Tbh if oculus weren’t associated with Facebook in a meaningful way I’d be all over it. But it is so I avoid it. The technology works fine but is a commercial failure, that’s not wholly Carmack’s fault.
Yea it is a device that goes on your face, puts cameras in your room, and creates a pseudo-reality for you. Who in their right mind would trust Facebook with that?
While I completely agree with you. I think it’s important to point out that if it wasn’t sold by Facebook, it would be 2.5x the cost and then most people wouldn’t touch it as it would be too big of an investment.
I think, in terms of the hype, VR was going to be the next big thing in gaming, and then maybe not just gaming after that, but other applications. So I was expecting it to become a required peripheral like a headset or a good mouse & keyboard.
But I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything by not having a VR headset. Like the product direction was very clear for oculus, had lots of buy in from devs… then it was bought by Facebook and became so much muddier. (“We’re going to use it in the meta-verse for boring work stuff” VR will be everything).
You need an exciting killer app for these things and they need to be commodity hardware. I’m guessing the best thing anyone could do for VR is give up all their patents.
It is probably helpful to define 'commercial failure'. In the sense that it sold a lot of units, it is a success; in the sense that it made any money for the company which produced it, it is a failure. So, it could be taken different ways depending on how the term is defined.
