Meta is Reportedly Partnering with LG to Create Apple Vision Pro Competitor

But Quest Pro was never planned to get anywhere close to Quest 2. It was essentially a devkit to build future experiences. But Meta dropped the ball by not delivering anything with it – you couldn’t even test eye tracking outside Horizon Workspaces, and the ‘cool’ demo where you are some sort of sunflower girl – you had to sideload it, compiled by someone on the internet.
Adding eye tracking adds real cost and costs battery life – Quest Pro lasts about an hour with all its fancy features on – it would be laughed at as consumer product.

Mixed Reality costs very little in comparison – and since passthrough is a thing since Quest 1 – it could be used as a low quality devkit to build XR experiences. And there were some. Not many, but even if we ignore XR – it’s a natural improvment that would come anyway and will have real influence. It’s impossible to expect developers to go back to their long-finished project and adds some moving eyes that really doesn’t change the experience all that much. Even on Quest Pro, you had to position the headset nearly perfectly for it to work somewhat properly and not look like you’re half baked.

At this point in time – my expectations are low. What I want is more powerful standalone headset with pancake lenses – and Quest 3 will deliver on these features. I’ve bought Pro on release, but lack of any software support, uncomfortable headstrap and high price did not make it feasiable to keep it, so I returned it. If Pro launched at $999 – I could deal with it as a beefier Quest 2. But it was too expensive at launuch. Bozworth spoke about “games” coming, but it all takes time. Quest 3 with “double” the performance might make these games more of a reality without trading too much. I think what VR needs is single titles (not single player) that you can pour hundreds of hours into – and by that I mean real games, not beat saber type rhytm games.

Personally I was always the gamer to sunk tons of hours into handful of titles, instead of playing a little bit of this, little bit of that.

Contractors proved the multiplayer formula works. As we are approaching 20th anniversary of COD – maybe they will reboot the series with VR port?

> I always wonder how many people would play Beat Saber if there were only original songs + DLC song packs?
For what it’s worth – Beat Saber was (still is?) at the very top of sales for PSVR1, where no modding scene exist.

So apparently quite a lot would play.. but is it really about playing? If people play it for 5 hours instead of 5000 hours with mods, it’s still just one copy sold. I do not have data on DLC popularity, but even as a non-player I found the DLC songs to be nothing but cash grab.

I always found its popularity extremely cringe. “Everyone” was waiting for VR for ages at that point, people fantasized about being able to do “anything” in VR, fly, shoot, teleport to ancient rome, escape from police, whatever, you name it – and then everyone forgot about their actual dreams and just accepted perfect Xbox Kinect type of game as the best way to spend time in VR. I highly suspect at least 75% of that is just from overweight people who used it as a “fun VR gym”, believing in the 9000 calories burned on sexpert++ during 10 minutes. Lol the amount of hate I received for even pointing the above years ago was unreal. I was clearly “in bad shape” to play Beat Saber, and if I wasn’t, I would start my own Beat Church.

I would say the release of Beat Saber was a very bad thing for VR, because it switched from being for the “real” “enthusiasts”, to people who have completly different goals, zero knowledge but will gangbang publicly on those who dare to even question it. I think you yourself observed how toxic positive internet VR space has become.

Same stuff with VR Chat – these users act like they are making meaningful connections in high-end metaverse (using PCVR as an example of superior platform because quest versions of the “same” worlds is way way lower, despite PCVR quality being something of a blend of N64 and Wii graphics), when in reality all they ever do is cosplaying cool humans wearing furry/egirl avatars. Take those avatars away, and you kill the whole platform. There is a reason why VR Chat is basically a meme and refugee for all sorts of acronyms like FBT, LGBTQ and so on.

There are no official numbers, but someone did the math based on Meta’s financial reports for Q4 2022 and came to ~25K Quest Pro and ~1.1mn Quest 2. That ratio of 1:44 would be enough reason for most developers to simply ignore any Pro exclusive feature. In addition the eye tracking is so compute intense on the Pro that it cannot be used while the app is running at the highest CPU/GPU performance levels, meaning demanding games couldn’t even integrate it without changing the rest of the game for it first

The ratio may have changed later in either direction, as the Quest Pro got cheaper, but it also became obvious that it more of a flop than a slam dunk. So we are most likely looking at (much) less than 100K Quest Pro sold in total.

Eye tracking usage on PSVR 2 may turn out very different. It is indeed unlikely that cross-platform VR games will make it an important part of the mechanics, but there is a chance that Sony sees the PSVR 2 very different from how Meta sees the Quest. For Meta the Quest is a platform, while Sony possibly treats the PSVR 2 as a accessory to the PS5, meaning they also care less about VR-only games and ports from Quest and instead more about PS5 AAA games getting VR modes like RE8 and GT7.

Many of these would be technically exclusive to the PSVR 2, as no Quest 3 or 4 would provide the required performance and even PCVR ports may be difficult if the games rely on the extra performance provided by ETFR and the insanely fast storage subsystem of the PS5. Meaning there is a reasonable chance to expect future AAA releases on the PS5 to not only support VR in general, but make use of the special features like HDR, advanced haptics and eye tracking of the PSVR 2. It’s kind of wait and see, as the decision for a hybrid design should be made early during the development, and with the PSVR 2 having released just this year and AAA usually taking years to finish, we may see “proper” hybrid games making full use of the PSVR 2 features only in 2025 or later.

Oryon is Qualcomm’s in-development CPU cores meant to compete Apple silicon; they’ll first used next year’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 SoCs meant to compete with Apple’s M2-powered MacBooks, and will be used for phones and XR devices as well further in the future (likely the earliest timeframe being late 2024 into 2025).

Qualcomm’s phasing out ARM-made Cortex CPU cores for its own in-house Oryon cores over the coming years, giving it more control to optimize their performance better (similar to Apple). It’s not a chip/SoC in itself, but it’ll allow Qualcomm to compete with Intel, AMD and Apple in performance instead of only relying on ARM.

Only a Snapdragon 8cx-powered XR headset can properly compete with Apple’s M2-powered Vision Pro; no XR2 SoC can since it’s a smartphone-based chip versus a laptop chip.

I’d expect Samsung-Google’s headset to be the first Android XR headset to be powered by one of the Oryon-based Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chips given their close partnership.

It’s very exciting, honestly. I can’t wait.