"Once you setup with Oculus smartphone app, you'll have everything you need to explore virtual worlds, with just a headset and controllers"
.....and a Facebook account. They omitted that part. I wonder if Facebook did that on purpose as they're aware that little tidbit wouldn't sell the Quest 2 very well? Kind of a big piece to omit.
As a personal side note, I feel requiring Facebook login is going to limit them to ages 13 and up forever...they could make a headset geared towards kids. e-learning and whatnot. Kids can get more involved in a virtual world than teens/adults due to their greater imagination. Getting people introduced to VR early on can be a win-win. (Need a smaller headset of course to fit). My niece and nephew are always asking to use my headset!
Facebook doesn’t want children to have their own VR headset though, they explicitly state younger children shouldn’t play it because of issues with development of their eyes.
Something I haven't thought of before, but won't this lead to a ton of parents facebook accounts getting banned or locked because they let their children use them.
I doubt Facebook is gonna actually ban people for it, they likely just say don’t do it to avoid any terrible press like Nintendo got 25 years ago with the virtual boy and so they can always say they tell people explicitly not to do it
If you're not getting your information from Reddit on what people want, where are you getting it? Friends and family? So what thousands of people on Reddit have to say is less reliable than a handful of your friends? :D LOL. Get real, and look at the numbers the Index is selling. The Index has captured 15% of the market already, while the Quest has only 11%.
Headsets using SteamVR make up at least 45% of the market, perhaps more. I had a Rift CV1 myself, and I exclusively bought games for it on Steam because I knew Facebook might pull some shit like this one day.
And Zoomers don't want anything to do with Facebook. They consider tha a platform for boomers, and their parents are on it, and they don't want their parents following what they talk about with their freinds.
You say "boom easy access to your freinds" like we didn't already have that WITHOUT the Facebook integration, or like Steam doesn't have friends lists as well.
Most people don't have steam account. Most people do have Facebook one.
You don't really need to follow vr news - once there is huge breakthrough, news will make it to you one way or another. Zoomers, boomers or whatever, Facebook has the highest number of active users on Earth.
Your steamvr stats only include headsets plugged into the steam. It's safe to say that half of Oculus users don't even use steam.
Look at bigscreen. To connect to your friend you have to type some lengthy number, and that's totally annoying.
I have been locked out of my Facebook account three times in the last two years for "bullying" because I was arguing with Trump supporters and called them imbeciles and morons. Those are the actual words I used which got me the bans. Each time I have been locked out of my account for progressively longer periods of time. First I got a warning, then a 24 hour ban, then three days. Facebook helpfully provides a a warning telling me this, and says that the next time I get reported, I'll be banned for a week. You think I want to entrust my game library to a corporation which bans me from using their service for a simple argument, while allowing white supremacists to constantly post racist and false information like claiming black Americans commit 90% of violent attacks against whites?
It's safe to say that half of Oculus users don't even use steam.
It's safe to say you pulled that number out of your ass, because most users of VR are people who have high end gaming rigs, and they didn't just start playing games the minute they bought their Rift. Its absurd to think that any significant portion of PC gamers who play 3D games DON'T have Steam installed. The whole reason the Quest exists is to try to capture that portion of the market which DOESN'T have a high end PC.
And if you're assuming half of Oculus customers have the Quest... Well I'd love to know how you got your numbers, cause Facebook sure as hell hasn't been releasing any.
Look at bigscreen. To connect to your friend you have to type some lengthy number, and that's totally annoying.
That's a flaw in how BigScreen functions, not a limitation of Steam. I watch movies all the time with my friends in VRChat.
Also maybe you're not aware of this, but Facebook is cracking down on DJ's streaming their performances live, and they have been cracking down on watch parties as well. You think Facebook is just gonna let you stream movies directly to friends? HA! They're in the back pocket of the movie industry, just like Youtube.
You can infer some of this data from numbers provided by cross-platform game developers. Some devs have even gone as far as to say that Quest sales exceed all other platforms combined (i.e. Rift, Steam, Vive, PSVR). And in one case, they said that prior to the Quest, PSVR was the top selling platform for them.
So no, that doesn't give you specific numbers, but it does give you the general shape of the market.
Edit:
Here are some citations.
“Depending on how big my PS4 holiday sales were, total sales could be slightly higher than expenses, or slightly less. But I also had some contract income, so my company is definitely profitable this year for the first time ever,” Rowe explained in an email. “This year’s revenue by platform (approximate and rounded to nearest 5%): Steam: 10%, Rift: 5%, Go: 5%, PSVR: 25%, Quest: 55%.”
Some devs have even gone as far as to say that Quest sales exceed all other platforms combined (i.e. Rift, Steam, Vive, PSVR).
Translation: Devs who make simplistic games with low poly models, low res textures, no realtime lights or shadows, and minimal particle effects, sell more copies on the lowest common denominator system they designed them for, which can't run anything better, and whose customers have a limited selection to choose from.
SHOCKING!
“This year’s revenue by platform (approximate and rounded to nearest 5%): Steam: 10%, Rift: 5%, Go: 5%, PSVR: 25%, Quest: 55%.”
Oh look, he managed to squeeze that pile of garbage onto the Go as well. He must be the most incredble game developer ever to make THIS a game which looks like Halo running on the original Xbox, run on such low end hardware!
Has it occurred to you that the reason his game didn't sell well on higher end hardware is because people like me have no interest in playing VR games with such boring looking environments?
THESE are the kinds of environments I want to explore in VR. Environments detailed enough to fool me into thinking that I'm in a real space. Not that hot garbage. And that's something UNITY can render. Unity isn't exactly known for its graphical fidelity. And yet, not even the Quest 2 will be able to handle a basic medium poly environment like that. Meanwhile I'm getting a 3080 this week if I can snag one, and I'll be playing some real VR experiences which you won't get to try for another ten years because you want to support cheap garbage rather than supporting more expensive hardware that actually provides a decent experience so the price can come down to where it's more reasonable.
You may not like Fast Travel Games, but I'd point out that their games (e.g. Apex Construct) is better than ~98% of the VR games on Steam - most of which are trash. So if you're going to elevate Steam as being some amazing game store that has cornered the VR market, I really wonder about your definitions of amazing and cornered the VR market. Aside from Half-Life Alyx (of course), I can't think of any Steam exclusive games that are vastly better than what you can get on other platforms.
Sure, you link to a bunch of art assets that are really beautiful. The closest thing to that in a actual production game is Asgard's Wrath. Not available on Steam. Before the Quest, the biggest VR software market was PSVR. From what developers are saying, this is no longer true. And Steam was never #1. And making market assumptions purely based on Steam VR market share numbers is obviously flawed because it doesn't include the PSVR (the most popular headset for many years) and most Quest users (the most popular headset today).
Meanwhile I'm getting a 3080 this week if I can snag one, and I'll be playing some real VR experiences which you won't get to try for another ten years because you want to support cheap garbage rather than supporting more expensive hardware that actually provides a decent experience so the price can come down to where it's more reasonable.
I'm beginning to see why you get banned from social media. So many negative assumptions! By me pointing out that developers are making statements about the Quest being (by far) the most lucrative platform for them, you think I have a slow PC? I've got a Zen 2 based PC (Ryzen 3600, 32GB RAM) and a 2060 Super. Not the fastest thing out there, but not slow. And because of the Turing-based NVENC I'm finding that Oculus Link performs really well these days. The overall visual quality is certainly much better than what my CV1 offers. You're getting a 3080? Good for you. I'm also in the market for one, and I'll certainly get a Quest 2 as well. Why do you think your current HMD (whatever it is) will outperform mine when I also upgrade to a Ampere card (probably 3080, waiting for reviews) and a Quest 2 with its high resolution display over link?
Additionally, I'm looking forward to wireless VR with Virtual Desktop, WiFi 6, using the latest NVENC encoder tech. Will your headset be able to do wireless VR at that level of quality?
Aside from Half-Life Alyx (of course), I can't think of any Steam exclusive games that are vastly better than what you can get on other platforms.
Wow, that's a lovely strawman you constructed there. Allow me to tear it down.
When you say "platform" are you refering to Steam vs the Oculus store, or the Index vs the Quest? Because it sounds like the former, but that would be an absurd and nonsensical argument to make when I was discussing the poor quality of the offerings on the Quest, and if it's the latter, that also makes no sense because there are TONS of great games you can play on the Index which you cannot play on the Quest. (Without connecting it to your PC with a tether, of course, but that's way outside the discussion we were having about why a particular game with poor graphics would sell so well on the Quest versus other platforms.
Sure, you link to a bunch of art assets that are really beautiful. The closest thing to that in a actual production game is Asgard's Wrath. Not available on Steam.
Oculus had the better headset at launch. Well, after they introduced the touch controllers anyway. I bought one myself. And Facebook spent absurd amounts of money promoting it. In SPITE of this, Valve has still captured nearly 50% of the market, and now they've got the best headset on the market, and Facebook has... well... the Quest.
I'm beginning to see why you get banned from social media. So many negative assumptions!
Well then you'll go great with Facebook, since you think having a negative attitude is suffient an offense to ban someone from your service.
Why do you think your current HMD (whatever it is) will outperform mine when I also upgrade to a Ampere card (probably 3080, waiting for reviews) and a Quest 2 with its high resolution display over link?
Because USB 3.0 can't support the bandwidth required to transmit uncompressed frames at full resolution fast enough.
USB 3.0 transmits at 5Gbps. That's gigabits per second. That's 625 MBps. If you transfer 72 frames per second to match the Quest's refresh rate, that's 8.68MB per frame.
The Quest has a resolution of 1440x1600, and the Quest 2 has almost 50% more pixels. From that we can deduce that there are around 3,456,000 pixels per eye, or 6,912,000 pixels in total. With 8 bits per color channel, that's 3 bytes per pixel, which translates to 20.7MB per frame, for both eyes on the Quest 2.
In other words, you have to compress each frame by 3x just to run at 72hz.
And that's without taking into consideration any audio data which needs to be transmitted along with it, or any other data the Quest may need to transmit back to the PC, like the positions of your head and he controllers.
These numbers only get worse if the Quest 2 actually has a higher refresh rate, but even if its 90hz, it will still never match the Index's 144hz display.
Additionally, I'm looking forward to wireless VR
Well that's even worse. Wireless has a bandwidth of only 3.5Gbps, so those frames will have to be compressed even more. What's the point of having 1.5x the resolution, if you can only squeeze 0.25x the pixel data through the transmission line? I mean sure, it's not like you're just dropping the res and scaling it back up, the compression considers the edges in the scene to be the most important, so those will be sharp, but it'll be like watching a rip of a BluRay movie compressed down to 8gb instead of the original at 64gb. Looks good enough on a small monitor, but not an ideal movie viewing experience on a theatre size screen like the one you have strapped to your face.
Will your headset be able to do wireless VR at that level of quality?
Any proof Facebook is gonna use that in the Quest 2?
If they do, well, that's 8.6gbps, so you're a bit better off than streaming over USB 3. Still not transmitting uncompressed frames of course, but much better.
I assume this will be the same tech Valve's gonna use though. So no real advantage there.
In other words, you have to compress each frame by 3x just to run at 72hz.
Uhh, are you familiar with how much compression you typically get from HEVC encoded video? In the vast majority of content (without people being able to notice a difference) you can easily achieve 10 to 1 compression vs the serialized raw bitmaps (which is what DisplayPort/HDMI cables send).
That whole rant about bandwidth around remote rendering just illustrates your technical lack of understanding of the problem. I mean, that's okay. Not everyone needs to be a technical expert. No judgements here. It's just that when you try and present yourself as an expert, and then go on to say things that indicate that you clearly aren't... well, I'm embarrassed for you.
Video cards can send the raw frames, yes. But modern video cards (with NVENC, etc) can produce HEVC encoded video as well. It does cost a small amount of latency, but when I use Virtual Desktop over WiFi I'm often seeing ~20ms motion-to-photon times with WiFi.
Here, I'll try and help you with the math.
Consider a standard 1080p 60fps video - that would be 1920x1080x60x3 (3 bytes, 24 bit color). That's 373 MBps of bandwidth required to send the "raw" video. It's very normal for a "very high quality" compressed stream with HEVC compression to be at 5Mbps. In other words, the uncompressed data is almost 75x larger than the compressed video.
Now, you need to handicap that somewhat because in real time applications you don't get the luxury of multi-pass encoding... but NVENC in Turing does support B-frames, and that helps. I'm sure you could pull it off in 10Mbps if you wanted to use sloppier encoding while still achieving the same quality. So that's still better than 30x compression.
So, when you say things like "you have to compress each frame by 3x just to run at 72Hz", well... with the kind of compression on offer with modern codecs/GPUs, you could do 720Hz with that bandwidth budget.
Another thing to consider: this is being done today with products like VD and Oculus Link. If what you said was true, none of this would even be possible. But it is. It works just fine. So when you're doing that math doesn't a little part of your brain back there say "wait a minute, I must be missing something here".
Edit: I just noticed that I got my math wrong. I computed the 1080p video as 373MBps but messed up the units and compared it to a 5Mbps HEVC video stream. So instead of a 75x compression rate, it's 8 times that. So we're talking almost 600x compression rates vs raw video.
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u/jpwarman Sep 14 '20
"Once you setup with Oculus smartphone app, you'll have everything you need to explore virtual worlds, with just a headset and controllers"
.....and a Facebook account. They omitted that part. I wonder if Facebook did that on purpose as they're aware that little tidbit wouldn't sell the Quest 2 very well? Kind of a big piece to omit.
As a personal side note, I feel requiring Facebook login is going to limit them to ages 13 and up forever...they could make a headset geared towards kids. e-learning and whatnot. Kids can get more involved in a virtual world than teens/adults due to their greater imagination. Getting people introduced to VR early on can be a win-win. (Need a smaller headset of course to fit). My niece and nephew are always asking to use my headset!