Meta's head of augmented reality software stepping down

I worked at Oculus on the product that became Quest from 2014-2019 and this statement could not be more wrong. You need more than a vulkan driver to make a VR headset, e.g:

  * lenses that minimize distortion and chromatic aberration, that are lightweight and compact
  * astounding amounts of work on inside-out tracking to make it work within latency and power budgets with sufficient accuracy
  * latency reduction and prediction throughout the stack
  * foveated rendering
  * supporting all of those things in Unity and Unreal

> The user side Android system is, really badly done and irritating for people using it as people like Carmack have pointed out.

The user shell side we have today is entirely his creation, as a response to the less-than-stellar behavior of the Unity shell in the first release. I'm not sure Android is very material for the day-to-day user experience; it's just a particularly opinionated version of linux.

There are plenty of missteps here, but none of them are things you've described.

In my opinion, the technical know-how of Zuck was perfectly valid to build Facebook, but not this. VR/AR/anything with real-time world simulation and rendering is completely different from the web tech stack and could be considered to be a different world, with a different mindset.

Carmack obviously had the appropriate mindset, but AFAIK not the power to act. So Suck and his appointed staff probably took critical technical decisions regarding the software architecture of this project.

Given that we know that part of plan was to buy Unity back in 2015 and build their Metaverse on top of this engine, I seriously doubt this team really understood what they were doing.