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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Measuring Oculus sales through mobile app downloads, lol...

I have 2 Oculuses and have the app downloaded on 5 devices at least.

Anyway, I feel like the popularity of Oculus is pretty limited. Unlike consoles, you have to be pretty physically active to play most games on it. I do think it's an excellent fitness device, though.

I think Google made a huge mistake discontinuing Cardboard/Daydream. They should bring it back. It really doesn't make that much sense to have another device when phones already are more or less as powerful as an Oculus anyway. Not to mention that the Quest runs on Android to begin with.

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> I think Google made a huge mistake discontinuing <insert great products here>.

Google collectively as a company suffers from some kind of mental illness whereby if 20% of the world's population doesn't immediately love their product, it's considered a massive failure and abandoned in short order, instead of lovingly worked on until improved enough to be truly popular.

The success of any Google product is directly linked to ad revenue. If it doesn’t get more people giving up more of their data, to improve Google’s ad revenue stream, it’s killed.

Well Zuck has said that Oculus Quest 2 sales are over 10 million devices, and the graph claims 2020 + 2021 is 12 million devices.

Considering then that the Quest 2 came out October 2020 it doesn’t seem like the graph can be far wrong. As the devices are very close to each other on the graph though it’s hard to say if the headline is correct.

There was also an FTC filing associated with the Quest 2 face interface recall that disclosed US sales numbers in the millions as well. 10M devices is a reasonable number.

I didn't check to see how the data was collected on the chart, but might this count app downloads per person rather than raw download numbers? I might have an app installed on multiple devices, but I'm still using the same Google account.

It uses app downloads as a proxy for device sales - which was OP's criticism (as you noted, this could be multiple app downloads per device), but in reality the numbers for app downloads seem to approximately tally back to the publicly disclosed figures anyway.

Phones need to have high refresh rate displays to be usable for VR without contributing to motion sickness. That's becoming a standard for the high-end phones now, but a lot of people still have phones with 60 Hz displays, which is just not enough for VR.

Daydream/Cardboard's positioning was for very light use, in short bursts. A lot of viewers could get away with no straps nor bother with micro adjustments for that reason.

It was perfect to check a YouTube VR video for instance. There needs to be more to VR than that, but I think it was still nice to have.

It wasn’t good enough. Even today people mistakenly refer to Daydream when they have a poor opinion of VR.

120Hz is already on many mid range phone brands such as Realme. Won't be long before thats common. What is the cost of the Oculus headset? If phones will be capable within 2 years and you don't need another device do you think Oculus will ever be more than a temporary solution? I suspect phones will crush that market as they did compact cameras.

I do think that going with a dedicated device is a better approach. Imo, the screen/hardware is only a small part of a quality VR headset. Those optics probably don't come cheap, so a 'brainless' VR headset probably won't cost that much less than the Quest. Add in the problems with non-uniform phone sizes, small phone batteries/throttling under load, and the fact that the devs can't target a single HW config in what is a very performance sensitive application, I don't think the bring-your-own-phone approach can compete.

The phone should just be the external monitor to the pc.

E.g. The Sony Xperia 1 III has a 4K 120hz screen and can be used as an external display for a Sony camera, would make sense as part of a headset too.

Tried and failed with the Gear

That uses the phone's gpu and has a separate ecosystem

Oculus already tried the phone route and abandoned it because of the inherent limitations of not controlling the whole hardware stack. Let's look at first mobile Oculus headset, the Oculus GO which was binary compatible with content made for GearVR;

- Performed better than GearVR with a far slower SoC than the Galaxy handsets because the thermal solution could be designed around the headset.

- Cost $200 vs the $1000 for a Galaxy handset + GearVR

- Was more comfortable with higher weight because of better distribution across the headset instead of being concentrated in the front where the phone attaches.

- The display was sharper with lower resolution than GearVR, because you design the panel differently for headset than a handset.

Can you say more about the physical activity aspect of an Oculus? For the benefit of the non-VR people

The short summary is that both your head via the headset and your hands via the controllers are tracked.

The result is that to dodge items in the game you must make the corresponding movements like ducking, tilting, bending, etc in reality.

Many games like super hot and pistol whip take advantage of this. The result is that playing oculus games is much like exercising.

Other games like audio trip and synth riders explicitly make it exercise focused.

I own most of the oculus games and I’d say audio trip on cardio mode is probably one of the most physically demanding. Unfortunately it’s not super popular so there aren’t a lot of songs.

You can see some of the fitness ratings for VR games here: https://vrhealth.institute/vr-ratings. From personal experience, the boxing game Thrill of the Fight was a brutal workout - after ten minutes, I was sweating and panting. I saw the same from fairly fit individuals as well. Also big fan of Pistol Whip for fun lower body workouts (lots of squats while evading bullets).

Beat Saber is also a good workout - arms moving all over the place, and once you get into the Vol 2+ tracks plenty of squats as well.

Depending on the game, you can expect to burn between 5 and 11 calories per minute using the on-headset tracking, at one point I was consistently burning 1k calories per day at a healthy weight. Both hands and your head are tracked, allowing games to detect leaning or squatting out the way of attacks, as well as physically moving around the play space. Many experiences involve swinging swords or fists, which is also cardio.

The common example is Thrill of the Fight; it's a (shadow)boxing simulator. Users have reported over 3k calories burned from this in a day[0][1]. It's intense exercise, and you quickly build a heavy sweat.

TL;DR: It's much more intense than I'd imagined. Imagine playing badminton, but in a smaller area.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ThrillOfTheFight/comments/rjrcze/hi...

[1] https://vrhealth.institute/portfolio/thrill-of-the-fight/

Cycling on an indoor bike at enough effort to burn 600 calories an hour will leave me covered in sweat that makes wearing glasses hard. How comfortable is the Occulus headset when sweaty? does it stay on with violent movements you might do in shadow boxing?

It stays in place and is comfortable with the 'elite strap' accessory, can't say for the default one it ships with. IMO it should be standard. Brow sweat is a problem, but new units all ship with foam + silicone rather than just foam padding so at least it's cleanable.

There is also an actively ventilated face pad from "BoboVR" that I've found to help a lot with the eyepieces fogging up, which they otherwise will do, especially with the snap-in prescription lenses from FramesDirect. (Those need ventilation holes too, though; they'll fog up in the space between the prescription lens and the stock one. I haven't taken a pin vise to mine yet, but intend soon to, as that's the only place I still have fogging problems with the fan running.)

The Quest 2 stock strap sucks. You really need an "elite strap" or something like it. For Beat Saber or anything even vaguely like it, you also want knuckle straps for the controllers, so you don't have to worry about holding on to them or about failing to hold on to them.

Quest2 default strap is fine for me, compared to Quest1 default one. I just put cheap pad like this. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LVX2X2M/

The stock strap doesn't feel secure to me, even with headphones over it - I get shy about moving my head for fear I'll lose the headset. The "elite strap"'s knob-tightening mechanism holds everything much more firmly in place.

I also sweat a lot. To wear an Oculus headset and most VR headsets comfortably, it’s enough to just have a silicon cover. There are also plenty of accessories and mods to counter sweat.

Well, i have the mobile app 0 times. I only use the quest through Steam and the Link cable.

( and considering the eco-system arround discounted games and the prices i'm seeing in the Oculus store. I don't expect it to change anytime soon.

Also, i'm not going to help their VR monopoly ( much) on games - since they are buying a lot of VR game creators)

But yeah, i bought the device before I saw they are trying to corner the market.

If you wanted to know how many oculuses that were sold wouldn't you just ask your retailers how many oculeses they sold? I mean measuring downloads would give you ame order of magnitude measure of sales but not a very accurate number.

Does “mobile app downloads” count devices or accounts?

Clearly it counts downloads. If you downloaded, deleted, and reinstalled it would count that too.

pl. oculi?

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