John Carmack Resigns Meta VR Post, Leaves VR Industry, Criticizes Meta's 'Ineffi...
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/12/17/075248/john-carmack-resigns-meta-vr-post-leaves-vr-industry-criticizes-metas-inefficiency
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John Carmack Resigns Meta VR Post, Leaves VR Industry, Criticizes Meta's 'Inefficiency'
"John Carmack, the programmer who brought us Doom, Quake and Oculus/Meta virtual reality products, has resigned from his executive consultant post for virtual reality at Meta," reports VentureBeat. "This is the end of my decade in VR," Carmack wrote in an internal post (which he later reposted on Facebook).
"I have mixed feelings."
Quest 2 [Meta's VR headset] is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning — mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing. The issue is our efficiency.... We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort.... It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover. This was admittedly self-inflicted — I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway. Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement. Make better decisions and fill your products with "Give a Damn"!
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Facebook is an advertising company. They want to control what you see, and a VR headset is the ultimate level of control. That's why Fakebook is interested, and for no other reason.
As for Meta - it has about the graphics appeal of the Nintendo Wii. As a showcase for VR, it does very poorly.
But advertising, that works.
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Yep, exactly this. I'm glad to see Carmack leave this shit storm.
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Why? They gave him money, and he is precisely the kind of genius you want at the helm. I would be glad if I heard he was joining some other VR company to produce products that could leapfrog Facebook. But as it stands there's nothing to celebrate here. The only company providing really meaningful investment just lost the one person seemingly keeping things going.
There's nothing to be glad about, unless you have some deep seeded hatred for VR and just want it to fail.
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Carmack working for an advertising company is what was disheartening here. As you pointed out, his talents would have been much better suited at an actual company wanting to push VR forward for gaming and/or some sort of metaverse, not getting eyeballs on ads. Facebook entering the VR space set the technology backwards in my opinion. Carmack tagging along with them was a puzzler.
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Unfortunately none of those existed or were willing to spend as much money chasing after it as Facebook was. Carmack has been around long enough that he isn't so naive not to realize this. Be glad that Facebook spent billions of dollars forwarding the state of the art. Even if it didn't really pan out for them, there are a lot of people who now have several years of developed skills in this problem domain. Even if the overall market contracts, those skills don't entirely go away. Maybe another company decid
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I have a deep seated hatred for Facebook and I just want to see them fail. So losing a guy like Carmack who trashes them on the way out makes me happy.
As for VR, I'm indifferent. I don't think it will fail, but I also think it will always be a rather niche. So, in the eyes of guys like Zuckerberg, who are banking on it being the next big thing, it will probably fail.
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Personally I would certainly celebrate Facebook failing, getting out of VR or losing VR market share. I think these would all be positive developments.
It's possible to hate Facebook and wish they go bust and love VR. It's also possible to hate VR and hope it fails while wishing Facebook success in all of its sleazy endeavors.
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It was a terrible match. Other than having lots of money (and Carmack isn't poor himself) Facebook had nothing going for it. John apparently had to fight management at every step because Zuck's vision for VR is ridiculous.
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I am, but I have to worry about his criteria. I mean, if it's just "inefficiency" then if Carmack had gotten his way, wouldn't Facebook be twice as bad by now?
I've been disappointed by Carmack's direction since ID software. He seems very much typical of my generation (X's) "Whatever" attitude towards anything that could be seen as a moral or political issue. Staying at Facebook for so long, and then quitting over "efficiency" rather than, say, because Facebook is a giant black hole of suck that's a big p
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Really no one cares why they are interested, and no one is criticising their position. Quite literally everyone from the industry who has commented so far have been quite unified in their complaints: They simply aren't showing enough for their investment. And so are you for that matter. Given how much Facebook has sunk into the metaverse you'd think the showcase for VR would be compelling. But it's not.
Advertisements aren't the issue here. Bureaucracy in a massive company is.
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It's because the case for VR isn't compelling. Same as 3D TVs a decade ago.
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Not to you, perhaps.
Over 14 million headsets sold in 2021.
VR game sales are in the multiple billions of dollars a year region ($1.5 billion, alone for Meta's store)
But ya, just like 3D TV.-
All those sales (at a huge per-unit loss, btw), and Meta still has only made less than a half billion of REVENUE (not profit) from it.
Revenue without profit just doesn't work long-term. That's why Facebook stock is in the tank, down by 2/3 from the beginning of the year.
So yes, except for games it's just like 3D TV. Overhyped shit.
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Bullshit. You made that up.
My HMD cost me $1000, there's no way it was sold at a loss.
Oculus devices being a bit cheaper (though still not cheap) could potentially be sold at a loss, but you can't possibly know that.You're confusing R&D costs with unit costs.
Meta is currently spending a large fortune on their whole "Metaverse" bullshit.
Don't conflate that with loss-leader sales, which there is no evidence Oculus devices are.Bullshit. This is car manufacturer math, where each new model "loses money f
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Forbes, October 2022 [forbes.com]
Revenue of $285 million includes their cut from sales of games by 3rd party developers. We're past the "early adopters" stage. And people aren't buying. It's the whole 3dTV scenario repeating. So headset sales are in the tank. It's "exponential growth" but with a negative exponent.
Turns out that not that many people are into a tarted-up Second Life experience.
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Read, my dude.
Read.They made a shit ton of $1500 HMDs, and nobody bought them.
Nowhere is it implicated that their HMDs are loss-leaders, or that the existing ecosystem is not itself profitable.-
Even the cheaper ones were selling at a loss - which is why they bumped up the price. After all, fewer sales == fewer users to monetize data off off (someone put that at about $100/headset/year).
And of course, few sales == higher cost per unit for everything else that keeps the ecosystem running.
Helps explain the 11,000 layoffs.
And you totally glossed over that headset sales are down by half. That's not because of the Meta Quest 2. The cheaper units aren't selling as much. As I said, (posted a quote f
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Your source does not support that claim.
There is no evidence that the Oculus was a loss-leader.A hypothetical that is again unsupported by evidence. The "ecosystem" maintenance costs have not been demonstrated to be high, and there's no logical reason to think they are.
You are again conflating the bizarre Metaverse push with the Oculus product.There have been layoffs all across tech right now, having nothing to do with VR.
And again, you're conflating the Metaverse with VR gaming.Wtf, sales of everything
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Millions of people have those 3D televisons. Do you see them watching 3D content all day?
I brought one of the Meta headsets. It promised a better integration than the crummy old Pimax 2K I had.
Its pretty cool, it works well, and SOME things look decent. it doesnt give me the nausea the old one did. With a degree of screwing about it also works OK with Steam VR.
The issue is, there just isnt much to do using it. Halflife Alex is kinda cool. But I never get far before I get weary of it. Uh, theres a neat rolle
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3D televisions sold millions of units for a couple of years in the early 2010s, as content was available for them.
As content stopped being available for them, sales dropped off a cliff.
The content market for VR increases every single year, and is now alone a multi-billion dollar a year business, while 3D home films was never, ever, a multi-billion dollar business.Nope. It's also a shit ton of AAA games. Just because you don't like them doesn't really mean shit to this equation. I've got just short of 200
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It's because the case for VR isn't compelling. Same as 3D TVs a decade ago.
Yeah, I never really understood that. I mean, a common complaint with 3D is the glasses, yet the enthusiasm for VR is you strap a heavier headset to your head to see things in 3D.
I enjoy a 3D movie, I have no problems with wearing the glasses (I have coke bottle glasses anyways, so 3D glasses are no big deal). But heaven help me because VR goggles almost always fail to adapt to glasses, so no matter how hard I try, they just don't wo
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Btw, PSVR works fine with glasses.
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Have a feeling most of the people making 3D comparisons have never actually tried VR. VR is amazing with just one eye. The point of the technology isn't that you get fancy stereo vision it's that you get to be somewhere else.
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No. The common complaint with 3D is that they were shitty glasses which didn't work well and ultimately did nothing but very limited perception of depth to this tiny little 2D box in front of you. 3D on a small screen was an abortion of an idea. I don't hear anyone complain about having to wear 3D glasses in the cinema.
I have a big comfortable office chair I sit in where I'm typing this right now. I love stretching my legs under my desk. Yet next week I am going to be sitting in a very uncomfortable very ti
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There were 3D TVs without glasses. They also tanked.
Half the population will never be able to tolerate VR because of visual defects. And there really isn't a compelling business case for them - virtual meetings? Bullshit. Email, chat, text, ordinary video already have that more than covered. If it's so great why isn't Zuckerberg forcing all Facebook employees to work wearing VR goggles in a VR reality? Simple answer - it doesn't work for real productive work.
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You say that, but reality doesn't agree with you. Even through all the doom and gloom VR headsets are trending on exponential growth, and the thing which separates them from a TV is that they are an expensive optional device, not a feature people couldn't escape (we have a 3D TV which never once displayed anything 3D).
So you personally may not find it compelling, but many people do and one of the biggest problems right now is it has an early technology price / benefit ratio: Expensive toys, little content,
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They're heavily subsidized. 3DFx Voodoo 2 cards didn't have to be subsidized to sell. And with the 10s of billions that are being thrown at it every year by Facebook, perhaps the lack of content is an indicator that it's never going to be a must-have for most people, so any competent manager would sell off the whole division.
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