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Comment by stevage | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly surprised just how underwhelming this looks. Meta has buckets of money, and hires the absolute best engineers available, and what they can come up with is...this? It just looks so bad - ugly lighting, bad textures etc etc. If this is a showcase of the best that Quest can be, I'm surprised.

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The Quest is pretty limited in hardware. The article mentions they use both Quest 2 and Quest 3; the Quest 2 is a $250 device that runs on a 5 year old mobile chip (about the same as the one in the Galaxy S20 Plus). The Quest 3 is much better (about on the level of a $500 phone), but they might just use the same games on both.

And in VR/AR low latency and high framerate are much more important than visual fidelity. Your brain just kind of accepts those low fidelity representations, but reacts very badly to latency spikes or frame drops.

Your point is valid but it will "feel" different in VR. The stereoscopic effect bolsters the lower quality rendering. The aesthetic from the screen cap reminds me of the horizons style so this may have been intentional.

It's not Meta's work. They're just highlighting a Quest application made for a large partner (seemingly by these guys: https://www.msm.digital/business-units/ar-vr-labs/).

It sounds like MSM.digital is the one that created the MR "experience". It's not really clear what Meta's involvement was from the article.

Maybe they should buy EA. Considering the amount of money they are spending, financially it may be feasible.

Even if you’re one of the best engineers, doesn’t mean you have style.

Physics. A quest is basically last year's mobile phone pushing way more pixels and FPS than on a phone. Because VR is heavy. And needs low latency so some optimisation tricks are out the window.

Even PCVR with my 4090 is still very limited in quality in things like Flight Simulator.

Meta could have gone the Apple route but they price themselves out of a real market. And the external battery is really poor UX. And really it's not super much better (though they compensate a lot with foveated rendering)

This is basically what the tech is right now if you really want standalone.

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