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This is true, but also these apps tend to be poor quality.

I have a Quest 3, and I suspect a lot of the people who are thinking AVP and not Quest 3 haven't liked Meta's pitch. A lot of the metaverse stuff is silly. It was a poor pitch, and it wasn't remotely ready.

Beyond that, the Meta Quest 3 doesn't have the best screens, so things like watching video aren't actually very good. The passthrough is comically bad, so any AR stuff is really a no go.

The only things the Meta Quest 3 does well is video games and video game fitness experiences. The reason to consider the Quest 3 is almost 100%, "do you want to play VR video games without breaking the bank?" That's it.

The Vision Pro is not making that pitch at all, and doesn't even support motion controllers.

I don't think there is a lot of cross shopping between the two, and I don't think people looking at the Vision Pro are just Apple enthusiasts. They simply aren't that interested in video games, but are interested in the other experiences Apple is touting.

Do you own a Quest 3? I disagree on a few points here.

> Beyond that, the Meta Quest 3 doesn't have the best screens, so things like watching video aren't actually very good.

Is it as good as a 4k OLED TV? Obviously no, but it is the by far the best screen watching experience I had away from a TV. So if you want to chill in bed or a travelling for work and spend a lot of times alone in hotels it is by far the best media consumption device.

Another point are immersive 3D VR videos which is a completely new dimension and let me tell you there are a few really great things to watch, which you cannot replicate on a TV.

> The reason to consider the Quest 3 is almost 100%, "do you want to play VR video games without breaking the bank?" That's it.

see above about watching stuff. Another point are social experiences like VR chat, which I would not consider games.

I do have a Quest 3.

I also have two OLED TVs, and no way I'd watch the Quest 3 over that. But I also own a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and I'd much rather watch movies or a TV show on that. I'd also much rather watch on my desktop monitor.

The 3D videos are a nice diversion, and I do them from time to time.

I almost entirely play video games and workout apps on my Quest 3.

Hard to say about the passthrough. The MQ3’s passthrough is terrible from an eye chart perspective but the latency and spatial perception are good enough you can throw and catch a ball without any trouble. The Apple Vision has cameras far away from the eye centers to support the front screen so it’s going to have to work harder to reproject images and it may be functionally worse. We’ll have to see.

>(2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP and not thinking about buying an MQ3 at 1/7 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an technology enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.

I don't think this follows. I haven't used an AVP myself but apparently they are much nicer to use than an MQ3. If $3.5k is not a significant expense for you then you might as well get the premium product.

Based on what?

The Q3 is a 100x better device for market entry than the avp.

It has also very good resolution.

For just watching movies etc it would be a game changer for a lot of people and still it's not a thing everyone just owns

If your primary interest in VR is for gaming then the AVP is mostly a downgrade from the MQ3, due to the limited input options. There's no proper VR controllers with IMUs, sticks, buttons and triggers, just your bare hands. You're not going to be able to play something like Beat Saber or Half Life Alyx on the AVP to any satisfactory level.

Maybe your primary interesting in VR isnt gaming.

If you want to do spreadsheets in VR then that's your prerogative, but it's still not accurate to say the AVP is a more premium substitute for the Quest in general.

So the only options are spreadsheets and gaming.

Even though it's obvious to everyone that content consumption will be the killer app.

The weird part is the MQ3 does more.

I'd assume people with this kind of purchasing habits are just buying both and some more anyway.

Hard to say.

I think the most interesting feature of the AVP is the eye tracking which could not only project your avatar to the front of the device but might be able to make an avatar good enough that you could jump into a Zoom call from an AVP. That's one of those things that would make it possible to travel and pack an XR headset instead of a laptop

That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc. The kind of thing that makes people afraid that Facebook is involved with this.

The Quest controllers work great for a range of applications. Hand tracking has come a long way since the painful experience of holding your arms up high so the Hololens 1 can see them but I don't know if AVP's hand tracking will really be as versatile as the Quest controllers and Apple's the sort of company that will go down with the ship because they think there is something unclean about a design... But on that other hand they've got that battery pack.

The Quest has really good VR games and also the kind of media apps that this article is talking about. MQ3 came with a great MR demo game: they opened up the API for MR apps as soon as the MQ3 hit the street but they have been slow to get third-party MR apps through the app store, I just got my first one the other day.

The Quest's graphics capabilities aren't that great by modern standards, certainly if you are a serious gamer with a powerful gaming PC you have seen games that are much more detailed and impressive... I would say that the graphics of Asgard's Wrath 2 are pretty similar to those of Metroid Prime. On the other hand there is something really special about being in a space.

The AVP is a lot more powerful and on paper could synthesize better graphics but it's not so clear to me how it works out in practice. I think how the 2004 game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas lets you travel in a huge world with no loading screens in a Playstation 2 with 36MB of RAM... An experience which is still uncommon despite having phones with 1000x the RAM because it is a lot of work to tune up graphics. Similarly you see most of the games that are on Xbox and Playstation and PC are also on the much less powerful Switch.

Part of the reason Horizon Worlds has failed is that they were trying to make an easy authoring experience that would be accessible to people who don't use traditional 3D tools which comes with all sorts of limitation, not just in the amount of geometry you can have or the number of players, but that you can't bring in your own textures. In the end it all has to fit in RAM in the headset. Maybe you pay 7x as much for 7x the capacity on an AVP (so a world could have 140 max players instead of 20) but often you give people more resources and they just waste them... Look how cloud gaming never developed exclusive titles that did anything that you could only do with cloud gaming.

> That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc.

For better or worse Apple isn't allowing this kind of thing, the eye tracking "cursor" is only ever known to the OS itself and apps only receive "click" events with a snapshot of where you're looking when the OS detects the relevent hand gesture. Apps are never allowed to know what you're gazing at passively.

It's a good move for privacy, but it's very limiting for games since they will only have (accurate) head and (not so accurate) hand tracking data to work with.

I suspect there will be ways of getting this information though, it would be incredibly hard to design the foveated renderer such that you can't figure out where the eye is by e.g. positioning different amounts of geometry on the screen and then timing frames.

Apple hasn't made it exactly clear AFAICT, but I suspect that foveated rendering might only work in the managed RealityKit environment where Apple controls the entire rendering pipeline, and not inside applications which implement their own rendering from the ground up using Metal, for exactly that reason. There's nothing in the documentation about foveated rendering in Metal apps, and it is something that engines would have to be explicitly aware of if they do any kind of off-screen rendering.

I don't believe you get mouseover/"glanceover" events; you have to define your focus visual behavior declaratively. Rendering of that behavior is then not visible to an app with default entitlements.

Of course, Apple's store means they can just forbid gaming the system.

Thanks !

BTW I find Apple/Meta's focus on meetings so fascinating. As a mere employee I can't imagine being excited to do meetings in a more immersive way, when we collectively agreed to disable cameras on most of our calls for stress reduction.

That would be better with family, I guess, but then $3500 of material and getting kids and elderlies in VR is quite an hurdle.

On AVP's performances, I fully agree. Currently, running the Quest as a PCVR headset, and thus aleviating the base computing part, still requires a pretty beefy PC to run the games at full quality. And even laptops have a hard time getting enough power and cooling to run at decent speeds for sustained periods.

While the AVP has an M2, I wonder how far that would go when it comes to games that actually push the envelope (or apps that are as underoptimized as VRChat ?).

Regarding the meetings: VR meetings are much less fatiguing because you aren't staring at 12 people who are staring back at you. The spatiality and body language make a huge difference.

The corporate implementations are bad, but they'll eventually take some lessons from VRChat.

VRChat stands out as one of very few “multiplayer” experiences in VR that are successful. Sure you might have somebody jump into tutorial island yelling “I am a furry! I am a furry! I am a furry” but I also had positive interactions with people right off the bat whereas there was no way I was going to get somebody in Horizon Worlds how to work the stupid fishing rod.

I think we're not talking about the same thing. The main sources of "zoom fatigue" (camera on) I see are:

- having to show you pay attention to people speaking when you're actually looking at documents (or doing something completely different if you didn't need to pay attention).

- being stuck where you are as you can't just go to the kitchen or feed your cat while someone else is presenting.

VR solves none of that, and having your whole body captured makes it worse (to note, the AVP doesn't allow moving past some small boundary I think ?). We're still in the fantasy that meetings are something you should be 100% focused on, and double down in a "it doesn't work because we aren't doing it enough" cross training way.

I truely believe the appropriate future of meetings are holographic slabs floating in space representing each participant audio only, Evangelion style.

This can be done without VR though. Mozilla Hubs meetings, for example, right on my ThinkPad screen, don't suffer from the zoom brady bunch problem and it didn't require a dedicated device that's twice as expensive.

Meta has captured the home and family segment with the Quest devices, as evidenced by the number of kids you hear in social spaces and games. No parent is going to hand a $3.5k device to their kids when a $300 Quest will do the same job.

Note that that consumer is still buying the Quest 2 instead of the Quest 3 so save a few hundred $.

https://mixed-news.com/en/quest-2-vs-quest-3-amazon-sales-fi...

Although Asgard's Wrath 2 is a pack-in game for the MQ3 it plays fine on the MQ2 and doesn't take advantage of the more powerful processor of the MQ3 and only includes a tiny amount of MR gaming as an afterthought.

All of these video apps, including Netflix, are on Meta Quest, which makes it all the more of a snub.

Yep, its a bit of an elephant in the room in both this and the linked blogpost that the authors seem completely unaware that this is an already well-established medium use case that Apple is very late to.

I don't think it really needs to be stated that everything Apple does is an already well established medium that they're late to. They didn't event smart phones or smart watches or set top boxes or smart speakers or the personal computer or or or

…or mp3 players or wireless headphones.

But all those markets became much bigger after apple entered them.

Netflix is barely on the meta quest. They haven’t updated their app in years despite everyone begging them to do so. Netflix didn’t even develop their app on meta.

I’m not sure what Netflix is thinking when they are releasing a video game that no one wants instead fixing their meta client

Because video is a terrible use for a headset, especially feature-length movies or TV series. I'll bet the number of people willing to watch for that long with a brick strapped to their face, unable to comfortably drink or eat, is extremely low. Netflix is probably seeing this app used for a couple minutes before consumers realize it sucks and go back to some real VR experiences, or resume on the TV. No wonder they're not launching on apple vision.

How would you know if you’ve never tried it?

I have on a Quest. It's useless.

Probably because VR glasses are barely even a tiny drop in the bucket for Netflix. And the amount of people who are only watching Netflix on a VR glass (and thus would cancel their sub if it's not nicely viewable on the glasses) is tinier still.

You have a valid point. I’m complaining because Netflix is developing a Stranger Things VR game that no one wants, instead of updating their streaming client.

Honestly, I think VR games are already a bigger market than VR streaming apps. So I see more reason to invest in a VR game (even if this one turns out to be shitty) than to invest in polishing a VR streaming app.

At least with the game, there is a theoretical market if the game turns out good. The market of people who will subscribe to a streaming service based on the quality of their VR app seems to me to be ~0 today.

There are already more people who want an updated VR Netflix client than there are looking forward to a Netflix VR game.

> (2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP and not thinking about buying an MQ3 at 1/7 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an technology enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.

I bought the Quest 1 when it was an Occulus product and stopped using it the moment they started enforcing Meta anything within the device. I could not care less if it is a 1:1 hardware equivalent as long as it has anything to do with the Meta empire. The last I checked, my Quest 1 refuses to function on my home network because of the filtering I enforce on my router...

The "technology enthusiast" crowd is highly heterogeneous

Porting a Unity game is way harder than you think, especially on a VR headset where Netflix would have had to tune things to specific hardware to get video frames syncing properly. The entire UX has to be redesigned. Not to mention that Unity apps are second class citizens until they're rewritten as "immersive apps."

It's not trivial.

> (2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP and not thinking about buying an MQ3 at 1/7 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an technology enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.

It depends on the use-case. For productivity, Quest 3 doesn't have the pixels per degree so it is "almost usable" as a desktop replacement, but not quite there.

A better comparison is a Varjo headset for $4k - $12k which has similar capabilities.

> (2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP ...

At the low production volume they have right now they're clearly targeting the super premium market and developers who want to get in early, so they have good apps ready when the AVP hits the mass market.

It's not like the first revision of iPod or iPhone was a global phenomenon over night either. They were also full of compromises and flaws. I know maybe one or two people who got the first iPhone. I'm the only one I know who got the second gen iPod. But with the third gen of each of those I know dozens who got into it.

I think in the next two generations, the Meta's headsets will go up in price and functionality to be closer to AVP in both. Apple's will stay stable (letting inflation "reduce" the price) or come down a bit. By the third generation AVP will still have a hefty premium, but maybe more in the 2-3x range, and it's not like that has been a problem for Apple in other market segments.

Developers who wanted to get in early could have snagged a Hololens 2 or a Meta Quest 2 and gain a whole year over the AVP. (I did get a Hololens 1 real cheap and found the software story was absymal, when MQ3 came out and got really good reviews but startling little buzz I concluded I couldn't afford not to get an MQ3)

Apple's APIs and UX guidelines are very different. There are some ports (like Rec Room), but building a visionOS-native app means the only thing you'll be able to take with you is your spatial design awareness. (Not nothing, but a far cry from being able to develop your app ahead of time.)

“If you’re thinking about buying an iPod and not thinking about buying a Sansa Clip at 1/6 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an music enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.“

As someone who loved his $10 Sansa Clip and never owned an iPod Shuffle, you make a good point. There was no point in the iPod Shuffle, except for Apple enthusiasts.

Back then I got an iRiver which didn't require me to install malware on my Windows machine to transfer music to it.

Actually a good strategy, as such a device would probably work fine for 5 years then you could 2-4x your storage for another 1/6 iPod, or like most iPod competitors buy a new SD Card.