Regardless of how you feel about meta, it’s really impressive that they were able to ship a decent 6DOF, standalone, VR headset at $299 which is relatively easy to use for even normal people.
Going on a tangent, even after all this time people still don’t understand what the metaverse is. The metaverse is simply an AR / VR platform that has online access. That’s it. So this why Fortnite, voxels, and decentraland are NOT part of the metaverse, but Roblox, Minecraft, Rec Room, and Horizon are part because they all have VR support.
And that’s because Meta did a shitty job to tell people what it is! Have you heard or seen one of their ads? In Germany, they go like „the Metaverse will help doctors to do complicated surgery. It might be virtual, but the Metaverse will have a real impact“
It’s like pure essence of bullshit, on the level of those self-reordering fridges promised in the 90ies. If Meta would just release a single, convincing use case now, maybe things would look different. But they don’t, because they can’t, because there isn’t one. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
I'd like to highlight these parts again. Even as someone who has a desktop gaming pc and all: Base stations suck. Wired VR sucks.
Having wires get in your way while you are in VR is such a shit thing. I would never get back to it, not even for a generational leap in graphics quality.
And base stations automatically mean you need far more space (or "creative solutions"), something people living in e.g. flats don't have. Or don't want to have. Sure, I could probably rearrange half a room around it, but VR is not that great and probably never will be. Almost nothing would be.
Wasn't Facebook losing money on each headset sold, though?
Unreal and Unity do much preprocessing and optimization of game content. All that takes place long before the game runs. Much of the smarts in Unreal Engine resides in Unreal Engine Editor, not the runtime. A metaverse client which displays dynamic user-created content from many creators doesn't have the benefit of that pre-optimization. There's not much instancing. Some content is badly optimized, has too much detail, oversized textures, or errors. You can't pre-bake lighting or shadows.
A metaverse client thus has most of the problems of an MMO client and some of the problems of a web client (browser). Games are normally pre-tuned so that the client does not face these problems. For a fully dynamic metaverse, content overload is the normal case, and frame rate has to be maintained independent of content changes. Think of what happens when you doom-scroll a web page. It's like that, but in 3D.
(There's a class of limited metaverse which works like a game level loader. Users build a game level, the level is loaded during a long preload period, and then you can use it. Sinespace, Breakroom, High Fidelity, VRchat, and to some extent Decentraland are in that category. You build your parcel offline, then upload, but you can change some object transforms in world and move things around. This allows some offline optimization. Clients for these systems are close to standard MMO clients. Dynamic stuff is tied to the frame cycle.)
Unreal could probably make their system into a metaverse-in-a-box product, with some functions that now run in the editor running on servers or as background tasks in the client. So far, they haven't done that, although Sweeney has talked about it.
I'm part of the organization that picked up the old High Fidelity codebase.
Sure, that’s not VR, but I would argue that VR actually needs better visuals to be compelling to avoid an uncanny valley-like effect, unless you go super stylised and cartoony, which may work fine for many entertainment virtual worlds/games but good luck with real world brands and business.
Personally, I don’t even want VR, for two reasons: 1. it shuts me out of the real world too much, I don’t want to be that disconnected for long periods of time because I have coworkers, family, deliveries, my cat, whatever other things around me that I need to be aware of, and 2. in its current form factor, it’s simply tiring. I was playing with a PSVR2 recently and it was cool, but after about 45 minutes my face just got tired of wearing a headset and I wanted to do something else, even though I would have happily kept playing the game itself.
Well yeah. Horizon Worlds runs directly on the Quest 2, not on a gaming PC.
Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're powering it with a gaming PC, just by basing it on Unreal Engine.
It's a bit disingenuous of you to act like you've achieved something Meta couldn't. Now if you can get GTA V quality to run natively on Quest 2 hardware, then let's talk.
> Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games.
Where's your evidence for that? People happily play mobile games all day long that are nowhere near AAA, and they use social media too. There's zero indication at all that graphics quality is the problem. People adore Minecraft and that's not exactly known for its AAA graphics.