The Oculus Quest 2 was announced at Facebook Connect today, and I was able to get early access to it last week to try it out. I wanted to invite Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang to share his impressions, and to unpack some of my experiences as well. Lang sees the initial improvements as an Oculus Quest S, but that over time as more experiences are upgraded from 72Hz to 90Hz and the increased textures take advantage of that additional headroom. We also talk about the lack of competition in the standalone VR headset space, which means that Facebook can push forward their vision of using VR to aggregate more data on our us through our VR activities.
A Facebook account will be required to use the Oculus Quest 2, which means that it’ll be under Facebook’s Data Policy as well as an Oculus Supplemental Data Policy that won’t be released to the public until October 11th. Facebook has not made any representatives available for an interview about any of these privacy policy changes yet during Facebook Connect, and I’m still waiting to hear whether any representatives will be available for interview before or after the new changes are launched on October 11th.
I asked Facebook, "Will you be sharing the Oculus Supplemental Data Policy for Facebook users [who merge their Oculus accounts or buy new hardware] before October 11th?
Answer: "No – that document will become available on October 11th."
I expect some privacy changes on Oct 11.
— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) September 14, 2020
Anyone within the VR community has to negotiate their relationship with Facebook as we move forward. I have a lot of open and unanswered questions about the future of privacy in VR in Facebook’s hands, and so it makes it difficult for me to unconditionally to recommend Oculus hardware. I’m really excited about the potential of VR, and I expect that the Oculus Quest 2 will indeed help VR go to the next level with the price point of $299. The Oculus Quest 2 is by far the best standalone experience out there, and I’m really happy with the ergonomic improvements. But I also have many open questions about the future of VR that’s driven by a business model of surveillance capitalism.
Be sure to check out Ben Lang’s full review of Oculus Quest 2 here.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So Facebook's annual developer conference used to be called Oculus Connect. It would have been Oculus Connect 7, but they've renamed it to Facebook Connect. So it's happening today, September 16th, 2020. And they're announcing a new headset, the Oculus Quest 2. So I was actually sent an advanced copy of this hardware to be able to take a look at it and review it. I decided to have Ben Lang of Road to VR because he's one of the industry's most expert reviewers when it comes to analyzing hardware and diving into all the different technical details. But before I dive into the conversation that I have with Ben, I wanted to just set a deeper context, which is that, you know, Facebook is really pushing forward virtual reality. And without the investment that they have done with virtual reality, virtual reality wouldn't be where it's at today. Their investment in Oculus of over $2 billion was a signifier to the rest of the industry that this is actually a viable market to start moving forward. So they've really been pushing it forward since they acquired Oculus back in March of 2014. Now at this point, there's not a lot of other market competition that's coming from the wider immersive technology industry And so in some sense Facebook has the leverage to not only push forward VR but also to start to do other things that are I guess are more concerning for me which is to start to move into this more closed walled garden app ecosystem, and start to merge the Oculus accounts into Facebook accounts. So for anybody that buys this headset, you have to have a Facebook account. And the thing that gives me the most pause is that we haven't even seen the Oculus supplemental data policy that is going to be released on October 11, 2020, to even know what their new approaches to privacy are even going to be. So as we're in the midst of Facebook Connect, still ongoing right now throughout the course of this day, the embargo lifts at 1030 a.m. They haven't made any privacy experts available for me to interview. In fact, they may not actually have anybody that I can talk to until October 11th of 2020. So that's the big caveat of the Oculus Quest 2 is that we don't even know the privacy policy of this device will be until October. So that's going to be my biggest pause, and I'm going to be tracking that and wanting to get some more experts to be able to unpack their new privacy policy, their new approach. But overall, it's this shift towards trying to aggregate more of our data. So when I talk about the technical aspects of the hardware, it's hard for me at least to disconnect it from the larger context of Facebook and their larger business model and where the overall industry is going. If anybody is in the VR industry, you have to negotiate your relationship to Facebook to some extent. If you do have concerns, it's completely valid to opt out and to go other routes when it comes to PC VR, but Facebook is really pushing forward and innovating on the standalone VR, and there's not really any alternative that's a viable competitor to what the Oculus Quest is. So it's certainly the best headset in its class for the standalone VR. And if you do want to continue to be engaged in the immersive industry, then you kind of have to negotiate to what degree are you going to participate. if you are gonna participate like myself, then I don't feel like it can unconditionally recommend the hardware until some of these deeper questions are addressed or if I see some changes of behavior from Facebook. So that's the caveat for the Oculus Quest 2. Other than that, it's an advancement of the Oculus Quest 1, and there's many different things that I love when it comes to the increased ergonomics, and I'll be diving into that more in the takeaways, I wanted to have this conversation with Ben Lang to sort of dig into some of the technical details of the Oculus Quest 2, and then I'll unpack more of the context here at the end, as well as some of my other impressions that I didn't get a chance to get into, as well as some of the other questions I was able to ask Facebook's spokespeople. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Ben Lang happened on Monday, September 14th, 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:06.177] Ben Lang: Thanks for having me. My name is Ben Lang. I am the co-founder of Road to VR. We've been covering the virtual reality, augmented reality, and kind of immersive computing space since 2011 at this point, actually coming up on our anniversary in October, I think. So yeah, it's been coming up on nine years. And it's amazing that we're talking this week because we were talking in some of the earliest days that all this stuff is happening, and this week is Oculus' conference, their seventh one now, which is pretty crazy.
[00:04:38.000] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know I've been covering it since the May of 2014, where I think I did an interview with you, and you've been covering it way before even the Oculus Kickstarter. And of all the different people in the VR industry, you've been closely tracking the evolution of all the different VR hardware. And I wanted to have you on just to not only talk about the new Oculus Quest 2 that is just being announced today as I'm releasing this podcast episode at Facebook Connect 1, which I am going to have a hard time not referring to it as Oculus Connect 7, but Facebook Connect 1. There's Oculus Quest 2 that's being announced. I want to talk about a lot of the hardware details there, but also at some point dive into the other issues that are happening with Facebook and their accounts and my concerns around privacy, how I relate to them, how you relate to them. I'd love to dive into that there. But first let's just dive in into the Oculus Quest 2. You've had a chance to play around with it. I've had early access to it as well. So what are your initial thoughts and what do you make of this new headset?
[00:05:39.350] Ben Lang: Sure. First, I think it's exciting, and I think there's going to be a lot of debate initially about whether this is like a true Quest 2 or like a Quest S, because obviously we saw with the original Rift, they went from Rift to Rift S, and it was not a straight upgrade, and it was good they didn't call it Rift 2, right? Because people would have definitely said, no, you know, there's too much of a sidegrade here that I don't really think that that is an appropriate classification for it. So with Quest 2, obviously they knew that Quest S was a choice of name, but with Quest 2, by calling it Quest 2, they are saying this is kind of your next step up. So I think people are gonna be wondering about that, and the thing that I'm starting to feel actually is it will probably feel a lot like Quest S when it launches, and I think it will eventually become Quest 2. And what I mean by that is that a lot of the stuff that's gonna get better is gonna take time just like we saw with the original quest so i'd look at quest two and i primarily see it's the same headset with more power i mean that's a complete oversimplification there is cool new stuff about the headset about the hardware but when i look at it from a strategic standpoint for face book i see them saying we want better hardware in there so that we can like make this product better so quest the original was uh... snapdragon eight thirty five which was underpowered at the time that it was released
[00:07:04.907] Kent Bye: And going to from that in quest two to what's the xr2 is basically going from like When they launched it that was like not even you know, the latest gen at the time Yeah, I looked it up and snapdragon 835 was announced on november 17th 2016 And then you have the 845 in 2017 855 in 2018 and 865 in 2019 So you have a chip that was already a couple years old and the xr2 my understanding is that it's kind of like the equivalent of the 865 Which was announced also in December of 2019. So you have like three generations of the qualcomm snapdragon system on chip chip Yeah, so I think just to wrap up that point.
[00:07:43.981] Ben Lang: It's kind of like they stuck a bigger engine in it, but they're gonna need to continue to Adjust a lot of the hardware stuff to really get the most out of it And we did see that with 835 on original quest to be fair original quest got significantly better throughout the course of its life, because there's just all this software changes they could do to make the experience better, and also to get more performance out of that chip. Now they have all this additional headroom, and I think at launch, you're not gonna see everything that it can do right away, A, because they haven't really tapped into all the performances that is there, and B, because we're gonna need to wait for games to come out that really, truly optimized for the amount of power that the thing has. So that's kind of why I say, out of the box, it might feel a little bit like Quest S, but I think that later on, once you put on original Quest and then you put on Quest 2, you'll say, yeah, this is a big jump. You know, it just, it looks better, it plays better. it's kind of better across the board. But it's exciting to see that they're dumping to XR2 and dropping the price. Like that's surprising, but I think it speaks to how confident they are now in Quest and saying like Quest 1, if that was an experiment, was absolutely a successful experiment. And now we want to give ourselves kind of the best chance to do the best we can with the next headset. So let's put the big engine in it and let's make it cheap so that people buy it and we can try to blow this thing up.
[00:09:01.300] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I just rewatched John Carmack's keynote from last year, because he said there's a bit of a sneak peek of some of the announcements that are coming that are embedded in there. And one thing he did say was that when they first launched the quest, they wanted to do it on a processor that was well established. So they went back a few generations to the Snapdragon 835 because they didn't want to be on the bleeding edge before they've really ironed out their architecture. Now that they have, now they're able to upgrade to the XR2. Me, as I was wearing this and using it, there's a couple of things I noticed immediately. Number one, the comfort of it is a lot better, at least the way that it fits my face. I don't see as much light leakage coming up from my nose. It's almost completely enveloped. It's a little bit smaller. I think they said around 10% smaller, but it is more compact. The heat management was the thing that I noticed the most, especially because, you know, if you wear the Quest for any length of time, then it starts, for me at least, the Quest 1 would just start to leave these red marks on my face just because of the heat that was coming out of it. But the heat management seems to be a lot better. And the controllers, for me, seem to be a lot more ergonomic, as well as the haptics are a lot more visceral, I guess. I can pay attention to them more. And they also said that the battery life was longer. I'm not sure if you've noticed anything just offhand, you know, your first impressions as you start to use it, any sort of qualitative things like that, like what really jumps out?
[00:10:22.302] Ben Lang: Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm kind of waiting to get access to the game that really pushes the hardware to show it all off. And that's, like I said, kind of the thing I'm waiting for. If you just put on one or the other and you weren't a dedicated user looking for the details of the differences, you'd probably notice the higher resolution. you'd probably notice the higher frame rate, so from 72 hertz to 90 hertz. But a lot of that stuff, like the 90 hertz, that's not gonna be on every game out of the box. That's gonna be on like a per game basis. It's gonna take time for all this to roll out. It's kinda why I was saying that Quest S did Quest 2 over time. One of the things that struck me initially actually is, hopefully this is by default on all the upcoming Quest 2s, but my Quest 2 finally got the ability to set the home space as the pass-through view. which is actually really nice. Original Quest can technically do this, but it's not rolled out. I guess it's been an experiment for a while. But it really is kind of amazing, both with the resolution improvement and the frame rate improvement. Just how it looks to see this screen, your menu, just kind of floating in your room and just walk right up to it was actually one of my initial impressions was like, wow, this floating panel right in front of me when it's in the context of the pass-through view really looks pretty darn convincing. And I think that's really helped by the resolution and the frame rate.
[00:11:36.533] Kent Bye: I tried that out and I actually didn't like it initially because there's something about when I get immersed into VR, I like to really get transported. And it felt like that was almost like ruining the illusion because when I'm in VR, I have this much larger sense of space. And then when I have that pass through on, then the space is a lot smaller. But as anybody who's done enough VR, you start to develop a little bit of the sixth sense of being able to map your room space to your virtual space already. And so you're kind of like maintaining multiple spaces in your mind. But yeah, I guess one of the other things that I noticed, and I wanted to ask you about this specifically as well, because there is a higher resolution. I think you probably have the numbers as well, but I think they told me it was like 1832 by 1920 per eye. So just shy of 2K per eye. They'll say like just under 4K display, but they really mean, I think the just 2K per eye. That's up from the previous resolution of 1440 by 1600 per display. So they said it was around 50% more pixels. I did notice that it did look like a higher resolution, but I also noticed, and I'm not sure, you know, you have much deeper trained eye, but it looked like some of the white on top of the other text was either like a little bit more blur, or I don't know how you even like characterize that, but it was something about the white on black that I was noticing as I moved my head, there was almost like a little bit of that either motion blur, or I don't know if you noticed that as well, or how you would even describe some of that.
[00:12:57.188] Ben Lang: It could have been something like ghosting, although, yeah, there's a lot of little kind of minutiae to the display. I haven't noticed anything that I would think of as a ghosting. I mean, everybody will ask, as they do every time, is, is there still glare? And the answer is yes, because these are Fresnel lenses, just like the Quest 2. So that's still there. It's not terrible, but yes, because you're going OLED to LCD, you are losing those really deep blacks that really high contrast. But I think you know at a certain point if you can't get an OLED at that resolution There's a certain point where the resolution boost to LCD I think makes it a reasonable trade-off for the legibility and all that stuff But I think also it's important to understand you're kind of getting like a double boost and resolution almost or a little bit of a bonus when you go from OLED to LCD because the OLED panels have this sub pixel layout where they share a a green subpixel with other subpixels, whereas for LCD, every pixel has three, if you ever hear the term RGB stripe, has three subpixels per pixel. And what that ultimately means is if you count all of the subpixels, an OLED of the same resolution of an LCD would have less subpixels, which is technically less resolution. So it's like you're getting that resolution jump and you're actually getting an additional sub-pixel for every pixel there, which means it's like a little bit more than you might even intuit just by looking at the numbers. So it is a nice quality jump forward and we're definitely reaching the point where like you wouldn't say that the screen door is completely gone, but it's like If you were to just put someone in the headset and say like what are your first thoughts? It'd be like 10th on the list would be like I think I see like something going on with pixels like if they weren't looking for a screen door, right? So we're finally getting to a point where the density is high enough where the screen door almost doesn't bother you at all anymore. Even if you're really looking for it, it's a little hard to see, and when you're immersed in a game or something, it's just the last thing really on your mind. And I think that's great, because forever, it's kind of just been like, how's the screen door? It's like, oh, it's still there, and you know, yada yada. But I think once we cross that 2K by 2K per eye threshold, of course, depending upon the field of view, it just starts to be not nearly as much of an issue compared to other things like glare or ghosting or anything like that.
[00:15:13.057] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's very interesting experience of trying to look at this hardware because a lot of it is perceptual. And, you know, you are somebody who's really trained your perception over a long time to be able to notice a lot of these nuances, especially as you test different VR headsets and try to articulate it and write about it. But there's a part of me that doesn't really trust my own perceptions on some of these things, because it's like, Is this something that everyone's going to experience? And I don't know if there is necessarily like some standardized benchmarking tests that like going to a website and seeing like a pattern and saying, okay, let's compare these. And what is your process for being able to like suss some of this out when you get a piece of hardware like this? And sometimes it's difficult to do a one-to-one comparison because not all the apps are available. How do you do that calibration process to be like, okay, what is the game? What is this hardware? What is my perception? And how do you differentiate all that out?
[00:16:08.089] Ben Lang: Yeah, if we're talking purely about what it looks like, which is, you know, tracking and all that stuff's totally different, but if we're talking about just what it looks like, things like field of view, screen door, all that, I mean, you're right, it is really perceptual. There is no widely adopted, standardized benchmark that anyone really agrees on in terms of what companies are putting out there publicly, right? So if one company says our field of view is 90, and another company says our field of view is 100, they may be measuring those things in very different ways, and so most companies have just Basically don't even want to state their field of view because they know that somebody else You know is just gonna say the next highest thing as far as they can justify it I actually am in a position where like I kind of refuse To do through the lens photos if I don't have a really rigid procedure, which like I don't Have a great one at this point, and I haven't seen anybody that really does because if you don't have an extremely repeatable procedure And you say hey, here's the vive through the lens and here is the index through lens I mean yeah, you're gonna get some of it But it's like it's really easy to mess all that stuff out with all the various differences with how camera works compared to your eye that tells you nothing about what the tracking feels like the frame rate feels like so and It's kind of like a position where if I can't do that right, then I'm gonna just try to lean on people trusting that I've been in these headsets for hours and I've been looking at them for almost a decade now. And so a lot of my comparisons unfortunately have the limitation of they kind of refer to previous generation devices. And doing something like really standardized that people can actually get behind is something that we've been talking about for a while and is way more complicated than you might think. I won't share too much about it now, but there's a project that's been in the works to do something along these lines to get something out there that can be more of a standard reference. But the intricacies of it are very challenging to measure all this stuff. There's just so many more details than you might think of. So anyway, to get back to your question, how do I sort of do it when I report on these things? I have just honestly a written checklist of various things that are usually important to look at. So I'll get my kind of initial impressions because I want to get a sense I'll put on the headset and just use it for a while because I just I don't want to like immediately jump in and look at everything, but eventually I'll go down that list and look in detail at anything that didn't immediately jump out at me. I'll look in detail to see what I can say about it and all that. And it's an interesting process. It's been fun over the years being able to put on a headset and within a few seconds be like, yeah, that's like pentile subpixel. There's like little hints here and there that you can see in various things. But we're finally reaching a point where I probably won't be able to do that anymore because the pixel densities are getting too high, which is probably a good thing.
[00:18:49.962] Kent Bye: Yeah, it was actually at CES 2017 that we were both at and we actually went to some VR headset that was from China. And I saw it and I was like, oh my gosh, this is really bad and terrible. And then you saw, and then you had all these questions that you were following up. And then it was after that, that I was like, you know what, I'm going to focus more on the content than on the hardware, because it feels like it's going to be the major players that are releasing the major headsets. and it'll be basically between them rather than trying to take into all of the different headsets that are out there. But that's something that I think that you are unique in the sense that you've continued to not only look at those major players, but everybody else and to really hone your own perceptual input to be able to see all these nuanced things. So just experientially, were there any other things that, because I know you do probably some of the most exhaustive write-ups of all the new hardware that it comes out. And when something comes out, I really lean on you to get some additional insight and context for things because you really put the hardware through its paces. And so what were some of the other big takeaways that you had from being able to do your deep dive into the Quest 2?
[00:19:54.285] Ben Lang: Sure, one of them actually is a little to do with the, what it looks like, but actually what it feels like to wear. So ergonomics are obviously huge and I wouldn't say anybody has really solved that. The headsets are still heavy. Some are more comfortable than others, but there's no like golden standard for like, we haven't reached the point where we're like, this is comfortable enough, it doesn't need to get lighter. So we're still on that path and Quest 2 doesn't make any massive changes there. It's still a heavy headset. I'm actually pretty darn happy though with the elite strap. They're going to sell so they're going to finally do a first party accessory different strap because we've seen over the years people being like I want my headset to be more comfortable and there's all these mods out there and third party accessories. Finally, I think they've said, Okay, not only is there a demand for this, but we think this product is gonna be big enough to justify making, you know, an additional headstrap accessory. So out of the box, Quest 2 comes with a soft strap, which I'm not a big fan of. It doesn't feel quite substantial enough for me, and I'm kind of bummed that they didn't just put the Elite Strap right into the box. So the Elite strap is a rigid strap and I actually think it's so far as long as I've been able to use it which has been you know two weeks or so I think it's probably the best strap that Oculus has made yet I don't know if you had a chance to use it but it's functionally pretty similar to what you've seen before it has the ratcheting you know wheel on the back to tighten it up but there's something about the way that they have that rear rubber headpiece that for better than any headset I've seen so far does a really good job Making it intuitive to find out where it's supposed to go on the back of your head because I see people wearing headsets Like I know you're uncomfortable. Like can I fix that for you? Like it's not intuitive how these different headsets should be fit on your head in many cases and if you haven't had somebody like show you like hey, here's like the occipital Ridge on the back of your head here and And that's where it's got a grip. Like if you don't like literally pointed that out to somebody and like help them understand that that's kind of where the leverage is supposed to be. Most people just want to vice clamp it to their face by tightening the side straps. And that's a bummer, right? And it's a huge, huge challenge for the product designers because how do you make it intuitive for people to understand how to like fit this on their head, right? So anyway, the Elite Strap, I think they have finally done a really nice job of like, when you put that thing on, if you do it wrong, it doesn't feel right. And when you slide that right into the right spot where it gets the best grip back there, you're like, oh yeah, that's where it should go. And then you tighten it up. And that's actually, I think, a big win for ergonomics. And I hope that we see other head straps do something similar in the future because, you know, the more people that can put on their headset right the first time and be comfortable in it, the better experience everybody's going to have in VR.
[00:22:30.273] Kent Bye: Did they actually send you some of those straps to test out?
[00:22:32.910] Ben Lang: Yeah. So I have the elite strap, but I do not have the elite strap with the batteries. So they're doing the same, basically the exact same thing, but it also has an additional battery and weight from the battery in the back. That's like slightly more expensive, but I believe if I remember correctly, they said it would roughly double the battery life of quest. It just has a plug that goes into the side when you play.
[00:22:52.887] Kent Bye: Yeah, from two and a half to five hours, I think they told me and that, yeah, they didn't send me the straps. What I noticed for me, at least for the comfort, there was, um, a spacer for glasses. So when you first get it and you just put it on, my glasses did feel pretty close and I put that in and it was a little bit better. And they did show that they had other face inserts as well, like for different face shapes and stuff. So, yeah. as VR grows and have more diversity of faces, then you're able to have that. And also the, yeah, the IPD, I noticed there's basically like three different sections there for the IPD adjustment. And they said, they're trying to hit the, from above 5% to 95th percentile of folks. And my IPD is around 60 millimeters or so, maybe 61. So it's usually like the smallest. And so I put it into the smallest, I had a very interesting experience where the first time I put it on and the Oculus logo came up, I saw it cross-eyed and then like my eyes sort of adjusted after that. I don't know if that's just because I've done so much VR that I am able to soften my eyes to a point where I'm able to maybe fix any mismatch that is happening from the IPD side. So I don't know if you had any experience with that of the manual, because there's three slots you have. hopefully your IPDs and one of the sweet spots where you're not like in the middle or on the edge, but did you, what was your experience of the IPD?
[00:24:11.341] Ben Lang: It's great that IPD is in there. Anytime that a headset has that, it's going to be able to be more comfortable and look clearer for a larger number of people. So it's good that they didn't remove it entirely, even though they are using a single display. I absolutely don't understand the design approach for the mechanism, and maybe that will become clearer over time, but right now I just don't really get it. Previous headsets, with IPD adjustment have had a slider on the bottom where you're looking at the image and you can adjust it in real time and you also get a readout by the millimeter so you can say if I know that I'm 64 then I can set a 64 or if I don't even know what my measurement is I can just find what's right for me and then I can see that 65 so every time I come back into the headset okay I can set it to 65 without any guessing. Granted it's not you know, most people aren't gonna know their IPD even though it is useful for VR But going to like a 1 2 3 so you mentioned it has these three positions It just kind of like jumps between three different slots rather than being like a continuous slider it doesn't read out the distance in the headset because you have to take the headset off to adjust it and And so, I just don't know how a new user would ever know which one they should use. I don't even know which one is best for me. Like, I'd have to go into the documentation, wherever it is, to see which setting is closest to the one that I have. And if you don't already know your IPD, I think that if you didn't number those, and you just had someone put on the headset and said, is it clear? They'd be like, yeah. And then if you changed it, you didn't tell them, you put it back on and said, is it clear? They'd be like, yeah, it's clear. Like, it's too subtle that from not being able to look at it in real time as you adjust it, I don't think anybody would reliably be like, that's the one that's closest to my eyes. So needing to take the headset off, change it, and then put it back on to look at it again and be like, I don't know, I guess this is better. I do not think a good portion of users are gonna set it correctly, and that's already been an issue, but it's gonna be even more of an issue if you don't have that, at least that real-time number to once you set it, you know what you can return to if it's ever changed.
[00:26:13.567] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I don't, I don't know if you've ever gone to an optometrist where they are testing your eyes and they say, okay, is a, or B better having that real time ability to look at it and to adjust it. That's for me, I'm, I'm lucky. Cause it's, I'm usually at the lower end of the spectrum. So I just dial it all the way down. But for a lot of folks, they may need to really. use that dynamic sliding. So it's most likely a cost cutting measure as well as just trying to make it more optimized. Like you said, it's a single display rather than having each of those displays connected to the eye. So it's probably both in terms of weight and efficiency, lots of ways in which they're able to optimize that. But yeah, I think you're making a lot of really good points there. And I guess my concern is that as people use somebody else's headset and they don't even know that they can change it, they're going to look at it and it's going to not look like it's a clear image. So yeah.
[00:27:00.708] Ben Lang: Hopefully their lenses have improved enough that even if you're pretty thin and it's on the widest like it's not the end of the world But hopefully if it's your headset and you're using it regularly, you should know what the most ideal setting is for comfort and clarity I've suggested that for any modern smartphones that have a camera capable of it, which is like recent iPhones and some Android phones a They should use... Oculus has an app on the smartphone which is required to use the headset. They should have an IPD measurement selfie tool in there, you know, where you just hold that thing up and it tells you, okay, your IPD is 68, so use three, right? But like right now, as far as I've seen, there isn't a lot of instruction about how users should figure out which one of the three to use, so I don't know. It's strange, but like you said, it is a cost-cutting tool. Just jumping between three different things is mechanically, I think there's a lot less to do, rather than having continuous sliders, especially with the digital sensor in there to read the distance. So we'll see, I mean, it's not gonna ruin anybody's experience, but it's one of those things, kind of like, honestly, wearing the fit incorrectly, where it's like, you might not really notice what about the experience is not as good as it could be, but if people are using it incorrectly, it will unfortunately just not be ideal.
[00:28:12.651] Kent Bye: You know, I had a chance to do like a 45 minute briefing. They talked to me for around half hour. Then I had 10 or 15 minutes of questions and I'll go through some of the questions I asked and answers. And I'll be curious to hear what additional information you got. But for one, the court that comes with the quest to super small. So it's like, okay, what's up with that? And they said, well, for most people, they tend to not be charging while they're playing. And they're up and moving around. And so they just figured that they would do another cost cutting measure. For me, if I do a lot of social VR, you know, I am in there for long play sessions, and it is nice to have that long cord. So people may want to get an extra long cord if you do plan on wanting to be doing some sit down experiences and still continue to play. But if you run out of battery, then you're not going to be able to continue to play with the cord at least that comes with it. One of the things that I've personally found with using the Quest, especially in VRChat or say Mozilla Hubs or Altspace, is that once you have a significant amount of audio streams that are happening within a room, then the Quest starts to really break down when it comes to being able to handle those many audio streams. I was not able to find a social VR room yet that had that many, but I have had in the past where I was in a experience on the quest and then I go to my PC VR and there's no issue. When I asked about that, they said, well, that might actually be more of a VoIP engineering backend issue rather than something that's going to be solved with the Snapdragon XR2. So it could be still like a network engineering issue. But I think that's, for me, one of my biggest complaints with the Quest when I'm doing social VR experiences, that that starts to break down. They said they're not going to make any changes to the sideloading process, but I think you may have even reported maybe it was upload VR that you have to start to enter in different information of credit card or some verifiable information in order to do some of the sideloading. And the wireless streaming is something I asked about. And they said that it's not there yet. And when I talked to Guy Guidwin of the virtual desktop, he said, you know, you can do the streaming, especially if you have a good PC. And if you want to do cross multiple rooms, then you have to kind of set up a mesh network in order to get that low latency signal across floors. So I think they're trying to still experiment with that. And they said they're just not there yet. And they're still maybe at the 70, 80%, but they're still iterating on it. It'll be interesting to see if they make any announcements about that, but it sounds like they want to, if they are going to have a solution, they want to have it so you don't have to like set up a mesh network and be able to be at a significant distance away from your computer. And the heat profile, they were able to do additional profiling of the heat and do better cooling just with the fan. And I've definitely noticed a big difference, although it still does get a little hot if you put your hand on it, but I don't feel it as much on my face, which is nice to be able to have a little bit more insulation from that heat. So those are some of the things that I was asking about and getting some additional context on where the, what were some of the stuff that you were asking about?
[00:30:59.903] Ben Lang: Um, well, I guess a lot of what I had heard was Along the lines of sort of like we were talking about kind of at the start which is like what's gonna happen to the headset over time and a lot of those things like I mentioned like I do see this being kind of like Right at launch, I mean, it might be slightly like an early access product, like I said, because I think there's gonna be a lot they're gonna still have to pull out of this. So, the 90 Hz frame rate is really nice. I think you can easily see between 72 and 90 Hz how much smoother and kind of more just real stuff feels at that frame rate. That's not only just like pure realism, but that also is just directly lower latency. So when you're moving your head around, it can potentially be a lower latency than at 72 Hertz. But that's only going to be in the home space of Quest at the start. And then when you launch into a game, it'll go to 72 Hertz or potentially even 60 Hertz, depending upon the game, I believe. And developers are going to have to enable that on a per game basis. And some games just might not ever get that upgrade. And some games hopefully will take advantage of it. if they can optimize for the additional power. But then there's the resolution. It did sound a bit like they were saying that most games would kind of just get that automatically. Developers will still have the choice if they want to tune it, but it sounded like out of the gate, most games would either be dynamic or just sort of launch at the increased resolution, which is nice because kind of out of the gate, your existing Oculus library will look good. Even if it's still at 72 Hertz, it should have higher resolution. But there's a funny thing that happens with that, which is that for games where, like, all the textures were designed for the quest's resolution, when you get a higher resolution display, suddenly the game, in some ways, can almost look worse, because now you see the lower... It is revealed that those textures are not up to your clarity from the actual display resolution, which is kind of funny. So for the big games, I expect we'll see the Quest 2 patch or whatever coming through, which may enable 90 hertz or do... Bigger textures and that kind of thing and down the road That's where the now the 256 gigabyte model will be useful because you know bigger textures to meet that quality bar Means bigger games. So 64 gigabytes on the low end. I'm kind of surprised they stuck with rather than doing 128 256 and because it'll start to fill up pretty fast for a serious quest user. One other thing that kind of surprised me but was not entirely unexpected was that Oculus confirmed that in 2021, sometime in 2021, they're going to discontinue the Rift brand pretty much entirely, and their plan is basically to not make any PC-only headsets anymore. Quest 2 and Quest are Link compatible, and it seems like their plan going forward is we're gonna try to continue to make our standalone headsets great and make the Link experience good and better over time. That was one of the things that they said would improve over time. At launch, Link on Quest 2 will not operate at 90 hertz, and it will not operate at Quest 2 resolution. So eventually, at some point, hopefully not too long from now, They plan to upgrade those things to fit the frame rate and the right resolution. And then on top of that, Link in general, they say, should improve with the additional hardware they have. I think they're saying they'll probably be able to do better quality encoding, which will make it closer to that native PC experience. But it's never going to, well, not never, but right now it's not quite there just because it is a compressed stream coming over the cable. So compared to a native headset, even if it was exactly the same, you know, specs on the display and all that, you won't get quite the same crispness. Hopefully they can reach a point, and the kind of question is whether or not they're committed enough to PC VR to really drive this, or if this is gonna be something that people have to, you know, bug them to do. Hopefully they get to a point where it's nearly indistinguishable between the Link experience and, like, if you were to do it natively plugged in with an uncompressed video stream to the headset.
[00:34:54.127] Kent Bye: Yeah, Guy Goodwin of Virtual Desktop was saying that his streaming feature was pulled from the store because it wasn't up to the quality, but then he said, but the link isn't actually up to the quality either. It's like sort of a similar degraded experience, but people still want to do it. So, but yeah, they told me that spring of next year, they're going to stop selling the Rift S. So it sounds like they're going to be, from what you're saying, they're going to be discontinuing the PC specific VR altogether. I know they were doing some different stuff with very focal displays and whatnot. I wonder if that's going to still continue. or if they're just gonna go down this mobile route, which is bringing it up to scale because there's a lot of stuff and a lot of tech that they've been continuing to iterate on, but would require like a PC VR headset. And yeah, maybe they'll come back with something that's more of an enterprise scale or the very focal displays. There's a lot of trade-offs you have to do when you do these headsets. And some of those features are not gonna be able to fit into a low price. 299 is really a bargain basement price that's, likely being subsidized by other aspects of their business model. Maybe that's a, and I don't know if you have any comments on the future of some of those prototypes of varifocal and other displays that that seemed to me, at least from my perspective, would need to be a PC VR, and then less likely to do that type of innovation on mobile.
[00:36:09.204] Ben Lang: Yeah, I think mobile just makes it harder around just across the board. I mean, as soon as you go mobile, you have to put a battery in there. There's a lot more heat to worry about with the compute. The costs are higher. There's just less room for that stuff. So yeah, I think PC VR is the kind of most right place in terms of like just literally fitting both in space and costs, like those newer technologies into there. My gut is that the reason that we're seeing Quest 2 so soon after Quest and that they're jumping like right to that xr2 like they're trying to make this now kind of the most premium product they can in terms of horsepower you know i really don't know that there's even a better option out there if they wanted something even more powerful that would still fit their needs my sense is that they saw In their metrics for people using quest that they were like, whoa, people are really using this thing and people are really loving this thing and quest two is Them doubling down on that. They're saying that's really working. We know we can do it better we know we can do it cheaper, and we know that if we do that, if these metrics get even better, that's great for us. The overarching strategy here for Facebook is not like, I think a lot of people think like, oh, Facebook wants to do video games, like they want a piece of the video game industry. And that may be sort of what VR is right now, but it is not what they want in the long run. The end goal for them is to beat the other massive tech companies in the world. Facebook wants to beat them to this immersive computing space. In the way that Microsoft and Apple, for instance, own just such important critical parts of the PC ecosystem, and Google and Apple own critical parts of the mobile ecosystem, Facebook from the outset, I mean, we're talking when they bought Oculus in 2014, said, you know, we believe that immersive computing is, if you have PC and you have mobile, we think immersive computing is the next big computing paradigm shift, and we want to be there first. It is, you know, you might call it like a digital land grab. They're betting that this is where the world is headed. And they want to be that big Microsoft or that big Apple player in there where they own the platform and they dominate the hardware and all this. So I think that that's why you're seeing them drive the price of Quest down like so much. They just want to get people using it. They want to get it out there. They think they're on a good path and apparently they're doing a pretty good job. I mean, Nobody is really competing with them at this point. And well, I don't know if it's a good job or they just have enough money to pour into it, but they appear to be achieving that objective at least at this point. There are no other major players competing with a piece of hardware that's in the standalone space. I mean, even Google, who already owns so much of the mobile pie, right? They pretty much just dropped Their VR initiatives and it's almost like you might have thought that Google would be the one doing what Facebook is doing where they're like really pushing this piece of hardware, which is ironically Android based and They're trying to just capture this space not because they want to be in gaming but because they want a huge portion I mean, they've said we want a billion people in VR. That's the goal. That's where this is ultimately pointing toward. Hmm
[00:39:25.272] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know. Talking to Alex Heath, he said that, you know, they're working on their own operating system. And so they're likely going to want to eventually migrate away from Android. And, you know, for me, I guess it's hard for me to unconditionally recommend Oculus products. And I think that the thing that gives me the most pause is the lack of engagement around some of these really intractable issues around privacy. I've been covering these issues for a long time. And when I try to engage with them, it's like, they don't really want to talk. They don't want to really go on the record about any of it. Just as an example, there's is the emerging of the Oculus accounts. If you don't merge, then there's a new Oculus privacy policy in terms of service that just came out last Friday. But moving forward, if you do merge your accounts or you get new hardware, then there's a new privacy policy that is the Facebook privacy policy on top of the Oculus supplemental data policy that they're not even releasing until October 11th. So we can't even look at it to see what the privacy policy even is. So as I'm trying to talk about these issues of privacy, they're not even showing us what the privacy policy will be for all the stuff that they're going to be talking about. So by them not releasing it, they're not making anybody available for Facebook Connect to even have a conversation around the privacy. And I'm going to be really keen to see if there's anything that they talk about in terms of privacy architectures, because If they are, then they're not making those people available to talk to someone like me to really interrogate. Are you doing homomorphic encryption? Are you doing differential privacy? Like, what are the ways in which that you're going to be handling biometric data? All these different things that there's a developer agreement that says, here's all the risks and harms that they're preventing developers from doing, but they're not doing those same things. So for me, there's some deeper issues around their approach towards privacy and data sovereignty, and how much they're going to potentially use this as this big surveillance machine to do all the psychographic profiling on us. And that's the risk that I see, but a lack of dialogue and conversation about some of these risks and harms for me is the most unsettling, just the lack of engagement to even start to have a conversation. So as new hardware like this comes out, they've made it very difficult for people like us to bridge that gap because they're saying we're going to make all these changes, but we can't see them. So I don't know how you reckon that, you know, that's obviously a huge issue, but if you're only looking at the hardware, you talk about the hardware, but there's all this deeper context of what Facebook is and where this all is going.
[00:41:46.468] Ben Lang: yeah yeah and for me this all comes down to like i was saying i mean it's a lack of competition right it's like a lot of people may say hey i don't like the direction that this is heading where face book once a billion people in vr and they want to be able to set the rules on what those people can and can't do and how much tracking the company's ought to do on those billion people if there's no other option Which really, like, there's not in the standalone space. If you have any amount of content that you've purchased on Quest, it's like, that's basically not portable at all. You know, they've set up this walled garden as they want it, because that is the best way to kind of capture users, if you will. And even if it was portable, there's really no equivalent headset out there that's even close to the same price or quality. And they're just destroying the space because they have the money that other people can't dump on it. And I think that's a big bummer, right? Like, geez, at least if you have one other good standalone option that you can get behind, that would be great. But even for the people who don't like what Oculus is doing, it's sort of like you either accept their version of VR that they're building, or you don't get the standalone consumer VR at all. You don't have anywhere else you can go. So that's absolutely problematic. There were people competing with them like we're talking about you know google had daydream and they were trying to push us really hard they said the same thing you know they thought they'd have billions of users in vr and not too long and. As google does they kinda just petered out and play the long game face books and playing the long game. and yeah i think the real solution the practical solution is somehow beginning anybody to really be a true competitor to what face book is doing right now so that at least people have and option i mean just what the historically the way that privacy has gone with face book and just the internet at large without competition i don't see real structural safeguards being put in place to get us to like a future where If in the future what happens is what Facebook wants to happen, which is lots of people are spending lots of time in VR almost like they might like Sorry, let me back up. So The long-term goal what Facebook hopes and what many people? Hope or think is interesting is if we have like this metaverse world where a lot of people spend time in VR and it's not like a toy, it's kind of just like a virtual space. And you might do your normal daily stuff there, like work or hang out with friends or all this stuff. And in the real world, where we do all those things, work and hang out with friends, they're not governed by one company, right? And in the places where they are governed, to some extent, they're usually governed by some kind of democratic process that is fundamentally alterable. If facebook owns the kind of virtual land in the future that a billion people are living on they get to settle those rules It's not a democratic process and I get the sense that the way that they're structuring Their approach to vr and this like we're obviously in the early days of like hundreds of thousands if not, you know you know, maybe a million VR users regularly. We know we're near the billions, but it's coming. I get the sense that Facebook is building all this out in the way that just functionally does whatever is best for the company. I do not get the sense, like you said, that there is people there who are trying to look at, if I didn't work at Facebook and I sat down and thought, what is kind of the safest, best structure, most private way that we could make as the precedent for a framework for this future metaverse where people spend a bunch of their lives, what would it be like? I don't get the sense that that's the question they're asking. I kind of get the sense that they're just building it for whatever works for the product. And I don't necessarily think that's like evil, like they will, we want to control everybody. I just, it's just a profit thing, right? It's like to the extent that they can get away with it, their whole business model is advertising the most relevant ads they can to you without many safeguards for you in mind. I think the word like privacy, when they talk about privacy is, It's almost like privacy is the tiny little thing that we have left and they kind of refer to it as the Unprivate part like unprivacy is almost more like like maybe what we should be calling. It's like how? Unprivate do you expect this network to be and are you trying to set it up in a way that in the long run? If it wasn't you Facebook if you were designing Apple's version for how this should be, how would you make it? I don't get the sense that they're doing that. I get the sense they're structuring it for their benefit and not the benefit of the users, which is, I think, a bummer, because again, no competition, this is gonna become the new norm. Just like we saw with the early days of the internet, people kind of walked into the internet not really understanding the implications of giving up their privacy online really even meant, until it was way too late, that all this is way too established, that you're not gonna undo a bunch of stuff that's already been done. And that's where we're at right now. Hey, I don't know. Maybe there is some champion of privacy in Facebook working on this virtual reality stuff But I haven't talked to them. I guess just as you haven't really talked to them
[00:46:43.518] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. And you know, it's Monday, tomorrow's Tuesday, Apple's going to be having an event. And I know that Bloomberg as well as Alex Heath have both reported that Apple actually is working on the Quest competitor as well as AR glasses. So we'll see if any of that is announced tomorrow. Apple's been very secretive and AWOL from the larger community. So we'll see if they can swoop in and provide some competition. But yeah, we just have a few more minutes left here. And I just wanted to sort of wrap up by asking you, Where do you think this is all going? Where do you think the ultimate potential of VR might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:47:15.668] Ben Lang: Um, you know, that's a good question. I've been looking at this space for almost a decade now, and I've seen the hardware evolve. I've seen the software evolve. And like, I still fundamentally feel like VR and AR by extension is going to be this transformative technology. I do think that it is a large part of how we'll compute in the future. It is still best in specific areas, like for gaming and stuff, but as the years go on, it's getting a little bit better and better at that vision, I think, that many people had in the early days of what VR could potentially do for society. So, the other day, I was stuck inside with this wildfire smoke on the West Coast, as many people have been, And I was really feeling cooped up, and I hit up a friend and I was like, hey, you want to play disc golf in VR? And so we throw on our headsets and then, you know, not too long, we linked up in Rec Room. And we just had a fun time. My friend was on the East Coast, I'm on the West Coast. And we played and just hung out. we weren't going there just to play the game it was kind of like have to hang out and have to play the disc golf and it just felt like this pretty cool way of hanging out with somebody who I haven't seen in a while and like kind of almost getting outside in a way as dystopic as it sounds to be stuck inside from the pollution with a headset on your head inside but you know it gave me this sense that I was not a whole country away from my friend, right? It gave me the sense that I was there with him and hanging out and having fun and just messing around. And I think that that's a massive power of VR. And the easier that gets for more people, more activities. Not too long before I played ping pong with my aunt for the first time, who recently got a quest just on her own. She said, Hey, that thing's cool. Like I want to get one of those. And then she got one and We played ping pong and chatted for an hour and it was really cool. And so like, I think that one of these huge powers of VR is what Facebook frankly had bet on, which is that it's going to be this powerful social tool in the future. And it is getting better and it'll be really unfortunate if we don't have good competition there. But in that long run, it does look like it's trending in that direction, you know. in the next five years when the headsets are even lighter and easier to use it's like I just see the applicability of it's like as it gets easier this sphere of people that would be willing to like hop in and just hang out like just talk to you or watch a show with you or whatever it just grows and grows as the hardware gets better and the software is better. I think there's lots of people who say VR's use cases are so limited, but really I feel like it's just this ever-expanding sphere that's been going kind of since this stuff started, where it's like, it becomes more and more applicable to more and more people for the things that they might want to do, like talk to my grandma or watch a movie with my friend or do a puzzle with somebody, like where you go away from just this pure gaming entertainment thing, which is obviously kind of best for right now in many ways, and it just starts to appeal to more and more people. And it's not like this tech gadget. It just starts to become this thing that is useful because, like a phone, right? Like a phone, I don't buy a phone because it's a gadget. You know, you buy a phone because it lets you communicate with other people. And I think the VR is gonna start to feel like that. It will start to be less novel, high tech, and it will start to feel more like, hey, that's the thing that I put on when I wanna hang out with friends who I am not near at the moment. And yeah, it's going that direction. I mean, you know, you see the steps and steps every way. Yeah, pretty exciting and amazing what we'll be seeing in the next several years here.
[00:50:45.560] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Ben, I know it's been a long journey in the road to VR. We're still at the, it feels like we might be at a turning point in terms of going to the mass market. I certainly have a lot of questions around, you know, whether or not I should go slower and what are we losing by accelerating this and putting the gas pedal down to the metal to sort of accelerate it. But it does seem like a turning point. And I know that you've been covering this space for a long, long time. You're really, if you look at the history of VR, you're, you're really on the front lines helping to record a lot of those first drafts of that history as it's been unfolding. So thanks for your continued work and dedication to all this and to keep track of all this stuff as it's unfolding. So, and thanks for coming on the podcast.
[00:51:25.275] Ben Lang: Absolutely. And the same goes for you, Kent. I mean, you've been at, we've been, we've been passing each other in the hallways of these conferences for years and years. I know you've been right there with me. So this has been a really fun catch up and look back and look forward to. So thanks a lot for having me.
[00:51:38.139] Kent Bye: So that was Ben Leng. He's the co-founder of Road to VR, which was founded in October of 2011. And so he's been covering the VR industry for coming up on his nine-year anniversary. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, for me, it's striking to hear that Ben would consider this to be an Oculus Rift S, but that over time it's going to eventually become Oculus Quest 2. For me, I think there's enough ergonomic improvements. It's lighter. They said it's about 10% lighter. It's more compact. And so the weight distribution there actually feels better. So it doesn't like weigh down on my head as much. The resolution's a lot better. The thing that I was mentioning with the blur, that was actually like the Fresnel lens glare. as I looked around I could see that it wasn't actually on the display but it was more of like the lens glare that happens so like there's different gradients on the fresnel lens and so as you move around then the images start to have like these weird reflections and as you move your head around then you can determine where that glare is. And overall, the comfort is so much better than the previous version, for me at least, as I am able to go in there, it just fits better in my face, it's got a little bit more distance, as well as it's lighter, and the heat management I think is one of the bigger things for me, it doesn't make my head as hot. And the controllers actually feel a lot better as well. They actually have a thumb rest so that you can move your thumb to a place where it's not on the buttons, but I'm so used to using the Oculus Quest 1 that I just rest my thumb in the exact same orientation, which is on top of the buttons. You didn't have much choice in the first iteration of the Quest 1, and so I think just my body memory is that I just end up putting my finger there anyway. They did say that they have more tight grip when it comes to the controller as you pull off to put in the batteries. It doesn't have a battery built into the touch controllers. It is, again, using AA batteries. But it is harder to get off, which means it's less likely to slip off if you're playing something like Beat Saber. But Ben's point was that, you know, it's going to feel like a Oculus Quest S because even though there's an increased amount of frame rate from like 60 or 72 Hertz all the way up to 90 Hertz, not all the games are going to launch with that immediately. And then the increased ability to have new textures means that it's just going to be a larger file size on top of the frame rate. So. There's some folks that are saying that, you know, with all the other increased frame rate and textures, then that's going to eat up a lot of the extra headroom and that you're not going to have like significant improvements in the graphics initially, at least at the start. Ben's like really looking forward to seeing a game that really is designed from scratch to be able to really take advantage of the full capacity of the XR2 moving up from the Snapdragon 835, which was released in like 2016, whereas the XR2 was at the end of 2019. So it's like at least three generations ahead. from the 835 to the 865. I do agree with Ben with what he says around the IPD is going to be less intuitive for new users. I know what my IPD is and it's easy for me to just pick the smallest one but even Ben said he's not quite sure which one he should be using. There is this effect where you can kind of like soften your eyes and correct anything that's happening and I'm not sure if that's what's happening for me. There's so many things with VR that there's these weird perceptual things that Don't know if it's just me being accommodated and using enough VR There's perceptual aspects of like maybe someone who has never done VR at all Maybe seeing the LCD screen might give them a headache versus some of the other screens and it's gonna be dependent on each individual So it's hard to say. Okay. This is what your experience is going to be You kind of have to try it out and see for yourself Because I know I've talked to Alex Heath and he was saying, you know, for him, the comfort has never been up to the level of quality bar. That wouldn't mean that he would spend more than a half hour. And I don't know if that's just you are able to accommodate and adapt as you spend more time, or if it's just something that needs to have something on the technology side that changes or improves. So I think with VR, it's going to be up to each person's perception to be able to know whether or not their comfort and ergonomics and everything is improved or different. For me, there's an improvement. The one thing that I'd say about the soft strap, though, that I had to really figure out is that as you put it on, sometimes when you're wearing it, it does feel like it wants to kind of like start to slip off. and there are two arms that kind of swing up and that if you push those down then it just i found that it fit a little bit more snug on my face and that each time i put it on i kind of have to push that down in order to make sure that it's nice and tight and it's not going to go anywhere so that that did actually take a little bit to kind of figure out because the previous quest didn't have that problem as much with the firm strap but as i talked to the folks at facebook they said that It does fit different types of hairstyles and other things as well. So it is going to be a little bit more accessible for some folks. But there is the Elite strap and the strap that has the battery. They sent a copy of that to Ben and he's really happy with it. They didn't send one to me so I haven't had a chance to check it out to be able to say what the difference might be. So I guess I'll just be using the soft strap for now. So they are going to be discontinuing the Rift S and the Rift line altogether. Not sure if they're going to have another new line at some point that's more enterprise PC VR or what's going to happen with VR on the PC, because there are things like the varifocal displays and eye tracking, all this stuff that is going to be more likely going to end up in something like PC VR. But we'll see as we move forward how they're able to get things down to the point where they're able to put it into a mobile VR headset. It does feel like that the Oculus Quest untethered aspect that that is going to be where the future is going. And so they're relying upon this Oculus link cable to be able to connect it to your computer. And as Ben said, you know, they're going to have to continue to improve and to, you know, they're not going to be able to match the new frame rate or the new resolution. They have to compress all that video. And so they have to not only compress it, but it hit that new frame rate. And so as time goes on, they're going to be improving that. But also I asked about the wireless streaming and what they said is that it's only about 70 to 80 percent there and that, you know, they're really wanting to get it so that it works for everybody. And I said, yeah, but Guy Goodwin of Virtual Desktop told me that, you know, if you have a really good PC and you have like a mesh network, then It works fine. And what Facebook seems to say in response to that is that they want the wireless streaming to just kind of work out of the box at like maybe a lower spec rate than what the most hardcore gaming folks have on their PC, but also folks that are willing to set up a mesh network to be able to do VR gaming, you know, in another room. So I think that's another thing where if you're in the same room and you're really close and you have like a high enough PC, then using the virtual desktop streaming, which you have to go through SideQuest to be able to get that feature because it's not in the version that's on the store because they made him take it out. And Guy Godwin was like, well, there's things with the Oculus link cable that actually isn't up to the same quality bar either. And that he's able to either match that or even do better in some cases. And so. And he also said that, you know, with the Quest 2, he sees that there's new capabilities with the Snapdragon XR2 that should potentially make some of that streaming even better as well. So that's something that Facebook continues to work on, whether or not they're going to have some sort of customized piece of hardware to be able to make that easy for you to be able to be anywhere within your home. or if you have to be in the same room. So those are some of the different insights I got that, you know, they have different bars for what they're trying to achieve and not have to have people go out and set up a whole mesh network in order for it to work. But if you do want to do that, then you can start to have access to that as well. Some of the other questions that I asked Facebook is just around like the user agent detection. There will be ways to detect for the people that are creating these different experiences. What version of the quest do you have right now? When I was trying around the different experiences, they didn't have that. And so I was still being detected as a quest. But if you from the quest one to the quest two, there's going to be different variations of experiences that you're going to be able to deliver. So, uh, there might be different versions on like, say going into a VR chat world, there may be a quest version, a quest two version, and then the version that works for PC, or a lot of these companies may just decide to keep between those two, like the quest version versus the PC version. But given that there is more processing power within the quest two, then there's the potential to have rooms that have a little bit more higher fidelity. So it's a little bit of like, as creators do really want to create three different versions of things, you're already perhaps creating two, but if you want to make things the most accessible, and if things are moving towards this path, towards the Oculus Quest as having the biggest market penetration, then there's going to be an increased desire to want to have more compatible hardware. And it's a trade-off as to whether or not you want to live into the deepest potential of what the hardware can do versus, you know, cutting out the Oculus Quest one users because they don't have enough processing power. So there's a little bit of. Trade-offs that folks have to make when you have platforms like VR chat as an example And the final point is just around the privacy things that I was talking about and from Ben's perspective He's really looking at through the market lens and the fact that there's not a lot of other competitors that are out there You know, there are legal regulatory ways of looking at this as well But I think that a lot of times at least in the US context you have to show harm being done before you start to have any specific regulations and So I do think that Facebook is likely going to be moving slowly in that sense, but they're setting up the frameworks to be able to start to use virtual reality as a way to be able to look at what you're doing, look at your activity, and eventually potentially start to look at specifically what you're looking at within experiences and We'll have to wait and see how much they put within the privacy policy. Because like I said, for the Oculus Quest 2, you're not going to be able to actually see what that full privacy policy is until October 11th, when they release that Oculus supplemental data policy. And they're not making that available to me. ahead of time. They're not making anyone available to talk about it ahead of time, at least at this point. Hopefully they will. We'll see. They're not making anyone available for Facebook Connect to be able to talk about that. And so October 11th, it is for the Oculus supplemental data policy, which is the privacy policy that's going to be in addition to the existing Facebook data policy that as you get this new hardware you're underneath both of those privacy policies both what the Facebook privacy policy is as well as what the Oculus supplemental data policy is which again will be coming out on October 11th and I'll be very keen to see what's in there. We can see maybe a little bit of a sneak peek by looking at, like, maybe the Horizon data policy. Facebook Horizon is still in beta. They have a privacy policy. There's the portal privacy policy. And there's also a developer policy that has a lot of things that they don't want the developers to do when it comes to different things that you can detect and determine. based upon the information that are available but yet Facebook aren't giving themselves the same limitations when it comes to what they're doing so they're saying developers don't do this but as Facebook we're going to be able to have access to this and they're not making that same commitment that they're not doing that so It really takes me back to about nine days after Oculus Quest 1 launched and I was at Augmented World Expo and talking to Chris Miranda and he really had this unbridled enthusiasm for how this was going to really take VR to the next level. And I think that's what Facebook wants in terms of they really see the engagement that they had with the Oculus Quest 1, and they really want to take VR to the mainstream. They said to me that it's pretty much been sold out every week since it launched. Of course, there was COVID issues there, but also there's just been a pretty huge demand. So it's been sold out every week since they launched. The demand has sustained itself to be so high. The developers that are on the platform are going to be able to see enough real revenue to be able to really make themselves viable. And so they really just want to double down on that and get it out there and, you know, just really focusing their efforts on the future of VR being in this Quest 2. And, you know, there's a lot of enthusiasm that they're going to be able to really make this push and push it out into mainstream, especially when we're in the middle of a pandemic and people are looking for any type of escape. And so VR can certainly give you that sense of going into these virtual worlds, but also having these different social interactions, just like Ben was saying. Burning Man 2020 happened within Altspace and It did give that feeling of being able to explore these different worlds and hang out and to go around and explore. And, you know, there's different things that you can do in VR that are COVID safe. If you're home alone and being able to hang out with people and you're able to be physically distanced, but still, you know, have this amount of social engagement. So it's certainly at this turning point in the history of VR. And as we move forward, like I said at the top, I think each person within the VR industry has to negotiate to what degree are they going to participate in this vision of the metaverse and the future of VR that Facebook is putting forth. you know, they're making it more accessible, they're making it cheap, and they're really innovating and pushing it forward to see what's possible. And like Ben and Alexeith and myself and other people in the VR industry, we would like to see other competitors that are coming up to be able to maybe have a little bit more options that are out there for folks just from the hardware perspective, but also just from some of the deeper business model trajectories of where things are going with Facebook being an ad company, they're data mining all this information, and they have all these people that their whole job is to figure out how to monetize data. So there's this hybrid model between having the app store model like Apple selling all these different apps and these different services. And there's also the surveillance capitalism aspect, which what degree of whatever we're doing within VR is being tracked and monitored and potentially trying to be monetized within other contexts and eventually within VR as well. But they're not doing any advertising within VR, but it's mostly for when you're on these other platforms. So that's part of their long-term data play is what Alex Heath had said in my previous interview with him in episode 942. So Facebook connect is still happening. I recorded this in the morning ahead of Facebook connect. So any new announcements and stuff, that's not going to be within this podcast. Uh, this was just, uh, all put together, ready to go with the launch at 10 30, after they announced some of the information around Oculus quest two, but yeah, I'll continue to be covering what's happening at Oculus connect. And, uh, I've got some other interviews coming up as well, and we're going back and looking at some of the stuff from Venice film festival as well as burning man, but it feels like it's a turning point within VR, but also this. One, that I'm not have the umbrella of enthusiasm just because I have more concerns and more questions than I have answers at this point. And I'm happy to see VR continuing to grow and evolve. My concern is just at what cost are we going to be accelerating this without having any guardrails or without knowing the full implications of how much of our privacy are we mortgaging in order to get to the future of what the potential of VR might be. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of supported podcasts, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
