Meta's Insane Plan to Change VR Forever.

[Music] hello and welcome to Tuesday news day your number one resource for the entire week's worth of VR news so it's been a long time my friends but I am finally back and I'll talk about what I've been up to in the future of this entire channel in a bit but the reason I came back was actually a bit unexpected probably the biggest VR news of the entire year maybe of the past few years just dropped and it has a lot of really deep ramifications everything Quest and meta and honestly the entirety of the VR Market just changed in the past day and there's a lot of really good stuff a few legitimate concerns and some open-ended questions and I figured this would be the perfect time to try out something that I've wanted to do for a long time so this Tuesday news day we're talking about one single topic one really big event the quest operating system the quest store the APPL everything that has been a Mainstay of the largest virtual reality platform to ever exist is about to be gone everything that we know is in a state of change maybe for the better maybe for worse I guess we'll have to see but we've got a lot to talk about and a lot to break down so let's just get right into the news just yesterday meta dropped a pretty massive announcement that has a lot of different sides to it and I think it's best to break down each part of it individually and then come to conclusions at the end and that's because this announcement wasn't just new games or a new headset it's a complete and total overhaul of how the entire Quest and primary VR ecosystem works at its most basic level and it also means that the quest ecosystem doesn't really exist anymore in any recognizable way with Asus Lenovo Xbox new vendors we haven't seen before all entering the race so I'll just start with the general theme the Oculus developer blog titled this move as quote a more open ecosystem for developers end quote and this is primarily because of an overhaul to probably one of the biggest issues for VR developers and therefore users that the quest platform has had since its launch 5 years ago the largest VR App Store out there the quest store is heavily curated to a fault and because of that it's always been notoriously difficult for developers to publish their titles to the official Quest store Page it's in fact been so bad over the years that for a lot of Studios getting their game that they've worked on for say 2 years onto the store is a make or break moment that is never guaranteed and I've personally watched dozens of studios and games shut down entirely over the time simply because their app was never accepted or it just took too long now that's of course not the story for every Studio but we also mostly only hear and see of the success stories the ones that made it on the other side and in case all of this sounds a little crazy or conspiratorial the most success uccessful VR game of all time to have ever existed to this point gorilla tag was stuck on APPL unavailable on the main store for 13 months now that didn't really hurt gorilla tag very much as they acred $26 million of Revenue during that time but you have to think about how many VR games were sort of suppressed because the quest store has operated this way for so long and it's because the majority of quest applications are stuck in what's called applab most of you know this already but there's a surprising number of people that have absolutely no clue what it is and it's kind of for good reason the majority of the quest store is entirely hidden and not shown to anybody it's just behind an invisible wall and here is where the first of big changes is coming meta announced that they are opening the quest store unifying applab and the public facing store into a single app market that will be known as The Meta Horizon store now that name carries quite a bit of weight but basically moving forward new titles will now directly go to the primary store and thousands of titles will no longer be hidden and this change will roll out in phases the first phase starting pretty immediately is that applab applications will have their own section of the Horizon store but the goal is to eventually have a system much more similar to say a phones App Store all apps in one place under a unified store with a much looser review period And this is a good change I'd honestly say that this is a fantastic change and it's been a long time coming and I also know that to people that use VR every day this isn't anything super massive side quest and applab are common terms and tools that a lot of people use but you also got to realize that the mass majority of VR users are simply not aware that all of these thousands of applications even exist and it's because they've been quite literally hidden from everybody unless you know what you're looking for okay so that was prong one a new unified storefront with a new name it's a huge problem that's solved and that in itself is already a huge deal the next part however is another big thing because it's a complete change of how the quest operating system works with itself and with other Hardware so there's been a problem plaguing the entire VR ecosystem for the past 10 years or so and that's become especially evident in the past few and that's ecosystem fragmentation and I'm not sure if you've noticed but the only true decent option if you want an affordable all-in-one VR headset has been the quest and it's been that way for years now that's partially because of meta heavily subsidizing the cost of Hardware making headsets cheaper than any company can afford to sell them which is great for consumers but that's also partially because to be real meta is Leaps and Bounds ahead of any sort of competition in terms of software capabilities maybe besides a few Fringe cases with apple and The Vision Pro but in general even with their restricted store the quest store is larger and full of higher quality apps than anything else out there by a large margin and it also turns out that most of them are either Quest exclusive like beat saer or built specifically to work with Quest OS and Quest headsets only so any and all competition that wants to be in this space has to fight basically two battles one building and curating their own entire store and then on top of that building affordable decent Hardware not to mention actually building an operating system and this whole move just put a giant wrench in all of that the current Quest operating system ceases to exist it has now been renamed as The Meta Horizon OS and they even added little stickers on the box to let everyone know and as of now this change seems to be mostly a name but in principle this is a massive change for the entire VR industry moving forward as meta is now licensing The Horizon o to outside vendors and Hardware manufacturers so that all anyone else has to do is build their own hardware and meta takes care of the entire operating system sdks storefront basically everything else and I think from this point it's pretty safe to say that Horizon OS is bound to become a sort of deao virtual and mixed reality operating system moving forward which it already is today but the difference is that it's going to be ran on non-meta devices for example Asus announced that they are building a republic of Gamers VR headset of some sort that is powered by Qualcomm chips and runs on meta's Horizon OS and will likely have full access to the entire Horizon store that has never happened before Lenovo also announced the same as meta and Lenovo have been speaking on some sort of partnership for a long time and I can imagine these two headsets and from these two manufacturers won't be the only ones and maybe a company like Asus can carve out their own Hardware market share which is kind of a crazy thought that's also not to mention things like highly stripped down devices or specialized versions of the Horizon operating system like Samsung's own Android rapper on their phones for better or worse but I think one of the most interesting things about both of these moves are the questions that bring up for existing devices and existing companies that have heavily struggled within the space over the past few years again competition with meta is really hard and companies like pico and HTC and even pimax have struggled to both build hardware and entire operating systems and populate a game store and still after doing all of that at the end of the day end up with a more expensive device that does less and so do these companies just start using Horizon OS as well is it the end of experimentation with different OS options and I'm not really sure and while this is a really awesome move and I think it's overall extremely healthy for the VR space and it's something that's pretty necessary I can't help but think of the possible negatives because while this is a positive move it is also a land grab a very real land grab and I can't tell if it's going to be the best thing ever or the worst thing ever if basically every android-based XR device is running on meta software on one hand exclusives like beatsaber a huge seller of Hardware itself could run on anything that runs Horizon OS and on the developer side this makes everything so much easier one operating system one set of Standards all push to a variety of devices and to as many people as possible and while this is exactly what open XR has been working for for years open XR being the crossplatform standard for XR applications that technically should allow any XR app built within the standards to be used on any open XR device in practice it's really not that simple and still porting titles from quest to say HTC's or Pico Standalone headset even if their openex are compliant still require actual porting if everyone adopted Horizon OS and its standards then everyone would be living under the same roof however if everyone lives under the same roof that also means that they live under the same rules and as awesome as meta's contributions have been to the space over the years they don't exactly have the best track record as a whole and so with any big move like this where an entire industry is possibly unifying under a single corporate worldview there are inherent risks and downsides that I don't think should be ignored along with you know looking at the positives but I think we should zoom out a little bit now that we have a whole big picture view of exactly what these changes are and exactly the problems that they solve when you do zoom out a little further it kind of paints a bit of a different picture this was clearly a signal and a direct move in opposition to Google and in some ways Apple but I'd say more so Google Google themselves have been working on their own XR operating system also on Android dubbed XR o in partnership with Samsung and possibly a few other vendors now we've been talking about this for a while but it's now pretty clear when you look at it that there's a bit of tension between meta and Google Google has refused for years now to bring the Play Store to the quest and other meta devices something that should be an absolute no-brainer I mean just look at the Vision Pro it clearly make sense to have your whole app catalog available but they've been holding out all this time and I'm not sure if that's going to change especially if meta is trying to make their android-based version of an XR operating system the standard all at the same time that Google is trying to make their android-based XR operating system the standard and at this point kind of anything can happen but what does happen over the next few years in this operating system land grab as companies fight over OS market share is bound to bring some really interesting things and I think it'll be important to see just how good it can get for consumers the best thing we can possibly get out of this is healthy competition and a whole lot of innovation all I do ask is that you be careful as you possibly shop for your next XR operating system as the openness that everyone claims and will continue to claim may not be as open as you think but in the face of a unified system that works for developers and users and kind of everyone involved maybe it's a bit worth it all I know is that we're in for some interesting times and a whole lot of changes and of course speaking of changes this whole video was a bit of a change in itself and uh these are just a few words from me to the real ones that are still here this late in the video and that care about what's been going on in my life and what's going to happen with the channel and I realized looking at the date that this right now today is pretty much my 5year anniversary on YouTube and besides moving for few weeks this is the longest that I've ever ever been away from YouTube and especially the internet but let me tell you taking a bit of time away from Twitter Discord YouTube all of it was probably the best decision I could have ever made and I also highly recommend it to everyone just you know every now and then I think the saddest thing in the entire universe is to watch something that is made out of passion slowly have that passion sucked away from it and the second I felt any semblance of that I slammed on the brakes just to rethink a few things and I know YouTube May heavily punish my absence I know 2 months is a long time to not post a video but I don't really care and if I have to rebuild everything back up from nothing I will I've done this in covered VR for this long because I freaking love it not because I have to it's really because I think that this is one of the coolest Technologies man has ever made the ability to take something from someone's imagination and turn it into a real place or thing or experience is insanely powerful and I haven't just been doing nothing for the past couple months besides a few health related things I've spent pretty much every second building and doing VR stuff writing crazy shaders learning how to really build virtual experiences you know reading books all of it and these were things that I never had time for when I was posting a couple videos a week and also helping out other VR game studios I have a pretty strong belief that you can't really understand the true limitations and drawbacks of modern virtual reality hardware and software and talk about it intelligently unless you push the boundaries of what that hardware and software can do and I also think it's a pretty Universal thing if you're into VR that we all have this deep thought about what VR and AR are capable of hypothetically and it's capable of so much but we also are tied to the politics and economics of the modern world with modern companies and I have to ask even if this technology is hypothetically capable of some amazing things if it's never made is it really capable of it and so on that I'm coming back from a period of serious leveling up and I'm also formally changing my channel description to reflect that I'm no longer spreading AR and VR I don't think it needs any more spreading everyone knows what this thing is instead I'm exploring it and I'm taking you guys along for the ride I guess we're kind of on this journey together and I'll still do News videos occasionally where I think something big happens but I'm reserving my time and energy to really contribute and so I'm going to have lots of crazy VR experiments and apps and Gam games that I'm making and talking about and doing videos on so I'm pretty excited to announce that everything that I make is going to be available and published under thrill seeker Labs so whenever I make something you'll know where to find it and so hopefully you'll tune in for the next one where we get to explore exactly why VR user interfaces suck so freaking bad and I also want to thank you all for being here for the comeback I have no clue how hard the Channel's hit but it is what it is and I hope that you'll be here through the ups and downs you guys all know that I'll be here for them too and uh one more thing I haven't talked about it much but I made a crazy VR chat live music venue in my spare time during the break and it's got some insane World building and backend systems most of it all built from scratch like water simulations and smoke Sims and such so if you want to stop by and say hey during the live performances I'll be there this Saturday and I guess that's the first move under thrill Seer Labs but I hope to see you guys out there and if you want to be a tester for thrill seeker Labs or maybe help out in any way you can join in my Discord server it's all down below but I want to say thank you to my patreon supporters I could have never done this without you guys and until next time I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day much love thrill out [Music]

Channel: ThrillSeeker

Views: 256,767

Keywords: VR, virtual reality, quest 3, Meta quest 3, Quest 2, Quest 3 review, Quest 3 headset, Quest 2 review, VR review, Thrillseeker, Tuesday Newsday, Best VR, Valve INdex, VRchat, beatsaber, Gorilla Tag, Quest, Meta Quest, Oculus Quest, Oculus Quest 3

Id: Ck0P8HfR_OE

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024