Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta Horizon OS

meta.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 813 posts

Re: Meta Horizon OS

#481

Post by williamcotton »

williamcotton wrote: post #474
theptip wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t agree with this take. I’m sure Meta would be fine with other vendors taking over the low-end, if that meant there was a vibrant platform they controlled (ie the OS). They will lead with flagship models to push the boundaries of what the OS/tech can do. Why would they want to sell at/below cost forever? The reason they do this now is to make the platform viable. The only reason they are focusing on cheaper devic…

Don’t agree with this take. Is this a command or an opinion that left out the subject of the sentence?

[flagged]

Re: Meta Horizon OS

#482

Post by rokkitmensch »

distortedsignal wrote: post #342
bonton89 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either. Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?

The low end of the market is taken - but (from an outsider perspective) the high end appears free. The people who want to buy a Honda aren't the same people who want to buy an Acura, even though it's (essentially) the same parts. Let's say that, tomorrow, Gucci or Dolce and Gabanna (or however you spell that) want to make a VR headset (why? who knows?). They don't have the tech acumen to compete with Facebook on expe…

I strongly disagree that the low end of the market is taken. XReal's Air/2 are awesome and Moore suggests we'll see awesome displays in that form factor, not even necessarily from XReal.

Re: Meta Horizon OS

#483

Post by PaulHoule »

drdaeman wrote: post #292
PaulHoule wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That CPU or battery puck for Apple Vision Pro, Magic Leap, and some others is a real killjoy. It makes it certain you won't be using fitness apps.

I'm skeptical about working out with a headset, at all. There are probably some good use cases, but I'm just mentally going through the stuff I'm doing at a gym, and I think that typically a headset would be either a hazard or a gimmick of questionable usefulness.

Try Supernatural. It’s like a dance, boxing, or martial arts workout. My VR lab is a little small and has slanted ceilings so I have to be careful not to hit the tips of my fingertips but it is a real workout that is reasonably safe.

Re: Meta Horizon OS

#484

Post by bobsomers »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #439
araes wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr. And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast? Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user…

How is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year? While in many cases folks are overpaid in big tech, some of them are insanely talented people who can do things others simply cannot.

> How is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year?

Probably because of this:

> How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?

Re: Meta Horizon OS

#486

Post by btown »

mebazaa wrote: post #22

Meta has a lot of work to do on DevEx for non-gaming experiences. Say what you want with the Vision Pro, but it comes with a lot of niceities like SwiftUI. When you develop with the Quest, you're stuck with Unity or Unreal Engine -- it's almost too much freedom to develop simple productivity apps.

Reposting a comment I wrote on a comparison with Vision Pro here, which is very relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39830713

> The biggest innovation with Vision Pro is visionOS. visionOS provides native app frameworks, so developers can build apps for it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, and yet its something Meta have failed to offer for years. Every app on Quest has to reinvent how buttons work, how a scroll view works, how far away from the user the content should be etc.. and every app works differently. On visionOS, all of this is handled by Apple, and every app looks and feels the same.

Meta does have standardized utilities for translating movement to touch/drag/etc. interactions on arbitrary virtual surfaces:

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/11/22/buildin...

https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-isdk-...

But it doesn't seem (AFAIK) to answer the other side of this, which is the UI design system so apps have a consistent look and feel. Which is perhaps more common coming from a game development perspective, but ever since the Mac OS shareware days, Apple's understood that it's empowering to a certain kind of developer if you make it easy/the default path for them to build experiences that match a standardized look and feel. I'm honestly surprised that Meta didn't at least make an optional SDK for this.

Re: Meta Horizon OS

#487

Post by giuseppe_petri »

pavlov wrote: post #145

Shades of Apple licensing the Mac OS to clone hardware vendors in 1995 - 1997. It seems like Meta will be controlling the software experience quite closely, just like Apple did back in the day. There’s an important difference though: Apple made all their money on Mac hardware margins which the nimble clone vendors could undercut. Whereas for Meta, the Quest hardware has always been sold at breakeven or even as a loss…

> So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either.

How does Meta make its money? Advertising. Licensees bring actual eyeballs to the table and eat the hardware costs fighting amongst themselves selling commodity hardware and Meta re-position Quest as a 'premium' product that they might actually make a little money on.

Post reply on HN