His comment wasn't about platform feature parity it was content parity. He also never said there is anything legal agreement preventing you from selling at a lower price on other stores, just that "Valve has ways to punish you" if you choose to do that.

In a brick and motor store where your product is located in that store matters a heck of a lot. What aisle, height on the shelf, relative placement to the competition are all very significant for how many units you sell. He's saying Valve has a massive amount of power because they control if your game is up front on the eye shelf or if it's "put in the back" where nobody can find it. If you decide to sell your game for less on another store they will decide not find an optimal place on the shelf for your game.

I think you're being hyperbolic regarding Valve's key generation policies... Yes, they are very generous with keys but no studio capable of doing sales volumes Valve cares about, ends up paying Valve nothing. Their policy doesn't seem very explicit (or maybe the really detailed stuff is not publicly available) but the term they use is request key. I would bet good money Valve reserves the right to do whatever they want when it comes to key generation. If they feel you're taking advantage of them they'll block you from generating more keys. It's not loophole for people to take advantage of Valve it's platform feature that very likely ends up increasing the market size, which means more, not less revenue for Valve.

A recent interview with Epic's Tim Sweeney touches on, what to me feels like a very anti competitive practice, Steam (and other parties) employee to prevent other stores from competing with them on price.

Think of it like the Ford has been evaluating four engines for their 2026 Mustang and it was leaked one was dropped from the running. Then the press run with "2026 Ford Mustang canceled!" instead of car designing just doing their jobs and narrowing in the final design of the 2026 Mustang.

Source: Meta's CEO on Twitter / X regarding this leak.

Yeah, the "poorly received" is objectively false.

It made it to the #1 spot on Steam's Hardware Survey by Sept 2020 having been on the market less than a year... It stayed at #1 until Quest 2 overtook it in March 2021 Even today it's still the 4th most popular headset on the Steam hardware survey despite being discontinued since like April 2021.

Or this is what allows Meta to give access to the raw camera streams to devs because they can unload all privacy concerns/liability onto the hardware vendors. Meta could even keep their 1st party hardware locked down until it's "safe". ie Let devs figure out how to maek MR software that has a rael world use case worth the privacy concerns/risks on somebody else's hardware. Then when it's the customers demand it just flip the switch so they use it on your hardware too.

A good way to stay ahead of Apple is to let the whole world do your R&D for you.

Sounds like the same argument people made about computers 50 years ago.

Yes, The model itself is built "in the cloud".

They explain it here in announcement presentation.

You scan your face with the headset and Apple processes the scans (remotely) to build a 3D rigged model of your upper torso that they are calling a "Persona".
You can puppeteer it via the face and eye tracking sensors on the headset. Anytime you use Facetime while in the headset you transmit your persona instead of a live camera feed.

They aren't as impressive as Meta's Codec Avatars but Meta builds those using much more elaborate data via dozens of cameras in very controlled conditions so it's not Apples to Apples. Meta does have a phone scan version too which I still say look better/more natural. But since Meta has no timeline for when this will come to an actual product Apple kinda wins by default anyway.

Everybody would but unfortunately nobody has figured out how to make a device that can do it in a small enough form factor with a desirable enough image quality/field of view.

Passthru AR at least produces a good enough experience where we can start trying to solving the major UI/UX challenges now and starting to get a basic understanding of the medium.

It's really not that simple... It's very situational dependent.

Is it 6DOF or 3DOF. Are you sitting, standing, or physically walking around in space. How much physical movement you make and how much the world/objects move around you play a massive role. Regardless of the frame rate some people can't handle artifical locomotion at all.

Also, the specifics of the hardware matter. An OLED display can feel very different than an LCD display even at the same frame rate. One can be comfortable and the other can result in you getting sick. The consistency of the frame rate matters a heck of a lot. A steady 72fps might be fine but 90fps but dropping frames 5-10% (never going below 72 though) of the time makes you quite ill.

There are just tons and tons of variables but I'm quit confident in saying 60hz is too low and large portion will get physically sick from most content at 60hz. My gut says the "sweet spot" where nearly 99% of people are fine is probably low hundreds but it wouldn't shock me if it was closer to 1000fps.

VR is more complicated because wearing the headset can get physically ill and a low frame rate can radically increase the chances of that happening. Unfortunately there are so many factors that contribute so we can't just say anything above X is safe for most of the population but early headsets decided on 90hz being that min bar. You can go lower and I personally am fine at 72hz (for most types of content) but when I go as low 60hz I have problems. It's physically uncomfortable for almost everything and certain experiences (even with my fairly strong "VR legs") will make me physically ill.

We don't know the upper limit (again it's really really complicated) but for VR the difference between 90hz and 120hz is quite significant. I don't NEED 120hz to not get sick but plenty of people do. And 120hz isn't the magic threshold where 99% of people are fine.

The neural interface is likely this thing. They purchased a company called Ctrl-Labs a few years ago just when they started sending devkids out to developers. I believe Ctrl-Labs bought the tech from somebody else who already had a product on the market and they were mostly a AI/software company. I'm aware of at least one open source myo control project that I believe used the original hardware before Ctrl-Labs acquired it.

The camera tracking of hand movements has been available on Quest headsets since Sept 2019 and is getting pretty good. It seems unlikely they will replace/emulate motion controllers for gaming but for basic UI navigation and certain styles of games it works quite well.

I assume Meta intends to use camera based hand tracking as their entry level interface in order to further cut costs and eventually producing headsets in the $199 range for the intended purpose of media consumption, productivity, and lite gaming. Gamers will buy add on motion controllers and then their premium interface will be the ctrl-labs neural interface hardware.

Yes, plenty of work can be done strictly by voice communication but there are tons of fields where having a physical component has benefits. Architecture and real estate are two obvious fields that would benefit from such tools.

I'm not an auto mechanic but if you give me a decent Youtube video walking through a repair process i can do a fair bit. But even sometimes hard to find components or make judgement calls on when to deviate. However, if I'm taking direction from a mechanic who is physically present and can observe my actions and literally point out where to find component X. Well, I have no doubt I could perform pretty much any type of service on the vehicle.

If a company can get a service tech on site without actually having them travel, that's a huge win. Sure, you can give direction just purely via phone call but you can get so much more done if you can directly observe them and see what they see. Yes, can say look on page X of the schematic but it's way easier to just walk over and point to the component.

True but we didn't get the modern smartphone overnight either. Even the iPhone 1 which was a pretty big leap over all the other phones of it's time is down right clunky compared to what we have today. The ultimate goal of Meta is a device that can provide more value/functionality/productivity than having a smart phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop PC in individually.

That's a pretty tall order but they aren't intending to do it with their first product. The Quest is just the first step to understanding the entertainment/gaming aspect of such a product. Learn, build a market, generate some revenue to fund the core research to build that "ultimate device".

Unfortunately the terms get muddy and people tend to use them interchangeably especially with Meta... But the majority of Reality Lab's budget is dedicated to AR research. They just they haven't released a product yet and the rumors are they may not for several years. VR (in the form of an entertainment device) is the logical starting point as most of the problems they solve for VR also apply to AR. You gotta learn to walk before you can run so to speak.

"Passthrough VR" is looking like it could be the bridge between VR and AR because it let them bypass some of the larger technical hurdles/limitations involved with existing AR display technology. Meta too has passthrough VR in their Quest (1,2 & Pro) products but it's not very mature yet. But the way it's evolved suggests it was more a happy accident and quite possibility a major reason why they've they decided to cancel their first gen AR headset originally set to release sometime in 2024.

I do...

Sure, today's VR is quite primate and seems only suited for entertainment purpose but the second a "VR meetup" can be used instead of physical travel it will be adopted by the business world. Once that happens it'll snowball. The internet of the 80s/90s have a lot in common with current VR...

It was clunky to operate and pretty much only the folks building it really knew how use it effectively. If you listened to those folks talk about its potential you could easily hear them describe most of the modern internet. Yet when you showed the average person the internet of the 80s/90s but talked about it in terms they'd dismiss it. Not because the network was so drastically different and incapable of those doing all those big ideas but simply because the tools/interfaces just didn't let the average person see that version of the internet.

It wasn't until the business world learned how to use/benefit from the internet that everything changed. Once you had investments to make it usable for the average person all that endless potential started to become a reality for the average person. VR is going to give us a physical internet. If you think going from text commands/terminals to GUI/web widened internet accessibility and usefulness just wait until you see what a physical component will do.

At it's core VR's (ignoring the distinctions / confusions between AR/VR/MR/etc) ultimate potential is teleportation technology. The closer it is to simulating reality the more it can be used for instantaneous travel. It isn't too difficult to imagine how the world would change/benefit from effectively free (time and money) travel.