It's hard for me to hear your argument when you don't address the most obvious criticism.

Plus the cable tethers and the need to bolt and wire up the IR lighthouses to your livingroom walls vs the Quest that you can slide into your backpack and take with you and play virtually anywhere indoors.

The simplicity, polish and ease of use of the Quest and its ecosystem really killed the tethered VR future regardless of much more high-end the hardware was, just how the iPhone simplicity and UX polish killed the Nokia and Blackberry power-houses.

You are criticizing them for a industry standard practice. Make loss on the console, make it up with the software. With what they are doing with the Steam Deck it seems like they have learned a lesson about trying to make a profit on the hardware from their VR efforts.

But Valve has Alyx. Oculus tried to have a Mario in Lucky’s Tale, and Lucky is a super cute and appealing character, but gaming is older now. I had to look up the name of Lucky’s Tale to remember. Alyx has WAY more mindshare imho.

I wasn’t looking so much at cost as much as capability to innovate.

The manufacturing cost for the Oculus has to be far less than the Index since Valve reportedly isn't making much off their headsets. For argument if we say Meta's costs are $400/headset and Valve $900/headset, that still makes the Index over twice as expensive and it still can't run anything without being tethered to an expensive PC!

I don't know how you could seriously try to argue that kind of price undercutting isn't "innovating".

I'm hopeing that Apple, Valve and hopefully totally new players can enter the VR/AR market and make better products than FB without selling out to them. My only realistic hope for a competitor to Quest 2 is Apple at the moment.

They'll make great hardware but the price will keep it in the "well off consumer" range. Good for Apple because that's where the profits are but it won't make VR mainstream.

For VR, I wouldn't be suprised if a lot of people would be ready to pay a premium just to have device that has feature-parity with the Quest 2 but is not owned by Facebook. You have to understand that so many people use the Quest 2, despite the fact that they hate Facebook (yours truly included).

I doubt people are willing to pay that much more just to avoid facebook (especially considering facebook is decoupling their logins again from the quest services).

With current inflation rates (The EU is printing money by the billions per day) I do see a big gap in American (especially Silicon Valley) purchasing power and here in Western Europe. Whereas a few years ago I'd see only flagship phones in public transport, now it's a ton of redmi, budget samsungs etc. People don't have a lot of money anymore.

Yes, for sure. And I think that's a part of the reason they haven't released a VR headset yet. Give it a few years (maybe 5?) and there will be enough entertainment value and other utlity from a headset, especially if the ergonomics get better, which they will.

There's a huge difference between selling a phone which is a status symbol and a VR set that has to have actual utility (entertainment, etc).

People pay more for iPhones even in Africa because it's a status symbol - only the rich can afford them.

Apple's VR doesn't have to compete with the Quest on price if their product is that much better. Which, hey - it's Apple. They might be able to pull that off.

In every other region not so much. Here in Western Europe they are far from market leading, though still able to be considered 'mainstream'. But due to the inflation and lack of salary increases here since the 2007 crisis, most people go for midrangers now, and the iPhone SE is not attractive at all (old design, no oled screen). Just looking around on the subway I would see nothing but cheap Chinese phones now, most of the iPhones are from tourists.

I'm bullish on Oculus since I think they'll get the software and exclusives right (also I have one and I'm impressed by it) but I don't think Apple being an upmarket brand is going to slow them down at all.

Tthe first iPhone cost $499, and they even dropped the price of the $599 iPhone after a few months to $399, in a pretty unprecedented move by Apple. The price was clearly too high for a market that had not yet proven its value. VR is in the same situation as the modern smartphone was back then.

Carmack has also left Oculus, hasn’t he?

Valve's stuff isnt really superior for most users for what you get for your price point. There price point for entry is TEN TIMES what Occulus is, and I've used both headsets. Yes Valve is better. It's NOT 10x better. Maybe not even 2x better. And if you want to play Half Life Alyx, the cheapest way to do that is to buy an Occulus and hook it up to your computer. Valve has effectively put themselves in the luxury sports car lane when it comes to VR.

Occulus and Sony's VR for Playstation seems to be the actual entry points for most people when it comes to VR. And Valve isnt even really positioning themselves as a competitor to Occulus sense Steam VR has Occulus support. They seem to be fine wiht letting Occulus be the entry point sku and Steam VR being what people do when they go further down the ecosystem of what is currently the VR niche hobby.

You seem to know what you're talking about but it's really hard to take it seriously when you misspell the company's name.

That hasn't been true for a long while. Having a room-scale VR system back in 2016 certainly made Valve look quite a bit ahead of Oculus's "Rift is a sitting experience, have an Xbox controller" disaster.

But these days Oculus is far ahead, they are constantly adding new features (AR, hand tracking, wireless, standalone, 2D app integration, etc), while SteamVR is still mostly the same as it was back in 2016. At the moment SteamVR is barely even usable and full of bugs (resolution and input settings regularly disappear).

That's not to say that Oculus is the only one innovating, Microsoft's WMR Portal was a great attempt at bringing the Desktop into VR and they were the first ones with 6DOF tracking in a standalone headset. Some of the AR pass-through stuff, that Quest2 has just added, could be done on Daydream years ago.

But Daydream is dead, WMR seems to be on life support and SteamVR isn't getting any improvements either, all while Facebook went full throttle and is pumping out new VR features every few months. The only one that might have a chance at competing with Facebook's VR effort at this point is Sony with PSVR2 and maybe Apple, but their VR doesn't seem to not be aiming at the mass market.

But: . I don’t see a lot of apps using many of these features at all.

. I don’t think VR will ever win the consumer space. I’ve been working on it for half a decade now, and I don’t know anyone who regularly uses their headset for entertainment. Party trick? Sure. Everyday use to watch a Vr film or play a VR game? Not really. I own a headset myself and I barely use it.

VR is a productivity and industrial tool, that’s where the true user adoption is. FB is fundamentally misdirected, and the sooner people get that the sooner they’ll realise there’s nothing there at the end of the rainbow for Zuck.

They've got enough people working on this I don't see how they can't work on gaming and work at the same time.

Microsoft was first to this in the consumer space with WMR