Meta Horizon OS

https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/meta-horizon-os-open-hardware-ecosystem-asus-republic-gamers-lenovo-xbox/

by ahiknsr • 2 years ago

790 643 2 years ago

blensor• 2 years ago

It's going to be interesting if Google/Samsung will win out or Meta/etc.

notRobot2• 2 years ago

What category has Google really succeeded in since the initial era of gmail/Android/chrome? I can't think of any recent successes off the top of my head.

EVyesnoyesnoyes4• 2 years ago

'really succeeded' sounds super crazy dismissive.

Besides android being gigantic huge, you still have google maps, chrome, gmail, pixel phones, passkey, yubikeypush/2fa, the new cookie aproach, YouTube!!1 etc.

Why would Google need a 'recent' success to be able to win ar snail?

vineyardmike6• 2 years ago

What a weird framing? You say this as if gmail, android and chrome are all dead now. They’re still being used and improved. Even if they didn’t enter new “categories” they’re still in a lot of existing ones and very popular -like hundreds of million of users- even if alternatives exist.

First of all, Google Search has maintained dominance and relevance for decades. That’s no easy feat. They have news, patents, books, LLMs all added into it.

Google has a hugely popular cloud service. Especially if you include Google Workspace.

Obviously YouTube is huge and regularly gets new features. There is a YouTube app for almost every piece of hardware with a screen.

They have a pretty impressive mapping product suite. Everything from Google maps to Google earth and all their GIS products and tools (eg solar panels location SaaS).

The play store is huge. AND They have a huge variety of extremely popular consumer apps like Photos, Music, Home, etc.

kernal7• 2 years ago

The most recent success:

YouTube TV has piloted past a new milestone: The internet pay-TV service now has more than 8 million subscribers, according to the video giant. That means YouTube TV, available only in the U.S. starting at $72.99 per month, is far and away the biggest internet-streaming subscription TV service in the country.

-Feb 6, 2024

vineyardmike6• 2 years ago

Zero chance Google actually supplies Samsung with a real operating system they can use. Samsung will for sure release a headset with Meta’s Horizon OS before anything from Google.

kernal7• 2 years ago

LOL. Watch I/O on May 14 for the debut of AndroidXR on the Samsung VR headset with a faster Qualcomm SoC than the one in the Quest 3.

baby10• 2 years ago

Isn’t Samsung going bankrupt at this point?

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

I wonder if every category has a "winner". When compatibility was a determinant, you had winners (Microsoft, obv.). I'm not sure winner-takes-all applies any longer.

mckn1ght• 2 years ago

Not an actual product render.

OJFord3• 2 years ago

It's a silly caption isn't it, why would it be third-person view, nobody's going to see those sketches and assume it's an actual product render, surely.

NBJack2• 2 years ago

Some folks stream VR games with a second camera on a green screen, which provides a 3rd person perspective for the audience. It's pretty incredible.

I can easily see less tech savvy consumers being confused.

zenlikethat• 2 years ago

Likely a change requested from legal.

9999000009993• 2 years ago

This is awesome, I'm waiting for a VR manufacturer to add an HDMI input. Then I could use it as a monitor without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

ShamelessC• 2 years ago

Then I could use it as a monitor without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

bold of you to assume your hdmi cable won't naturally form some hoops.

jsheard4• 2 years ago

The XREAL glasses are trying to fill the niche of a headset that just mirrors a HDMI input on a big virtual screen.

I don't think anyone is currently making an all-purpose VR headset which can also do HDMI mirroring though.

9999000009993• 2 years ago

I understand, but it seems trivial to add HDMI input here.

Technically you can just remote desktop into a computer from your VR headset, but that won't work in every scenario.

m4634• 2 years ago

I thought about getting some xreal glasses, but I think you have to activate them to use them, which annoys me.

TrueDuality• 2 years ago

You're not going to get HDMI (or at least not directly), but you can now get DisplayPort with many of the XR headsets. They're primarily using the alt-mode of USB-C as the cable is re-used for power as well.

9999000009993• 2 years ago

Which headsets support this?

superkuh2• 2 years ago

The original Vive has HDMI input.

m4634• 2 years ago

Hmmm... I wonder if FPV goggles (from drones) could do what you want? lots of them have HDMI inputs...

https://oscarliang.com/fpv-goggles/

banish-m42• 2 years ago

LOL. The problem is the shitty software. SteamVR and Oculus apps are worthless and flaky, but when they work, there's zero need for any damn cables.

PS: I have a barely used Meta Quest Pro for sale. ;)

modeless5• 2 years ago

Official blog post: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/04/introducing-our-open-mixed...

Short video from Zuckerberg: https://twitter.com/NathieVR/status/1782436898654273981

This is an interesting move and feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But this isn't open source. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the store. Maybe there's an app revenue share involved?

Wait, at the end of the video he says "We're also as part of this going to be opening up our store to give you even more options to use whatever experiences you want. So whether they're on Steam, Xbox Cloud Gaming, our own App Lab, or even Google Play, if they're up for it." The blog post doesn't mention Steam or Google Play. It's not really clear what that means. Will they allow Steam to sell native Quest apps?

Edit: There's a better blog post that has more detail. https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/meta-horizon-os-open-hardwar... This one seems to suggest that being "open" to Steam just means allowing game streaming which they already do, while being "open" to Google Play means that they would allow Google to install the actual Play Store app on the headset, for 2D apps only. But Google doesn't want to. In any case it seems like they would specifically not be open to alternative app stores selling native 3D apps directly on the headset itself.

ejj28• 2 years ago

I think this is at least better than nothing for companies who want to build standalone headsets and not just headsets that are dependent on PCs. Up until now everyone's had to make their own OS and store and hope that people care enough to port over apps and games.

At the very least, this could lead to more high-end standalone headsets being available. Not every 3rd party headset has to be competing with the Quest line of headsets, so the lack of revenue from the store might not matter to some companies.

Mindwipe2• 2 years ago

It seems to suggest they're limited to Qualcomm chipsets, and Qualcomm don't make a higher end VR chipset so it's hard to see where a high end headset would come from.

Mindwipe2• 2 years ago

Yeah, if it was "we acknowledge that is bad for hardware to have one installation path" and they were allowing itch.io to have an indie VR store that might be cool but they are very much not.

pteraspidomorph• 2 years ago

Far enough down the line, it will all end up in EU regulation. Doesn't everything?

Or if Meta doesn't become strong enough to be considered a monopoly, you always have the choice to go with their competitors (as is currently the case). I can still install anything I want on my Pico 4.

mrmetanoia• 2 years ago

This seems kind of interesting to me, it's a shame it's from Meta so I'll likely never touch it because of the toxicity of their core products, but I'm glad to see this, as it seems like it could stimulate some competition.

philo23• 2 years ago

I think the mention of Steam will be to do with the Steam Link app they released for Meta quest devices fairly recently that lets you stream your VR games from your desktop computer to the quest wirelessly https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0E2C-406B-9135-38...

waynesonfire2• 2 years ago

Short video from Zuckerberg

The use-cases for AR are so awful. The last thing I want is to consume already a passive medium with my family wearing goggles. Such an anti-social platform.

stubish2• 2 years ago

AR will be able to overlay names and important information about your children in case you forget who they are.

jerlam• 2 years ago

Feels like Microsoft just tried this with their own VR ecosystem not too long ago and it fell flat on its face.

dotnet00• 2 years ago

MS did the entire VR headset partnership thing, got some very good headsets out (for the time), and then just dropped the project and put it into maintenance mode. If they had kept working on it, it would've done well, as it wasn't falling flat on its face, it was just getting going when they dropped it.

They made the weird business decision to drop the products they had third party cooperation and an enthusiastic userbase for, in favor of an experimental product (Hololens) that ended up only being affordable to businesses and which afaik has never really taken off in the same way as WMR had been.

staticman2• 2 years ago

Microsoft's efforts were pretty half hearted, for example, none of their headsets worked with Xbox.

kkielhofner• 2 years ago

IMO the issues Microsoft had weren't unexpected. If you look at the disaster that was their US military Hololens project it turns out a fairly significant portion of the population experiences motion sickness and other fundamental issues[0].

This is a hard problem to solve and from what I understand it is similar to issues that are screened for in specialties. For example - fighter pilots and astronauts are screened for all kinds of fundamental things:

- Vision

- Tolerance to motion sickness

- Tolerance to Gs

- Tolerance to claustrophobia (for flight suits, tight cockpits, etc)

If you don't have 20/20 vision (or better), puke all the time in sims, and freak out when put in a flight suit you're just not a fighter pilot, astronaut, etc. Once you make that cut then you train on improving what you fundamentally have and even then wash-out rates are high.

With the Hololens project the goal was to strap a Hololens on pretty much any random soldier. If some fairly large portion of the population just can't make it work the utility and value of the project drops to zero. Imagine standardizing on a gun sight or other key technology that just won't work for even 1/10 of your (already limited recruits), potentially even for otherwise elite soldiers.

I think they realized they will have similar fundamental issues in the enterprise - the utility of a Teams meeting with everyone in Hololens drops pretty significantly when a non-zero portion of employees get sick after a few minutes.

I'm not sure how these issues with the technology can be overcome. Sure, if some gamers can make it work that's cool but that doesn't provide the overall value to the technology MS was hoping for.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-hololens-fails-us-army-te...

zmmmmm8• 2 years ago

Nobody's tried anything like the broad scale pitch Meta is making here. Everyone else has tackled the high end or specialized use cases. Meta's really the only company that's tried to make a true OS play that is meant to be accessible to everyone. Based on that alone I just don't think you can extrapolate from "X failed so this has already been tried". Nobody has tried what Meta is doing.

wvenable11• 2 years ago

Microsoft also tried this with phones...

technotony• 2 years ago

"we encourage the Google Play 2D app store to come to Meta Horizon OS, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms." - I feel like this might be the rub of this. Google is way behind in building the android of spatial computing, and maybe this can play into the trust busting cases where meta can show Google not playing fair?

meragrin_• 2 years ago

It sounds to me Meta is terrified of Apple and they needs apps sooner rather than later.

gryn3• 2 years ago

from what I've read on the internet they've been asking for this for a long time but google is blocking it, even before there were rumors of the apple headset.

As a user you can already sideload android APKs, I've tried it works great, but you also need to install apps that manage android permissions since you can't grant them through the quest settings.

having the android store there + integrations where android app devs can make the app VR ready would be a big plus. But, the blocker is that google still has ambitions of making some sort of big comeback on the android VR space and therefore are in direct competition with meta.

TulliusCicero4• 2 years ago

Maybe. So far, Apple's headset isn't particularly impressive or compelling, but I suppose it's possible they'll fix its issues in a future version.

aranelsurion• 2 years ago

they needs apps

Meta likely has the most apps and most users of any one VR platform. Sure everyone needs apps, but they needs apps the least, especially from Play Store.

Unless you see using phone apps as 90" virtual screens as a killer feature at least.

ketchupdebugger• 2 years ago

Meta is desperate to get devs to develop apps on their platform. It is the only way to get more interest in VR. Devs dont want to be on it because there are no customers, consumers don't want it because there's no apps. They've been trying to market it hard but nothing has worked. They tried to brand it as a fitness device, a work device, and a game device, but the consumers are not biting.

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

They are selling plenty of games. The issue though is that the Meta Quest consumer is cheap and would rather buy an MQ2 at a discount than an MQ3.

zmmmmm8• 2 years ago

They hit $1b in revenue on their store last quarter. I'm not sure how you evaluate that but it's something more than "not biting" I think.

sidcool2• 2 years ago

This sounds like a good idea. Love him or hate him, Zuck knows how to ship.

tsimionescu• 2 years ago

Oh yes, like he shipped the Metaverse.

baby10• 2 years ago

Have you tried vR chat?

sidcool2• 2 years ago

It was a failure, but he hasn't given up yet.

EVyesnoyesnoyes4• 2 years ago

I would really love to see proper educational content from Meta but i bet this is not were the 'next money thing' is.

Imagine a catalog of proper real life skills you can actually train reasonable good:

- cooking - soldering - welding - Tons of woodworking things - ...

You could also go to a lot of makers of tools and offer them to digitalize their products for them so someone can actually exercise with a cheap to super high end machine like specific CNCs or table saws etc.

OJFord3• 2 years ago

Where would that fit in between watching others do it on YouTube for entertainment, and doing it for real where you can hold (or eat) the result at the end?

graypegg4• 2 years ago

More hassle than a YouTube video, which is already more hassle than an article, but considering we’re talking about mixed reality, the ability to do the soldering, next to a detailed 3D model of exactly what you should be doing, in your line of sight, is a big selling point to me.

slyn• 2 years ago

It seems one of the primary tradeoffs in edutainment is between actually learnable teaching and “content porn” where you sub content with food, cars, tech, etc.

When I think of truly learnable cooking videos the first thing that comes to mind is Kenji’s POV cooking videos / streams. Seems like something that could be relatively adaptable to a AR / MR format in a way that would differentiate it from other (still valid) content like the relatively educational food porn from Alex / @FrenchGuyCooking.

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

As cheap to perform in as YouTube video, almost as vivid as the real thing, but again with most of the bullshit ("reality has a lot of detail") removed, just like with a YouTube video. Ideally, it would be suitable for experimenting with something you might want to then try out for real, but which would be too risky (time, money, embarrassment) to start with for real.

inopinatus• 2 years ago

That would be Ender's Game. Please don't eat the egg, though.

lvspiff• 2 years ago

This the gap that the porn websites will need to figure out how to fill for it to be a success.

EVyesnoyesnoyes4• 2 years ago

Training critical steps before actually doing it.

If its good enough, you can train cutting a 1000 onions without cutting 1000 onions.

With complex machines, you can learn how to control them and than focus on actually using them instead of first learning were all the buttons are.

graypegg4• 2 years ago

I really want some good VR train sims. It’s vaguely educational! A standalone quest train sim would be an instant buy for me. Probably not for many other people.

stetrain• 2 years ago

Derail Valley is a good one on Steam. Obviously that isn't standalone but it works pretty well with SteamVR streamed to a headset.

sph2• 2 years ago

I used to play Derail Valley on Steam, which has optional VR support.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/588030/Derail_Valley/

But I agree with the sentiment. Sim games are the killer app of VR and I just want more sims. Where's my Das Boot simulator?

jasonpeacock• 2 years ago

Virtual welding training is already a thing:

https://www.lincolnelectric.com/en/education/training-progra...

https://www.fronius.com/en/welding-technology/our-expertise/...

EVyesnoyesnoyes4• 2 years ago

yeah but not mainstream and it needs accessories and is probably more for teaching schools.

I would love to see all of this in a free/paid marketplace and with a basic learning progress framework behind it.

danavar• 2 years ago

A previous company I worked at was using mixed reality years ago (>4) to train manufacturing operators on manufacturing processes.

It ended up looking like a simulated workbench with low-detail models of CAD parts that needed to be assembled - it was pretty cool. Engineering companies are very ready for this technology.

lagniappe• 2 years ago

A local school here trains nurses in a VR environment that is situated inside a fully built out wing of a hospital. The headsets come down from the ceiling, all the equipment is real, but there are dummies in the beds, and some observation screens for others who supervise.

abraxas• 2 years ago

Yeah, we could call that the... Job Simulator ;)

paxys• 2 years ago

Why would you want to see it "from Meta"? There's no way a single company, that isn't even in the education business, can product that kind of content and keep it up to date. Meta's play is the right one – make an OS and software platform and let people build whatever they want on it.

yunohn• 2 years ago

Coincidentally, I saw Meta ads plastered all over London today - showcasing a welder who claims she practiced/learned welding with a Meta Oculus sitting at home.

kypro2• 2 years ago

Meta playing 3d chess here. Opening up the OS to other hardware providers is a great strategic move imo. Excited to see what innovations other hardware manufactures add.

drdaeman5• 2 years ago

Not to devalue their engineering departments, but I really don't remember any innovations in the software space from ASUS, Lenovo or alike hardware vendors. To me they're all essentially the same stuff, with different kind of junkware (or, in case of Lenovo, malware) bundled.

What I read is "we reached out to a bunch of vendors who dabbled in VR/AR/XR/whateveryounameit but failed to produce anything outstanding, so we made a deal of licensing them some software so maybe they'll fare better". Meta did the right thing in a sense that they made some sales, but I wouldn't hold my breath as a end-consumer.

kypro2• 2 years ago

I kinda agree. I don't think any of them are likely to be major players in the space, but I think they might be able to build niche products that serve specific markets better than Meta's generalist VR headset. They might try a lightweight, battery free, sitting headset for gamers or media applications, for example.

And I think just generally they're more likely to try random things than Meta are to get hype around some unique feature. Take the Asus Zenbook Duo as an example, it's not necessarily a great product but it's interesting and some people will buy it for that. Plus industry learns something from experiments like this.

Either way, it's a good move for Meta and it's good for the industry that there is a fully-featured OS available for hardware manufacturers.

mvkel2• 2 years ago

OS by Horizon by Meta Horizon OS by Meta.

Why not just call it Horizon OS?

mebazaa• 2 years ago

Meta has a lot of work to do on DevEx for non-gaming experiences. Say what you want with the Vision Pro, but it comes with a lot of niceities like SwiftUI. When you develop with the Quest, you're stuck with Unity or Unreal Engine -- it's almost too much freedom to develop simple productivity apps.

pavlov4• 2 years ago

OpenXR Mobile SDK is the native development option for the Quest devices:

https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/native/android/mo...

bartvk• 2 years ago

I skimmed through it, but can't find the programming language without downloading the whole SDK. Is it Java, or Kotlin? Or something else?

vineyardmike6• 2 years ago

Don’t they also have a web view wrapper for 2D tools?

gryn3• 2 years ago

for 2D you can also plain old android apps, they work here. the point though is that there's not that much room for 3D stuff without going through either unity or unreal or writing everything yourself from scratch.

if your goal is to make some sort of `spatial computing` tool, well there nothing here you can use. each app is it's own little silo that has little room for interaction. I'd love to be able to write my own custom apps that can exist in the home screen/environment and that can interact with each other in non trivial ways. it would make it feel more like a personal space rather than a 3D slideshow that I can use to launch games.

_akhe7• 2 years ago

It's all going to end up in JavaScript anyway.

I say this as a joke, yet: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-unity-webgl

  Simply rendering your Unity Application within your React Application is just the beginning! The Unity Context exposes a lot more fun functions and properties to play around with such as two way communication or requesting fullscreen or a pointerlock. The possibilities are endless, what's next is up to you!

Love it or hate it. Everything ends up in JavaScript!

zmmmmm8• 2 years ago

A video about their upcoming spatial SDK ("augments") already leaked [0] and you are correct, it's based on JavaScript, using their Spark toolkit [1] which is hardly surprising - when the company already ships a production AR dev kit, why would they not use it?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svlL_ndNdj0

[1] https://spark.meta.com/

tstrimple• 2 years ago

I don't hate it. JS has its worts, but so does every language. I don't think there is a single language even close to JS for lowering the bar of entry to software development. All of the bad things about it that "real computer science" folks complain about are the exact same features which give it a far more broad reach than Rust or Golang. Software development experiences the exact same problem that the internet at large has suffered. The lower and lower bar of entry invites less and less competent folks to create things they never before would have been able to create. Some of these things are genuinely useful and we benefit greatly by lowering the bar, and most of these things end up being shit because the people who made them really had no clue what they were doing.

Lowering the bar of participation greatly increases the amount of shit that is created, but also increases the amount of exceptional examples which can come from a domain. If 80% of everything created is almost complete garbage, then lowering the bar of entry for participating will exponentially increase the amount of shit out there. But it will also enable a few really great apps which wouldn't have existed otherwise. I think we need better filtering than to raise the bar so only true experts can participate.

ccheney• 2 years ago

Atwood's law

gorbypark3• 2 years ago

At one point in time the React/React Native teams put out a blog post devoid of any actual details about “multi platform” support and mentioned VR in it. I’m surprised I haven’t hear anything else about it since.

gr__or• 2 years ago

Yeah it's kind of mind-boggling to me that the creators of React (which SwiftUI is ofc heavily inspired by) and the most successful cross-platform quasi-native library (React Native), have not managed to bring those powers to their biggest investment.

I truly don't get it.

btown• 2 years ago

Reposting a comment I wrote on a comparison with Vision Pro here, which is very relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39830713

The biggest innovation with Vision Pro is visionOS. visionOS provides native app frameworks, so developers can build apps for it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, and yet its something Meta have failed to offer for years. Every app on Quest has to reinvent how buttons work, how a scroll view works, how far away from the user the content should be etc.. and every app works differently. On visionOS, all of this is handled by Apple, and every app looks and feels the same.

Meta does have standardized utilities for translating movement to touch/drag/etc. interactions on arbitrary virtual surfaces:

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/11/22/buildin...

https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-isdk-...

But it doesn't seem (AFAIK) to answer the other side of this, which is the UI design system so apps have a consistent look and feel. Which is perhaps more common coming from a game development perspective, but ever since the Mac OS shareware days, Apple's understood that it's empowering to a certain kind of developer if you make it easy/the default path for them to build experiences that match a standardized look and feel. I'm honestly surprised that Meta didn't at least make an optional SDK for this.

atrus• 2 years ago

You can also use Godot (although def has the too much freedom issue) and a-frame as well. The latter might be more attractive to webdevs

nailer• 2 years ago

Is this ‘open’ as in ‘we have partners’ or actual open source?

OJFord3• 2 years ago

It says 'to more device makers', not all, and anyway it wouldn't even have to be open source but just public releases? I expect it's a case of applying and meeting whatever standards though.

LatticeAnimal• 2 years ago

The fact that you still have to apply as a developer is a bit discouraging. (though that might change...). I can't seem to find anything on github.

Hoping that this is an oversight and that they will open-source the core platform in the next few months/years. It would be so awesome to hack/build on this platform

not_your_vase2• 2 years ago

Is it based on some prior art (BSD, Linux...), or a new proprietary OS written from scratch? The post is not too rich in actual information, beside that now other tech-giants can use it too...

seydor2• 2 years ago

Isn't it based on android?

reactordev• 2 years ago

A flavor of android

flohofwoe2• 2 years ago

Ooof that's a bummer, I hope that doesn't translate to the typical "Android developer experience".

kingforaday• 2 years ago

"This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people."

Hopefully they stick to a proper license model with AOSP as a cornerstone.

not_your_vase2• 2 years ago

Ahh, indeed, thanks all. Apparently I managed to glance over it.

asveikau2• 2 years ago

I can't recall when I first heard the name "OS" used to mean just another linux distro, whereas my increasingly old-man brain expects the term OS to mean a unique kernel, not a repackaging of a different one. Certainly by the 2010s that usage was common.

I feel like these days some would even call something an "OS" if it's running in a docker container, without providing any kernel at all. Which is to say the meaning of the term is expanding.

amarcheschi• 2 years ago

I do like the fact that you just accepted the evolution of the term rather than having a rant about how it changed and eventually being accused in the replies of gatekeeping the term os

dmayle• 2 years ago

From personal experience as far back as the 80's (and from my understanding going back before that as well), OS has never meant kernel.

An Operating System is the collection of software that allows you to operate a computer, so that means kernel, program loader, simple text editor, simple disk management, etc.

As computer users became more savvy, and hardware became more powerful, more and more functionality was included in the OS (graphical interfaces, utility apps, etc.).

I don't think many people would have trouble calling Android an operating system, and that's just the Linux kernel with utility apps, loader, and app libraries, yet very different from something like Redhat.

I don't think it's a stretch in the least to call Horizon an OS.

steventhedev• 2 years ago

This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people.

Which gives some context to the calls for Google to bring the play store content library to Horizon.

crmd2• 2 years ago

I wonder if this "opening" of the operating system is their way of putting the metaverse project out to pasture - analogous to donating it to the Apache Foundation - without admitting that the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure.

soared• 2 years ago

Seems more aligned with trying to achieve what android is to mobile phones but with mixed reality.

persolb• 2 years ago

Exactly this. Facebook makes money by network effects. They are incentivized to grow network engagement, more than they are to make direct money off new network members.

bee_rider5• 2 years ago

Which, I guess, makes sense. I think it is absolutely nuts that people would buy an OS developed by an ad company that relies on user profiling for their whole business. But then again it works for Google.

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

It actually is Android, just customized for XR.

romanhn3• 2 years ago

I'm guessing it's the opposite. Meta is trying to establish the same OS-level foothold/control that Microsoft, Apple and Google have.

nicce• 2 years ago

Is there better place to place ads than Metaverse ;)

bevekspldnw• 2 years ago

Exactly, at the root a lot of this about ATT.

AzzyHN• 2 years ago

Having a personal computer at home was a game-changer, though. "The Metaverse" has been around for a couple years now, and yet consumer VR (which has been around for eight years now) is still just a "gimmick", rather than a must-have.

The IBM Personal Computer released in 1981. By 1989... yeah.

iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.

babypuncher3• 2 years ago

The difference here though is I don't think AR/VR will ever become as ubiquitous for general purpose computing as laptops and smartphones.

r00fus• 2 years ago

It's both. Meta can be "giving it away" and "hoping to establish an OS foothold" but if there is no major interest in playing in this space, it's going to be a very empty metaverse.

graypegg4• 2 years ago

Using the name « horizon » without showing Horizon Worlds at all definitely hints at Horizon Worlds being a side social feature of the Horizon OS, versus this being an OS specifically FOR the horizon worlds metaverse.

Meta/Facebook really has trouble with focus, I hope they can pick 1 vision for VR.

vineyardmike6• 2 years ago

I think they have the most focus out of any big tech company. They have like 4 products.

They’re trying to build a platform to build VR experiences on. That’s clearly their goal. Horizon Worlds is “just an app” to show that off. It’s a “hero use case”.

rbanffy• 2 years ago

Not really. There is no money in VR/AR headsets. All the money is in the services that back them. Even further, the less money is in making headsets, the more money is in the services.

To say nothing about your data, which is Facebook's primary revenue driver.

swatcoder2• 2 years ago

It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are.

I'm not keen on more headsets having a Meta data vacuum built-in, but this isn't the opposite of putting the metaverse stuff to pasture.

They're just shifting from an Apple strategy of full-control vertical integration to a Android/Windows strategy of platform ubiquity.

sgift2• 2 years ago

It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are.

Which would be weird cause the hardware (Quest 3/Quest Pro) is top notch, while Metas software for it is garbage. Everything good is provided by 3rd party companies.

vineyardmike6• 2 years ago

1. Zuck always wanted to own a platform. He was a developer at heart and wants a product that developers can build on. He’s personally invested in this.

2. I’m pretty sure a lot of the cost quoted for their “Metaverse” stuff included their CapEx for a ton of GPUs which probably have a lot of other uses within the company.

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

I wonder how 1. works. Won't any developer tell you that platforms are traps, to be avoided unless necessary (or unless you're prepared in advance to jump off it at any time)? I feel platforms are only interesting to business folks, particularly those selling access to them.

zem2• 2 years ago

as a developer at heart he should have thought back to how interested he would have been in sharecropping on someone else's locked down platform!

TiredOfLife4• 2 years ago

Meta reality does a TON of research.

burnte2• 2 years ago

This is them doing that but also trying to do what Android did, capture the bulk of the market and leave the ultra-ridiculously-high-end to Apple.

criddell2• 2 years ago

So create a big market where nobody makes much money to compete with Apple's smaller market that captures absurd margins?

Culonavirus• 2 years ago

the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure

Watch out, the VR mafia is gonna get ya!

Seriously though, any well informed and level headed person could see this coming a mile away. Apparently, such people are in short supply at Meta.

wahnfrieden• 2 years ago

The number of employees who can see failure coming does not matter when they are organized by hierarchy and coerced to work toward failure under threat of losing their wage.

nradov• 2 years ago

Meta kind of doesn't have a choice. The major platforms are now owned by Apple, Google, and Microsoft (and also to a lesser extent IBM and Amazon). The strategic risks of being dependent on other companies' platforms are huge. Meta is desperately hunting for a disruptive innovation that will allow them to control the next major platform. A lot of people are betting that will be AR/VR but it could be something completely different.

imzadi2• 2 years ago

Speaking from the perspective of a person who is very into VR. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong. First, Facebook/Meta pushing hard with low-end hardware that caused the existing VR gaming to take leaps backward. PCVR was progressing fine before Zuckerberg intervened. Now the VR space is just cluttered with so many low effort, low res games. None of the big players want to get involved, because everyone is so convinced it is too "niche." Meanwhile, you have people who really want to spend money on VR and there's nothing worth spending the money on.

baby10• 2 years ago

Why would they shut down the Metaverse? It’s clearly the future and Zuck brought it up again in the last podcast that people are linking to. Apple just release a bad headset that just confirmed the bet that Meta took

araes2• 2 years ago

How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?

At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better.

Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.

azinman2• 2 years ago

100k/yr is not reasonable for Bay Area, let alone top talent. There are people working on it making $1M/yr+. Junior developers straight out of college are making more at Meta. You're also assuming everything went to just engineering payroll, which is obviously not true.

bee_rider5• 2 years ago

I want to make a snarky comment about how any reasonable person would want 10x that to work for Facebook but 500 human lifetimes is still a wild amount of time for what they’ve gotten.

TiredOfLife4• 2 years ago

They didn't and they didn't.

boloust• 2 years ago

In terms of difficulty/complexity, nothing you've listed there comes anywhere close to the r&d required to go from the original oculus prototype to volume shipping the meta quest 3.

drdaeman5• 2 years ago

"Opening" what? I can't think of anything here that even remotely resembles opening something to a public or donating a project to any foundation.

They realized they have an asset, and they made some money by licensing it. Sales department did their job, story at 11. But it would've been a boring non-story, so a copywriter used the corporate brandbook - and "open" is the buzzword of the last few years when it comes to the technology.

Someone need to make an LLM SaaS to de-bulshittify the news.

mvkel2• 2 years ago

Agreed. Zuck on Dwarkesh's podcast definitely seemed to be doing some aggressive retconning, making it seem like AI was always the plan, and the metaverse never was. Of course the opposite was true.

seydor2• 2 years ago

I hope at some point they expand to devices beyond goggles, like i dont know a holodeck or something

smeej6• 2 years ago

Am I the only weirdo who does not want, under any circumstance, to move to a world where head-mounted computer systems are normal? It's bad enough we have the things in our pockets. I don't want mine mounted in front of my eyes.

I can hear the replies already, "If you don't want one, don't use one," but if something becomes normal enough, the outside world does change around it. Why invest in street signs, for example? Who prints maps or encyclopedias now? Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?

It's not just that I don't want to use it. I don't want it to become normal among other people either.

parl_match• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, we are many decades away from this being the new normal in daily life. It'll more likely start to chip away at iPad and computer sales though.

As for your examples, such as maps/encyclopedias, they still do even in the smartphone age.

Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?

There's a great movie called Virtual Nightmare that is basically about this. But I don't think it's such a bad thing, to be honest. We'll have a world where art can be more easily exchanged and public spaces become more collaborative. And the flip side is that hopefully, "offline" will have less ads and there will be a renewed focus on more indie and subversive decoration.

Change isn't always bad, and it isn't always good.

smeej6• 2 years ago

I've wondered for a long time what things my grandchildren's generation will take for granted and not be able to live without.

I'll consider it a tragedy if it ends up being the case that they can't imagine having grown up actually seeing the real world.

Sol-• 2 years ago

I fondly remember the times where Glassholes were rightfully mocked. Now it's cool to drive around in your Tesla wearing an Apple Vision. It really seems to have become very normalized.

wnevets• 2 years ago

Now it's cool to drive around in your Tesla wearing an Apple Vision.

This may have more to do with your particular social circle (or mine) than a general trend in pop culture. I don't know anyone who thinks any of those are cool.

tantalic• 2 years ago

Being cool and getting a lot of views/clicks should not be confused.

talldayo5• 2 years ago

It's funny to me because pretty much every single issue that the Google Glass had still persists:

- it's too damn expensive (you look like a rich klutz wearing one)

- the content is mostly just normal games and videos that you watch in stereo

- the FOV and camera resolution are too poorly miniaturized to do anything serious with

Why doesn't it surprise me that public perception did a 180 when they saw the brushed-aluminum model with an Apple logo on it? At this rate Apple should sponsor a second Hindenberg just to check if their luck's run dry.

adastra222• 2 years ago

Part of the difference is that Glass was uploading images (and audio?) to Google for them to use however they like. That was the asshole invasion of privacy. People trust Apple more, right or wrong.

smeej6• 2 years ago

Google Glass still stands out as the only thing I can ever remember encountering that made me think, "Wow, that's even too dorky for me."

I dislike Apple's version for other reasons, but for something to out-dork me really takes a lot.

adastra222• 2 years ago

No, you’re not the only one, or even in the minority (outside of the terminally online tech bubble). I feel the same way.

But I also see the value of AR/VR to a number of industries that need more visual interaction metaphors. CAD/CAM, architecture, and real estate come to mind. I could totally see buying a house across the country “sight unseen” based on a 3D scan (if regulatory guards are in place to prevent modifying the scan).

Having an open OS architecture for AR/VR apps is key to making this happen. Current offerings all fall short in various ways, so I’m curious to try this out.

me551ah• 2 years ago

It's only a natural extension of the things that we have in our pocket. I would rather be immersed in the whole virtual world rather than stare at a 7 inch screen for a large part of my day.

Lets face it, we spend considerable amounts of time in front of a screen. A bigger and more immersive screen will be a better experience for everyone.

arrowsmith• 2 years ago

I would rather be immersed in the whole virtual world rather than stare at a 7 inch screen for a large part of my day

I would rather do neither of these things.

smeej6• 2 years ago

It's bad enough we have the things in our pockets.

I'm sticking with this line of reasoning. This is already bad enough. I do not think more of it will make things better.

yayr• 2 years ago

if it takes a similar course as the form factors of mobiles from the 1990s to today it may become quite convenient to use... Also many including me prefer Wikipedia over printed encyclopedias. Getting that context while navigating the world may even become a necessity to collaborate or compete with AIs efficiently in the future.

On the other hand I do appreciate beauty in nature and design.

But why not have both?

jeffbee• 2 years ago

I am fairly sure that 90% of people are on your side and only emotionally stunted weirdos like Zuck think this is a good idea.

flkiwi• 2 years ago

It feels like a competition to own a comparatively narrow market (if we're talking about VR). And, within that context, it may indeed be a good idea. But I just cannot see VR headsets being anything approaching common, primarily because people do not like tech accessories they cannot put away unless they have a high fashion value or effectively look like something else. VR headsets, today, check none of these boxes. AR might end up being a different story.

loudmax• 2 years ago

The Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End famously presents a future in which people's interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality via contact lenses. It's not presented as a necessarily bad thing, but who actually controls access to information is a very important consideration.

candlemas• 2 years ago

VR makes me sick. Don't know about mixed reality but I've read that also causes nausea.

ciwolsey• 2 years ago

You have no choice, so no point worrying about it.

smeej6• 2 years ago

Just because I can't stop a ship from sinking, it doesn't mean there's no point to trying to get off of it and encourage others I might reach to do the same.

jjcm• 2 years ago

Just giving an anecdotal response that I am very much the opposite. I'm absolutely thrilled for that future. There's something magical about that blend of real + digital that to me feels more human than sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen.

It will definitely be a cultural change though, and I totally get how that can be almost repulsive from a different perspective. I just want you to be aware though that there are people who at least are interested in that future.

smeej6• 2 years ago

Why is the comparison to "sitting behind a computer stating at a screen" and not "going outside"?

If these only replace desk work, I might agree with you. My fear is that wearing them full-time becomes normalized.

wredue2• 2 years ago

If we had lightweight reality augmenting glasses (as in not much more than a pair of reading glasses), I’d have that in a heartbeat depending on use.

But yeah, I’d personally not want much beyond that.

Of course, to each their own.

swozey• 2 years ago

This is interesting, hopefully it gets more HMD options out there, but even better get more developers making ar/vr games.

Was the OS a limiting factor in any of this, though? I've only used a Vive and my Oculus 2 and 3 so I'm not sure what other HMDs use, I assumed some Android distro that just connects to steamvr/openxr/whatever.

Are Asus, Lenovo and Xbox really trying to get into the vr/ar ecosystem? Are they going to be Oculus clones? Their own r&d? Is this all a pipedream?

aprilnya4• 2 years ago

the advantage of using meta’s OS is that you get the whole Meta Quest Store library (or, i guess, Meta Horizon Store) meanwhile before, you’d have to convince devs to manually publish for your platform

api• 2 years ago

With this and Llama I'm starting to wonder if Meta is making a pivot toward openness similar to what Microsoft did under Nadella.

It's not altruism of course. It's a strategy. But it's a different strategy from the closed pure walled garden strategy they have executed previously.

joshmarinacci2• 2 years ago

Smells like competition.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

Given React and PyTorch I'd say they've always been doing that. Also they've been releasing open source models for years and pretty much from the beginning.

idle_zealot5• 2 years ago

"Open platform" my ass. I still have to jump through ridiculous hoops to mod BeatSaber (which is the only way to make it worth playing for more than a few minutes). Quest 3 makes modding even harder. This announcement is trying to frame App Lab as an open app distribution platform; it isn't. Those "basic technical and content requirements" apps have to meet are basically the same ones that Apple or Google or Meta themselves enforce for their app stores. Entire classes of applications, particularly those that undermine platform-owners' business models are not allowed.

Additionally, Horizon is generally a terrible operating system. Useless and intrusive "social" features out the wazoo, laden with tracking/spyware, and it isn't even good for anything beyond launching apps that take over the whole environment. Want to use your fancy headset to open up apps in 3d space and do some multitaking work? Well I sure hope you're happy with exactly 3 2d apps (all equally sized) lined up in a row in a fixed location, because that's all you're getting. If you want to do anything real you need to install an app that launches its own environment for multitasking, but of course then you can only pull in windows from a remote PC, so if you want to run any local applications it's back to basics for you. Oh, and of course you can't mix those remote PC windows with local apps. As poor as Apple's Vision OS is in the multitasking department Horizon falls far behind even it.

hackcasual• 2 years ago

Modded beat saber is the only reason I still have kept my original quest

zem2• 2 years ago

I was half tempted to get a quest after playing beat saber on a friend's device. it's kind of amazing how much better it is than the next best thing you could do on one, some team just knocked it out of the park designing and implementing that game

NBJack2• 2 years ago

This is ultimately what they want: their owned walled garden, where they get to be the decider, hold the power, track the user's as first party data, etc. It makes perfect sense. They want this to be the next Android OS (with Play Store equivalent of course).

This is really the only move that gets them back in (perhaps only somewhat) with the dwindling ads market.

Much as I don't like it, it is a legitimate tactic. I just don't see it being effective in the current market, even with Apple as a player.

znpy• 2 years ago

They want this to be the next Android OS (with Play Store equivalent of course).

Or the next Apple with the next iOS ?

zooq_ai9• 2 years ago

Dwindling Ads market? Which planet do you live?

freedomben2• 2 years ago

If what they ultimately want is their own walled garden, then wouldn't opening things up be the opposite of what they should do? I mean, it's a lot harder to re-take control that you previously released than it is to hold onto it from the start. Look at Apple's difficulties tighteninng up control on the mac for example. It has to be a very long game. Compare that to the iPhone, iPad, vision OS that have been tightly controlled from the start and they have no difficulties (other than regulatory) holding the reins tightly.

bagels• 2 years ago

Why can't you play BeatSaber without mods?

yuck39• 2 years ago

The out of the box track selection is quite weak. The game depends on community made tracks to make it playable in the long term.

munk-a2• 2 years ago

You can - it's just far less fun than BeatSaber with mods. The biggest improvement is from being able to select from the community list of songs that are available that may better suit your taste than the songs that come built in. It's a rhythm game so using a rhythm you like makes it much more fun.

idle_zealot5• 2 years ago

Lack of any songs I actually care about, and the actual note mapping from the devs has been pretty bad up until recently. The modding community has had them beat for ages. Without mods the game would be a breif curiosity before I got bored with the provided songs, most of which don't suit my taste.

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

Mind that "mods" includes "custom tracks".

OG BeatSaber comes with a small-ish selection of tracks, most of them obscure and not generally known. Good or bad, they get boring quickly. Modding lets you expand to arbitrary number of tracks, including pretty much all the ones you like. It's what makes it fun and worth returning to. Not being able to add your own music, makes BeatSaber not worth the sticker price (much less if you're getting Oculus just to play it).

Also note that people were used to this capability, because before BeatSaber became a poster child for Oculus, it was streamed to other headsets from PC, where adding custom tracks was tacitly allowed.

micromacrofoot2• 2 years ago

because they want to use songs they didn't pay for

kotaKat2• 2 years ago

And I'm still forced to have some form or variant of a Facebook-touched account, even if they want to change the front company behind it.

I don't want to sign in to use a headset, period.

prab97• 2 years ago

But you do sign in to use an Android phone, or iPhone. Although, I agree with the point that someone would never want to sign in with their Facebook account there, with FB account holding so much personal information about them! For gaming, somebody would rather prefer to use an alias like dungeonmaster669 instead of their verified actual identity.

fijiaarone• 2 years ago

Plus, it doesn’t have the Apple logo.

gnarbarian• 2 years ago

Hey, at least it supports webXR and there's no way to control that content.

cma• 2 years ago

They mention Steam Link but don't mention it isn't allowed to sell in-app purchases (maybe a decision on Steam's side to be fair; they dont want games on Steam themselves having a "remote desktop" overlay workaround where you buy DLC without paying the 30% revenue tax).

bodge5000• 2 years ago

I sure hope you're happy with exactly 3 2d apps (all equally sized) lined up in a row in a fixed location, because that's all you're getting.

To be fair that is all I really want. Regardless, its still a privacy nightmare which makes it a no-go for me, combined with the fact that the most powerful ("productivity") app I can expect to run on it would be something like excel which makes me not really need anymore than 1 window, at which point its no better than a regular laptop.

I'm waiting for the Simula One, or maybe XReal Air support for linux

EDIT: To be clear, the kind of apps I'd want to be running (what I run on my regular laptop) that I doubt would be available on Meta OS include things like: Godot, Blender, VSCode, terminal windows, probably a bunch of other stuff but those are the main ones

ru552• 2 years ago

With this and Llama, looks like Zuck is trying to be the Linux of whatever the next big wave is

brevitea• 2 years ago

There exists a severe deterioration of trust with respect to Zuckerberg. I don't believe people are as eager to jump on his bandwagon today.

mousetree• 2 years ago

I think he is working on turning that trend around (see Llama).

etrautmann• 2 years ago

Is that still true?

cairhart• 2 years ago

We’re also developing a new spatial app framework that helps mobile developers create mixed reality experiences. Developers will be able to use the tools they’re already familiar with to bring their mobile apps to Meta Horizon OS or to create entirely new mixed reality apps.

Like porting my whole android app + spatial features or...?

tasoeur• 2 years ago

My guess is that they saw how nicely Apple made basic app development (read 2.5D planes with list views and spatial UX) and they are gonna try their best to shape their “app framework” in a similar fashion.

pavlov4• 2 years ago

“Meta Horizon OS devices will also use the same mobile companion app that Meta Quest owners use today—we’ll rename this as the Meta Horizon app.”

Churning through so many VR brands. The app that used to be called Oculus and is now called Meta Quest will soon be called Meta Horizon.

If Meta really believes in the Metaverse, why do they need the Horizon brand? Why not just the Meta OS?

what_ever• 2 years ago

Because their whole company is called Meta?

sangnoir2• 2 years ago

If Meta really believes in the Metaverse, why do they need the Horizon brand? Why not just the Meta OS?

Perhaps for the same reason why Apple OS, Google OS or Microsoft OS don't exist as customer OSes - each OS is scoped to a specific function/device-class, and maybe superceded in the future.

blululu• 2 years ago

This is actually a really cool move. Not sure about the business case, but building an os for AR/VR is challenging. A naive port of Android or Linux will not really work (without inducing massive motion sickness). Having a framework that allows a hardware oem to quickly create a decent AR/VR headset could really open up the market.

lucideer• 2 years ago

pivoting some underlying metaverse tech? scant on detail unfortunately

spintin• 2 years ago

I think linux would be the obvious choice.

VR is being gatekept by Valve and Meta.

How likely is Valve to use Android?

jsheard4• 2 years ago

How likely is Valve to use Android?

Not likely, unless they make a headset which doesn't do much of anything by itself and is just meant for streaming from a PC. To make a standalone headset which can draw on the Steam catalog they would almost certainly want to use a variant of their SteamOS Linux distro.

TulliusCicero4• 2 years ago

Valve already has its own OS for a mobile device: Steam OS (based on Arch) on the Steam Deck. My bet is that they'd just modify that for a standalone headset.

amluto• 2 years ago

I wonder if this will allow full use of Meta's hardware without an account.

pavlov4• 2 years ago

It’s the other way around: you can get the Quest’s software on hardware not made by Meta.

ein0p• 2 years ago

Doesn’t seem very “open” actually. Open to ASUS and Lenovo != Open.

pjmlp5• 2 years ago

It is open in the sense of POSIX Open Group.

boomlinde5• 2 years ago

So it's publishing standards I can implement to make my own compatible OS?

neural_thing• 2 years ago

Very strange how many people are here to dunk on Zuck. He's opening up an OS. THAT'S AWESOME! We should celebrate that in principle, no matter how we feel about him or VR in general.

Oras2• 2 years ago

Oculus still requires a Facebook login; don't you see the conflict?

purge• 2 years ago

it requires a meta sign-in, which isn't a facebook account.

zmmmmm8• 2 years ago

you really should be factually correct when dunking on something

It hasn't been called Oculus for ages and it doesn't require a Facebook login. Meta accounts are stand alone and completely different, you can create as many as you want without giving your identity, just an email address, you don't need to link it to anything.

croes• 2 years ago

to third-party hardware makers.

And it's still based on Android.

The reason will be the same as for Android by Google: Control the market.

alt227• 2 years ago

Dont be fooled by the marketing language.

All they are doing is allowing some companies to pay them billions of dollars to put meta onto their own headsets. Similar to how Valve allowed a few companies to put SteamOS onto their own hardware to create 'Steam Machines'.

I cant think of a single time in history when this tactic has worked. and made a product or brand more successful. Please correct me if I am wrong.

woopsn11• 2 years ago

I know I'm fighting the overwhelming tide here, but what the hell is "mixed reality"? What is "the metaverse"? For that matter what is "artificial intelligence"? Stop trying to dazzle and just use words, if the technology is revolutionary then it will be. An automobile is not the magic carpet, a cell phone is not a soulmate, etc. Otherwise fuck it -- TV is virtual reality, getting high augmented reality, TI-84 calculators are artificial intelligence, libraries are the metaverse, ...

neverokay2• 2 years ago

We are like gamers that no longer perceive the improvement in graphics across generations.

Talk to Siri and then talk to ChatGPT if you are feeling that clueless.

woopsn11• 2 years ago

I do. I've said it before too -- I like that they called it a "generative pretrained transformer" aka GPT.

HL33tibCe7• 2 years ago

Meta are trying to dazzle you with words because there is nothing fundamental behind any of this metaverse stuff

idle_zealot5• 2 years ago

These are not complex or dazzling terms. Artificial intelligence is software that seems intelligent. Virtual reality is a simulated environment that you can immerse yourself in through small screens and head tracking. Mixed reality is virtual reality overlayed on your real environment. See also "augmented reality". The metaverse is the web, but replace websites with 3d environments and add some sort of personal avatar, perhaps with some persistent identity.

woopsn11• 2 years ago

People seem to think I have trouble understanding what the terms refer to. That's not my point -- you're right in that they are not complex.

But why is virtual reality associated with small screens and head tracking? Why wasn't Everquest on a CRT "virtual reality"? A lot of software calculates probabilities over some distribution, why isn't all that "artificial intelligence"? Why isn't my Subaru's cruise control and lane keeping technology "autopilot" or "self driving"? Why isn't the elevator controller an "agent"? Why aren't my own servers "clouds"?

I don't need the terminology explained, I'm just tired of it. And I do think in many cases it's meant to be dazzling and marketable rather than mean anything.

LZ_Khan• 2 years ago

I think "mixed reality" is the marketing term for augmented reality. Easier to understand for some people.

creativenolo3• 2 years ago

Typically “mixed reality” is used to mean mixing your vision with virtual content. Whereas, “augmented reality” has typically meant displaying a live video feed on a single screen.

They are two quite different experiences and use cases. Once both are common it would make sense to call both augmented reality but I haven’t heard any better terms for describing the difference to people yet.

baby10• 2 years ago

The Metaverse is what the Internet is if you add VR. It’s not hard to understand.

creativenolo3• 2 years ago

It can also mean just plain olde 2D 3D (according to companies selling metaverse services)

woopsn11• 2 years ago

I understand. I read Snow Crash. Besides the Metaverse there was also a nuclear powered dog.

My point is this -- by allusion to some concept with which an inventor wishes to form an association in the consumer's mind, their products are to be thought of as something different than they are, something too grand for plain language. This doesn't serve anyone but the inventor.

The "Internet with head-mounted display" is actually pretty cool technology, I'm not against it. My concern is that it shouldn't be sold or even referred to as an alternate form of reality. For the benefit of product sales, or else the egos of certain technologists, language becomes muddied and the very idea about what makes someone "a person" is bastardized. I think this is wrong and very short sighted.

hwbunny• 2 years ago

Why the forced push by big companies into this VR thing?

wvenable11• 2 years ago

What the hell is "cloud computing"? What is "big data"? What is the "Internet of Things" or "SaaS" or "SEO"? For that matter what is "agile development"?

Just use words to describe technology? Every time I want to say "cloud computing" do I have to say "a service where you use the internet to access software, storage, and processing power that's run on a bunch of server located far away in data center that are owned and managed by a company that specializes in providing these services" instead?

woopsn11• 2 years ago

In business you would traditionally call that sort of arrangement "outsourcing". The Internet of Things is okay -- it could have been worse, The Omninet or something.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

A new OS will be interesting ONLY if Meta commits to certain policies that Microsoft and Apple have violated. Users should be able to use their devices without any telemetry or phoning home. They should be able to install any software they want from any source. They should not be forced to make payments only through Meta’s services. Etc.

willi59549879• 2 years ago

wouldn't trust meta with anything for sure not running a whole os.

Closi2• 2 years ago

Did they consider the UK market when naming this?

Horizon is synonymous with a computing scandal involving buggy IT code.

pavlov4• 2 years ago

Shades of Apple licensing the Mac OS to clone hardware vendors in 1995 - 1997. It seems like Meta will be controlling the software experience quite closely, just like Apple did back in the day.

There’s an important difference though: Apple made all their money on Mac hardware margins which the nimble clone vendors could undercut. Whereas for Meta, the Quest hardware has always been sold at breakeven or even as a loss leader (a few years ago they actually raised the price of the Quest 2 to cut further losses).

So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either.

samspenc2• 2 years ago

Like other comments have pointed out, I think of this as similar to how Google controls the Android OS. While theoretically open, the real useful stuff on top of Android (Google services etc) require a license from Google along with their Play store, so Google makes revenue from there.

Certainly more open (edited) than the Apple ecosystem, but still controlled by one (big) player, with a little bit of flexibility but not a whole lot.

ec109685• 2 years ago

You’re discounting the huge number of android devices that use it as a base OS. E.g. Amazon and Peloton use android without Google services for consumer devices.

bsharper• 2 years ago

Amazon used AOSP to create tons of their products. Even if most Android devices have the Play Store, there are successful variants that don't. And I'd even include Meta's Quest line here: every headset since the Go has the ability to sideload apks using standard Android tools.

talldayo5• 2 years ago

A bit more open than the Apple ecosystem

It is not "a bit more open" than iOS, it is a completely different approach to OS development that enables wildly different results.

While theoretically open, the real useful stuff on top of Android

That stuff is by no means necessary; I've run Android without Google services for years and it just feels like a normal tablet OS. Again, it is not "theoretically open" but in fact practically usable without any first-party services, unlike iOS.

bonton89• 2 years ago

So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either.

Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?

distortedsignal3• 2 years ago

The low end of the market is taken - but (from an outsider perspective) the high end appears free.

The people who want to buy a Honda aren't the same people who want to buy an Acura, even though it's (essentially) the same parts.

Let's say that, tomorrow, Gucci or Dolce and Gabanna (or however you spell that) want to make a VR headset (why? who knows?). They don't have the tech acumen to compete with Facebook on experience, but they have the brand to compete on "people who want to be seen in Gucci."

Is there a market for that? I don't know. But this opens Facebook up to the possibility of making that deal.

__s• 2 years ago

Because you want to use it as a basis for military VR or something

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

Are they capable of selling hardware loss leaders indefinitely? If so, can they do it at a scale that matches the company's digital presence? The Google Daydream headset sitting on my shelf is skeptical.

Regardless of whether they can sell the hardware at a loss forever, they probably won't need to.

Third-party hardware is engineering labor that Meta doesn't have to pay for. In fact, it's engineering labor that will pay Meta through royalties. Cost-cutting measures developed by those third parties can easily be copied by Meta's own product, reducing the cost of future versions of the hardware. Cheaper options in the marketplace also help Meta gain market penetration without their own hardware developing a reputation for poor quality.

After a couple generations, vendor lock-in will start to set in, and they'll be able to charge more without losing customers. The aforementioned cost-cutting techniques start to pile up, too.

ryanbrunner2• 2 years ago

Google did this early on with android - originally the Google devices (Nexus) were lower end, and high end devices were left to other manufacturers. They've flipped around recently, but I think the Nexus line was a decent enough idea at the time.

richardw• 2 years ago

its partly in the article. Companies like Xbox and Lenovo want different experiences for their clients. This allows them to share the basic platform but specialise for their customer segments, eg professional or Xbox owners or whatever. Architects and civil engineers and doctors might not want normal game controllers and the default resolution. Cheap devices used in developing countries can have a lower resolution and no hand tracking. Meta wins because they can’t build 100 versions themselves, all they care about is growth of the market. Nothing is locked up yet, think of a market 100x bigger.

wvenable11• 2 years ago

Seems like without some kind of software revenue sharing model it doesn't make sense. These things are consoles -- sold a cost or below cost in order to make it back on software sales.

lttlrck• 2 years ago

PCVR maybe. There are latency optimizations to be made (preferably, for me, by adding DisplayLink)

threeseed2• 2 years ago

Because Meta will be focused on the consumer market.

Which leaves a huge opportunity for professionals and businesses.

mkozlows• 2 years ago

Because you want to compete in a different market segment.

To put this very concretely, look at Pimax. Their Crystal headset allegedly has standalone capability. All the hardware is there for it, they make this thing, they sell it -- but they don't have a standalone platform, and have no hope whatsoever of being able to develop one.

For PCVR, they just use regular standard SteamVR and OpenXR, but for standalone usage, they suddenly have to be an amazing software company and they definitely are not. Using Horizon makes a ton of sense, and makes their product more attractive and better than it is without it.

Closi2• 2 years ago

Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?

Because you want to expand your market.

Let's say you are Pimax or Bigscreen Beyond and want to target users who don't have large gaming PC's - this is an obvious option for them.

_giorgio_• 2 years ago

Why should it be different than Google and Android?

Google makes medium and high cost devices, but actually doesn't compete too much on margins.

If the OS catches up, meta will do the same move, allowing other vendors to proliferate.

giuseppe_petri• 2 years ago

So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either.

How does Meta make its money? Advertising. Licensees bring actual eyeballs to the table and eat the hardware costs fighting amongst themselves selling commodity hardware and Meta re-position Quest as a 'premium' product that they might actually make a little money on.

nvy• 2 years ago

Whereas for Meta, the Quest hardware has always been sold at breakeven or even as a loss leader (a few years ago they actually raised the price of the Quest 2 to cut further losses).

Indeed, and that means they'll seek a return on their investment from continued invasive surveillance, emotional manipulation, and cramming ads everywhere.

chiefalchemist• 2 years ago

The other important difference between Apple then and Meta now is that Apple wasn't in a position that subjected it to possible (government) regulation. Meta has to try to play nice. Perhaps few vendors bite? But when the regulation noise increases - and it will - Meta can say it tried.

hankchinaski• 2 years ago

They are not looking to make margins on the OS or the hardware. They want adoption and distribution. The money will be made later on extracting value from the ecosystem they are trying to build. Whether that is with a higher end product later on, monetising the OS/ecosystem later on with ads or app fees is not relevant at Thai stage. What they are trying to do is to build a new ecosystem that they are entrenched and that they control firmly. They are trying to build the android of VR to put it simply

brink• 2 years ago

This all looks incredibly lonely.

tfandango2• 2 years ago

I think it all depends on context. It is lonely if you are the type of person who wants to interact physically. I work at home, and it can get kind of lonely here physically but there are some guys on Horizon I chat with from time to time as a break from work, in that sense it's the opposite of lonely.

gausswho• 2 years ago

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the upside-down language that Meta is trying to execute here with the repeated use of 'open' to describe any of this. This is an invitation for other corporations to drink from their social spigot and join their walled-off app store. The word 'open' really is under multiple fronts of diffusionary attack lately.

Is the Overton Window now a mobius strip?

b_d982• 2 years ago

While good, Meta is likely to attempt to form a walled-garden in the vein of IOS and even Android to an extent. What I’d really hope for is a general-purpose computing platform with root access for the user, As I believe that mixed reality headsets have the potential to overtake both the smartphone and the PC as the default compute device of choice.

squigz• 2 years ago

Is there any such solution in the VR space, even if not state-of-the-art?

b_d982• 2 years ago

There's SimulaVR. https://simulavr.com/

xyst2• 2 years ago

likely this. I fell for Apple once. I definitely won't fall for a Apple clone with one of the most untrustworthy companies since the turn of the century.

modeless5• 2 years ago

And we encourage the Google Play 2D app store to come to Meta Horizon OS, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms.

It sounds like they are specifically not open to third party app stores selling native AR/VR ("3D") apps. I can see why Google might not want to participate if they're not allowed to compete.

This feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But they aren't open sourcing the OS. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the exclusive store for native AR/VR apps. Maybe there's an app revenue share to sweeten the deal for hardware partners?

bsimpson2• 2 years ago

I think you're overindexing on "2D."

The Play store is full of flat apps, designed for phones and tablets. There are a gajillion of them, and FB wants them in their headsets.

It's not about not wanting competition - it's about wanting people to have more than 100 apps available when they use a Meta headset.

int_19h8• 2 years ago

But why would I as a user want to use those flat apps in VR, when I already have a phone and a tablet?

modeless5• 2 years ago

That's what it's about for Meta, sure. But for Google it would be about selling apps on a headset, and being prohibited from selling the native type of app for the platform would be pretty bad!

Meta wants to have their cake and eat it too. If it's their intention to allow third party stores to sell native Quest AR/VR apps on the headset in competition with their own store, they should state that explicitly because what's written here pretty carefully doesn't imply that. I don't think we can just assume what isn't stated here.

cmiles74• 2 years ago

This seems like trying to come up with an answer to Apple Vision's ability to run iOS apps. If you can install apps from Google Play then you could, if you wanted to, check your email from inside your headset.

I'm not sure many people would want to do that, but if Apple thinks it's a good idea, blah blah blah.

jayd164• 2 years ago

Its not a killer feature, but having to take off the headset to read mail or slack or whatever is a real drag.

It will quickly become table stakes.

modeless5• 2 years ago

Sorry for the double post. One of my comments was moved here from a different submission so now there are two top level comments from me, and I can't edit or delete them because the edit window has closed.

TiredOfLife4• 2 years ago

https://sidequestvr.com/ exists. Also Google is pushing their new AndroidXR os behind the scenes (after they killed Daydreams).

mattlondon• 2 years ago

Notable by it's absence: ML/AI

wearhere• 2 years ago

I was hoping to open this and see screenshots of what the OS looked like—I have never had a sense of what the OS for Meta's headsets is, only what individual games look like.

Instead, we get five (5) "Not an actual product render" illustrations.

jayd164• 2 years ago

Its Android with a VR quick action bar and app launcher grid. You can select an immersive skybox "desktop" or a use passthrough. There's not much to show seeing as the passthrough is still fairly new. There are no built in 3d widgets or anything atm so there's really not much to show besides apps.

Anyway, this seems like a licensing deal announcement, not a big software release.

nathan_compton• 2 years ago

I don't care what these people do, I'll never use one of their products unless it is to literally save someone's life.

zooq_ai9• 2 years ago

what a sad hill to die on

t1c4• 2 years ago

I don't think it's a particularly sad hill to die on – Meta has proven themselves to be exploitative, invasive, and downright malicious time and time again.

gretch2• 2 years ago

No one is dead on a hill.

If anything, not using VR makes you much more "alive".

A real misapplication of this metaphor.

vonwoodson• 2 years ago

I remember when Facebook released an "OS" for the phone (it was really just a skin for Android). While I'm really happy to see that FB is making another stab into the field with the Quest, and I'm very happy that we're finally getting some real development in VR, I'm even more skeptical of them now as I was then: I just don't trust FB with my data.

Part of what makes me so skeptical is how "cheap" the Quest 3 is. There's no way they're not loosing [literally billions](https://fortune.com/2023/10/27/mark-zuckerberg-net-worth-met...) of dollars developing VR tech and, given their track record, only have one way they know to make that money back.

joshmarinacci2• 2 years ago

"Open" in the same way Android is, with complete control and app store by Meta. I think we have to accept that an 'open hardware platform' the way PCs were was an anomaly. We will never have anything like that again.

andygeorge2• 2 years ago

i think that ship sailed when smartphones became ubiquitous. given how heavily subsidized mobile devices are (especially compared to PCs), there's no incentive to produce an actually-open hardware or software platform. Google and Apple want you re-upping every 2 years and to stay locked into their ecosystems. i agree this is sad, but definitely not new

drdaeman5• 2 years ago

I don't think it's in the same way. I see "we licensed some software to ASUS, Lenovo and Microsoft (and may license to others - serious inquiries only)", not "we are releasing something under a free software license".

Aaronstotle• 2 years ago

I won't touch VR/AR until the technology progresses to the point where its nealry indistinguishable from regular sunglasses/eye-glasses.

I have yet to use any VR device that made me want to purchase it, its all felt insanely gimmicky, so far the only time a headset seems nice is on a plane ride.

I can see the potential, still seems a long way off imo.

zooq_ai9• 2 years ago

Feel sorry that you feel that way. There are many experiences (especially ball games that require hand/eye co-ordination) that has made my game / fitness / skill improve at least 80% with very minimal amount of time I spent (compared to real world training). If you are into Fitness, nothing like training in VR for literally no money (compared to Gym / personal trainer)

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

If "cool" people insist on only wearing Ray Bans that will keep VR fun. It will keep VRChat safe for furries, kemonomini and animekin.

trendoid• 2 years ago

Any recommendations of games or apps that helped you most?

drdaeman5• 2 years ago

Typically frames are made very light, so they won't make too much pressure on one's ears and nose. Unless someone runs a fiber to a frame, then keep the rest in a backpack or belt bag or something, I doubt it's physically possible to pack all the necessary additional hardware keeping it nearly indistinguishable from a frame without it.

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

That CPU or battery puck for Apple Vision Pro, Magic Leap, and some others is a real killjoy. It makes it certain you won't be using fitness apps.

bluescrn• 2 years ago

Battery tech is likely to prevent that within our lifetimes, even if the displays and electronics can be miniaturised to that level.

zmmmmm8• 2 years ago

So you are ready to go then:

https://www.rayneo.com/products/rayneo-air-2-xr-glasses

ApolloFortyNine• 2 years ago

And we encourage the Google Play 2D app store to come to Meta Horizon OS, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms.

Did they get told to shove it by Google when they asked through back channels? To even come out and essentially say publicly "they can still get their 30% cut" is just wild to me.

Also of note, they don't mention any license. Is the hope they can avoid the Google antitrust concerns Google is running into that Apple is somehow avoiding?

potatolicious2• 2 years ago

I'd speculate the two things have a lot to do with each other. It's easier to avoid accusations of monopolizing software distribution on a platform when you've openly invited other parties to participate.

traek• 2 years ago

Google asked Meta to switch to AndroidXR for their Quest devices. Meta said no and suggested Google offer Play Store on Quest, which Google rejected.

Google then went on a PR offensive accusing Meta of fragmenting the VR/AR ecosystem.

Meta is including this in the announcement to head off criticism by Google aimed at creating pressure on Meta to consolidate on AndroidXR.

https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-google-android-xr-quest-reject...

sheepscreek• 2 years ago

Isn’t it built on Android?

lyu07282• 2 years ago

Almost exciting, if the software wasn't just this shitty hacked together proprietary android fork. It's just an app store and game launcher, there is nothing there that I would imagine a metaverse operating system to be, like interoperability between vr apps. This would have to be built from the ground up around the VR paradigm on open standards and hackable.

If the Internet started on today's proprietary app stores and nailed-shut operating systems it would've never innovated this quickly. This is what AOL/MSN desperately attempted, but it all failed (thank god).

Meta's dream of the metaverse is nothing but laughable, hold back by nothing but terrible software.

haytamoptika• 2 years ago

i love rivals on tech, hope like ios vs android

ambichook2• 2 years ago

i mean, its an android fork and some ios derivative so thats exactly what it is :D

xandrius2• 2 years ago

Never wished something would quickly fail already at its announcement as much as this.

_akhe7• 2 years ago

Long plane rides and TV before bed - 2 things it would be better at than what we have now. Imagine watching a 27" screen from across the room in the dark vs a screen that moves with your vision... No more awkward pillow adjusting to make a makeshift couch etc. your neck can finally just relax and you can stare at the screen however you're laying. In these cases you're not doing anything else anyway.

But yeah, the Tesla Airpod people who talk to themselves all loud outside will no doubt have a full UI of the world 24/7, gesturing like maniacs in the middle of stores, in crosswalks - just a news and stock ticker streaming across the top of their field of vision at all times. And there will of course be junkies in the streets, with - instead of smartphones - goggles on their faces, crumbled up in a brick corner just like the dystopian art showed us.

For Pareto's 20%, it's an Apple Watch, or Airpods++.

xandrius2• 2 years ago

For your own health, try to avoid TV before bed, it's not good for your sleep.

I still think that watching movies/TV should be a social experience and not akin to scrolling on social media. My neck can be a bit less comfortable for that :D

DotaFan• 2 years ago

Quite dislike Quest 2 dependency on Meta, would probably never buy their hardware again.

bee_rider5• 2 years ago

Yeah my CV1 doesn’t work anymore, I think Meta added some account requirement. I feel like Facebook stole some money from me, in the sense that it wasn’t obvious when I bought the thing that I’d need to buy into their ecosystem. But it is basically first gen hardware, so I guess it isn’t worth anything.

I was pretty excited about VR (enough to drop a couple hundred on what was then a top of the line headset) but overall this experience killed all interest for me.

Maybe good open source options will come out in a couple years.

RainaRelanah• 2 years ago

A friend of mine has been working this year on getting the CV1/Rift S running without the Oculus app/Meta account, which also means continued support for these two discontinued headsets. I don't think she has publicly released it yet, but good progress is being made.

https://github.com/BnuuySolutions/ReLinked

https://twitter.com/BunniKaitlyn/status/1756580547768279466

a13o• 2 years ago

The bridge to nowhere doesn't need more features, it needs a somewhere

DragonMaus• 2 years ago

Would this be the logical extrapolation of the "it's not the destination, but the journey to get there" mindset?

spxneo• 2 years ago

feels like US tech companies are running on fumes

just as the AI bubble starts to fizzle its one last push at AR

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

I disagree to an extent. I think AI is the real deal, VR though is indeed an evolutionary dead-end that we've been down and retreated from before.

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

That's a bad name collision, "Horizon" is the name of the OS on the Nintendo 3ds and switch.

_joel• 2 years ago

And also for people following the UK news, the name of the Fujitsu/Post Office software that led to a not insignificant number of sub-postmasters being falsely convited in the largest miscarriages of British justice ever (maybe anywhere).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

darkhorse13• 2 years ago

Literally nobody knows this though. Even searching for "Horizon OS" only returns Meta stuff already.

xcdzvyn• 2 years ago

Yeah - while I've never dived too deeply, I have modded my 3DS a fair bit and didn't know what the OS was codenamed. I've always just seen it called 3DS OS, native firm, etc.

sb8244• 2 years ago

Eh, I don't think this is a bad name collision. Nintendo doesn't really talk about stuff like this publicly, and searching for it is pretty much reddit + hacker news threads.

I'm sure there's a lot of internal code name collisions.

lsllc• 2 years ago

There's precedent, when Apple named iOS, Cisco had (and still has) IOS. They just came to some licensing settlement for Apple's use of the name [0].

Actually, it looks like Apple also licensed the iPhone trademark from Cisco too!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#:~:text=In%20June%202010%2....

superkuh2• 2 years ago

This entire thing is newspeak. Every headline means the opposite. For example, "A More Open App Ecosystem" means a more closed application ecosystem. By switching to a proprietary OS and setting up a walled garden where they have to approve all software you can run. This is part of the coming war on general computation.

tempodox2• 2 years ago

This is part of the coming war on general computation.

Coming? I'd say it's already full on. Apple's malicious compliance with the DMA is one part of it, for instance. Of course others try to imitate.

inanutshellus• 2 years ago

Does this page even load for y'all in Firefox? For me CORS protection blocks the whole site from loading.

asabla• 2 years ago

Nah, the same issue here as well

coryfklein• 2 years ago

Wow that spam bot is quite creative! Looks like they've figured out how to create a green account, and perhaps bypassing the spam detection by having each new account only post one spam message.

I'm sure dang is really busy right now.

macintux• 2 years ago

Yeah, the flood of spam is killing the server’s performance.

librasteve• 2 years ago

not sure Horizon is a great name for a software project

_akhe7• 2 years ago

Lol "Sunset your product today on... Horizon"

riffic• 2 years ago

great, another Android.

taylorbuley2• 2 years ago

While the web trends away from open, Facebook is zigging where others are zagging and supporting the resistance technology-wise.

Andrew_nenakhov• 2 years ago

What are you even talking about?

Facebook is THE biggest actor who works non-stop against the open web and is the biggest closed-off silo of data on the web.

taylorbuley2• 2 years ago

What makes you say that?

slim• 2 years ago

This will (thankfully) fail because meta will not be able to harness the chinese industrial firehose because 1. US protectionism 2. chinese people are not stupid, they won't let a company whose business model revolves around selling attention, acquire a monoply on attention of human beings

29athrowaway2• 2 years ago

Imagine being banned from Facebook due to not complying with the community guidelines and being unable to use your computer.

Community guidelines that can change at any moment at any time and are enforced by random people who can make mistakes.

A Facebook OS as a daily driver is an idea that is vomitive in every way.

Imagine ads that track you eyes and that you cannot look away from. Ads that track your face muscles so they know exactly how you react to them. Like being connected to a lie detector 24/7.

This is pure evil, everyone should reject this.

askafriend• 2 years ago

What you wrote makes doesn't sense because Horizon OS doesn't require a Facebook account or any account on social media.

29athrowaway2• 2 years ago

For now

_akhe7• 2 years ago

Meta is smartly capturing the MR developer market like they captured the web developer market with React.

In terms of Vision vs Quest - I wonder if there will be a "React Native" parallel that allows developers to write React for both Vision and Quest apps. A lot of the developer market comes down to languages: Python for AI/ML, Obj-C (Swift) for iOS, Java (Kotlin) for Android - but JavaScript always seems to weasle its way into these native platforms and a lot of companies end up just writing React for anything front-end.

ImHereToVote• 2 years ago

Making any multiplatform real-time 3D for Apple is such a pain. Even simply using Xcode is a nightmare.

_akhe7• 2 years ago

Agree with you there! I don't particularly love Facebook and haven't even used it since 2009, but I can't deny how world-changing React has been for not only front-end (in terms of state management etc.) but also for building cross-platform native UIs on various platforms like TVs and mobile devices - and being able to do it with a (mostly) common codebase.

I probably would have never built for iOS if I had to use Xcode and their entire ecosystem, luckily in RN you usually just need to install their command line tools and never open the software.

gorbypark3• 2 years ago

There is react native for VisionOS already and the react team has hinted at react native for Quests/VR in the past..

_akhe7• 2 years ago

I didn't know, thanks for letting me know! Just found this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@callstack/react-native-vision...

This is a full fork of [React Native] with changes needed to support visionOS.

Awesome.

guiomie• 2 years ago

At least I can build VR apps for free on Meta Quest with Unity, as opposed to 200$ a month with Apple Vision Pro.

paulspl• 2 years ago

I don't think anyone cares.

w0mbat• 2 years ago

Otherwise known as Linux.

gnuser• 2 years ago

fyi I’m working on a GPLv3 competitor and intend to outshine whatever this is

nar001• 2 years ago

I'd be curious to see but no idea how you intend to get enough people to develop for your platform

zmmmmm8• 2 years ago

I've got to hand it to Zuckerberg : when he spouted the "open" vs "closed" rhetoric earlier in the year, I said it was nice words but meaningless unless he put his money where his mouth was and makes Quest OS available to others as well as put firm guarantees around side loading etc. But in the same breath I said I doubted he would do that. And now he has done exactly that. However much antipathy people have towards him and his past, he keeps putting meat behind his words and actually doing the things he says.

At the same time, important to recognise here that this is still to some extent "open washing" what is a totally controlled OS. This is not like AOSP where you can go download the source code and compile it yourself. So far it is not even like Windows where you can download an installer and run it on a computer yourself. A manufacturer will have to form a business partnership with Meta to even get access to this "open" OS - I assume. But since I keep under estimating Zuckerberg maybe he will exceed my expectations on that front too.

Nonetheless, this is a huge step forward and a genuine challenge now for Google/Samsung. The bar is now very very high for them to deliver something compelling enough that manufacturers will jump on board instead of building on Horizon OS with an existing install base of 25M+ users and thousands of apps.

All up, this is pretty exciting news in the XR space and really sets the stage for an epic battle in the next couple of years as these platforms go head to head.

weinberg• 2 years ago

Somewhat surprised to not see Valve in there, especially after Steam Link showed up a handful months ago.

dev1ycan• 2 years ago

Dude they already have a new grift, AI, why are they still pouring money in this failed project? Zuckerberg is trying so hard to not be Elon 2.0

webninja• 2 years ago

It’s funny that Horizon is named after Horizon in the Amazon Prime TV series “Upload”. Good TV series btw.

Grimeton• 2 years ago

Funny what they call an OS nowadays. I'd say it's another Linux distribution.

fragmede• 2 years ago

Depends on if you consider Android, ChromeOS, and Ubuntu to be the same OS or not.

kernal7• 2 years ago

If Android was Linux then I should be able to run any GNU/Linux app, without modification or installation of additional software, on Android, right?

ThinkBeat• 2 years ago

As usual I get quite hopeful when I hear about a new operating system. We so absolutely need paths to move away from what we have today.

I didn't even know what "mixed reality operating system" was so that made me hopeful. May include some nifty quantum processing.

Alas, it is just stuff built on top of Android, which is built on top of the Linux kernel.

Perhaps "Meta Horizon SDK for Android" would be a better label?`

meiraleal• 2 years ago

Perhaps "Meta Horizon SDK for Android" would be a better label?`

Yes, the same as Android SDK for Linux. But it became just Android.

BlueFalconHD2• 2 years ago

What about "Meta Horizon SDK for Android SDK for Linux?"

kernal7• 2 years ago

Let's just cut to the chase and call it the HDK.

snvzz2• 2 years ago

Alas, it is just stuff built on top of Android, which is built on top of the Linux kernel.

Look into HarmonyOS, Fuchsia, LionsOS, Managarm, Haiku and Genode.

fsflover3• 2 years ago

And Qubes OS.

rainsil2• 2 years ago

What unexplored space do you think is ripe for a totally new operating system?

lp0_on_fire• 2 years ago

A space where operating systems exist to service the operator and not the OS vendor.

One that isn’t just a vehicle to push ads and subscriptions to <blank>-as-a-service or otherwise act as a siphon to send telemetry up to the mothership.

Yes, I know *nix exists but it’s so fractured and every little variant has its own quirks making it difficult to be a general purpose OS that the masses could adopt, IMO.

klabb33• 2 years ago

Ironically, general purpose computing. Like servers, smartphones, etc. The premise of Fuchsia, as a prominent example, is to build an OS that operates more like a sandboxed/capabilities-based microservices platform, with structured IPC across processes. All major platforms both cloud and clients (even browsers) have gone to great lengths to deliver precisely that on top of existing OSs, with many expensive layers and hacks. It would be a lot nicer to have it built into the OS.

Does that mean it’s truly ripe? I don’t know.

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

Dreaming of a world where normal PCs could have an OS on the quality level of MacOS with the software ecosystem but Linux is just too fragmented that you can't build anything coherent or reliable on an interface level in the way MacOS is.

This isn't saying Linux is bad, its great at what it does and being modular but how can something like MacOS spell check where it works on any text field coherently across any app work in a modular world like that.

Windows just feels like bad decisions made decades ago hold it back, it can't even open a folder of 20 thumbnails without choking, MacOS can handle 10,000 like a knife through butter. Can't even find a file opened yesterday when you search for it in the start menu by exact name, MacOS manages in a fraction of a second. Maybe the right team could rewrite all the things causing this jank but you'd essentially have to replace so much of the company that caused it anyway that it doesn't seem feasible.

Still use all 3 for different tasks but MacOS is the only one that feels like an operating system should feel in 2024.

llm_trw• 2 years ago

May include some nifty quantum processing.

While we're at it they might do a bit of dabbling in reversing entropy and solving the halting problem - it's only impossible in flat space-time after all.

jessriedel• 2 years ago

“Operating system” is being used to refer to the UI for running and managing apps (not the original under-the-hood sense of the word for how app share resources, manage security, etc.). For better or worse, that is how consumers understand it.

BizarreByte• 2 years ago

We so absolutely need paths to move away from what we have today.

Why though? What necessitates our move away from what we have?

hanniabu• 2 years ago

Diversity = freedom

sircastor• 2 years ago

I was amused and interested when I found out that HaikuOS is not Linux, nor even the Linux Kernel, but a reimplementation of BeOS (concepts mostly) on the NewOS kernel.

I've been dwelling in some nostalgia recently and miss some of the earlier days when everything wasn't so homogenous. This is all rose-colored glasses though, as I don't miss when everything was also extremely incompatible. And slow. And expensive.

dfex• 2 years ago

I've been dwelling in some nostalgia recently and miss some of the earlier days when everything wasn't so homogenous.

You are not alone in this. I see announcements like this one from Meta and others like Oxide - companies out there having a swing in a different direction and it makes me glad that there are people out there thinking outside the monoculture that computing feels like it's become sometimes.

Sure, standardisation has been good in some respects, but I feel like the incentive to really innovate (as opposed to incrementally improve) in the operating system and compute space has really dried up.

classified2• 2 years ago

And you seriously expect an ad company to improve anything? What's Google missing?

pjmlp5• 2 years ago

Android is already quite cool compared with what traditional OSes happen to be.

For starters it is what Microsoft has failed to do with Longhorn, because contrary to having internal sabotage from the kernel team, the Android team doubled down on their efforts to make a managed userspace actually work in a mainstream product.

Dalvik sucked balls against Sony and Nokia J2ME implementations, with its DEX interpreter, yet they managed to create ART with quite cool mix of JIT/AOT/PGO, and a very modern GC.

Then it follows up, that for all the praise Plan 9 gets on hacker circles, Android's approach to user space closely follows on Inferno with Limbo, Plan 9's successor that many of its praisers tend to forget.

Followed by being able to encapsulate Linux kernel into a micro-kernel like stack, where most drivers are process based using Android IPC to talk to the kernel, and can be written in a mix of Java, C++, and now Rust.

If only they handn't screw Sun, and stepped away when the ship went down, maybe they could have saved themselves some headaches, however Google isn't really a language designer company, so maybe that was for the greater good nontheless.

Ah, and using AIDL is so much better developer experience than dealing with the primitive COM tooling on Windows.

anthk• 2 years ago

Limbo and Inferno are partially alive in Go and plan9/9front. On J2ME, it worked well in legay devices; but for modern usage, Android's Java-like API was a godsend for the developers, as they could seamlessly transition from one Java-like lang to another one. Heck, J2ME interpreters for Android do exist, and I think lots of them just use shims...

jojobas2• 2 years ago

What we have today is Absolutely Awesome. Even Windows.

hatthew• 2 years ago

Joel Spolsky's "Commoditize your Complements" [0] seems relevant here. From that perspective, it seems like Meta is trying to commoditize the hardware and monopolize the OS (and likely the app store and payment system), similar to Android.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

w10-1• 2 years ago

If hardware manufacturers actually wanted this, Meta would be announcing a licensing deal.

This is a threat to Apple: if Apple doesn't relent on advertising/privacy in VisionOS, then Meta will do to VR what Google did for smartphone's: sell the market to maintain advertising access.

Meta doesn't care about money or mindshare on VR. They just want ad access.

EchoReflection• 2 years ago

they want ad access because they care about money and mindshare (a term I hadn't heard of until reading your comment, so thank you for that!)

hooloovoo_zoo2• 2 years ago

Apple and to a lesser extent Google have high trust. Nobody trusts Meta at all. So who would adopt their OS?

threeseed2• 2 years ago

Not sure why you wouldn't put Google and Meta in the same basket.

Both are advertising companies with a history of working to undermine pro-privacy initiatives.

ceroxylon• 2 years ago

As a Quest user: mostly younger devs. I see 18-22yo developers who do not care about the history of Meta making very impressive games that attract large amounts of their peers, adding micro-transactions along the way to fund their development, and it works, they make a large amount of money and have very active communities on Discord.

rmbyrro2• 2 years ago

Apple and Google have high trust?

In what world?

In terms of privacy, Apple has more trust, yes, but the daily stream of zero days on iPhones hurt it by a good margin. I won't even start talking about Google's privacy issues...

m4634• 2 years ago

I think apple has high trust only because they repeat their message all the time.

However, just buy an apple device and try to use it. You cannot use it without apple allowing it. You must connect to apple and activate your device. And as part of activation, you get a chance to read apple's privacy policy. Literally thousands of pages of privacy policy without the ability to DO anything, like say "No". And everything in the os phones home, continuously.

If you are a european and disable location services, and use a european vpn, apple still won't let you use the european app store because the phone knows your location. sigh.

TiredOfLife4• 2 years ago

And that is weird. Apple gives Chinese government direct access to user data. Apple obeys every demand from China and Russia. Meanwhile Meta communications director Andy Stone just got 6 years in russian prison for allowing people to say mean things about russia.

zmmmmm8• 2 years ago

Meta isn't even trying to get anything on Vision OS at all, I'm sure they have no interest or care about that until and unless it becomes a mass market product.

They don't want to be locked out of freedom to do what they want, and that's a primary motivation here it's true. But the obsessive focus on ad revenue that people assume they have is pretty far from their thoughts in the VR/AR space at this point. They have complete faith that being the dominant owner of the dominant platform that they think the future of computing will revolve around (I'm not arguing this, but I'm satisfied it's what Zuckerberg believes) will yield sufficient value to be worthwhile and they aren't worried about how it happens at this point.

varispeed• 2 years ago

That's a poor name for an operating system, especially in the UK.

Google Horizon Post master drama or watch the TV series.

rock_artist• 2 years ago

This seems like a great move. Similar to existing Android ecosystem, If this ends up making standardization of AR/VR, meta benefits from being the tone setter just as Google for Android. I wonder if the Qualcomm lock-in would stay or Mediatek and others would also onboard.

The biggest test is how much current partners (Asus, Lenovo, etc) will sell. This will verdict the future of this idea.

vcryan• 2 years ago

More "awesome tech" from Meta that few people will ever use. If you do, just be careful they don't share your location with any genocidal occupiers!

edfletcher_t137• 2 years ago

Subtitled "Not an actual product render."

mey• 2 years ago

There is a Meta earnings call in 2 days, and the annual shareholder meeting at the end of may.

The details here seem a little thin. Partner agreements to produce something rather than a concrete thing.

Hopefully we will see prototypes, but right now the skeptic in me sees this as a trial balloon for investors more than anything.

kernal7• 2 years ago

And we encourage the Google Play 2D

They just had to stick that 2D in there. Yes, poke the bear.

bitwize• 2 years ago

It's gonna be a live service OS, like Windows, with subscriptions, fees, and developer restrictions.

What VR needs is a VR OpenBSD.

xyst2• 2 years ago

Unless I have the ability to inspect source code of "Meta Horizon OS". No way in hell am I touching anything from this company.

I wonder what types of telemetry garbage is embedded into the OS.

juliendorra• 2 years ago

'Pivot to software' has been done several times in computing history: Go Corporation, SGI, Sun, Blackberry, Palm, Sega, and oh, NeXT. These are interesting precedents. I don't know of a 'pivot to software' that actually worked (NeXT ended up going back to hardware, thanks to the reverse acquisition!)

There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because they don't have anything else? Quest OS is neither a best in class user experience (it's still full of bugs, frictions and is a very inconsistent UI), and it's clearly not a good dev experience at all.

So your hardware now inherit all of Meta's tech and UX debts, and you don't even have a guarantee of daily recurring usage or of a killer application user will flock to. Is that the great win for their hardware that they think it is?

Of course, as several of us predicted when the number of Vision Pro apps quickly surpassed Quest Store Apps, Meta is now forced to react and change their weird two-tier approach: they are opening a (small) marketing presence for App Lab apps and are creating a "brand new" spatial app framework, to start and get out of the Unity/Unreal game engine third-party pipeline trap.

That they only now see that giving developers a native app UI kit is a basic of any OS is… not promising from a supposedly now long term OS owner.

jimmySixDOF2• 2 years ago

The 'pivot to software' is more like a pivot back to software because Meta already disbanded a previous OS team at Reality Labs and indeed platform software was exactly what motivated the thinking behind buying Oculus as expressed in Zucks internal deal memo on the subject [1] where he ranks Apps and Platform OS (eg Android/PlayStore) both above hardware. They also recently passed on an offer from Google who are working on a new XR android build. 6DOF 3D is a unique surface area and so far all we have seen are OS ports from 2D pancake land so these efforts can't come soon enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742

bemmu• 2 years ago

Promoting App Lab apps was the most exciting part of this announcement.

I had been put off porting anything to Quest since I'd need to get official Meta blessing to actually get store presence to have enough users to pay for such an effort, but now if you can publish in App Lab and actually get some in-store promotion, it starts to sound way more compelling.

I do agree with their initial approach to keep the perceived quality of the first apps high. But reality is that people want to play what they find fun/funny, even if less polished, and this change might open up some store promotion for such apps that solo devs like me are more likely to be able to make.

dkrich• 2 years ago

The most interesting thing about this is that everyone just forgot all the anger about the spying from a few years ago during the Cambridge analytica thing. Did that just go away?

random_kris• 2 years ago

Maybe because it was woke propaganda and now we realized everyone is doing that shit

nsonha• 2 years ago

How does this compare to Microsoft's and Apple's? Is there any other player in AR/VR/MR OS?

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Not too surprising given how Google has been closing down their Android platform to Meta for a while now

luma• 2 years ago

Sounds like MS ditching Windows MR has left an opportunity in the market for Meta. The OEMs listed all previously made MR headsets and presumably needed a new solution.

purpleidea• 2 years ago

It's nonsense. They're claiming to be "open" but it's all still vendor controlled proprietary nonsense.

If they really want to be the dominant VR winner, then release it all under GPLv3+ and let us all get to innovate together.

trimethylpurine• 2 years ago

Are there really "millions of people" using it?

tempodox2• 2 years ago

Just as this detergent washes whiter than white!

classified2• 2 years ago

For all those who feel insufficiently tracked by Google. If it has a browser, you might be able to run the JavaScript implementation of Android on top of it, thus being double-tracked.

deliriumchn• 2 years ago

I have a bad feeling that this will break modded beat saber on quest once again :/

banish-m42• 2 years ago

Android tried it and the results were closed-source fiefdoms and crappy hardware.

There's not a big enough market for this to sustain itself because VR is a flying car category that no one needs.

marcus_holmes2• 2 years ago

Has anyone actually tried the Metaverse yet?

As I understood it, this was basically a massively expensive failed experiment so far. No-one is using it for reals (yet?).

Who's the market for developing apps for it?

esskay• 2 years ago

Tried it, was very unimpressed, it feels very much like a tech demo even as recent as this year. Certainly wouldn't waste my money on it.

tfandango2• 2 years ago

It is really hard to find a "world" that has people in it, that you actually want to talk to. I have had some great experiences there though, some regular people that hang out in worlds and talk about stuff. It's kind of cool when it happens but it is hit and miss. And there is something missing with the kinds of things you can do, Super Rumble feels like a real game, but most worlds are aesthetic in nature, a place to sit and look at stuff. It feels like it needs to mature.

lionkor2• 2 years ago

Not personally interested in an OS from Meta - the only thing I use from Meta is WhatsApp, and that's just because it is difficult to replace here in central Europe.

I don't get excited about new OSs unless they're FOSS. It sounds like an ideological take, but it's not: When an OS is not FOSS, they either succumb to the wrong incentives and lack of care (Windows) or just become a walled garden (MacOS). From what I've seen from, say, Visual Studio Code (FOSS version), or Chromium, or other such projects, is that a large company open-sourcing the core of their product can only yield positives over the alternative (fully closed) solution.

Fully FOSS would be sick, partially would be useful. Closed and ad-ridden, driven by wrong incentives and run by a company with zero sense for privacy (see their Facebook product) and a love for hype (see their AI and Metaverse products that just about nobody wanted?), I don't see this becoming very popular.

sharkjacobs• 2 years ago

I know this is totally tangential to what you're saying and irrelevant to your point but I'm curious. I'm pretty up on MacOS and Linux, not so much on Windows. Is Windows less of a walled garden than MacOS?

Longlius• 2 years ago

It's functionally the same - code signing is mandated unless you want your users to get a scary pop-up.

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

"sick" - slang for "fantastic, amazing"

(for the sake of non-native English speakers)

fsflover3• 2 years ago

It sounds like an ideological take, but it's not: When an OS is not FOSS, they either succumb to the wrong incentives

AFAIK, the whole point of the free software movement and the key idea in all Stallman's essays is that free software brings actual, practical benefits to users, long-term. It's not a religion.

tga_d• 2 years ago

No, Stallman has always insisted from its inception that free software is firstly a moral principle, a sort of human right like free speech in the traditional liberal worldview, and only secondarily a pragmatic one.[0][1] I suspect if you asked most people involved with the FSF, they'd say something similar. This is probably the largest difference between the free software movement and the open source movement.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-moral-and-the-legal.html [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

jojobas2• 2 years ago

Hot take of the day: googles don't need a separate OS. Abandon the sell-at-loss-to-recover-on-games model, open up the hardware and we'll talk.

urza• 2 years ago

FOSS everything or go home. I am not buying into closed VR ecosystem. Not Apple, not Meta, not anything else that is trying to lock me in.

Meta Horizon OS

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