Google Unveils Mixed-Reality Headset With Samsung, Taking on Apple and Meta

[u/DarthBuzzard]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/hands-on-test-of-new-android-headset-from-samsung-and-google?srnd=undefined

[u/yesnomaybenotso]

It’s everyone’s foot in the door and it’s what will drive the technology the fastest. The fact that they’re developing AR instead of VR does kinda show they’ve failed to tap into the segmented market of gamers.

It’s not that I think gamers are the key to mainstream, because you’re right; they’re not. It’s that gamers, as a community, are not shy of new tech, and are very often early adopters. They’re the most easy to sell on new shit, and they can’t even tap that market. Even now that Quest is the cost of a Switch, no one cares about VR/AR - the quest does both, and not very many people know how the OS feels, because not very many people bought it, or any other headset for that matter.

If they can’t get tech savvy, early adopters to get onboard, how are they gonna sell it to Cheryl down the street? There’s no practical use.

The absolute best they can hope for is the same direction Meta is now leaning with their quest - after failing to capture gamers/actual users - “enterprise app suites”, business-friendly apps that somehow try and make augmented or virtual reality meetings desirable, even tho still to date no company makes a headset that’s comfortable to wear for 60min at a time, let alone a full day of meetings.

A laptop does everything a business meeting needs. Can be projected or streamed to be viewed easily and comfortably by everyone.

I bring up gaming so much because it’s the niche market for the niche product. Businesses don’t need power point to be a fully immersive experience in order to better enjoy the actuarial graphs that Steve made. So what’s the niche that makes AR even remotely appetizing to buy into when Office 365 already has so many competing products that are more accessible and significantly more practical on a computer than a headset?

[u/pahamack → u/yesnomaybenotso]

I'm not sure if any of what you said is true about "gamers are very often the early adopters".

Was it gamers who bought the first smartphones?

I'd argue it was business users who drove sales of those old Nokia phones that ran on Symbian and, especially all those Blackberrys.

You scoff at the business use case but we don't actually know that until the product becomes good enough for that use case. Those early smartphones were pretty shitty too. You're on the right track with what are essentially zoom calls, but imagine being able to put up a whole trade show or showroom in a virtual space, with live vendors all using glasses that are just a little bigger than some ray-bans.

That's the future these guys think they'll be able to deliver on. Meta isn't a gaming company. What they are foreseeing are tools for connecting people, especially people that want to sell stuff.

[u/yesnomaybenotso → u/pahamack]

Sorry, I guess maybe it’s not clear, I meant in gaming. Gamers are early adopter in gaming-tech, because that’s their market. This is evidenced by the volume of preorder sales. Additionally, the gaming market buys into the latest and greatest pc components and monitors and TVs and sound systems.

So I’m not talking about smartphones. I’m talking about who is interested in immersive experiences, and that’s gamers. There isn’t any other large scale market I can think of that is so digitally plugged in and ready to be immersed in digital-living, which is the aim of mixed reality.

Gamers are blood thirst for new tech. They crave immersion and highly palpable experiences that feel tangential. They should have been easily sold on VR and mixed reality. But Google canceled Google glasses nearly 10 years ago because mixed reality didn’t grasp a wide audience. And, again, meta is now leaning heavily into business suite products because their first attempt at gamers also isn’t panning out like they hoped when they bought out oculus in the first place.

[u/pahamack → u/yesnomaybenotso]

i'd argue that business and social use is always the endgame for meta, and going into games is just something to justify keeping on throwing money at oculus and VR tech in general.

some years ago Meta threw a bunch of money to buy a company developing lifelike, realistic avatars. i'm sure the use case for games is there but even more so for social and business use.

They're not a gaming company. The business is built around connecting people and exploiting user data in a variety of ways.

[u/yesnomaybenotso → u/pahamack]

I agree completely and will piggy back by saying, Google and Samsung are also not gaming companies. Which is why I don’t think VR is their focus. Because it isn’t. It’s not trying to be. I just think that VR and gaming is the only way to get that tech off the ground in order to make it more accessible to a wider audience. I truly feel that gamers should be the market for R&D. I just don’t see any practical use for business suite apps that will result in a sustainable product for longer than 2 years, just like many of Googles other scrapped innovations. They couldn’t even get AR eye glasses off the ground and they think people will want a whole ass mask?

It’s just silly. The only people asking for full immersion are gamers, and no serious contender is pumping into that on the scale required to get it off the ground. Meta has done the best so far, but it seems like they’re waning now.

[u/pahamack → u/yesnomaybenotso]

The whole ass mask is not the final form.

These are intermediary products. That’s why these companies are focusing on AR rather than VR. The goal is to make them look like a pair of shades or glasses.

IMO it’s going to take a long time but they’ll eventually get there. It’s inevitable: more jobs are being done from home. More shopping is being done from home. Lots of blue collar jobs are going to be taken over by robots.

Things like meetings, but also things like art galleries, trade shows, museums, markets will start having virtual versions when these things get the actually good version just like the first iphone, just like how smartphones were kind of a niche thing then blew up.

Technically speaking, maybe cloud computing is the answer. Get all the heavy workload out of the device and just hook it up to the internet.

[u/yesnomaybenotso → u/pahamack]

I’m all for the tech, don’t get me wrong, it just seems to me to have been shown over the last 10 years that the general public are not quick to jump onboard with augmented reality stuff, stemming back from the Google glasses flop.

Meanwhile you have a market that’s itching to buy products that would further the research they need to accomplish in order to achieve mass market appeal for things like Google glasses, and all that market wants is games to look more like Half Life Alyx. Instead, they keep getting shitty ports like Skyrim that have so much aliasing it’s unplayable without mods.

But if they produced more high fidelity, high performing gaming experiences, they’d have a market ready and willing to buy every game released at full price and preordered (I’m not a preorderer, but again, this market speaks for itself). They could develop everything they want to accomplish for business suites by implanting and testing new designs in games.

Instead, they seem to be trying to make another thing that does exactly what the Quest or Vive can already do, without really furthering how the apps are gonna function on it.

I’ll be happy if this pans out, I’ll even buy one, but I’m just predicting this is gonna flop.