“AR/VR sucks!! It’s a fad!!! Nobody wants this!! I get dizzy! Wahhh!!” - Macrumors user 2022
“Take my money Apple!!!” - Macrumors user 2023
To be fair, existing VR (as available in eg Occulus Quest 2) is SERIOUSLY problematic.
It's starts with dumb things like the unboxing experience is just awful, and the UI is garbage (I still have no idea what the rules are for when I press which button to get something to happen in the Meta VR UI).
But there are also more serious things like
- the optics are just bad. I don't know how good these optics can get, and what the cost would be (in Apple volumes) but Meta optics are unacceptable. They are good enough to watch a movie (but not be impressed) but they are not good enough for reading, not even close. I hoped something like a Quest might be a comfortable way to read long web pages or PDF but, OMG no, no even close!!!
- AR (and a way to quickly toggle from VR to real world and back) is INSANELY important. You feel SO cut off from the real world in a VR headset. And sure, the people who want to sell this as gaming promote that point; but even if you are gaming you still need to be sure you don't hurt the outside world. "Boundary regions" are just not a good enough substitute. I did not appreciate how important this was till I tried a headset. Even things like the sorts of VR meetings that Meta is promoting will not work because you cannot easily toggle between the meeting and referring to your papers or a computer screen.
- you have to have a good story for connecting your existing computing to the device. Meta has a bunch of terrible "solutions" and clearly has put no effort/thought into this.
- holding controllers ALL THE TIME to have any sort of world control is clearly hopeless. It's even more unpleasant than it sounds. You need a well-designed UI (easy ways to toggle between apps and different types of functionality); what Meta has is a free-for-all where every app does things differently, and which is buggy enough that, when it freezes and you cannot escape an app, you have no idea whether you've hit a bug or simply haven't figured out whatever magic THIS app wants to perform to kill it.
And you need to solve the problem of motion. It's no good to set up all the visuals to make you think that you can walk around some large "world" only to turn around and tell you that the reality is you are physically stuck within a 6'x6' (or similar) sized box and cannot "walk" around the world.
I wonder how much Meta has taken the wrong ideas from skeuomorphism and whether the correct way to build a metaverse is rather more abstract. 3D yes, hand gestures yes, even VR yes BUT not pretending to be houses and land and similar real word items which have you walk around them. Maybe it's as simple as making the metaphor that you are wearing a jetpack and so "go" everywhere using a joystick, but NOT via walking? But that may feel clumsy and fake? all I know is tracking your body motion (via accelerometers) but not allowing actual walking, is a terrible mishmash that feels worse than any other solution.
- you need compelling use cases. Games are just not interesting or important enough to ENOUGH people, but that's mostly what Meta has bet on (in reality if not what they say). All the other interesting use cases (like a portable very large screen) require vastly better optics...
www.intel.com
www.macrumors.com
