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- Oct 6, 2004
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Meta's focusing on the standalone platform and Meta store. They can't compete with Steam on PCVR, as we saw with the Rift store. Hence using Asgard's Wrath II to show the potential of standalone with sufficient developer effort/money. That's also the reason for emphasis on MR.
As it is, taking on Google with the OS is a bold strategy. They've got a fair lead with their hardware and ecosystem, although the "Metaverse" R&D money doesn't seem to have gotten them much. They've made better OS developments recently by just imitating Apple.
Meanwhile Google/Alphabet are known for just abandoning products and this is a late return. They do have significant advantages with the playstore library and android development for hardware diversity. Maybe they will catch up? At least for general VR computing, if not gaming.
I do like the move to "Horizon OS" as a more open platform though. If Asus manages to make more premium headsets without completely blowing out the price, I could certainly see myself shifting to their hardware. Would have been nice to have an Asus version of the Quest 3. Presumably it'd even include a decent headstrap out of the box. Other things on my wishlist would have been eye tracking, slightly higher clocks/better cooling and upgraded displays using QLED mini-led or micro-led (micro-oled would have blown the price out Apple style). I would have been prepared to pay twice the price of the largest capacity Quest 3.
To me Pimax jank and poor quality control isn't worth the cost, weight and loss of actual standalone (I still don't think they have anything running properly) for the improvements in the resolution and QLED mini-led displays. A lot of their "features" also seem like development gimmicks without much of a use case. Like the swappable lenses and the supposed use of swappable display stacks on the upcoming Crystal Super.
Even with the brightness advantage, I'd need to try their new lenses to see if the aspheric lenses can match the Quest 3s pancake lenses for clarity. The Quest 3's pancake lenses absolutely blow anything with fresnel lenses completely out of the water. I also think the benefits of wireless for active PCVR outweigh any visual loss or lag from encoding versus a native display connection. Assuming you use a decent wifi 6e or wifi 7 setup and AV1 encoding. Of course the weight and cord don't really matter as much for people that only use their headsets for vr sims, but for everyone else it's a major drawback.
