- cross-posted to:
- technology@zerobytes.monster
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@zerobytes.monster
- technology@lemmit.online
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Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so shit
Listen pal - Do you know how hard it is to make legs for a wii-like avatar?! We need another 8 billion.
They’re called miis 😤
Hello, I am a friendly ghost coming to attend your serious business meeting in the Metaverse. Did you know that this is going to be a massive industry? Buy your Metaverse real estate now, it’s definitely not a fake digital asset that Facebook can create and delete at will.
Cutting spending by 20% while not reducing output will definitely accomplish that, too!
The tech in general just isn’t good enough to do that much more. It’s like having a coal powered steam engine and then saying you’ll build a formula 1 car with it. They thought that with throwing enough money at the wall, a few breakthroughs in tech would fall out, but it doesn’t work like that. If you’re very lucky you hit one breakthrough, but they needed a few.
Sounds like the intial pitch probably went something like this, except they weren’t realistic about the timeline.
Can’t watch the clip in my country, but it’s a common enough theme with tech bros. Theranos also comes to mind.
Maybe you shouldn’t have made it
so shit
You could have, you know, not bought and ruined oculus, and destroyed the VR ecosystem.
I was at GDC the year of the acquisition. There were Facebook suits walking around the showroom floor writing checks to sign exclusivity deals with anyone showing off a VR game.
That is a way more legit reason to still be mad, in my book, and it predates the Facebook acquisition. Oculus had made all that noise about how their devices would be platform agnostic and they wouldn’t try to railroad you into buying games through their platform and the moment there was money buzz around the idea Luckey dropped that stuff like it was red hot and we ended up with the travesty that is the PC Oculus store.
I don’t think VR was ever going to be mainstream, but imagine what the software ecosystem would be if techbro Smeagol hadn’t gotten greedy for that precious, precious investment money.
At least we have some pretty amazing hardware with a decent variety to choose from.
Yeah, I wish more quality content was made for VR, but it’s still pretty mind blowing even with what we have.
Yeah, well, don’t tell the local patrons, I’m in like post a hundred below of “how dare you acknowledge anything remotely serviceably about a Meta-related product”.
But yeah, no, you’re pretty much right. They’re subsidizing a huge chunk of that entire corner of tech. I don’t think it’s a mainstream type of device, but I’m glad we all got to spend a few years messing with it as a semi-viable consumer product, even if it’s just a bit of an overengineered novelty thing.
Facebook flooded the market with cash, but failed to secure any Killer App to get people on their product. I wouldn’t say they ruined Oculus so much as it continues to be an unsolved technology that wasn’t ready for this level of exposure. I still can’t use the damned thing for more than an hour without feeling nauseous, and Meta was trying to gear up Oculus headsets for mass adoption by office workers.
The games market isn’t what they’re fixated on. They want this to be standard hardware for excel-book jockeys.
Removed by mod
I suspect that we’ll end up not with the gaming market being where this sticks, but entertainment. Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
My neck is already hurting from craning all the time. And I’m guaranteed to miss the best part of the movie because I was looking in the wrong direction.
Moto X (2013) has a 360 demo movie on it. It was alright and neat to spin around in your chair to follow the action, but at the same time I could have sat still and the camera moved.
My crippling adhd would like a word
90% of technology companies quit before making a hit VR product. We should encourage Meta to spend more.
Let’s hope Meta sinks every last dime of their profit into “the next big thing” that is their VR division
I’d much rather see meta burn money into the fun project that is VR rather than AI or crypto.
Meh, the problem will always be that Meta will use its VR platform as a data vacuum first and foremost, which makes it a nonstarter (at least for me)
Well, if I didn’t have to make a face book log in to use one. If not for that I would consider one to play in steam. Even if I had to have it tethered.
That wouldn’t be better for the company. They probably don’t make money on selling the hardware.
Yeah, that’s the entire deal of it. And why it’s lame.
Same sentiment except additionally I will never buy anything from Facebook because they are radicalizing people.
Not going to buy an Apple Vision either if it won’t behave as a generic screen for any OS.
I am utterly sick of the account requirement and proprietary connector bullshit from every company.
I am still so incredibly salty that my quest 1 is a paperweight because of this requirement.
It did not exist when I purchased the product. Full Stop.
When they introduced to that requirement with the quest 2 you were able to use the quest one without it with no issue. Sometime last year we tried to hook our quest one up to Steam Link and were met with a Meta Account requirement. There was no way within the UI to get around it.
In a moment of frustration, wanting to play some Beat Saber with the family, I went ahead and started the process of making a meta account only to be stopped several times along the way by various privacy layers on our network. It was insane. My PiHole about caught fire.
30 minutes in I gave up and dug out the Vive Cosmos and all 20 wires it needed. So disappointed meta is the only wireless headse with decent battery life. They ruined VR adoption for me.
I think they don’t require that anymore. It’s a “Meta login” which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
Welcome to the classic social media 100m dash. Become a popular dunk target on socials > get people to call such and such choice as a dealbreaker > stop doing such and such > it is now “not enough”, or “they’ll enshittify it later” or “a slippery slope”.
Which fine, whatever. I’m not saying Meta are “good guys” (no corporation is, honestly). What I will say is a) that is not a particularly productive or functional way to engage with pretty much anything, especially when there is no comparable alternative to a product, and b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible? People will give me crap for it regardless, so I may as well get to sell some sweet, sweet data.
FWIW, I’m skeptical of the ability of Meta to turn around the VR market as a whole, I don’t like many of their privacy and content moderation practices and I no longer use Facebook, Instagram or Threads. But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society, and I do have a Quest headset, which I agree is the best price to performance you can buy and works flawlessly with PC VR both wired and wirelessly.
I don’t need to log into my computer monitor, why should I log into my VR goggles?
Don’t give them thanks for only half vacuuming your personal privacy, keep bitching until they do it right.
I mean, in this case because it’s a standalone device, so… for the same reason you log in to your PlayStation. Also, you already had to log in to it when this was a Oculus thing, the “I don’t want a Facebook login” complaint only became a talking point after they transitioned from the Oculus login over to the Facebook login, so the intellectual honesty in moving the goalposts based on this argument seems dubious.
In any case, I could see you getting uppity about logging in to use it wired. Maybe. There are a ton of hardware settings and configuration that are handled within the Quest’s software directly, so I bet that would be way less trivial to deploy than people imagine. There is certainly no way I can envision where this thing would be usable wirelessly without a software login. You need to run an app to link to your PC, be it the Oculus or the Steam Link app. For security reasons alone you don’t want a logless device that streams what’s on your desktop monitor at will.
EDIT: Also, for the record, there are a bunch of monitor manufacturers that do ask for a login. Hi, ASUS Armoury Crate, you suck and have always sucked.
You didn’t have to log into PlayStations back in the day btw… It just worked. Idk how it is now. (I switched to playing free games on PC and use my gaming budget to gamble on the stock market instead.)
My point is: Login doesn’t need to be a requirement for standalone devices.
FYI, you can use a PSVR headset (at least the OG one) on a PC using third party software and not only do you not even need to log in to a Playstation account, you don’t even need a Playstation.
Hold on, the last time you didn’t have to log in to use a PS console was… what, 2005? And you are seriously claiming in public with a straight face that you don’t use any gaming services that need a log in on PC? So… you use none of them? Not Steam, not Gog, not Epic, not Xbox, not EA Play or whatever Origin is called… none of those.
Well, I mean, bully for you, but I’m gonna guess that Meta is after a different demographic than… you know, people who don’t buy videogames on their videogame systems. Login absolutely has been a requirement for standalone gaming devices for the past twenty years, with no meaningful exceptions.
Specifically, though, what VR device do you use with no login? Because last I checked, all the places that deliver VR software have their own. The Oculus app does. Steam does. PSVR does. Apple sure does.
So… what type of mythical beast are you to be using this rawdog VR device with no login involved? Are you just beaming I Love Lucy to an HMD using the power of imagination?
If I ever encounter a monitor begging me to log in, that is going directly back where it came from the very same day.
Cool. Look after the ones you have now, then.
Show me these monitors you speak of that force you to log in before they work.
E: I’ll interpret your downvote and lack of answer as “there aren’t any”
I did not downvote you and I genuinely just saw your post now, chill your bits. Some of us have a job or a life beyond refreshing social media constantly (and I’m already pretty bad on that front).
So to your question, I didn’t say “force you to log in before they work”, I said “ask for a login”. Which my ASUS display in fact does to deliver updates and control lighting. In fairness, their dumb app also covers the keyboard, mouse and motherboard RGB, but account login it has. So does my Logitech mouse, by the way. My other Alienware monitor is interesting, because it doesn’t have a login, but it does ask to collect your data, including it scrubbing your games library and constantly monitoring your controller with no opt-out for some reason. I think I would have preferred a login. Still better than Armoury Crate, though.
And of course that assumes we’re only talking about PC monitors. Every single one of my TVs requests a login as part of the first time setup process, whether you use them stand-alone or as a PC output. The trophy to most annoying spyware on that front has to go to LG, whose WebOS device allows me to log out after creating an account if I want, but then it will stop updating some of my apps, so each time Max decides to change its name or Disney wants to change the background on its Disney Plus app I have to manually log in, update, then log out again. Fun!
b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible?
how incredibly fucking dishonest. profit motive is more than enough incentive for them to continue to do what they’ve already been doing for close to two decades.
“don’t boycott exceptionally shitty companies or you’re responsible when they just get worse” is possibly the worst take i’ve seen so far on lemmy.
That would sure be a bad take. Let me know when somebody makes it.
In the meantime I continue to argue that if you boycott people on the basis of their reputation without reversing that stance when they reverse their behavior then you’re not “boycotting” anything, you’re just removing yourself from the pool of possible customers altogether.
My issue isn’t with the notion of boycotting companies, my issue is with the moving of goalposts when the companies do cave to the pressure just to extend the online ragefest. I get that it’d be easier to argue with the imaginary opponent in your head, but if you want to argue with me instead I’d appreciate addressing the actual issue.
They haven’t reversed any behavior.
There is no circumstance that justifies having any account with anything Facebook owns, and stealing other company’s names to try to trick people into thinking they’re a different company doesn’t change that.
Well, thanks for passing judgement on… let me check here… two billion people, as it turns out.
They have, in fact, reversed the policy that required linking your Quest account to a live Facebook account, though. That is a fact, perceived moral failings of a significant chunk of humanity or not.
Okay, but what does any of that have to do with Meta?
In the meantime I continue to argue that if you boycott people on the basis of their reputation without reversing that stance when they reverse their behavior then you’re not “boycotting” anything, you’re just removing yourself from the pool of possible customers altogether.
Dude, Meta has been and continues to be fucking terrible. If you don’t understand why then i guess you’ve been living in your closet in a VR headset for the last two decades.
No, I understand the ways in which Meta is terrible.
I also understand the ways in which they’re not because I’m an adult who is capable of holding semi-complex concepts in my mind.
Meta sucks, their role in social media has been a massive net negative for society and they are at best in denial about that, and at worst a deliberate bad actor.
But they’re also a huge corporation, so if their dumb chat app is the standard for communication or their VR headsets are great and dirt cheap I will interact with them, just like I interact with Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and a bunch of other corporations I fundamentally disagree with on key issues.
I hate this notion that money is support. It is not. That is a stupid ass ultracapitalist fallacy to make people feel good for ineffectually buying one brand of cereal over another. I don’t take a political stance on Meta by not buying their cheap stuff, I do so by supporting political actors who are willing to break apart oligopolistic media companies and regulate their role in society.
I have never needed to use WhatsApp. Do I not exist in society?
It depends on where you live. Over here my last Covid vaccine appointment was given over WhatsApp and the guys that came to install fiber in my apartment did the whole thing over WhatsApp as well. Every single chatgroup I have with friends and family is on WhatsApp. I’ve tried to surface the notion of Telegram and Signal being things at points and it’s an absolute no-go. People don’t say “I’ll text you”, they say “I’ll WhatsApp you”.
My mom calls it “sending a Whats” and I have never hated anything more in my life.
So yeah, very regional, but in the places where it’s the default, it’s the default hard, both on Android and iPhone. People in the US Apple bubble severely misunderstand to what extent Meta won the social media race. I don’t like it, but it is what it is.
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If you want to roleplay this, then you may get a look, considering it comes preinstalled in both iPhones and pretty much every Android phone.
People are still aware of phone numbers existing, so they’ll figure it out. But like having an email address or a mobile phone, the default assumption is you have a WhatsApp account associated to your phone number and it makes a number of things more convenient.
But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society,
I’ve never encountered a situation in which I’ve needed to use WhatsApp for anything. Today i guess i learned that i don’t “exist in society” or something. 😆
Go find the other response I gave to someone else who made that exact joke.
TLDR, I’m guessing you’re American and just don’t realize to what extent WhatsApp has entirely replaced texting in many, many places around the world, regardless of whether you use Android or iPhone.
Who cares?
Why does a texting app have a network effect for you? Is SMS completely unavailable on people’s phones in your country? Or are you just afraid of seeming a little bit different from the pack?
SMS is still expensive in other countries, internet access is cheap and WhatsApp is free. For example, it’s the only way my mom can keep in contact with her family in South America.
Because, see if you can follow this logic, sometimes my mom wants to tell me things. Also my doctor. And my government. And the plumber. And delivery guys.
It’s not a “pack”, it’s a society and a family. And it’s not about “being different”, it’s about not having to explain to every single person in my life that they need to talk to me through a different device than they use for literally everything else.
Nobody I know has sent a SMS since the 2010s. You do not realize how detached from reality that sounds. I just checked my phone, the last time I received a legit SMS that wasn’t an automated notification was February 2022, when a seller from an eBay-like service wanted to ask me a thing about a delivery.
I’m not reading anymore of this thread, but go move to the EU and request all the data those companies you mentioned have on you. You will see a truly staggering amount of your day to day info from some of them. Facebook and google are just advertising companies trying to get their thumbs in every pie they can convince enough people to buy into. Part of that is designing their products to require phoning home. The issue isn’t signing in. Signing in is just the trojan horse to make sure every bit of data they pull from you is tied to the right advertising account ID. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do that, even if they have enough money to lobby for its legality. Even if every single company on earth was freely doing it to the same degree people should still push for a change.
The business world is truly a slippery slope. Google made unethical digital advertising into a major market, and now even if they close shop somebody else will come fill the gap. The only way to put the power back in people’s hands is to regulate them out of existence but that will never happen if most people don’t even know it’s happening because you can’t even fucking complain about it on the internet without a hundred reply thread jfc
No, hold on, get it right, the 100 post thread is about somebody defending something tangentially related to them. Thread was nice and short with just complaining, it was when somebody pointed out that the requirement people were complaining about had been removed that the massive dogpile started.
And yes, by the way, I do know what data these companies have on me. I pulled all my Google data just last week, all 50 gigabytes of it. I agree that regulation is the answer to this. Absolutely. Everybody knows that, nobody is finding that via a rant about factually incorrect anecdotes about Meta’s VR headset, of all things.
But also, I have an Android phone. With a Google account on it. Do you not have a phone? Nobody is saying to not complain about abusive data mining or breaches of privacy, but you don’t have to performatively pretend to never engage with them or that the reason they get away with it in absence of regulation isn’t that they do make things people want or need.
This conversation boils down to whether it’s a moral imperative to turn your chosen cause into your entire personality at the expense of reality and beyond any nuance whatsoever. And honestly, in the current sociopolitical context, and despite being just about the most superfluous demonstration of this imaginable… man, it’s such a bummer.
Not separated enough for me. I know all the big companies are bad, but I won’t touch google/fb hardware.
do you struggle to play peekaboo? how do you not grasp that they’re feeding into the same software ecosystem and your data is being stored in the same database?
The same jerks with a new name get the all your data. Bootlick harder.
[Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.
Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!
Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.
Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.
That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.
Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.
According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55 billion since 2019.
$55 billion in losses over ~5 years? That’s a substantial amount.
Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.
give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill probably have money spare for me and possibly descendants to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.
People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m for 27.8 years).
We should call billions thousand millions.
In a lot if countries a thousand million is a milliard and a million million is a billion. But somehow US English skipped the -liard numbers and it’s influencing UK English these days as well.
These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:
British usage: Billion has meant 109 in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.[12][13][43][15]
Before the widespread use of billion for 109, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.[16] The long scale term milliard, for 109, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.
I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.
Not a drop in the bucket of their revenues, though. This is really about someone feeling angst that they can’t get an extra quarter percent increase in profits for the quarter so that the dividends go up just so slightly.
Wow, that’s like half the total value of Nike!!!
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NKE/Or about the same as Ford:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/
Good. Learning Facebook bought Oculus was fucking depressing as shit.
What they’ve done to it since has been worse than what most (if not all) of us expected.
Oculus was created by Palmer Lucky.
Palmer Lucky’s new company is making AI drones and roboos for the military.
Nothing of value was lost.
Add a new VR headset to that list. Since the FTC has done away with non compete clauses the man went ahead and announced he will show off his new headset this August (I think it has a military focus as well). So many VR influencers were salivating in the comments of his post.
I find it frustrating that people give this man credit for jumpstarting VR when if he hadn’t Sony probably would have. They were expetimenting with VERY similar tech around the time he was.
If anything we should attribute Luckey to the contamination of the industry. If it wasn’t for his choice to sell to facebook the landscape might have been a little bit greener. Most definitely more growing pains for the tech but I do think we would have seen more open hardware. Hell, maybe Valve would have found it necessary to pick up the reigns. It’s been said the Deckard may not release because they don’t find it necessary with steam link on quest. (Not confirmed obviously).
Fuck Anduril.
Yeah. Anduril has tried to hire me multiple times as well as well as a number of people I know (their software is written in Haskell, which is a somewhat niche skill set).
Every time I’ve told them absolutely not.
meta: makes vr division
also meta: is shocked it bleeds money
keep in mind meta didnt make occulus, they bought it out. Oculus is just on the list of silicon valley startups that suceeded in getting bought out and profited from. (of the 10x more that fail)
Is this supposed to be better somehow? Personally it doesn’t make much difference to me if Meta created their own shitty VR or bought a decent VR then made it shitty… The result is the same.
They didn’t make shit. They did what Google loves to do and they bought a highly successful, incredibly progressive company. And now it’s shit, just like alllll the others that got bought out by big names.
Damn. Sorry to hear about that emotion a soulless corporation is having.
Lemmy hates Meta but honestly the Quest 3 is a fantastic headset. I use mine semi-regularly for wireless Steam VR.
I don’t think anybody is under the impression that their engineers are stupid or that they can’t make decent hardware when they want to.
They just rightly think that Facebook is an absolutely evil company.
A lot of clueless people here are calling the Quest shit product tho. I can understand not wanting to give money to facebook but the tech is incredible.
Too bad that it will turn into a brick once meta decides to axe their VR department.
It’s just an android device, someone will make a bootloader unlock and custom rom for it if it comes to that
I wouldn’t rely on that. Those projects take a ton of time and aren’t always able to activate all the features.
we now have to count on companies going bakrupt and some volunteer picking it up and making it good 🥲
Why would it? It’s just an android device. LG didn’t brick all their smartphones when they pulled out of that market.
I couldn’t go back after using the Valve Index, though. Wireless or not, it’s too much of a compromise on quality.
Edit: sleepy typo
What about the Index is an improvement over the Quest 3 in terms of quality? Looking up the specs, the Quest 3 seems to be handily beating the Index, a 5 year old headset. Pancake lenses alone are such a massive jump in visual clarity that it’s hard to consider buying a headset that still uses fresnel lenses.
I would agree with you if we were comparing the Index against the Quest 2 for sure, but the Quest 3 sets quite a high bar.
For me, it’s actually the FOV, it covers more ground (130 degree vs 110). Going back to less FOV sucks. It’s also perfectly fine for clarity and frame rate, although I’d like an index 2 for sure. I’ve heard it also tracks better although I’ve never noticed the difference (I only used quest 3 at other homes).
Still surprised it’s been 5 years, though. But it’s not about what tech is available so much as the priorities valve put into their headset. They wanted it to be comfortable for a long play sessions. Just wish it wasn’t tethered, but it’s probably another reason why it still out performs in things like stability.
Thank you that’s definitely something to consider! I’ve had opportunities to use the Quest 3 at this point but not the Index yet. I’ve used other fresnel lens headsets in the past like the Vive and Quest 2, but neither has that kind of FOV.
I was very impressed by the way the pancake lenses can keep the entire image in focus instead of having to find the sweet spot and stare straight ahead into it, but an extra 20° of FOV is going to definitely make me question which I value more. I’ll have to find a place to try the Index so I can see.
No worries, I wish it had pancake lenses too but at least it’s not as bad as the vive. No screen door effect, but yes to the sweet spot thing. There’s a few other things going for the index, like those cool speaker headphones, but yeah… 5 years old, I guess valve is getting distracted by it’s steam deck success.
I haven’t looked into it, but I think there might be a mod to make it wireless now, too, but I haven’t looked into it since having kids. No time for VR when you have self destructive little ones existing in your vicinity.
It’s better because it’s not from Facebook, and it does VR extremely well overall.
But how is the actual quality better than the Quest 3? That’s the part I don’t understand.
You could?
Quest is from Oculus, Metaverse is from Facebook, different management leads to different quality
It felt better when VR was the hot new buzzword, right? Oh well, there’s the AI division also burning money, but at least it’s the current buzzword!
Do VR/AR glasses like in the picture actually exist?
The Xreal Air~, or the just-being-released Xreal Air 2 Ultra, is potentially that.
Oled displays and cameras for tracking objects and hands.
Edit: also just saw this
Cool, thanks!
Those are just smart glasses, I don’t see any mentioned of AR / integrated displays.
I think the closest were the prototypes like Google Glass but even they canned it.
No.
u/chemical_cutthroat Reportedly Happy With How Much Money Meta’s VR Division Burns
But the worst part is how they affect me personally. With my big glasses 🤓 I am no longer allowed at places of personal interest such as science and engineering events, nudist beaches, orgies at friends houses and gangbang dates.
VR is over rated as fuck. It will never be mainstream.
Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.
I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.
I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.
It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.
I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.
It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.
I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.
My 6 year old has never played or seen a video game.
I take her to the beach, playdates at the park with friends, we go mountain biking, etc. Hearing your stories makes my flesh crawl
I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.
I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.
My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.
I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.
“VR” at its heart is just 3D goggles, motion sensors, software, etc. So yes it’s overrated but I don’t see any tech reason why it couldn’t be mainstream. It takes a really dumb and shitty company to fuck it up.
It requires its users to wear special equipment and the mainstream doesn’t want that. 3D Blu Ray died for the same reason. The only company that cracked the mainstream with anything remotely in that direction was Nintendo with its 3DS.
