Meta (Facebook) dissolves AR/VR OS Unit

TwistedSister77 · February 2022

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-platforms-dissolves-team-developing-new-ar-and-vr-operating-system

They fired a unit of 300 people that were working on their proprietary operating system for AR and VR systems.

I'm sure there are others that are closer to VR here, but can't be a great sign for Meta going Metaverse.

AAAMEOW · February 2022

You never need to make an OS. Meta is just pissed they keep getting screwed by plateform such as apple or google.

Scot · February 2022

Torval said:

Here is a way better link that doesn't require an account to read. https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/25/meta-disbands-ar-vr-headset-os-team-after-denying-it-would/

Android on the Quest 2 has been working fine for me so far. If they wanted something proprietary, custom, and with more power then they could always build on BSD instead of Android OS. Building an OS from scratch was a bad idea.

While I really like the Quest 2 as a piece of hardware, I'm not a fan of Facebook. The Oculus Quest interface is great, but the pushy nature of their social platform is off-putting. I'll be looking at Apple and Microsoft for my next VR/AR device.

Surely its best to go for the VR gear you think is best? The social platform sounds like it would put me off, but if I thought Oculus made the best VR I would stick with that.

Quizzical · February 2022

Edit: wrong thread. Oops.

Slapshot1188 · February 2022

Scot said:

Torval said:

Here is a way better link that doesn't require an account to read. https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/25/meta-disbands-ar-vr-headset-os-team-after-denying-it-would/

Android on the Quest 2 has been working fine for me so far. If they wanted something proprietary, custom, and with more power then they could always build on BSD instead of Android OS. Building an OS from scratch was a bad idea.

While I really like the Quest 2 as a piece of hardware, I'm not a fan of Facebook. The Oculus Quest interface is great, but the pushy nature of their social platform is off-putting. I'll be looking at Apple and Microsoft for my next VR/AR device.

Surely its best to go for the VR gear you think is best? The social platform sounds like it would put me off, but if I thought Oculus made the best VR I would stick with that.

No chance from my point of view. If someone at facebook (ahem Meta) doesn't like a link you post they can ban you from Facebook.. and also the Oculus.. or at least that was my understanding.

Either way... no chance I will be one of Zuckerberg's human drones from his ad.

OldKingLog · February 2022

Slapshot1188 said:

Scot said:

Torval said:

Here is a way better link that doesn't require an account to read. https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/25/meta-disbands-ar-vr-headset-os-team-after-denying-it-would/

Android on the Quest 2 has been working fine for me so far. If they wanted something proprietary, custom, and with more power then they could always build on BSD instead of Android OS. Building an OS from scratch was a bad idea.

While I really like the Quest 2 as a piece of hardware, I'm not a fan of Facebook. The Oculus Quest interface is great, but the pushy nature of their social platform is off-putting. I'll be looking at Apple and Microsoft for my next VR/AR device.

Surely its best to go for the VR gear you think is best? The social platform sounds like it would put me off, but if I thought Oculus made the best VR I would stick with that.

No chance from my point of view. If someone at facebook (ahem Meta) doesn't like a link you post they can ban you from Facebook.. and also the Oculus.. or at least that was my understanding.

Either way... no chance I will be one of Zuckerberg's human drones from his ad.

Scot · February 2022

Torval said:

Scot said:

Torval said:

Here is a way better link that doesn't require an account to read. https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/25/meta-disbands-ar-vr-headset-os-team-after-denying-it-would/

Android on the Quest 2 has been working fine for me so far. If they wanted something proprietary, custom, and with more power then they could always build on BSD instead of Android OS. Building an OS from scratch was a bad idea.

While I really like the Quest 2 as a piece of hardware, I'm not a fan of Facebook. The Oculus Quest interface is great, but the pushy nature of their social platform is off-putting. I'll be looking at Apple and Microsoft for my next VR/AR device.

Surely its best to go for the VR gear you think is best? The social platform sounds like it would put me off, but if I thought Oculus made the best VR I would stick with that.

It should be this is where the details get a lot messier. The easiest and most seamless way to use the device untethered (which is where it really shines) is to buy your apps through the Oculus Quest 2 store. That is one way they heavily push users to integrate with their platform.

There is a setting and tech call Air Link. In order to connect to your PC over wireless you must install the Oculus Desktop app. This requires a bit of fiddling on both your PC and the headset. I found it to be a very clunky implementation because not every game is going to run well over Air Link, but in order to use it tethered, for better performance, Air Link has to be completely disabled.

On top of all that nothing you buy on the Oculus Desktop app necessarily syncs to your headset even though they're the same account. In fact most of what I looked at (including an initial purchase mistake) doesn't sync over to the headset. That means if you play untethered without the PC and Air Link active you won't be able to play apps you've purchased. Beat Saber (one of the most popular platform apps) is a prime offender here.

Now let's say you want to play your Steam VR games on your Quest 2. This means you need to fire up your Oculus Desktop app, start up and shell out to the Steam VR desktop, and then finally start up your Steam VR apps. It's a ton of unnecessary steps and feels like an "alpha" UI experiment.

There are other clunky kludgy rough spots to the platform as well. For example, I can't cast to my TCL TV, Roku box, or Apple TV because since it's Android the only platforms it natively supports are other Android devices despite there being open casting implementations. Oculus recommends the users buy a Chromecast and use that to project to your TV. How ridiculous is that!

The exception to this is that it can cast to your phone (iPhone or Android) because in order to even setup your Quest 2 headset you must install their phone app and use it. So you can cast to your phone app on either platform. They do this primarily, I think, so they can spam users with their incessant promos and adverts. Of course you can disable notifications from the app, but by doing so you also lose access to less offensive notifications you might want. I've tried several configurations in the notifications settings to work around this but invariably they still spam their adverts.

I won't even get to part where they push social connections on you at every moment in every way. It's an effort to get around those and Meta/Facebook is very much collecting all your usage data as you have to sign into a Facebook account to even use the device.

To sum it up the hardware is pretty good visually when you're in an app, with a few issues on that level like the strap and fit and the "upgraded" accessories they sell to overcome those problems. Overall though, it isn't as simple as using it as a platform agnostic piece of hardware any way you want.

Remember when the internet and interconnectivity were a great thing? This sounds like some sort of digital Kafkaesque hell!

TwistedSister77 · February 2022

Scot said:

Torval said:

Scot said:

Torval said:

Here is a way better link that doesn't require an account to read. https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/25/meta-disbands-ar-vr-headset-os-team-after-denying-it-would/

Android on the Quest 2 has been working fine for me so far. If they wanted something proprietary, custom, and with more power then they could always build on BSD instead of Android OS. Building an OS from scratch was a bad idea.

While I really like the Quest 2 as a piece of hardware, I'm not a fan of Facebook. The Oculus Quest interface is great, but the pushy nature of their social platform is off-putting. I'll be looking at Apple and Microsoft for my next VR/AR device.

Surely its best to go for the VR gear you think is best? The social platform sounds like it would put me off, but if I thought Oculus made the best VR I would stick with that.

It should be this is where the details get a lot messier. The easiest and most seamless way to use the device untethered (which is where it really shines) is to buy your apps through the Oculus Quest 2 store. That is one way they heavily push users to integrate with their platform.

There is a setting and tech call Air Link. In order to connect to your PC over wireless you must install the Oculus Desktop app. This requires a bit of fiddling on both your PC and the headset. I found it to be a very clunky implementation because not every game is going to run well over Air Link, but in order to use it tethered, for better performance, Air Link has to be completely disabled.

On top of all that nothing you buy on the Oculus Desktop app necessarily syncs to your headset even though they're the same account. In fact most of what I looked at (including an initial purchase mistake) doesn't sync over to the headset. That means if you play untethered without the PC and Air Link active you won't be able to play apps you've purchased. Beat Saber (one of the most popular platform apps) is a prime offender here.

Now let's say you want to play your Steam VR games on your Quest 2. This means you need to fire up your Oculus Desktop app, start up and shell out to the Steam VR desktop, and then finally start up your Steam VR apps. It's a ton of unnecessary steps and feels like an "alpha" UI experiment.

There are other clunky kludgy rough spots to the platform as well. For example, I can't cast to my TCL TV, Roku box, or Apple TV because since it's Android the only platforms it natively supports are other Android devices despite there being open casting implementations. Oculus recommends the users buy a Chromecast and use that to project to your TV. How ridiculous is that!

The exception to this is that it can cast to your phone (iPhone or Android) because in order to even setup your Quest 2 headset you must install their phone app and use it. So you can cast to your phone app on either platform. They do this primarily, I think, so they can spam users with their incessant promos and adverts. Of course you can disable notifications from the app, but by doing so you also lose access to less offensive notifications you might want. I've tried several configurations in the notifications settings to work around this but invariably they still spam their adverts.

I won't even get to part where they push social connections on you at every moment in every way. It's an effort to get around those and Meta/Facebook is very much collecting all your usage data as you have to sign into a Facebook account to even use the device.

To sum it up the hardware is pretty good visually when you're in an app, with a few issues on that level like the strap and fit and the "upgraded" accessories they sell to overcome those problems. Overall though, it isn't as simple as using it as a platform agnostic piece of hardware any way you want.

Remember when the internet and interconnectivity were a great thing? This sounds like some sort of digital Kafkaesque hell!

The internet gave us reddit and Twitter... I believe I'm in 2 levels of Daunte's Inferno.

olepi · February 2022

I want to try VR, but I will never have a Facebook account.

AlBQuirky · February 2022

tzervo said:

It also gave us Wikipedia and other wikis, stackoverflow, project gutenberg, github and others. I am happy with it all things considered.

Wikipedia? That one has lost a lot credibility lately. Its information is almost as laughable as "news on TV", lately

Overall, though, I agree that the internet has provided many good services

Quizzical · March 2022

tzervo said:

AlBQuirky said:

tzervo said:

It also gave us Wikipedia and other wikis, stackoverflow, project gutenberg, github and others. I am happy with it all things considered.

Wikipedia? That one has lost a lot credibility lately. Its information is almost as laughable as "news on TV", lately

Overall, though, I agree that the internet has provided many good services

It is still invaluable in science topics.

It depends. Wikipedia is typically pretty reliable on non-controversial matters where the only people who care to edit are those who just want to know the truth. It falls apart when there are people with strong incentives to post biased information or outright lies. That typically includes politically controversial topics. It also includes information that could lead people to buy or not buy particular products or from particular companies.

Of course, that's not unique to Wikipedia. If you want to know what a smooth manifold is, there aren't a bunch of Wikipedia editors trying to lie to you. But random other web sites that want to talk about smooth manifolds are usually pretty reliable, too, as no one cares to try to convince you that it is something that it isn't.

If you want to know the date of birth of a recent US President, Wikipedia will probably have the correct answer. If you want a fair summary of what he did as president, Wikipedia won't have that. Of course, neither will most other sites that have an opinion of the former president in question.

Mendel · March 2022

tzervo said:

AlBQuirky said:

tzervo said:

It also gave us Wikipedia and other wikis, stackoverflow, project gutenberg, github and others. I am happy with it all things considered.

Wikipedia? That one has lost a lot credibility lately. Its information is almost as laughable as "news on TV", lately

Overall, though, I agree that the internet has provided many good services

It is still invaluable in science topics.

Most of the really good research went behind paywalls soon after the invention of TCP/IP (1974). Subscribe to our journal/newsletter/magazine/college's website to get the latest information and research on <science topic>!

ConstantineMerus · March 2022

tzervo said:

Mendel said:
Most of the really good research went behind paywalls soon after the invention of TCP/IP (1974). Subscribe to our journal/newsletter/magazine/college's website to get the latest information and research on <science topic>!

State of the art/innovations, sure. Those publishing the journals need to hire people and invest in infrastructure and make profit like everyone else. And those publishing to those journals do it to attract funds for further research.

Also lots of good papers that are still useful and relevant today and were published before 1974 are not public domain and never were.

There is still a huge amount of tech/science material in the public domain that is invaluable. I am using it daily, as do millions of others.

Publishing journals are the biggest scam in the scientific community. Everyone knows. But it is the way it is and nothing can be done.

Quizzical · March 2022

Mendel said:

tzervo said:

AlBQuirky said:

tzervo said:

It also gave us Wikipedia and other wikis, stackoverflow, project gutenberg, github and others. I am happy with it all things considered.

Wikipedia? That one has lost a lot credibility lately. Its information is almost as laughable as "news on TV", lately

Overall, though, I agree that the internet has provided many good services

It is still invaluable in science topics.

Most of the really good research went behind paywalls soon after the invention of TCP/IP (1974). Subscribe to our journal/newsletter/magazine/college's website to get the latest information and research on <science topic>!

At least in some fields, the paper you want will probably also be posted here:

https://arxiv.org

Mendel · March 2022

Quizzical said:

Mendel said:

tzervo said:

AlBQuirky said:

tzervo said:

It also gave us Wikipedia and other wikis, stackoverflow, project gutenberg, github and others. I am happy with it all things considered.

Wikipedia? That one has lost a lot credibility lately. Its information is almost as laughable as "news on TV", lately

Overall, though, I agree that the internet has provided many good services

It is still invaluable in science topics.

Most of the really good research went behind paywalls soon after the invention of TCP/IP (1974). Subscribe to our journal/newsletter/magazine/college's website to get the latest information and research on <science topic>!

At least in some fields, the paper you want will probably also be posted here:

https://arxiv.org

That's a useful link, but didn't exist when I needed to do research.

It makes quoting other articles rather difficult for undergraduate/graduate reports. I don't know about you, but I couldn't afford to join 15 professional societies and subscribe to their numerous journals when I was an undergrad (75-79). That was only marginally post-Internet; even most of the grad students (and several professors) hadn't even heard of the Internet then. I nearly broke the Inter Library Loan system trying to do one specific paper.

(Hint to those trying the Inter Library Loan system: order your sources the first week of a semester, or better yet, a month before the semester starts. They can be glacially slow.)

ConstantineMerus · March 2022

tzervo said:

ConstantineMerus said:
Publishing journals are the biggest scam in the scientific community. Everyone knows. But it is the way it is and nothing can be done.

In which sense?

The system is far from perfect. There's sometimes politics behind the scenes (even during the peer reviewing process with "anonymous" reviewers, but rarely in my experience), impact factors and other metrics of the quality of journals and papers are problematic, and bad science slips through.

But until something better comes along, it is a functioning system. At least I found it to be functioning when I was doing research in my field (computational fluid mechanics) in uni. I would not go as far as to call it a scam.

You have to pay £500 to £2000 for publication then you have to pay £50 to £100 for accessing the material while the service being provided is close to no existent and that money goes into corporate shareholders, it does not get recycled into research nor gets invested in research hubs or Universities. And as you put it, for all this money, peer review is abhorring in thr vast majority of the material.

The only way that this system can get worse is if they increase the prices even more, which they do every few years.

This won't change unless it gets regulated, and I can't be sure if regulations would make it even better.

I know you can publish for "free" but since that would prolong the process you might be risking that making your material irrelevant by the date it is published.

Yeah the research centers and universities do pay all of these costs for their top researchers, but it doesn't matter who is paying really, the system is not right.

ConstantineMerus · March 2022

tzervo said:

ConstantineMerus said:

tzervo said:

ConstantineMerus said:
Publishing journals are the biggest scam in the scientific community. Everyone knows. But it is the way it is and nothing can be done.

In which sense?

The system is far from perfect. There's sometimes politics behind the scenes (even during the peer reviewing process with "anonymous" reviewers, but rarely in my experience), impact factors and other metrics of the quality of journals and papers are problematic, and bad science slips through.

But until something better comes along, it is a functioning system. At least I found it to be functioning when I was doing research in my field (computational fluid mechanics) in uni. I would not go as far as to call it a scam.

You have to pay £500 to £2000 for publication then you have to pay £50 to £100 for accessing the material while the service being provided is close to no existent and that money goes into corporate shareholders, it does not get recycled into research nor gets invested in research hubs or Universities. And as you put it, for all this money, peer review is abhorring in thr vast majority of the material.

The only way that this system can get worse is if they increase the prices even more, which they do every few years.

This won't change unless it gets regulated, and I can't be sure if regulations would make it even better.

I know you can publish for "free" but since that would prolong the process you might be risking that making your material irrelevant by the date it is published.

Yeah the research centers and universities do pay all of these costs for their top researchers, but it doesn't matter who is paying really, the system is not right.

Unpopular opinion, but I do not agree, same as I do not agree with similar discussions about monetization in games. Free market and competition and all that.

Money not going back to research, you could say the same for any other resource, say lab tools. They all indirectly bring money to research by attracting industry or state fundings.

I had one bad and some good experiences with the peer review process when publishing, I would not say that it is abhorrent in the vast majority of cases. Although my personal experience is a tiny sample...

I respectfully disagree mate.

Would have been different if they paid the authors royalties like any other type of free market publishing or research hubs. But these journals make monies on both ends. This is rather a unique and unprecedented practice that you can't find anywhere else in the free market.

I understand they indirectly help people get funding, but still, they are really taking advantage of the individuals.

ConstantineMerus · March 2022

tzervo said:

Also I do not remember my institute having to pay to publish my papers, just going through the selection and review process. Been 10 years since I last published so I might remember wrong but I am fairly confident this was the case. Might also be journal- or field-specific (for reference mine were "Computer methods in applied mechanics and engineering" and "International journal for computational methods in engineering science & mechanics").

Yes I stated that there are journals that do offer to publish your material for free, but that usually takes months, even if you get accepted on your first try, which most people don't, because they are kind of like regular publishers too, they reject most of the submissions and rarely with good reasons. You can search for rejection letters on the web and you can find many a ridiculous story. In many cases people don't have the luxury of time nor the patience for snarky rejections, or they want their material to be published as soon as possible due to the competition and such, so they have to pay up. And I have witnessed corruption as well, but can't really talk about it since the case isn't closed yet.

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