Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Quest Pro Shows We Have a LONG Way to Go”.
Quest Pro yeah hey, if I’m an investor right: okay, I’m I’m a Wall Street fat cat or whatever else, okay, I’m looking at what Mr Zuckerberg over there is doing with meta, and this giant giant money furnace that he’s running over there with the metaverse, and I Am sitting here going? What the f are you smoking son, because for him to come out and say that he wants a VR AR headset to be as essential as a cell phone has become like, on the one hand, yeah I can, I can see it. I can see I can Envision that future. I could write a Sci-Fi, you know skit yeah, you know I could write some short story. Okay about that future, and it would be sick.
It would be so cool uh. The problem, though, is that just like with the rest of the technology industry, Moore’s law, ain’t gon na get us there or because of the way that Moore’s Law is slowing down any any line that we draw to extrapolate where we’re going to reach this supposed future. Where our AR glasses, that can either fully block out the light or they can augment our our reality with like superimposed menus over restaurants or uh, you know names and the names of their kids at you know parties of people that we don’t see that often um The future, where those actually look like a freaking regular pair of glasses, is so far out that I I I I don’t know if my kids will live to see it, let alone you know me and Mark who I think I think we’re the same age, how Old’S Mark Zuckerberg, no idea Ready Player.
One already exists: no, unless you’re literally trying to be super literal and you’re talking about like the book and the movie uh yeah yeah. That’S not what I’m talking about I’m talking about something that could actually go mainstream. Yeah! That’S not he’s talking about the like the headsets and the the the technical level of the the headsets, not not yeah yeah, not the not the concept.
The concept is there. I mean the you know the the metaverse. Okay, it’s a thing.
The problem is that we’re sitting here going uh; okay, they just announced the metaquest pro, which is a fifteen hundred dollar VR headset, which one to two hours of battery life. Okay hold on we’ll get to that. We’Ll get sorry new processor new screen, dramatically redesigned body and controllers inward facing cameras for the eye and face tracking that it can do and a color video feed for mixed reality. Apps.
Okay, the quest Pro is going to sit alongside the 399 Quest 2, which meta will continue selling as well, but where the Quest 2 is mostly focused on Fitness games and entertainment. The quest Pro is aimed at businesses and professionals who can afford its higher price tag, and there are applications for VR in a professional setting for sure like, for example, you know allowing a client to walk through an architectural design or allow a big one, allowing a Shopper in a in a virtual showroom to see what that couch might look like in their living room, there’s there’s totally valid use cases for it. The problem is that those are all business use, cases that are temporary they’re only needed. While you are shopping for that item or working on that project, they are not something that you actually need to carry around with you day to day, and this device is not even close, not even close to something that you would want to wear for long periods Of time it’s way better better, but it’s still big, it’s still heavy.
It still has like a forehead plate. I think, for it, that’ll be a big indicator when we don’t necessitate forehead plates anymore yeah. When I can drive down the road wearing it, that’s when it can go mainstream and we are just like like we’re so far away. I mean I remember when the first VR headsets were coming out.
What like seven eight years ago, was really when, like dk1 started, Landing in the hands of consumers sounds about right, yeah, maybe a little bit longer than that yeah. I remember, then, us going like yeah, but with with the state of the advancement of this technology, we’re gon na see the pixel density go like and we’re going to see the processing power go and it’s going to be. It’S gon na be amazing. It’S gon na, be that didn’t happen to be fair. It also. It also went in a direction that I think neither you nor I suspected um, where they moved the processing power to the device, yes um, and that still feels like the wrong way to me. It’S I don’t work in the space. Okay, I’m probably wrong for a bunch of reasons, but it’s the right way. For now what we’re gon na need is they’re, going to they’re. Never, okay! Well, I Shouldn’t Say: Never Never Say Never, they could be Standalone devices, but I think realistically, we’re gon na go from relying on a connected device at where we started was a computer to being Standalone with a computer built into the headset to relying on a connected Device but this time a wireless link to a computer in your pocket, yeah and then back to being a standalone device. If we managed to get there and that’ll be like way future. That is probably going to happen over a span of decades, and – and this is not just based on nothing right like I think we saw the early VR headsets and we assumed a similar development path like a similar trajectory of miniaturization and increases in performance.
That drove the personal computer to just unbelievable Heights throughout the 90s and the early 2000s right, but we didn’t get that we got Moore’s Law already slowing down and development actually being pretty slow. I mean we’ve only seen what, since the original Rift actually launched, maybe two actual generations of VR headsets, where we look and go yeah, that’s a lot better than the previous one, and I don’t think that the experience has aside from better resolution in the screen and To be in fairness, like Facebook has done some pretty incredible stuff with the limited processing power that they have in these Standalone devices, um other than better pixel density and higher FPS and not buy as much as I might have thought. I I don’t think the experience has fundamentally really changed that much and like I, I actually finally got a chance to play around with the hololens it sucks. It’S like laggy and the field of view.
The field of view is sucks horrid and when did they first announce hololens? My goodness, gracious wasn’t that back in the Google Glass days, so it would have been like also like seven years ago. Yeah. I think it’s about seven years ago, I think dk1 is is more than that um. Well, I mean when it actually started landing in people’s hands, because we did that collab with Lou right from unbox therapy, and that was an old house.
We’Ve been in this building for seven years so and then we were oh, maybe eight. I think we’ve been here almost eight years, Luke, it’s like nine! No, no because the company’s gon na turn 10. yeah, and we were in the house for six months. Then we were in the other, more different house for about a year and a half Okay, so we’ve been here about eight years. I think okay uh January 2015, man, I nailed it good Linus, um, so yeah, seven years and change was when they first announced hololens and it’s still like it was useful. I saw it as part of my visit to the Intel uh into the Intel Fab and what was cool about it.
Was it allowed a remote technician to help just someone who’s, never seen this thing before um, you know Screw all the right things into the right things for for performing maintenance and stuff, like that on on these super expensive machines, where you really cannot afford any extra Downtime – and you can’t afford a mistake – it was absolutely usable, but it was like glitchy as crap and we’ve seen this pattern time and time and time again did you see the the um? Did you see the machine learning computer vision, uh superimposed ads on NHL um of the NHL sideboards? No, I don’t think so. It’S really really bad uh check this out so yeah. Here we go so guys guys. Look at this because the thing is like yeah, AI machine learning, computer vision, they keep getting, they keep getting better and better and better, but this was seven years in the making.
Okay whoa yeah, like that’s a problem because see this is the actual board here right. Yeah and then this is the digitally superimposed, garbage, wow and so passes to Rogers. I hate it so much yeah, it’s rough and I know I know it’s really easy to look at the technology we have now and go yeah. It’S like it’s impossible. It’S never going to get better, I’m not that I’m not that kind of person right like I I love technology. I want to see it Advance it’s just.
These are really really hard problems to solve and to imagine for a second that we are gon na. Take the kind of performance that is running an application like this, like this is a big GPU array. This is sucking back hundreds, maybe thousands of Watts.
Okay, we’re gon na take that and we’re gon na be able to seamlessly without glitches and and odd behavior. Put that in something you can wear and not look like a complete glasshole. Okay to imagine that’s gon na happen in a short amount of time is ridiculous. I mean when, when Elon Musk came out and said, every Tesla shipping today will be capable of full self driving to anyone who knows who who follows technology who follows high performance, Computing and and machine learning Hardware to anyone like that. It should have been obvious that that was not true, because we already knew that with with the technology we had, then, even if they were so efficient, they were double the performance of the gpus of that time or triple it wasn’t even close, it wasn’t even close. Yeah I, when did I do that event. Whatever I went to Facebook to go visit Oculus, I said it was going to be 10 years or no, I didn’t say it was going to be 10 years.
The guy I was interviewing with that was there said it was going to be 10 years, and I agreed because I was saying similar things outside of that. But then someone at Facebook actually literally said it, and I was like thank you, 10 years for what, since it until it’ll, actually turn mainstream. Oh, I see what you mean: yep um, and that made sense to me and now I’m feeling like that was actually not conservative enough yeah because, like there’s arguments that can be made for for a quest who actually did go mainstream because they are trying to differentiate This they are saying that it’s for professionals and three is coming, and it will be low prices, business people and Quest three. So I don’t think this is like the death of it or whatever I’m concerned about the jump that Quest 3 will be, if that makes sense, um, because people are going to hate this. I bet you a very, very huge amount of those Quest. Twos are sitting in boxes really, I think so. How often do you hear about them? Oh sitting in boxes like not being used, yeah like people bought them got some really good use out of them. I think they genuinely did got some exercise. I think people enjoyed it, I think it was good and then there were things that were kind of annoying people were definitely able to tell that. It’S not really there.
Yet it’s not really ready, yet it’s still a little laggy. It doesn’t feel that great. This is interesting. I scrolled down to the reviews section and even though it is overwhelmingly five star four-star the top reviews, which I don’t fully understand exactly what the logic is, are all negative negative with lots of people finding them helpful, yeah, ipd socks, everything’s blurry uh.
I hate having to have Facebook for this yep a month later, it’s an annoying brick yep, um. Okay, is this just oh man? Okay, is this part of this just reviewing bombing a lot of people have a Facebook account and to them it is not a huge impediment that you need a Facebook account for this thing, and I don’t think you even need it anymore. I don’t think you need it anymore. I don’t know it might be a bit of a mix. I might be uh getting influenced by the like Facebook, negativity, I’m not gon na lie as well. You don’t use your VR headset. Much, though, do you not much? I don’t have space for it. .