The Vergecast - Zuckerberg on the Quest Pro, our impressions, and the state of VR games

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Today on the flagship podcast of low-latency head tracking: 02:35 - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg chats with deputy editor Alex Heath about Meta's new headset, the Quest Pro. 22:00 - Alex Heath and senior reporter Adi Robertson chat with David Pierce about their first impressions using the Quest Pro. 47:45 - Group Publisher for The Verge Chris Grant chats with David about what's happening in VR for video games. You can listen to the rest of the chat with Mark Zuckerberg on Decoder with Nilay Patel, watch it on The Verge's YouTube channel for the video version, or read it on our site. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of low-latency headtracking. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently sitting in my car, fuzzing with its settings, because apparently that's a thing you have to do now. I've never owned a new car before, and then we bought a cool new Hyundai-Tusan hybrid, which I like a lot, but it makes all these dumb noises, and it beeps at me every time I forget to use the turn signal or just open the door, and it's all just a lot. So I'm doing what any good tech geek does.

I'm ignoring the manual entirely, and I'm just sitting here hitting all the buttons and seeing what happens. Wish me luck. We have a great show today, all on a single subject. Well, a few subjects. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, whatever you want to call it, the future of reality. The reason we're publishing this episode a day early is because today is Meta Connect, and meta is releasing both a new Quest Pro headset and a lot of information about its plan for the future of all this technology. We're going to dig into the games, the headsets, and everything else it'll take to make VR and AR and mixed reality work, if, in fact, it's ever going to.

All that's coming in just a sec, but first, I have to apparently go put electrical tape on the speaker in front of my car because that's the only way to make the reverse noise quieter. I mean, listen to this. It's awful. This is the Vergecast. See you in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets. Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you

need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter

for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back.

So the first thing I want to do today is play a chunk of an interview that the Virges Alex Heath did with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, last week ahead of Meta connect. They had a long conversation about a lot of things. Turns out there's a lot going on at Meta. And if you want to hear the whole thing, it's available both on the Verge's YouTube feed and on the Decoder podcast feed. But for our purposes, I just want you to hear the chunk of their conversation about virtual

reality and mixed reality and augmented reality and the new Quest Pro headset and all of that good stuff. Although Alex is sitting here with me right now. Hi, Alex. Hi, David. Tee this up for us. You've been spending a lot of time with meta people, including Mark Zuckerberg, over the last couple of weeks. Like the setting for this is obviously it's MetaConnect.

They have a lot of stuff to announce, but like just tell us what you've been up to. Yeah. So I've been traveling around a little bit. This started with an invite to go up to their research center where they build all of this future VR and AR stuff in the research phase in Redmond outside of Seattle. And we did a bunch of research demos, but we were mainly there to see this new headset that Zuckerberg has been teasing. in dribs and drabs on his Instagram for the last year really called the Quest Pro. They've been calling it Project Cambria leading up to this. And you've been reporting on this for like a long time.

Yeah, this has been a long time coming. And the idea with the Quest Pro is that it's obviously more expensive. It's 1499, which is dramatically more than the current quest. It introduces two big things that I think are meaningful on the kind of just timeline of these headsets, right, which is mixed reality. So this concept of blending the real world with the virtual using pass-through video. And face tracking and eye tracking, which really lets your avatars become a lot more lifelike and feel like you're actually talking to people and not just, you know, basically 3D Sims from the 90s like it has been. So that was the main reason we were there, tried a bunch of demos.

And then the week after that, I went back to San Francisco to met his headquarters to sit down with Zuckerberg. he wanted to chat about the Quest Pro and about everything they're working on, the rebrand, how it went, the metaverse, why he basically feeds off of his doubters, which I thought was interesting. And then we also talked about social media, how they're competing with TikTok, his thoughts on what the government should do about TikTok, all that stuff. So you're right, it was a long conversation, but a lot of it is talking about this new hardware. And I would say the second biggest thing that they're announcing is this big sweeping partnership with Microsoft on the software and, services side for VR to integrate basically all of Microsoft's enterprise technology and even Windows itself into the Quest, which is a pretty big deal hashed out between Zuckerberg and Satya and Adela. So there's a lot to talk about. Mark was gracious with his time. We didn't get to everything,

but I hope it's an interesting conversation for people. Yeah, it was a good one. And I agree that the Windows stuff is fascinating. So we're going to get back to some of that end a little bit. But that is enough wind up. Let's just get to it. Here is Alex and Mark Zuckerberg. Well, let's talk about the Quest Pro because I got to try it at your research center in Redmond recently. And it's very different from the existing Quest line. And I think there's two big things that people will have probably not experienced until they try it. It will be the first time they try it and see this is the face tracking and mixed reality. And I wanted to kind of talk about those two points with you, maybe starting with mixed reality, which is this isn't VR in the traditional sense.

you're actually mixing video of the world around you with VR. Why is this something that needs to exist? I mean, what does mixed reality represent on the continuum of like where you've gone with VR today? Just first for background, you know, mixed reality, what it basically is that you see the physical world around you and then you can overlay digital objects. So you can think about virtual reality is the system is basically painting every pixel, right? So you're in a fully immersive world. You're in a completely different place. Over the long term, you'll have augmented reality, which are, you know, glasses, something like what you're wearing now is basically like the target of what we would like to get to.

I don't know if you'll be able to get that much smaller than that because there's a lot of electronics to cram in there, right? The, you know, all the silicon and the projector and the wave guides to display the holograms and the cameras to basically make sure that all the objects and the holograms are locked in the right place in the world and the speakers and batteries and all. Right, right. So a lot of stuff to fit into those glasses, but you'll get that. And when you have glasses like what you're wearing now, you'll see the kind of actual photons from the world things around you. And then you'll overlay holograms just in that place. So mixed reality is sort of this in between where it's a VR device that basically every kind of pixel that you're seeing in your vision is rendered by the graphics pipeline in the device. But it does this thing called pass-through where you have cameras on the outside, an array of cameras because, you know, your eyes we see in steroids.

right, that's how we get 3D. So it's not just one camera. It's important that we get the different perspectives. And it can basically pass that through in high resolution and in color. And then given the screen, it can either print what the photons are that it's getting from the outside or they can overlay digital objects. So you can be sitting at a desk and have your kind of perfect workstation up with three huge monitors. But you can see your physical keyboard in front of you and your physical mouse so you can control the digital monitors that aren't actually there. I tried this. I tried this last week, and I will say the monitor thing is compelling. What I noticed was the keyboard itself was a little fuzzy still. And I didn't feel like I could see the keys super well to feel like confident typing. Yeah, I mean, I think that all the stuff will get better over time. There's some kind of tracking augmentation that we can do for certain keyboards to. So yours may just not have had that. But in general, you can get a sense of where this is going. Right. I don't think, I mean, this is a V1 device, right? So it's not the perfect incarnation of this. I mean, just. like Quest 1 to Quest 2 is this huge jump and there's many times more sales. I do think,

you know, it's like, we'll keep on building this out. But this is the best mixed reality that anyone has built, right, so far. And this is, and this kind of, I think, is enough to introduce the concept to the world, show where it's going, get the development ecosystem starting to go. So you'll get people building use cases for work, whether it's the desktop, you know, solo productivity example. You'll be able to have kind of hybrid meetings. where instead of workrooms, which we have today where you're in VR and you can see people's avatars, now you'll be able to have hybrid meetings where you can see some people can physically be there and you'll see them. But then other people will just show up in VR and you'll see their avatars. So that'll be pretty sweet.

So there's a lot of mixed reality use cases, I think, that will show out over time. The other component of this is face tracking and being able to see your face movements and your eye movements. And I see the value in the experience. I did a demo where I was with one of your employees and workrooms and it felt it did feel more visceral, like being able to see how her face reacted in real time. So I understand the use case of it completely. I'm curious how you thought about building that into the product from a privacy perspective, because obviously there's going to be concerns about face tracking. Yeah, sure, sure. First, let's talk about what it is and why it's valuable. Sure. I mean, I think, well, I can answer your question quickly on the privacy side. The face sensing data

stays on the device and we don't send the raw data to apps and people basically have to opt in if they want an app to be able to know where, where they're looking, the eye tracking or their face expression. And importantly, you don't have the raw data either. Like meta. No, it's on the device and it's encrypted and then it basically gets thrown away as soon as it's processed. So, so I think that that's, so from a privacy perspective, I think we can. Okay. I actually think that that's been, you think that's solid. Yeah. I mean, we've also had people come and audited and, you know, I'm sure over time we'll add more capabilities and we'll need to keep thinking through this. So security is never a thing that's done. Sure. Right. But it's, it's something that we've thought through

very carefully given the sensitivity around it. But I do think it's worth just talking about why this is such a big deal. So mixed reality, I think, is clearly a big deal because it's this bridge between virtual reality, which you can build today, an augmented reality, which you kind of want, but it's still a few years away from really being able to get built. So this sort of starts to bring that experience in, even if it's in a VR form factor. The face expressions are critical because it gets to why we're in this at all, which is we're really. We're really. focused on the potential of VR and AR to deliver this authentic sense of presence. No other technology can do this, right? It's like when you're on your phone or if you're

on a Zoom call, it's nice to be able to see the person. You can like pick up some context around them, but your brain is under no illusion that you are there with them. Right. It's like you, if anything, you're trying to convince yourself that you're kind of having a closer interaction. You obviously know you're in a different room and all that. The magic of VR for people who have experience this, you know that it just, it basically immediately convinces your mind that you are present in another place and with the people who are there. And when you see avatars, you know, even if they're expressive avatars that aren't yet photorealistic, it feels very rich and present when you're there. In a lot of ways, you know, even more so than, you know, what you would get on a Zoom call today,

where obviously people show up in a photo realistic way, but there's just so much that it doesn't feel like you're actually present, whereas even if you have this expressive somewhat cartoon avatar, you know, next to you, it actually, you know, you feel like you're there next to each other, even if you're, you know, thousands of miles apart, if they're on the other coast or something like that. And that to you is compelling in and of its own right for this technology to where you think that's going to be a reason people gravitate towards this technology. That to me, that is the primary value of it, is basically the ability to feel and deliver this sense of presence. I think this like human sense of presence is such a profound and magical

thing that we're a company that just, like, everyone here wakes up in the morning and thinks about how we're going to, like, help people connect and communicate. You can't deliver that kind of sense of presence on any of the platforms that we've had the opportunity to build on yet, right? So we build on web, on PC, on mobile. There's a lot of good things about all those platforms. But if you think about, like, what is the ultimate expression of social technology, you're not going to get it on a phone. Right. So that's why we're investing so much money in, like, so many of our top people in trying to invent and accelerate the development of this next platform because it's going to enable, I think, the ultimate expression of what we set out to do with building

social software. So then the question is, okay, what are all the things that we just need to like burn down to make it so that, like on the list of things that get in the way of feeling like you're even more immersed and present with other people? One of them, obviously, is realistic expressions, right? So, you know, I think that this is going to be one of the defining characteristics of this product and hopefully a lot more that we do going forward is the accurate kind of face expressions and ability to make eye contact, which is also really powerful and also something you can't really do on video calls today. It's kind of, you know, it's like if you try to look at someone's eyes, you're not looking at the cameras. So all these kind of weird issues that break

the sense of presence. But in order to do that, it's a pretty big tradeoff in the design because you're putting a bunch of different sensors in there, which consume a lot of the, CPU on the device and the kind of silicon power budget that you have, basically processing the input from these sensors in order to make it so that when you're in VR and mixed reality and eventually augmented reality, your representation of yourself will have realistic expressions. So I'm interested to see what happens, but I think other folks in the space, you look at like Sony's coming out with a new headset this year. I mean, this isn't like a thing that I think that they're prioritized. I think Apple's headset is going to look and work a lot like

this. Well, we'll see. I mean, it's, I don't know. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's actually, it's been very hard for us to have any sense of what they're doing. So I find best to just I think we'll know soon. Well, we'll, yeah, that'll be interesting too. Yeah. But it's something that this really gets to the mission of what we're, of what we're doing. In terms of tradeoffs, too, this is an expensive device. This is a lot more expensive than the Quest 2. Yeah. You've been very clear that you want to make these devices as cheap as possible to get them in the hands of as many people as possible. I think in 2017, you said you want a billion people in VR. That was your goal. Well, it's a good start. I think the Quest 2 has done over 10 million sales to date.

Does that sound accurate to you? I mean, I'm not. Those are the estimates? We haven't shared any numbers. Why not? That's a good question. I think we tend to not share numbers until things are a lot bigger. So you're waiting for a certain number?

I don't actually have a number in mind. But I just, I'm not sure that there's any particular. So the estimates are that you've done over 10 million with Quest. I'm sure it's higher than that. You're obviously far from a billion. But who is this device for at this price point? Because I think, you know, the Quest 2 is considered kind of a gaming device. There's a lot of social stuff starting to happen.

There's fitness with supernatural. Who is the target customer for this? So there are really two sets of folks. One are just people who want the best VR device that anyone has made. So I think if you want that, this is it. It is better than the Quest 2. It's a lot more expensive. So it won't be for everyone.

But there are some group of people who want that. The second is people who want basically a device that's for productivity. When I think about the market, I think that there are going to be two basic different kind of tiers and price segments. I'm that there's going to be a kind of consumer-oriented segment that is maybe three, four, $500 devices that people widely can afford sort of in the price of an Xbox or a PlayStation. A lot of the use cases there will be entertainment focused, whether it's gaming or social

and kind of hanging out with people. or things like fitness. And that list of use cases will just continue growing, but it's been pretty cool to see how that's expanded so far. If you think about how you use computers, there's also clearly a market for people who want to pay, you know, or willing to pay $1,500, $2,000,

kind of high-end professionals for their workstations. And that's what you imagine being the audience for this. Yeah, I mean, for this and for the future of the pro line overall. Right. I do think that there's going to be a market for people who want to get, the people are really interested in VR being able to be their primary workstation over time. I think that there's going to be a market around that. And people who are sort of high-end professionals there, you're already paying thousands of dollars for your workstation. So I think

that's pretty clear that the ability to get more technology into there to make that even better, you'd do it. If I could give all of our engineers a device and have them, you know, be 3% more productive, I'd give them a $1,500 device for sure. So that's kind of the, in terms of the market segmentation, what we expect to happen. There's also this advantage in developing both of them, which is that we can introduce new technology first in this one. And this before we can get it into the price point for the consumer one. And being able to work on it and developing it actually helps us get it into the consumer one faster and better. And by the time that it is in the consumer one, we already have a developer ecosystem and content around it because even a fewer

people are buying the Quest one, it's more of a high-end device, it'll be enough to get the developer ecosystem going. So of course we're working on more devices in the consumer line too, where there will be a Quest 3 at some point, not this year. But, you know, I'd love to get, you know, some of these features into future devices, whether it's Quest 3, Quest 4. And, you know, the fact that we're building Quest Pro and have that and people can start building for mixed reality and all that is, I think it'd be just a pretty big advantage on that, too. You've been pretty open that on the Quest 2, you are not making money on the hardware. Are you making money on this, like on a unit basis?

I mean, I'd have to look. There are lots of different ways to basically do the accounting on this as I've learned. Is this a profit generating device for you? I think the strategy overall is not to make money on the hardware, but to make it that it can help develop the ecosystem. And then over time, the business model will be based on software and services. So that remains the approach. I wasn't sure because you invest so much.

in hardware. You have so many people working on this. You're spending so much money on hardware. I wasn't sure if you had landed on a hardware margin business or not. It probably depends on how exactly you account for it. So, like, if you're just saying what is like the materials that go into the device, maybe we're charging a little bit more for that for the device than the materials that go into it. But if you account for all the R&D and everything, then no way. But no, the strategy is not, And we're not trying to have premium device prices and make a profit on that. Our whole approach as a company is get as many people as possible to be able to access these tools.

And then over time, you build a better ecosystem that way. Got it. And this is like a pretty deep part of our philosophy around this overall. We also want to help build the open ecosystem around all of this. So rather than being kind of insular and, you know, trying to do everything ourselves, and a big part of the theme for this year's Connect is all the partnerships that we have, the partnership with Microsoft, which is going to be fundamental for, you know, we're not an enterprise company, right? So making it that this can basically succeed with enterprises.

Like I mentioned before, you can hear the rest of that conversation between Alex Heath and Mark Zuckerberg in the Decoder podcast feed, or you can watch the whole thing on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash The Verge. We need to take a break, but Alex is going to stick around and we're also going to grab Adi Robertson to come on and talk about the Quest Pro itself. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started.

Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into

with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify. com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward.

Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. So we've heard a lot now about Mark Zuckerberg and Meta's big plans for, like, your legs and mixed reality and the metaverse and how we're all just going to bop around in the future. But let's talk about the here and now, which is the Quest Pro. Addy Robertson's here. Hi, Addy. Hi. And Alex is still here. Hi, Alex. Hey. And if I'm not mistaken, you now have both

seen and used the Quest Pro, correct? That's right. That is correct. Okay. So, Addy, why don't you go first? Tell me, like, walk me through this thing in context of, like, what quests have been like before. Tell me about the Quest Pro. Yeah, in some ways, the Quest Pro is imagine everything about the Quest. Imagine a lot of the things you don't really like about the Quest. That's super front heavy. Its default strap is really bad. It screen is decent, but not the most absolutely high resolution.

And you can do this pass-through AR, but it's only black and white, and it's pretty rudimentary. So then just take that and upgrade all of it and fix a lot of that. So it's lighter and thinner. It's not remotely at pair of glasses territory. but it's a lot less front heavy. They've done things like move the battery to the back. It's got this high resolution screen that can do color pass through. So you can do this kind of, it's not faux. It's passed through AR that lets you see everything around you. It's got an upgraded processor. It's, oh, it's another Snapdragon XR2 plus this time instead of XR2.

You've got also eye tracking in it, which means that it can do things like a foveated rendering, which is if you're looking at a thing, you're pointing your eyes at it, it renders. the image really sharply. Otherwise, if it's on your peripheral vision, it gets to be a little blurry, and so that saves processing power. It also means that it can read your facial expressions. Mark Zuckerberg made a really big deal out of this with Joe Rogan's podcast,

where if you're in anything with an avatar, if you're in Horizon Worlds, or a different quote-unquote metaverse service, it can mirror your facial expressions, see if you are smiling, see when you're blinking, you're winking. So it has a lot of those features. It also, I'm sure that we will get into this little,

It's one really big downside is it has, from what I can tell, having not experienced one long consecutive session myself, very bad battery life. I'm told one to two hours, which is compared to like two to three, and I think I've stretched it maybe a little beyond that for the Quest two. I think on the hardware front, like Addy was saying, it's remarkably better than the Quest two. And really anything that I've tried, I think Addies maybe tried some more headsets than I have, but I haven't tried anything that has this level. of comfortability, optics. I should note this is an important thing if you wear glasses like me. This thing is much easier to wear with glasses because of just the way it's designed, which is a huge difference for me. I get that like it's just, you know, still large, right? And there's battery constraints, but you can see where it's going. There's a huge question

of who this is for, right? It costs 1499. And at that price point, you're really not including that kind of casual, curious, uh, VR user that the Quest 2 was really targeted at. So they're really making this a concerted enterprise push. I mean, we heard with Zuckerberg, he thinks there's really two cohorts of people who will want to buy this, VR diehards who are on the cutting edge and want to try everything. I'm not sure how many people there are that fit into that bucket, but I'm sure they're out there. It's like the three of us and 12 other people. I think is basically the entirety of that audience. There is honestly a budding developer economy here. So, you know, I think that's the other key piece is the point of this is to

really kickstart a developer flywheel for mixed reality that can then be ported into the more, you know, consumer cheaper quest lines and future headsets and even air glasses down the road. And then, you know, with the enterprise side, I think because of the price point, they're thinking, can we just position this for businesses? And you've got that Microsoft partnership that's really broad and encompasses pretty much all of Microsoft services. And most importantly, their sales muscle in terms of getting it into businesses that use Azure and Microsoft's device management stuff. So I think that could turn out to be the wildcard that if that partnership works, we could all of a sudden see this headset really do well. But if that doesn't work,

I'm just really not sure who buys this. Because with everything Addy mentioned in the battery life and all that, it's just, it's kind of a tough sell. It's a very cool demo. Like I want to be clear. Like we did all these demos in it and I was very impressed with the mixed reality and, you know, just with the comfortness of it and the fidelity and the face tracking. You know, like when you're looking at an avatar and their eyes actually move and their face moves as they laugh, it's a strange experience. I think people will have kind of a bit of an aha moment the first time they experience full face and eye tracking in one of these, you know, virtual worlds. It really does just add a new layer. Yeah. But it's still early. I mean, this is this thing is really a nice piece of hardware in search of software that makes sense for it.

Totally. Yeah, the two things I'm most curious about just from like a demo perspective. And I want to hear kind of the stuff you guys got to try. But is the pass through thing, which seems like obviously if we're on this like long road to augmented reality, like making pass through that works really well is really important. So I'm curious to hear like what you guys have seen in terms of how that goes. So let's start there. Like what did you guys get to try? How did the actual sort of mixed reality pass through cameras stuff work? Maybe growing with like two separate categories of demo. There were things that were more or less pure tech demos. There's a face tracking test where you're looking at this alien avatar that can mirror your facial expressions. And you can tweak the responsivity so you can see how much it perfectly mirrors your face and like how extreme the expressions are. There's a system that's an update of toy box where it's just a bunch of little things that you can test to see how advanced the controllers are and how precise they are. so you can play Operation, which is actually kind of great, and I love it in Fihar. That's actually pretty impressive, because Toy Boxes, at least until now, has been pretty rudimentary.

Like, it's fun. You can goof around, but, like, there's nothing that I would call, like, fine motor skills in a lot of that stuff. You can play Jenga. Nice. All right. Badly, but I'm bad at Real Jenga, too. So there's that. And then there's things that are a little bit less clearly toy-like and tech demo-e, but are still not really what I would class as enterprise or business application. So they have this genuinely very cool paint system that is a bunch of physical brushes. When I say physical, I mean virtual, but you're in like AR space.

You wander around your room. You can pick up these brushes. You have this virtual easel. You can slap paint all over it. You can then take your paintings and you can pin them to the wall because it can detect edges. And so you can create this little virtual gallery. And just to be clear, this is all in your, you're doing this in your actual space, right? This is not in some like fake VR world.

this is happening. Like, if you're in your living room, the idea is you're doing all of this in your actual living room. Yeah, it can detect your walls. It can do some limited object detection. This is where the mixtriotic concept starts to click, right? I did a painting, the painting demo too. And you create a giant canvas and you just stick it on the wall.

But it's the real wall in front of you, right? And so that same concept could be applied to monitors, virtual monitors, which was another demo we tried. When you see that and you use it, you go, oh, wow, this is actually. actually so much more compelling than this just cut off fully immersive VR experience that the Quest and every other headset has really had to date. We should note that there have been mixed reality headsets out there. Vario is one in Europe. It's even more expensive than the Quest Pro. The software is not as good. So this is really the first, I think, anyone could try this and

theoretically get into mixed reality headset. Apple's headset will do something very similar to this when it comes out as soon as next year, which I think is interesting. But this constant, of blending the reel with the virtual just has a lot more, I think, it just makes you want to stay in it more because you're not just like bumping into things. And when you're wearing VR, it's like hard to reach for coffee and drink it while you're doing something, right? I mean, the Quest has its guardian and all that, but this just really supercharges that. And feeling like you're not totally cut off from the world was for me a huge unlock. I don't know about you, Addy, but for me it was. It gets a lot closer to the actual, the things we have talked about is mixed reality heads.

which is things like HoloLens and Magic Leap, which have been able to do the pin a virtual screen to the wall thing forever. Microsoft HoloLens has done really sophisticated occlusion. You can like roll a little ball around a room and it'll mirror the physics. But this does it in a package that is a lot more polished for one thing and more comfortable because they've been working on these headsets for ages. And that doesn't have the same field of view restrictions. Like field of view headsets, field of view in like wave guide based headsets, the kind where you can

actually see the real world. It's getting better, but it's still just a fraction of what you would get in an Oculus style headset that's like 110 degrees. And just the quality of the graphics and the fidelity, because you're cheating and essentially just having a video feed piped in of the world around you. You're not actually trying to put graphics over, you know, real light coming in to your eye, right? I mean, I wouldn't say that this is like approaching real life at all graphics, but it's definitely like, I would actually look at a virtual monitor in this thing and it would feel almost as good as like looking at my real monitor, which says something. For folks who haven't actually been able to try this like me, where would you put that on the

spectrum of like, you know, cartoon version of my living room all the way up to it looks like my real living room? Like, is it like watching a TV show set in my living room kind of vibes? Like, how good is this actually coming through? That's actually a really good way to put it with it's the way that I think of it is it's a pretty good quality video. But it's a, Vario is still, it has this weird little quirk where it has this super high resolution screen right in the middle of your face and that is I still think better. Like if you're looking at a virtual screen, it's not as sharp as a retina display. It starts getting a little fuzzy if you're looking at, I don't know, Google search results, but it's real good. And you know, I think to trying

this, it kind of fit in well with these other demos that Adi and I did. You know, I was in Redmond. Addy was in New York. I went to Meta's research headquarters with Michael Abrosh and Zuck was there and Boz and all these executives. And we tried all these demos. And I think Adi, you tried them too. And really what you see is like meta's just constantly trying to say like, look, we are working on cool stuff that's going to one day blow your mind. And that's been kind of their story since they really got into hardware and especially since the rebrand. And the Quest Pro kind of fits into that. Obviously, it's a real product and the other things we tried weren't. Like, for example, I tried this personalized spatial audio demo. Adi, did you get this?

I don't think I did. Okay. They'd had this incredible, like, thing where it was spatial audio, but like personalized to where movement was in the room in a way that I can't even describe in this podcast. Like, it's something you really have to experience. It was one of the coolest, most visceral demos of technology I've ever experienced. It's not going to be a product for a really long time. Same thing with their EMG control labs band that lets you essentially control.

control, you know, these headsets with, you know, very fine neurons movements and muscle movements in your arm. Which, we should be clear. That's not, like, even remotely linked to this, the Quest Pro at this time. No, it's not. They hope it will be. But, like, just the theme of the day for me, and this included the pro demo, was like, look at all this cool stuff we're building.

We are a serious hardware and research company. And they are. They just don't have a compelling mainstream product yet, right? The Quest 2 is, I think estimates say it's sold more than the end. Xbox, right? It's at 15-ish million units, which is nothing to like, you know, shake a stick at. Like, I want to be clear. But, you know, with this pro device, it's just like, this isn't going to set the world on fire, right? Like, they may sell a few million of these, right? They may get some big enterprise deployments. They're going to do one with Accenture, right? Which is a ton of people.

But, you know, it still is just going to be a while for this tech, I think, to really catch on. And I don't think the pro is that device that maybe some people expected would be like that big aha moment for these headsets. The pro really feels like it is one generation before the thing that actually is useful. It's so in like tech development, there's the concept of the time machine, which is where you compromise on all the stuff that you think is going to get really good in like five years or so with, I don't know, prices of things come down, batteries get better, whatever. And then you just try to make the best version of the actually hard stuff, that stuff you think

is actually hard. That's kind of what this feels like. The battery's not great. The screen, like the pass-through camera could get showing. sharper, the screen could get sharper, but it has all of the sort of building blocks of this thing that it seems like they think are going to get into all headsets in five years, stuff like eye tracking. And they have a lot of work to do on the software, right? I think they're actually a lot farther along on the hardware front here. It's impressive, honestly, that a software company has

managed to build such quality hardware in a short amount of time. I think it's actually, I mean, Google's starting to do this as well. But I think on the software side, there's just so much room left. Like, you know, Adi, I think you mentioned your workrooms, which is their kind of VR, like, work experience demo was buggy. Mine was buggy as well. It was hard to, like, load certain apps. Well, Alex, you had a story just last week about basically, like, even meta knows Horizon is not where it needs to be for all of this stuff. Yeah. I mean, they can't get their own employees to dog food and internally test Horizon, right? Like, the head of Horizon is sending memos saying, look, I'm going to make you all at least use this once a week because it's just not compelling yet. And I'm talking about Horizon

Worlds, which is essentially like their Roblox meets the Oasis in VR type experience where you just hang out with avatars. Like there wasn't a Horizon World demo with the pro, right? They're really trying to say like, no, we want you to use this for Autodesk and we want you to use this for Adobe software. But it's also notably me that they did not show Autodesk or Adobe Software or flight simulators or any of the things that if you go to a company like HTC that actually cares about, that they will show you. Right. This stuff's not ready. Like the Microsoft stuff, I didn't see any, I didn't get to experience any of the Microsoft stuff like teams and VR or anything like that. Not that that's like a thrilling experience or a demo to write about. But this stuff is just early,

right? I think like I kind of expected there to be more done on the software side this year, frankly. Well, and I think one of the big open questions for me, especially with some of this new stuff is like what are they going to give you to do with it? Because like you're describing these like very cool tech demos. It's it's like neat and fun. But then it's like, okay, what most people do when they put on these headsets, is like they play beat saber. And like being able to read my facial expressions is like not going to make beat saber any more fun in any obvious way that I totally understand.

And so we're sort of getting to the point where it's like either things like Horizon Worlds need to start to like really click for people or meta needs to keep inventing and coming up with new things to do for people that actually matches this very cool technology that it's building. Like it's funny you mentioned teams, Alex, because that's the kind of thing where it's like, okay, now I can see why, if you're going to work with Microsoft, having expressions that work and match human expressions, like, that's a real meaningful addition you've just made to my, like, video conferencing life in VR.

And we can debate whether video conferencing in VR is like a thing that should exist in the world. But that's a whole separate story. But I do wonder, like, I feel like we're at this pace now. We're at the sort of R&D team is so far ahead of even what the like product team is trying to think about what to do with at this moment. It's going to be weird. It's going to be interesting to see if they can catch up to that.

But Addie also, it feels like that's the whole industry right now. Like, I feel like every headset you try on, that's the story. It's like cool technology. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. Some of it. I think the thing about a lot of enterprise work is that it ends up making compromises that seem like they're making a consumer experience worse. But it's because they have actual partners who are using their headsets for real things. And the partners say this is the extremely specific thing I need.

And then they just tailor it toward that. And this seems like meta deliberately not. doing that. It seems like they're trying to make an all-around consumer headset. They just know that they can't sell it at a consumer price yet. Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think just they don't have the enterprise software side built up yet. You know, if we talk again in a year, right, and we're on the Quest Pro 2, the Microsoft software has been integrated. It's starting to get deployed in like factories and tankers, you know, oil rigs, stuff like that. We may be having a different conversation. I think, you know, Zuckerberg, based on my conversations with him, seems okay with this

thing being kind of a dud in terms of sales as long as it starts getting developers interested in this mixed reality face tracking stuff. And if he can just build, start to build that ecosystem with the hardware, you know, maybe build better hardware down the road. I think that's still a win for them. So I don't think they're expecting this thing to set the world on fire. So does that mean in meta's head that the Quest 2 is still kind of the mainstream device for the foreseeable future? For now, what they've basically decided to do is create two lines. So there's going to be a pro line. and then the more consumer quest line. You know, Zuckerberg said in the interview, there's going to be a Quest 3.

I think you mentioned four or even five, right? They have multi-year hardware commitments. They're like in this. Like Google tells you they're in hardware for the long haul, right? What I think we're going to see is the cadence of a new consumer quest next year and then a pro again the following year. And then every other year it's going to be that back and forth. It's funny, like, he wasn't really clear with me as we heard like about how they're making money on this. but it's clear that it's still going to be a long, long time before these headsets give any kind of, you know, money back to meta that flows in a meaningful way to them.

I think they're maybe making a slight profit on a per unit basis, but, I mean, we heard them say like, no way when you factor in everything else. Right. Yeah. I mean, I liked that his overarching message whenever you asked him about money was basically like, we are prepared to spend a tremendous amount of money to make all of this work. And like, if it does, we'll make so much money in the long run. It won't matter. And if it doesn't, we're all screwed anyway, so it doesn't matter. That's, I think, a pretty good assessment. But I guess the good news is then it seems like for Quest 2 users is that, like, if they've done all this work to make it more balanced and feel better on your head, like this should give people hope for the Quest 3, right, that some of this stuff might come to that, even the less

advanced tech, but like a nicer headset to wear for long periods of time could be in folks' future, which seems like a win. Yeah, I think you're going to see this face tracking and mixed reality stuff come into the cheaper quest line. They just have to figure out how to do that at a cheaper price point and at scale, and that's what this first pro was kind of meant to show them. So this tech is definitely going to come downstream to everything. That's the whole idea, is to seed the more expensive far out stuff in the pro line before the quest line. And eventually the idea is this all eventually converges with air glasses, which are still several years out. Alex, what did you think of the stylus?

The stylus is the goofiest part of this headset to me. Yeah, they have this, you know, the controllers are a huge upgrade and they have this haptic kind of stylus experience. I don't know. I thought it was fine. I'm not going to be like writing on little virtual sticky notes on a they love this idea of like you go up to a whiteboard in VR

or mixed reality and pen of VR sticky note and you can have unlimited ones and you can erase everything and I'm just like I don't like sticky notes in real life. I don't know why I would want them in virtual reality or why I would want to like the time it takes to draw something right? Like if I'm

in a computer, I want to do things as quickly as possible. That's the whole reason I'm using a computer. So I think this concept of like bringing human, you know, the way that we have to do things physically into VR is like how iOS used to be skeuomorphic, right? It's like we're just in this phase of like trying to integrate virtual and physical and we haven't figured out the new virtual paradigms of how we actually do things efficiently. Right. And the same, I don't know. So I guess I'm saying I wasn't that impressed about the stylist. Addy's just sitting here like I have thousands of virtual sticking know it's all over my apartment right now. I should maybe describe it a little bit because it's honestly even weirder than the thing,

the way you're describing it, which is that there is, you can hold the controller and typically there's this wristband at the bottom. You can unclip the wristband and then put the world's tiniest plastic nub onto where the wristband at the bottom was. And then you flip the controller around and you hold it backwards. And then you can hold it like a pen, like an incredibly thick marker. And you press down on a real surface and the idea is that it's supposed to give you actual visceral like feedback because you're on a tape.

or a wall or something. It's just such a weird edition. I don't know. I'm just, I want to understand the process by which they came up with this idea and decided to implement it. I get it. We want to have this for businesses. You know, you need a stylus if you're, you know, a thought worker or whatever. Like, do you? Does anyone think that? I don't know. Please write in to David, call the Verge cast hotline if you use a stylus on a daily basis and we'll put them all in the next episode. Ports sold. Eight hours on siloises. I'm ready for the It's literally any time. Well, the thing that makes me wonder about is, like, whether they're going to try to sell this as a prosumer art device.

Like, one of the only actually business-oriented things, business loosely, that I tried was a DJ deck, where the idea was that it was super clear and it has all this very fine feedback so you can turn little knobs and see everything. And I think that if you're trying to do something that you want to have a really big canvas for, there's a world where VR headsets are good art tools. I think this is not the world we're in right now, but I wonder if that's the kind of thing that eventually they try for. It's also what all of these companies are desperate to have people do, right? It's why these VR companies talk so much about like architects and creatives and car designers. It's like it's just such a sexy use case to have people making this stuff. And if you give them these like fine tools, like I can totally imagine the meeting that led to we have to make a VR stylus. Whether or not anybody will use it, I think is a completely different story.

But I can absolutely imagine like the room in the Microsoft offices where somebody was like, But how will I create my beautiful drawings in virtual reality with these dumb controllers? And then somebody is like, I don't think anybody draws on whiteboards anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong, you know, DME at Alex E. Heath. I think whiteboards are not long for this world personally. I will just say before we move off this, because I feel like this is important, going into this demo, I really wanted the virtual office demo to blow me away because I've been reporting on what this headset is going to be like. I know the direction they're going, mixed reality.

the concept of not having a big monitor in front of me at my desk, having a comfortable headset, and huge giant monitors everywhere I want, and a keyboard in front of me and being able to do my work that way, that I would buy a headset. I would buy a $2,000 headset for that, right, if it had spatial audio and all these things. The demo was not that good. And it wasn't because the mixed reality wasn't great. It's just, you know, these little things like the keyboard tracking, like my keyboard was fuzzy, right? And so I'm like looking, and I don't touch type, like Adi, so like I need to, to look down sometimes. And it was buggy and kind of slow. And it's like you just, you feel that one to two second like delay between your input and something happening that's like I could be

more productive in real life. Yeah, you have an operating system on top of your operating system at this point. Exactly. And until they cross that threshold where, you know, it is literally just as fast as like typing into my browser on my monitor at home, I think the work from home, mixed reality, headset idea that all these companies want to have is not going to happen. And I really thought it might happen with this headset, but I don't think anyone's going to be sitting there even plugged in at their desk because they have to be because of the battery life. I don't think people are going to be sitting there for hours, you know, browsing in their Quest Pro. I'm really curious where reality OS, if they had really pushed on the idea that they wanted their own operating system would have gone.

Well, they're still working on it. I think, you know, I and others have reported on this that there were some internal tension about do we do a fully custom OS in the near future or do we still rely on Android. This is still an Android-based system. I think they still want to do a fully integrated OS. It's just doing that on the time scale that they wanted for the air glasses wasn't going to make sense. And it's one of those things that they're working and kind of fiddling with in the background and maybe one day, you know, we'll see something like that. And maybe that does solve it. You know, that's the problem is that they're not this kind of full stack software to hardware. where a company like Apple is.

And that's really where I think Apple's strategic advantage in this space, where that really matters in something like a headset, is going to make a huge difference. Totally. All right. We needed to take a break. Thank you both. But stick around and we are going to come back and talk about VR gaming,

which is not what Mark Zuckerberg wants to talk about, but it's a thing a lot of people do when they put on their headsets. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent.

And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn, dot com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking

usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.

aI slash vergecast. That's clod. com. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. aI slash vergecast.

Welcome back. As we've been talking about, the tech industry's vision for VR and mixed reality and AR and whatever you want to call it is huge. Too huge, some would argue. But it's huge. But even Mark Zuckerberg knows it's going to take a number of years to get to that point.

So what is VR good for right now? Ask around and almost everyone will give you the same answer. Games. Before VR is the future of video chat and music and like society at large, it is potentially the future of video games. But how's that going? To figure it out, I called up Chris Grant, who is the Virges Group publisher and was formerly the editor-in-chief of our sister publication Polygon.

Chris Grant, hello, thank you for being here. Great pleasure. You are a person who plays video games, I think it is safe to say. Are you also a person who plays VR video games? Like, what's your VR setup right now? I do have a Quest 2. I have been known to play games inside virtual reality at times. I would say I largely find those to be, let's call them detours in my gaming habits,

not necessarily destinations. What do you play? What gets booted up first when you start playing the Quest? Resident Evil 4, which is a whole ass game that they put into VR. Yeah. And one of the things that we could talk about, but VR for me is not a place to play whole ass games. It's a place to play 20-minute sections of games here and there. So I would say the game I'm playing is Resident Evil 4 still, maybe forever.

Wait, that's really interesting. So I want to talk about the like business mechanics of all of this, but you just raised to think I think it's really interesting. Like my assumption with all of this has been that if only VR could get good enough games, it would move up that ladder and start to be like instead of sitting down on your calendar. to play your PS5, you would stand up and put on your quest too. And the only reason you're not doing that is because the games aren't good enough. But you're kind of making me think that maybe that's just not true. Like maybe the activity is so different that it's just not the thing you're going to want to do,

even if the games are amazing. Resident Evil 4 is a banger, all-time classic. And the VR adaptation is excellent. Not only does it look good, but they redid the whole thing in Unreal Engine, but it plays really well. It's a smart reinterpretation of the game. It just, I don't want to spend more than half an hour at a time with a, with a heavy sweaty headset on my head, getting freaked out by zombies with their heads popping off.

I do think the mechanics of games, and we can talk about the sort of business of the Oculus store, but the mechanics of games and the refinement of game mechanics to a controller, I think keyboard and mouse too, if that's your thing. But the refinement of those mechanics is not a casual thing, right? That's 30 years of UX and player input evolution. And the games and the sort of systems and vernacular of games that have been adapted to that are pretty sophisticated.

And so I think VR sometimes a lot like the Wii. It has a huge wow effect. You play a VR game and you go, whoa, I'm going to get me one of those. I'm going to lose weight tomorrow. Right. In the same way that the Wii and Wii fit were this huge wow effect, right? You're going to play Wii sports every day. This is the next step in your journey to physical perfection.

And people bought the Wii and they bought the Wii fits. And that system had relatively seeing very low attach rate. People were not buying games. They got the Wii and they put it under their couch. Interesting. And so for me, the big question. on Quest is like people buy them. It's selling very well, Quest 2. What are they doing with it? It was a huge seller last Christmas. What are they doing with it? Are they actually playing games?

How much are they playing? What kinds of games are they playing? And then in turn, what kinds of games should developers build for that audience? What do they want? What will they pay for it? And I don't know. I don't think there's right answers there yet. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because like I think about the, the like, canonical games of VR, right? You get the like the beat sabers and the super hots of the world. And the thing a lot of those games have in common is they're super deliberately designed to be played for short periods of time. That it's like there is no game in VR that is like, play this for eight straight hours. Like it just doesn't exist. It's like a 30 minute activity and then you move on. Yeah, arcades hour or even short levels, right?

Supernatural being another sort of VR hit, very beat savory, but with all the self-help mechanics of going to the gym or hard to the club plus a subscription, which fixes the economics. Yeah. The logic of that makes a lot of sense to me. That's something that VR is very good at and can sort of. duplicate. The exercises you're going to do are somewhat limited, but you're not going to exercise for eight hours. You're not going to have a sesh in the same way. But Residentville 4 is like a famously long game. Games long. It's a lot of games. I'm an eight hour game. It's like a 20 hour game. And so you're playing games like that and you're not going to do it in the same kind of session. It's exhausting,

both physically, but also like input-wise, right? The amount of inputs you're receiving is, it's just a lot. There's some eye-strain stuff and like pro-preception and other things where you might just get a little bit soured on a stint that long. But at some point, maybe the glasses get better, they get smaller, all those other things might fix that problem, but you still want to be moving around and like doing gunplay in your living room for more than 30 minutes at a time. And I, you know, I do think that there's a world in which we use VR headsets to play traditional games with a control in our lap on a giant 200-inch virtual screen. That seems interesting to me. Yeah, it's like the Netflix things where it basically it's like you're watching Netflix,

but it's as if you're in a movie theater on a gigantic screen. I think, like, as resolutions get higher, that actually seems like it'll be very cool. It's not there yet, but it's the kind of thing that I can sort of see where that would go with something like the experience that we've had. It's like it always reminds me of the people who, like, sit in stadiums and play Mario Kart on the Jumbotron.

It's like just the novelty of that is worth it and is very cool. But so, okay, so coming at this from like the business side, right? There's been this question for a long time of like, where are the AAA games, right? Like, where is the halo for VR? Why isn't Call of Duty coming to VR? And my assumption has just always been that there's this chicken and egg problem of these games are very expensive to make. And there aren't enough people who have these headsets to be able to make them very profitable.

And until they are, they're not going to make the games. But until they make the games, there's not going to be enough people buying the headsets to make them profitable. Do you think it's that? Or is it just that this is like a fundamentally different thing and we're going to have to do fundamentally different things with it? I don't think it's just chicken or egg. So I think some of it, you know, they've sold 15 million or so Quest 2's. That's roughly what they've sold. of Xbox series X and S to date came out roughly the same time.

There's more AAA games on that platform. Why? The audience has proven that they will purchase 60 to $70 now games and play them for long periods of time and purchase them over and over again. The console lifespan has a certain fixed expectation. A lot of development just isn't clear on what that is for VR. You're going to make a big investment for what? For Facebook's digital store?

Like is that how long will that be around for? Will my game work on future hardware? or what is there a long-term hardware commitment? Do they want to make games? I think Facebook has already sort of, I don't want to say, straight up, like, Osborne effect, but they're already very clearly telegraphing. This isn't a game platform. Right.

This is where you're going to do your job in the future. This is where you're going to go on dates. Like, they're just out there. I think even in the store, they call it experiences now, not games. Like, what are the top-selling experiences? Which is bonkers to me, because it is so transparently going to either work or not work as a game platform way before any of that becomes anything. Like, this is the thing about this that drives me.

kind of nuts. I think some of it is about that. It's about, you know, it's the install base is strong, but what's that attach rate? How many people are going to buy games on it? How many games are they going to buy? How much time are they going to spend in the game? And consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation consoles, Nintendo's consoles, obviously, have proven to have very high attach rates and very high amounts of time spent. I think it's also about the price and what kind of games you can make with it. And this isn't to diminish the hardware, right? The Switch is an old Tegras-based Android console. But the Quest, too, is also running effectively cell phone hardware. So from a production standpoint, they're not going to make a

AAA game the way we think of AAA on at least an Xbox and a PlayStation. They could make something the way we think of it on a switch. But from a sheer production cost standpoint, it will not be as expensive to make games on that platform because it doesn't have the graphics capabilities that would require that kind of production to develop. It's part of it. So like the reason to not make Call of Duty for VR is because you literally just can't. You can make a Call of Duty, right? And Call of Duty on most. Mobile's successful. PUBG on mobile is successful.

Like, there's other ways to make those games. Fortnite on mobile is obviously successful when, and if you can get it in various app stores per ongoing lawsuits. But for mobile games, and I think, you know, VR, think of VR is a way like a mobile adjacent platform. This is not as simple as just porting something from a thing. It's an entirely different audience in some ways of who's buying these things and what they intend to get out of it.

I think you can also look at the store. Just look at the stores themselves and see what the average price. for games that are on the top selling list. It's not $60. There's nothing for $60 on there. Right. It's a lot of like 20 and 30 bucks. Which also tells me like what do people think they're getting when they spend $20 on a game? They don't think they're getting a $60 game on sale for $20. They think they're getting a $20 game. It's going to have a different level of engagement and have a different level of depth, probably a different level of length. A lot of these games when you look through the top sellers list, they are arcadey. You know, Creed Rise of Glory. You have like a boxing game. It's punchouty.

Again, not to diminish that kind of game. I think that is the kind of experience. You want Richie's plank walking experience is still on the top list. Like, that's one of my faves on Quest 2. It's the best party game for VR. You give it to people and you watch them embarrass themselves as they walk out over a plank. Yeah. You know, down the side of a skyscraper.

This is, I guess, to be fair to meta slash Facebook, this is not a game. This is an experience. And that's a top seller. So, like, what do people want out of this? And a lot of what they want is novelty. They want to move their bodies. They want fitness. and they want motion.

I don't know what the AAA audience looks like there. And inso much as there is a AAA audience that wants AAA games, these are in some ways solved problems. We have AAA experiences on console. And I'd be remiss not to bring up obviously PlayStation VR, PSVR 2. I was just about to ask, yeah. Because Sony seems like it should be the one with the most to gain by theoretically like fusing some of those two things together, right?

Like big install base full of people who will spend money. Who like AAA games? Right. Who like big, feeling expensive games. And PSVR1 sold, you know, like six million units. This is not going to change the world. This is, I don't think there was anything close to like a runaway hit. They had some interesting experiences there.

They had a Batman Arkham game kind of thing that was neat, that ran off the same engine, was made by the same team. Getting games that exist in this world that are really good. They had a Sopo Studios who did Astro Bot, which was still is the best PlayStation 5 game. I'm sorry. Please don't at me, but that's the right answer. Fair enough. They made a VR version of that game that was excellent. My platformer graphics weren't super.

It didn't have to be. There's a lot of fun to play it in VR. And the same I thought Lucky's Tale was a lot of fun to play in the first quest, the Rift when it came out. She's a long time ago. So I think there are these sorts of experiences that are like AAA light that you can do in VR. You know, Sony showed off for PlayStation VR 2, which will be a tethered headset. It will not be standalone the way Quest is, which gives it the power, the processing power of the PlayStation 5. They can put significantly better graphics in this thing than they could put on a quest by a long shot.

But you have a tether on you, which also limits the amount of physical freedom or mobility you're going to have, which probably changes the kind of games you're going to make. The install base isn't portable to other VR headsets, depending on the kind of game you make. If you're making a game that's going to use all that power, it's kind of pretty much go on PC and on PlayStation 5, and that's it. But they have a Horizon game, a game using the horizon setting and I think you play alloy in it. But it's a bow and arrow game. You know what I mean? Like there's all these different combat mechanics in the console game.

But in the VR game, you shoot a bow. Why? Because it feels good to shoot a bow in VR. Yep. It does not feel good to jump and to run into all these other things. And so playing to the strengths of the platform is good at, that what feels good inside of VR is smart. But that game, as far as I can tell, I have not demoed PSVR too yet.

It's going to be AAA in a sense, production-wise. But is it going to be triple-in terms of length, in terms of gameplay depth? No, but I think we have to reevaluate what AAA might mean on VR. Yeah, it does seem like I just get a kick out of the fact that like in the Quest store in particular, it seems like the single most common review is like fun game, two short, four stars. Like over and over and over again. It's like, boy, that was cool and it was 20 minutes.

And now I'm kind of wondering like, okay, if they took that game and gave you six hours of it, like is that actually what you want? Are we sure? And I think it's super interesting. But then I think about the sort of flip side of this, like to go back to the the sort of fortnights and Pubgies of the world, that kind of thing seems like it should be in theory, like, perfectly suited for some of these devices, whether they become like the VR versions of themselves. And like game streaming theoretically solves some of these processing

problems over time. And so it feels, it just feels like maybe we're sort of winding towards a world where a thing you wear on your face with a mobile processor isn't the sort of gating thing it once was. And then we come back to this sort of like fundamental question of, is this actually what you want. Like, is VR, Fortnite, the way Fortnite is currently constructed, actually a thing that you would want? And the longer we talk, the more I'm thinking the answer is maybe not. I mean, to make a distinction in VR, I'll redefine Fortnite not as a first-person shooter

slash building battle royale game, but just a place you hang out with friends. Yes. In that sense, Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, maybe those are all different solutions to the same kind of problem. I do think it's reasonable to assume that there might be some kind of game that you have a VR interface where you are mostly socializing or hanging out while also performing a shared activity like shooting something. Mark Zuckerberg is so happy you just said that by the way. I know. I'm going to Mark cool your jets, but I'm about to take you down and latch.

I think for VR, I wanted to bring up two other examples on consoles, but something that's about the time you spend or what you're doing there. On consoles, one of the things you get from a console-based VR headset is you get Resident Evil 7, I think is still a go-to example of a full-blown actual game. That's new. This is not a port like Residentable 5, but they just put a VR mode in it, right? Residential 7 was first unveiled, was unveiled in a what was called the kitchen demo. And it was just this kitchen scene that ended up being in the game, kind of a version of the game, but in VR. It's unveiled for PSVR.

It was freaky AF. And it turns out the whole game's in VR. They just announced Residential 8 is also going to have a full VR. Like this is kind of wild that they do this. But this idea that, like, that's an actual AAA game in VR. How big is the audience for that? How many people want to do that? I mean, max for PlayStation VR max 6 million.

It's not that big of a hit, and that's not enough to make full games for it. But if you're adapting existing games, I'd already have first-person interfaces. Maybe it's a reasonable cost. You mentioned game streaming. I want to get back to that too. Game streaming is really fascinating for a lot of reasons. Rip Stadia, pouring one out if you guys can't see me on camera. But game streaming comes with its own latency problems that are at some point, the laws of physics make it impossible.

Our brains can cover some lag on a TV screen. I think that the kind of latency that you would need to have in a. VR headset to not get sick. You're sort of pushing up against maybe what's possible there. Yeah. So I don't know if games streaming necessarily solves it. At least if you're not streaming off something local, there are wireless adapters for quests that work now and stuff.

But games, I think where people want to spend time, the idea of hanging out and hanging out in virtual reality, Big Mark really wants that to be the thing, right? Horizons. Yes. Is this bet they're making. It's a very weird bet. The last time that they broadcast their user, they boasted, they had 300,000 players.

300,000 players, inhabitants. What do you even call it? I don't know. 300,000 people. People with no legs just sort of bobbing around the Metaverse. Tell us how to be looking things. You have 300,000 people, and they boasted about it, right? That was like a press release.

They put that out there in the world. And my immediate thought reading that, like, 300,000 is the number that you shut your thing down at. That's like, this isn't big enough to sustain. You got 15 million users and you're bragging about 300,000 of them showed up to your goofy thing. If I was making AAA games and you told me your hit is. 300,000, you know, it's sold, depending on the size of the game.

I might make a game for it if I was a small studio, but that is not anywhere close to where a AAA studio is going to need that attach rate to be, and Horizons is free. And so, for me, this really pushes the question of like, what do people want to do in here? I thought about, with Horizons. I thought about Project Spark. Do you remember Project Spark? I don't think so. Well, nobody else does it either.

This is kind of my point. Project Spark was a game building thing that Microsoft released with Xbox One when it first came out. It was paid, and then certain amount of people used it. They eventually went free to play to try and drive engagement when they had about 200,000 users. And this was the thing that grew after that once it was free, but it still was not big enough to sustain and they shut it down. That's like what a game decision looks like. And with Horizons, from my vantage point, the audience data suggests that this is not a hit. And the only reason it's still here and being both of us because it's so key and integral to meta's entire play here that this is not just a gaming game.

console. This is in fact the gateway to your virtual reality future that we insist is going to happen any day now. Stay tuned. Just hold tight. It's going to happen. And meta has made very clear that it's willing to like burn a lot of money and waste a lot of time waiting for that day to come. And so I think the fact that meta is going to say 300,000 people as a smashing success is like the goalposts are weird and confusing and meta is going to move them every time it has to in order to continue to seem like it's being successful. But meta can always be. also afford to burn tens of billions of dollars trying to make this thing happen without any knowledge that it's going to happen. And most of the folks making games can't do that. And you know

the game making industry much better than I do, but it seems like there are a lot of places where every game you make is like an existential thing, functionally every time. The ongoing economics of AAA game development are increasingly make or break. You are all in and these games have to be monstrous hits or failure is more or less catastrophic. The amount of time that AAA studio will sit on a game, delay a game's launch in order to get it to a place where they can be somewhat assured that it will be enough of a hit. I think Ubisoft is a really fascinating study here, right? Ubisoft, this giant AAA studio, they kind of only make hits.

It's their whole business. They spend a lot of time. Their teams are comically large. And they, skull and bones, still is not out. This game is supposed to be out years and years and years and years ago. And it's supposed to have this year. And it's like, I don't know. I don't think they've even delayed it, but it doesn't seem likely.

This is a company that, like, we'll just wait until they have the product that they think is enough of a hit, decided by focus groups and playtests and mock reviews and everything else. Then once they release a game, they will wait until it becomes a hit. Rainbow Sixth Siege for Honor. They'll put these games out that do not inspire confidence at launch. And they'll just wait. They will iterate and wait until it is a hit. Because they have to be hits.

You see this in some of the acquisition strategy for both Xbox and PlayStation, PlayStation, PlayStation buying Bungi. Yep. for Destiny and Bungy now went from being, we don't want to just be the Halo company to not being just the Destiny Company. Yeah. Microsoft buying Activision in part for not just Call of Duty, but World Warcraft and Candy Crush. These other massive hits. I think that having a hits driven business is increasingly putting a lot of pressure on

AAA game development. In part, that's the production cost. It's the winner takes all nature of hits driven business. It's the social dynamic. If you play a game, you play it with your friends, and then they all played them by the same game and they play it over time. That's Fortnite. That's also Destiny. That's also World of Warcraft for the last 15 years. I think it creates this interesting fun space underneath AAA where you also see some of Microsoft's investments for GamePass, right? Getting a studio like

Obsidian to make a AAA game RPG, but instead of being 40 hours, it's like 10 with outer worlds. That's exciting for me. That's like as somebody who doesn't have 100 hours to spend on RPGs anymore. So I think there is a lot of fun room in the middle. And I think VR can be a big part of that, making games that are different experiences that don't have to have the same level of production value because they bring something else to the table. They're bringing unique, innovative experiences, different kinds of play dynamics. And that's partially why I even have a quest, even though I don't play it a lot. I like trying things on it. I like seeing what they're doing there. And I usually am not looking for AAA games. If I want to play AAA games, I've got an RTC3080 that I don't

use enough, just waiting for me to put something on it. Big picture question before that you go here. Like, is there a world in the near future in which it would ever make sense for somebody to do, like, full AAA, like, for GTA6 to be like a true first class VR citizen? Like, is that a thing we want? Is that a thing they're going to do? Like, are we close to that making any sense short of Facebook just like writing checks for billions of dollars to get people to do this? And quite frankly, if we're talking exclusively, I don't do that there's enough money under the sun to get Grand Theft Auto to be a VR exclusive. But even if Mark Zuckerberg goes to the Grand Theft Auto team and is like, I will give you, you know, we want it to be just as good on Quest as it is on any other platform. We want this big open world game that people are going to spend thousands of hours in.

Like, does everybody kind of look at that and be like, that's not, I'm not sure that's what VR games should be. Yeah. As a thought experiment, I say, no, I don't think they would do it for a bunch of reasons, not least which is it's a distraction from their core business, which is over here. Fair. Do I think that there's a world in which on something like PS VR, do you get an exclusive first person mode where some parts, the game or some modes in the game are there's a first person mode on Granthrift 5, or maybe that is in VR. Similar to the way Resident Evil 7 and 8, soon to have this VR functionality.

Maybe. And maybe some people do want to play it that way, or maybe some people at least want to experience what it's like to walk around inside of that world, even if it's not the actual full gameplay suite of mechanics. You know, I think about the VR headset that came with Nintendo Labo, the Labo VR set. And just being able to go in Mario Odyssey and look around certain environments, with a VR headset, a crappy VR headset, looking at environments built on now seven-year-old or so Android mobile hardware. And it was fun.

Yeah. And so I do think that there's this novelty that would I want to do that. Sure, I would. But I want to play the whole game. Is that how I would want to experience it every day? Me personally know, the studio, I think it's way too high of a risk and too high of a distraction. And what they really need is for that game to be as big of a hit or bigger than Grant Doth Auto 5 was. You know, I think even with Resident Evil 8 VR mode coming later, the.

answer is that they have to make a hit game first. That's the obligation. That's the requirement. That's the harder thing to do these days. And so it's not to say it's an afterthought. I think it's going to be neat. I think you'll continue to see investment in it. But I don't think anyone has really figured out what it is that VR gamers, consumers want to spend their time doing besides getting fit, listen to some good tunes and swinging bats or swords or other objects around. And not only their time, but they're $60 and they're $70. And that's. kind of stuff. Yeah, has yet to be, you know, at least exclusively a VR game that's commanding that kind of price. Totally. All right, Chris, thank you. Appreciate it. This was fun. Absolutely.

All right. That's it for the Vergecast. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more coverage on everything, including, like I said, the full interview with Mark Zuckerberg, on the website, on YouTube, all over the place. Verge.com, that's where to go. You can also follow all of us on Twitter. Alex is Alex E. Heath. Adi is the Dextriarchy. Chris is Chris Grant, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, know how to get legs in the metaverse. You can always email Vergecast at theverge.com. You can also call the Vergecast hotline

866 Verge 1-1 or send a voice memo to Vergecass at Vorge.com. Send us all your questions. We'd love to hear them. Oh, and speaking of the hotline, I know I've mentioned this a few times already, but we're still working on our cybersecurity episode to run in a couple of weeks. So if you have cybersecurity questions or crazy mysteries that we might be able to help you solve, call the hotline. 866, Vervege 1-1, ask us your questions. And some of our favorites, you might actually be getting a callback from Liam, our producer. It's all very exciting.

Stay tuned for that. Alex Nealon and I will be back on Friday. We're going to talk about all of the craziness with Elon Musk. We're going to talk about more meta stuff, more Microsoft stuff. Prime Day. There's a lot going on and we'll get into all of it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.