Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We so absolutely need paths to move away from what we have today. Why though? What necessitates our move away from what we have?
Diversity = freedom
Nope
Meta Horizon OS
651–660 of 813 posts
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#652Shades 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. 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?
Because you want to compete in a different market segment.
To put this very concretely, look at Pimax. Their Crystal headset allegedly has standalone capability. All the hardware is there for it, they make this thing, they sell it -- but they don't have a standalone platform, and have no hope whatsoever of being able to develop one.
For PCVR, they just use regular standard SteamVR and OpenXR, but for standalone usage, they suddenly have to be an amazing software company and they definitely are not. Using Horizon makes a ton of sense, and makes their product more attractive and better than it is without it.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#653[dead]
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#654'Pivot to software' has been done several times in computing history: Go Corporation, SGI, Sun, Blackberry, Palm, Sega, and oh, NeXT. These are interesting precedents. I don't know of a 'pivot to software' that actually worked (NeXT ended up going back to hardware, thanks to the reverse acquisition!)
There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because they don't have anything else? Quest OS is neither a best in class user experience (it's still full of bugs, frictions and is a very inconsistent UI), and it's clearly not a good dev experience at all.
So your hardware now inherit all of Meta's tech and UX debts, and you don't even have a guarantee of daily recurring usage or of a killer application user will flock to. Is that the great win for their hardware that they think it is?
Of course, as several of us predicted when the number of Vision Pro apps quickly surpassed Quest Store Apps, Meta is now forced to react and change their weird two-tier approach: they are opening a (small) marketing presence for App Lab apps and are creating a "brand new" spatial app framework, to start and get out of the Unity/Unreal game engine third-party pipeline trap.
That they only now see that giving developers a native app UI kit is a basic of any OS is… not promising from a supposedly now long term OS owner.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, general purpose computing. Like servers, smartphones, etc. The premise of Fuchsia, as a prominent example, is to build an OS that operates more like a sandboxed/capabilities-based microservices platform, with structured IPC across processes. All major platforms both cloud and clients (even browsers) have gone to great lengths to deliver precisely that on top of existing OSs, with many expensive layers and…
Dumb, probably overly broad Q: I'm looking to build a hardware project off a flutter app. Linux on Raspberry Pi is the straightforward option. But I want an excuse to build on Fuchsia. Let's pretend Fuchsia is just as easy to deploy on (I'm 99% sure it won't be). Does Fuchsia buy me any cool stuff long-term that isn't possible on Linux? Like, what's my excuse for going with Fuchsia other than "(handwaves) it'll be mo…
> Let's pretend Fuchsia is just as easy to deploy on (I'm 99% sure it won't be).
To stress this beyond a doubt: don’t do this unless you’re willing to become an early-masochistic-martyr adopter. My knowledge is outdated by years though. I don’t know how far you’d get today.
> Does Fuchsia buy me any cool stuff long-term that isn't possible on Linux?
I don’t think so. Fuchsia shines with capability-based multitenancy, and basically anywhere you would have different processes from different vendors communicating together (like a mobile OS with multiple partially trusted apps that may need to talk to one another). If you own/audit all code on your device, especially in a single app, you don’t gain anything from that.
Some auxiliary stuff like content addressable file system and OTA deployments may be attractive, but I have no idea if those things are actually supported or even around these days.
Oh, one thing that may be worth tracking in your domain is how fuchsia is progressing in terms of power management. If you’re on arm and battery power, and they prioritize it, it may beat Linux & android in terms of low power devices. But that’s pure speculation.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s crazy because if you try the Quest it’s quite insane how good it is already. If I were to guess what could give it an iPhone moment: - lighter/more comfortable - faster to get started when you put the headset on - more social experiences and event organized in VR - shorter time from headset on to hanging out with your friends in VR A number of years ago I convinced a bunch of my friends to buy the Quest after be…
The Quest is insanely good, for a single person in isolation, once it's up and running . But there's a ton of friction that shouldn't exist before that happens, and Meta hasn't nailed most of the UX here yet. For example: - App sharing / libraries doesn't work properly yet. (The owner has to secretly log in to each individual app themselves, before anyone else can use it on the device. There is no documentation infor…
> Screen sharing doesn't work, at all
This is definitely not true. The Meta Quest app can connect to a headset and show what the player is seeing, both video and audio. Been watching my kid play various games for years.
Also not sure what state reset you're talking about. I've definitely grabbed the headset from another person and continued with the game.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#657If hardware manufacturers actually wanted this, Meta would be announcing a licensing deal. This is a threat to Apple: if Apple doesn't relent on advertising/privacy in VisionOS, then Meta will do to VR what Google did for smartphone's: sell the market to maintain advertising access. Meta doesn't care about money or mindshare on VR. They just want ad access.
Apple and to a lesser extent Google have high trust. Nobody trusts Meta at all. So who would adopt their OS?
As a Quest user: mostly younger devs. I see 18-22yo developers who do not care about the history of Meta making very impressive games that attract large amounts of their peers, adding micro-transactions along the way to fund their development, and it works, they make a large amount of money and have very active communities on Discord.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is at least better than nothing for companies who want to build standalone headsets and not just headsets that are dependent on PCs. Up until now everyone's had to make their own OS and store and hope that people care enough to port over apps and games. At the very least, this could lead to more high-end standalone headsets being available. Not every 3rd party headset has to be competing with the Quest l…
It seems to suggest they're limited to Qualcomm chipsets, and Qualcomm don't make a higher end VR chipset so it's hard to see where a high end headset would come from.
> Qualcomm don't make a higher end VR chipset
I don't think that's a given long term. Even already the chip in the Quest 3 is rated at the same GPU grunt as an nVidia 1060, the minimum supported chipset originally for PCVR. The next gen is already announced and is significantly more powerful again, able to power 4k displays. I would project in 3 years from now we have something that can actually be considered at least moderately high end in stand alone form factor from Qualcomm.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#659'Pivot to software' has been done several times in computing history: Go Corporation, SGI, Sun, Blackberry, Palm, Sega, and oh, NeXT. These are interesting precedents. I don't know of a 'pivot to software' that actually worked (NeXT ended up going back to hardware, thanks to the reverse acquisition!) There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because the…
The 'pivot to software' is more like a pivot back to software because Meta already disbanded a previous OS team at Reality Labs and indeed platform software was exactly what motivated the thinking behind buying Oculus as expressed in Zucks internal deal memo on the subject [1] where he ranks Apps and Platform OS (eg Android/PlayStore) both above hardware. They also recently passed on an offer from Google who are working on a new XR android build. 6DOF 3D is a unique surface area and so far all we have seen are OS ports from 2D pancake land so these efforts can't come soon enough.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#660If hardware manufacturers actually wanted this, Meta would be announcing a licensing deal. This is a threat to Apple: if Apple doesn't relent on advertising/privacy in VisionOS, then Meta will do to VR what Google did for smartphone's: sell the market to maintain advertising access. Meta doesn't care about money or mindshare on VR. They just want ad access.
Meta isn't even trying to get anything on Vision OS at all, I'm sure they have no interest or care about that until and unless it becomes a mass market product.
They don't want to be locked out of freedom to do what they want, and that's a primary motivation here it's true. But the obsessive focus on ad revenue that people assume they have is pretty far from their thoughts in the VR/AR space at this point. They have complete faith that being the dominant owner of the dominant platform that they think the future of computing will revolve around (I'm not arguing this, but I'm satisfied it's what Zuckerberg believes) will yield sufficient value to be worthwhile and they aren't worried about how it happens at this point.