Meta would have to straight-up fire almost all of its workforce, and aggressively poach replacements for them from the hardcore silicon engineering, electronics, and 3D graphics industry, just to begin catching up to the extremely strong custom hardware/firmware/software integration that Apple just demoed, and after all that they wouldn't be able to manufacture the thing at scale. Zuckerberg knows he's stuck making plastic knockoffs for the next FIVE YEARS.
He's going to keep that project limping along as a "low cost-to-entry" toy, and dive headfirst into creating a software offering for Apple's headset. He always saw the hardware as a means to an end anyway, which is why 3D hardware gurus like Carmack and the other people who used to work for Oculus always had an uneasy relationship with him.
Zuckerberg's "vision" brings nothing new to the table, except some retrograde vision of the adorable cyberspace meeting rooms that William Gibson was already writing about back in the 80's. Sometimes I wonder if he even gives a crap about the company or its direction, and truly is just messing around at this point, or maybe trying to recreate something he missed in childhood. Regardless, his "social" vision completely and perhaps deliberately misses the point. The "killer app" is niche and is right in front of most people: AR/VR headsets are on the verge of becoming the new essential engineering and artistic tool, not a replacement for the current emperor of communication tools (the smartphone).
I mean, I don't know if you've stopped to think about this, but the flat rectangular screen was a recreation of an earlier form of information display: A piece of paper on a desk. We've all been working with information confined to rectangular screens for 40 YEARS, to the point where no one even questions how else information could be conveyed. Even in an AR product, the first thing people try to do is draw a f*&$ rectangle somewhere in it, and stick their information in there.
Most working people don't actually want their information confined to a rectangle. What sort of flexibility can freedom from that UI design paradigm do for ... Musicians? 3D modelers? Architects? Civil engineers? Geologists? Archeologists/paleontologists? Security personnel monitoring crowds? Surveyors? Tattoo artists? Physics, history, geography teachers? A doctor looking at an MRI? A nurse doing an ultrasound? A physical therapist gauging the movement of a limb over time? A military sniper working in the dark? A chef following steps to prepare a meal? Anyone who wants to watch anyone else accomplish a task through their own eyes and offer visual guidance along the way?
Why wave a studfinder vaguely at a wall, when you can bluetooth-enable it, upgrade the firmware and the sensor, and then use it one time all over your house to generate a map of every beam, pipe, and wire in your home, then hand that to the electrician/plumber? And never miss again when you put in a nail? Got a rat problem? Rent a handful of stick-on high quality microphones and place them around the house where the indicators in your headset show, and let them tune and listen for a while. Oh look, now you can almost literally see the rat running around in the roof. High-performance computing and sensing is mandatory here, but my point is, so is the interface. There's be no point to doing this in a little rectangle; it would suck.
Same for the uses above; same for a hundred other uses for information outside rectangles, things people haven't even thought of. We're just getting started with this. And guess what!
None of it has jack squat to do with Zuckerberg's vision of "socializing!" I honestly don't know what's wrong in his head. It's like he's been shown the word's first car, driving on the word's first road, and all he can think is, "hey these seats are comfy, what a great place for people to get together and talk!" Idiot.
Yeah, people do sometimes have nice conversations sitting together in a car, with family or friends... But that's not WHY they're in a CAR, and as soon as they get done using it for what it's for, THEY GET OUT.
I think in a couple of years he's going to have to announce some kind of "partnership" with a Chinese company, or perhaps with Samsung (if Google doesn't beat him to it) to make a much higher spec version of the Quest, because when Apple doesn't have a true competitor in their price bracket, the world is not in a natural state, and it is necessary to invent one.
