> I would be happy to be shown to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe there is a useful, engaging, fun, just, equitable, democratic, sustainable, novel VR experience where the avatars have legs, but Meta is $20 billion in and aside from the legs I don’t see any evidence that any of the above is forthcoming.
As a VR developer, this is professionally frustrating to read. Oculus and Meta have continually sucked all the air out of the room in this industry.
I actually really like my Quest Pro, if I squint and ignore the Meta logo for a minute, but there isn't anything particularly special about it. The hardware is basically a designer shell around a Qualcomm reference design. The software is pretty basic. The only reason the Quest line is so much better than the competition is because the competition is failing to show up.
And that's largely because of the huge amount of money that Meta is spending. How are you going to convince investors to back your competing platform if they look at the market and see Meta spending 20bil a year? How are you going to hire talent when Meta has been paying anyone they can find 5x normal salaries anywhere else, plus adult daycare benefits? Slurrrrrrp Hope you don't like breathing.
Meta isn't spending 20bils because that's what making VR takes. They're spending that to make it impossible for competitors to operate. It's basically the Reagan-era Cold War strategy.