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Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

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Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#51
post #12

The Oculus/Meta Quest 2 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2. That chip's GPU, the Adreno 650, has a pixel fill rate of 14 GP/s. Compare this to a GPU like the NVidia RTX 3090, which has a fill rate of 190 GP/s. Lighting, textures, transparency, and many of the effects that make things look good in modern games, at the resolution and framerate required for smooth VR, can't currently be done on a $400 headset. At least i…

It's not the case of fast/cheap/good choice. Good (high quality rendering) one requires external computing unit (like PC) so not handy device. For computing abilities, Quest2 was near the best (except Apple SoC) as a standalone HMD at that time despite it was extremely cheap.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#52
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago we had a friend who lived on our couch and played Second Life all day (we used to tease him that he didn't have a First Life.) One thing I saw that astonished me was that someone had written a tool that could create mirror images of a model (reverse one axis.) They were charging people per-use to create flipped duplicates of models they already had. (It doesn't need to be said but I can't help it: this is a…

Is this model flipper not simply SaaS? Aren’t a lot of the companies launched on this website just this concept but bigger?

Yup. (I'm still flummoxed by the success of Dropbox. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#53

Even if the metaverse looked good, which is doesn't, the entire development is a waste of time, resources, and human talent. The idea of extracting money from individuals for goods which don't exist or provide utility, is appalling. If the metaverse ultimately becomes popular and revenue-generating, it will be a sad day for humanity.

That ship has sailed a long time ago. Second Life was an early adopter, but games have been selling virtual goods for a long time. Not to mention NFTs.

Yes, since at least 1977!

Oubliette, a PLATO graphical (well lines :)) multiplayer RPG had a secondary market where people would in-game items for real-world cash.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#54
post #44
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways do you see it as being strong?

rust is amazing! crypto is evil! upvotes please!

And in those posts you see plenty of discussion with pro/anti arguments.

It's not a hivemind just because people have strong opinions you disagree with.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#55
post #51
post #12

The Oculus/Meta Quest 2 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2. That chip's GPU, the Adreno 650, has a pixel fill rate of 14 GP/s. Compare this to a GPU like the NVidia RTX 3090, which has a fill rate of 190 GP/s. Lighting, textures, transparency, and many of the effects that make things look good in modern games, at the resolution and framerate required for smooth VR, can't currently be done on a $400 headset. At least i…

It's not the case of fast/cheap/good choice. Good (high quality rendering) one requires external computing unit (like PC) so not handy device. For computing abilities, Quest2 was near the best (except Apple SoC) as a standalone HMD at that time despite it was extremely cheap.

Good art direction doesn't really have anything to do with the technology. You can make something look good by making the right choices. Game developers were able to make games look good with far fewer polygons a long time ago.

I think they are making bad choices.

So for example, yes its hard to animate feet walking around on the ground, but it was a weird choice to just cut everybody off at the waist. You could have given everybody hover shoes, or a chair, or a Segway or really a lot of things.

Also, if you can't afford lighting, you can at least paint some shadowing on and around the character faces. There _are_ textures on the characters, Zuck has weird rosy cheeks, I think whoever is creating these characters is just doing a bad job of it.

But I would be very surprised if you couldn't at least have 1 key light in the scene.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#56
post #50

I'm in the process of developing a small indie game for the Oculus Quest. It's not easy to get good graphics, but one really obvious thing that is missing from Horizon World's is really simple -- textures. I suspect the development team ditched most textures entirely as you can reduce virtually all rendering to a very small number of draw calls by having everything share a single texture. This saves the engineering t…

It's probably to keep it easy for end users to create content. SL had the same issue. Pro game creators have way more money and skills than ordinary end users, so unless you want a really jarring set of contrasts between ultra-basic objects and super awesome objects you have to pin everything to the minimum visual quality. Sort of like why Twitter is popular - nobody can excel at anything because of the character count limit.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#57
Not directly related to the topic, but one interesting thing I noticed in the video is that the characters have proper arms, rather than just disembodied hands. In the long interview Lex Friedman did with Carmack, the latter specifically mentioned how elbows didn't end up working from a 'UX' perspective (since they don't properly reflect real-world elbow positioning).

But perhaps this was only an issue from a first-person view, and the actual users of this, uh, abomination don't see their own elbows?

Anyways, more on topic, I agree that specs should be fine for much nicer graphics and it's baffling that with all their investments and even changing the name of the company, they produce this...

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#58
post #13

Even if the metaverse looked good, which is doesn't, the entire development is a waste of time, resources, and human talent. The idea of extracting money from individuals for goods which don't exist or provide utility, is appalling. If the metaverse ultimately becomes popular and revenue-generating, it will be a sad day for humanity.

> extracting money from individuals for goods which don't exist or provide utility It’s already a billion dollar industry.

To put it into context, Roblox makes about $3m per day.

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/07/apple-earns-close...

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#60

Along with some of the other things mentioned, mostly including the extremely low power hardware, the app is also extremely early in development. The art will certainly undergo many reworks, so they probably dont want to invest heavily in it yet. Plus the whole vision is extremely technically complicated, with significant challenges to it, while the art is something that can be focused on later. Imo the biggest thing…

Agreed. To state the obvious, they established an unsustainable burn rate on this project, hyped it to hell, then Apple cut their runway by an order of magnitude.
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