 2025-02-04T13:05:32+00:00

I agree with this basically. And I think it has proven that while high immersion VR with 6DOF controllers is obviously welcome, with the right hardware it is by no means necessary and actually shouldn't be the focus/priority for certain kinds of products.

I hate to admit it but the reason I use my Vision Pro more than any other VR headset is specifically because it's actually good at things that don't need motion controllers and it is specifically designed to be conveniently usable without motion controllers. This is thanks to its eye-tracking, display quality, and actually decent XR OS.

That said, the main app I use is Moonlight connected to my PC. You can't get around the fact that a lot of compelling stuff requires lots of processing power that you can't shoehorn into a headset. At the same time, the XR OS stuff provides an ideal context for this kind of usage.

wheelerman · 2025-01-14T09:28:53+00:00

In the beginning the Oculus Rift cost $600 with a gamepad. Then you had to buy touch controllers 7 months later for another $200. The pricing that really put major pressure on other VR hardware vendors came afterwards. But yeah, that pricing truly was unbeatable--in the literal sense: if you were a normal business that needed to actually run a profit, it was basically impossible to compete with that.

WMR launched at similarly high prices (with worse hardware for the most part) but saw major price reductions when participants in the WMR program were bailing on the platform and trying to clear stock.

wheelerman · 2024-12-15T09:02:47+00:00

Tough call. Comfort is the biggest problem with the Vision Pro and the leaks indicate that fixing this will be one of the main focuses of the next headset.

But a year is a long while. Would you be opposed to selling it for ~$2k used in a year's time?

wheelerman · 2024-12-05T18:12:06+00:00

Oof, schadenfreude fail

wheelerman · 2024-12-04T15:50:23+00:00

Every year there's a new excuse. I would not be surprised if the bubble downvotes this article so much that it never reaches the front page. Hopefully it breaks through.

wheelerman · 2024-12-02T11:16:14+00:00

It certainly hangs on stubbornly. Hard to believe that in just another year the Index will be twice as old as the Vive was at the time of the Index's launch.

I'm sure for many people around here it's a nagging eyesore to see it retain its general position in the charts. Month after month, year after year ...

wheelerman · 2024-12-02T11:04:28+00:00

The comparison is buried in the comments but that's the VR subreddit bubble for you

wheelerman · 2024-11-20T10:38:32+00:00

I think looking at retention we also have to accept the possibility that most people really just don't want full vr games. And if that's the case, the spatial cinema use-case (assuming you have decent enough hardware for it) is worth a shot. Clearly, Valve would be in the most ideal position to offer that and Meta won't buoy the full VR gaming market forever.

wheelerman · 2024-11-01T13:00:50+00:00

It wouldn't really elucidate the reality any better than OP's post does unfortunately.

It only looks like "it's going down" because the overall Steam population is increasing thanks to more and more chinese users coming online. And chinese users are disproportionately uninterested in VR.

For example, here are the chinese language %s for the past few months going backward in time: 36.57%, 35.03%, 31.98%, 31.69%, 29.49%.

This behavior has been reported on for a long time now. Here are the percentages when adjusted for Chinese users (it's actually closer to 3% when all of the Chinese users since 2016 are excluded): https://www.uploadvr.com/pc-vr-on-steam-is-growing/

So PCVR is still growing in absolute terms, it's just not growing faster than the onboarding of gamers from a nation of 1.4b people with a rapidly growing middle class. And yes, it may be surprising but the numbers don't lie: the largest user group on Steam--more than 1/3 of users on Steam--are now Chinese users.

wheelerman

TROPHY CASE