See also: Meta's previous push into VR/AR/Metaverse. They spent a hundred billion to be at the front of the pack when that revolutionary world-changing paradigm-shift took off... which simply didn't happen.
Their Orion glasses are apparently mindblowing in fidelity as well as the lightness of the glasses. Someone will absolutely make the smart glasses paradigm work so that we don't need to carry around phones anymore, and Zuck is racing to be first. This is because he lost out on the platform wars and was at the mercy of Apple and Google; remember Apple's privacy update that killed much of Meta's revenue? Zuck doesn't want a repeat of that by owning his own platform.
Seconded. I’m very excited for the day when/if their dev platform is opened up and it’s possible to access pass-through vision.
There’s a whole class of educational apps that could open up for people learning in the physical world. Whether it’s building physical things, sports or reading books or notes written in non-latin scripts... the impact will be enormous!
The only thing I'm concerned about is it'd be another locked down platform, like Oculus / Quest already is, only now much more disruptive just like Apple's and Google's (to a smaller extent). I want something more like Windows Mixed Reality or Steam VR to succeed more.
That's a bit different though. META invested in a product that, as of now, as very little competition. The QUEST is sold at a slight loss but at least at an approachable price and to a volume that makes them the clear leader in the market at the moment. Moreover, their OS is open source. Clearly, what they want is to sell enough VRs to get the monopoly on the ecosystem and its apps (they basically want to make an Android play store for VRs). You may argue they are far but at least that's a clear business model.
OpenAI's business model was literally "we don't have one: we'll make AGI and we'll let AGI tell us how to make money". This is so idiotic it's not even a scam. xAI will compete on the same plane field. Not sure about Anthropic: they seem a bit more sane.
