Facebook Halts VR and AR Operating System Project (theinformation.com) 39
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has stopped development of a new software operating system to power its virtual reality devices and upcoming augmented reality glasses, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the decision. From a report: Shelving the project, which had been underway for several years and involved hundreds of employees, marked a setback for the company's attempt to own the underlying software behind its Oculus VR headset and future augmented or mixed reality devices. The screens of its planned devices aim to overlay digital images on the real world or weave real-world objects into VR apps.
Meta uses an open-source version of Google's Android operating system to power Meta's existing Oculus Quest VR devices. But Meta wanted to create an OS from scratch to power them and future devices, a project that became known internally as XROS. XR is a catch-all term for VR, AR, and mixed reality. In MR, the wearer of a headset could view and use real-world objects, such as a keyboard, to do work or play games in a VR-like app. Instead, the company has told some staff it would continue to modify an open-source version of Android, which Google developed for smartphones but which other companies have used to power various devices, the people familiar with the matter said. Meta's modified version of Android, known internally as VROS, powers existing Oculus VR headsets.
Meta uses an open-source version of Google's Android operating system to power Meta's existing Oculus Quest VR devices. But Meta wanted to create an OS from scratch to power them and future devices, a project that became known internally as XROS. XR is a catch-all term for VR, AR, and mixed reality. In MR, the wearer of a headset could view and use real-world objects, such as a keyboard, to do work or play games in a VR-like app. Instead, the company has told some staff it would continue to modify an open-source version of Android, which Google developed for smartphones but which other companies have used to power various devices, the people familiar with the matter said. Meta's modified version of Android, known internally as VROS, powers existing Oculus VR headsets.
Ready Player One (Score:5, Funny)
I was really looking forward to a world where AR removed all of you assholes and replaced you with flowers.
--
Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes. - Becky Chambers
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Indeed, that's Instagram filters. I make a lovely petunia, by the way.
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That's a nice thought, but we all know that Facebook is going to use Nolan Sorrento's comment instead, that you can have ads in 80% of a user's visual field before they succumb to seizures.
Oblig. YouTube reference [youtube.com].
I know Ready Player One is fiction, but I suspect that 80% figure will be taken as the truth.
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but I suspect that 80% figure will be taken as the truth.
Anybody who has visited any ad-supported website without an ad-blocker condom on can attest to that. It is absolutely insane. I can't even pump gas anymore without being accosted by un-skippable un-mutable advertising.
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The gas pump advertising pisses me off big time.
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I can't even pump gas anymore without being accosted by un-skippable un-mutable advertising.
It's mutable if you've got duct tape handy.
Re: Ready Player One (Score:1)
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I can't even pump gas anymore without being accosted by un-skippable un-mutable advertising.
I find that if I push every one of the 6 or 8 buttons on the side of the screen, at least one functions as an unlabeled mute.
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Re: Ready Player One (Score:1)
How "new"? (Score:3)
Were they making a new kernel or using Linux? I would be very surprised if they, at any point, thought a new kernel would be a good idea. They just need a VR based window manager and app launcher which could be in Android or Ubuntu or any damn distro. OK, Ubuntu might be too bloated.
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Indeed. But apparently they did not even manage to get that working. Or they tried with their own kernel and failed. That would not be surprising at all, some projects are dependent on having the right people and no amount of money can fix it if it has not.
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I bought a Quest after my first week in lockdown.
Played with it for about 2 hours with a few of the free apps and marvelled at how cool it looked, but got bored of the offerings that were all a bit clunky.
After I found you could link it to Steam and use SteamVR I spent hours trying to get a wireless link to work with various tools - eventually succeeding, but it was a tremendously painful experience - and some software layer still complains that my graphics card might not be compatable, each and every time
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+1 on the fact that setting up the play zone thing is super annoying. I bet a lot of people ditched regular VR play because of it.
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It's not that difficult. There are a lot of young children playing with the Quest 2, especially after last Christmas. If you check out forums regarding Quest 2 VR, one of the biggest problems is little kids ruining games for the adults. There's also the problem that children on VR swear worse than sailors. No exaggeration!
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They built wireless functionality in so it's way easier now. The complaint about memory is because the Steam and Oculus App both have to run at the same time and take up video memory when running Steam VR games.
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It's not a complaint about memory - it's a warning that my graphics card might not be up to scratch.
I have an aorus 15p gaming laptop which has an 10870 i7, 32Gb system memory, geforce 3070m graphics chip with its own dedicated 8G memory.
There is no way that the laptop hardware is a limiting factor - but even if it was, it warn me once then get on with it. Don't keep bugging me with it every.single.time.
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Well, looks like this VR hype will just be as much of a failure as the last ones were. The tech is clearly not ready in any way.
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Airlink is not as easy to setup as it could be, but everyone I know got it to work. It recently came out of beta, so maybe it's different than when you tried before. You can also try "Virtual Desktop" which might work better for you. There are some good games, "Beat Saber"(with mods so you can download better songs), "Sparc VR"(It's like racquetball combined with dodgeball), Resident Evil 4, Half Life Alyx, Youtube 360 videos are cool in VR
I also have the Valve Index. The Index definitely looks better with
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Games I have tried: yes I might have exaggerated about only using it for 2 hours - actual usage is probably around 20 or so - but all that was in the first couple of weeks and I really haven't used it since. Only time I get it out is when my young nephews or nieces come round and want to dance with the robot in the VR tutorial app.
Beatsaber - Fun foro a bit but very simplistic game play. I probably spend 30 min in the demo version of this. I guess some people love games like fruit ninja too but that kind o
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Or perhaps Meta concluded that developing their own OS wasn't worth it. That [having readily available middleware + custom UI layer] was more important than owning the software stack underneath.
Personally I take pleasure in reading that side stepping a go-to libre software option comes at considerable cost. High enough that it doesn't make economic sense.
For end users, that is [black box, where some of the value lies in (closed-source?) software included] vs. [end-user value lies in the hardware offere
nobody gets hired for buying Microsoft (Score:2)
side stepping a go-to libre software option comes at considerable cost. High enough that it doesn't make economic sense.
quoted for emphasis .
We've come a long way, baby!
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Personally I take pleasure in reading that side stepping a go-to libre software option comes at considerable cost. High enough that it doesn't make economic sense.
Good point. I agree.
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Maybe they wanted more control over the system, as money and development cost mattered less to the executives.
Re:How "new"? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would be very surprised if they, at any point, thought a new kernel would be a good idea.
GNU Hurd is tanned, rested and ready.
The Metaverse definitely needs a Meta-Microkernel.
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Facebook might have been aiming for a low-latency RTOS. Android is definitely not a RTOS. Yes Linux can be modify into a RTOS but Facebook might not want their core VR technology to be GPLed.
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They were making a new kernel. It was not Linux and differed from Linux in a certain key area that Linus might have disagreed with someone about what back when.
I did however get the idea that they were interested in hiring people who could port Linux device drivers to their new kernel, but I don't know more because that wasn't a job I was all that interested in.
Michael Abrash was there. But he didn't seem to be all that into the OS part and more on the AR side. That was someone, I can't remember who, fro
Meta de-meta'd? (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the name-change reflected their new virtual universe focus: a glorified MS-Bob for social networks. A pull-back so soon? It would be like Apple changing its name to "iTablet" and then yanking their tablets a month later. iWTF
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I would be more concerned as a shareholder than as a customer. Facebook tried to reduce its dependence on google, and failed. Apple is the only one in the mobile space to pull it off and not fall into google's orbit. Many many others have tried and failed.
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If they ignore PC's, then their heart is not really in the concept. That's still roughly 1/3 of all web consumers, at least in the US.
They saved themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
Programming for Oculus is hard ENOUGH as it is. The fact that it's nominally built on top of Android is the thread of familiarity that gives new Oculus developers a sense that regardless of how overwhelming it is, it's not completely HOPELESS. Admittedly, the barriers to PUBLISHING for Quest(2) are enormously higher than they were for the Go and Rift, but at least they're low enough that someone could independently learn how to do it well enough to actually get hired by a publisher with the resources to go the last mile. Take that away, and you basically end up with Nintendo-like indentured servitude.
Seriously, though, the documentation for Oculus (both pre- and post-Facebook/Meta) is incredibly dense, and most of the learning involves reverse-engineering a few dozen example projects they've dumped on their site with almost no explanation of how everything fits together. It's not a huge exaggeration to describe their SDK docs for Unity as, "here's an example scene. It has about 20 prefabs, but no real explanations of what they do, how they relate to each other, or what's necessary to create a new project and scene OF YOUR OWN". Their "native" documentation is even worse, and is kind of like trying to learn J2EE development by having someone dump 20 megabytes of source code for a complex load-balanced web application in your lap & being expected to just reverse-engineer it until you understand what it's doing. The fact that it's ultimately Android-based, and that you can leverage a lot of foundational knowledge based on that, is the only thing that makes it semi-accessible.
There's a limit to the number of new concepts a developer can simultaneously tackle at once and master in a timely manner without going completely mad. Adding "learn the workings of a completely alien operating system" on top of everything else, and the camel's back doesn't just break, it gets ripped in two.
Let me guess (Score:1)
Feedback from the recruiter was:
"Although your experience in building operating systems is impressive, your {insert language} coding is not at the level that a key role such as yours will demand."
Unrelated, but, (Score:1)
"...Snoop onto them..."
"...As they snoop onto us..."
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
VRChat gets a Linux in a Pixel Shader - A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat...
https://blog.pimaker.at/texts/... [pimaker.at]
Kinda crazy, but wow...
Disclaimer: don't use VRChat on a computer you're not prepared to burn to the ground, this looks like stuff out of the wild wild wild west...
^Mod Points +1 Intersting (Score:2)