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A comment on Meta Quest 3. Parent comment

Re:Meta Quest 3 by umeshunni on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:12PM (#37679741)
Originally, it was Excel/Lotus 123.

Later, it was the web browser.

Nowadays, it's mostly games.

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Re:Meta Quest 3 by justapassenger on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:34PM (#37680068)
Web browser and Excel are still killer apps for PC. There's way more PCs used for that, than for games.
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Re:Meta Quest 3 by umeshunni on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:02PM (#37683832)
Yeah - Excel and other 'productivity' apps are probably still the killer apps for PCs, especially for businesses. I assume businesses still drive the majority of PC purchases.

Some other factoids:

There are >1B PC gamers (source: random articles on the web). I'm guessing the number of mobile gamers is 2-3B.

There aren't that many active Excel users. Even Google sheets (free) has only a few hundred million users.

Most web browsing is now done on mobile. The transition happened sometime ~2015 for most of the world and something like 2017 for 'developer markets'.

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Re:Meta Quest 3 by lawlessone on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:32PM (#37680024)
Seems its excel again lol, they're bringing MS office to the quest
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Re:Meta Quest 3 by baby on Thursday September 28, 2023 @11:57AM (#37691473)
I'd say I exclusively used the Go and the Quest I've had to play games
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Re:Meta Quest 3 by MBCook on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:47PM (#37681087)
Right. It was Wordstar instead of a typewriter. VisiCalc instead of ledgers book. Photoshop. PageMaker or Quark Xpress. AutoCAD.

Over and over as computers got more powerful new killer apps appeared that changed the way people worked and the world did its business.

VR doesn’t appear to have anything like that. Just a small niche of the gaming market.

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Re:Meta Quest 3 by disqard on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:20PM (#37683974)
...and remember, the smartest people in the world (including some super-perceptive folks like Jaron Lanier) innovated in this space in the 1990s -- no one back then was able to come up with a "killer app" back then. The hardware has gotten smaller, and we have more pixels.

Are these changes fundamental improvements? Are they enough to unlock some brand-new killer app that nobody could even envision in 30 years ago?

I remain skeptical...

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Re:Meta Quest 3 by MBCook on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:31PM (#37684484)
Exactly. I think Apple is doing something fundamentally different by emphasizing AR so much that they built the hardware around it with ultra-high resolution screen and no controllers.

If something can enable that next step, I think that may be it.

But I really question if that will ever pass being a niche product. VR may just never have a popular use besides some gaming. I’m not sure AR in a headset has a big future either. Some specialty applications sure. But common?

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