this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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The sacrifice might still end up being worth something as Facebook subsidised so much of the cost of the hardware in the push that they ended up selling over 20 million headsets introducing VR to a huge new audience. If that actually translates to long term VR users or fizzles down as a one-off curiosity we shall see in the coming years when those people are up for an upgrade.
One could argue that someone other than Facebook/Meta could have done better but I guess we'll never know for sure.
I still shudder to imagine what the CV2 could have been. CV1 remains one of the best designed VR systems to this day.
The oled display, 90fps, fantastic audio, light HMD, ergonomic controllers... Its only real weakness was the constellation tracking, and with my three tracker setup even that became nearly a non-issue.
Replace the tracking with lighthouse, maybe upgrade the oled with one from today, put in the newer optics that reduce godrays to nearly nil... It would be unbeatable.
I still found those controllers to be the most comfortable and best VR controllers I've ever used. The Index controllers are great for its features but they're a bit too heavy for my liking.
The thought of taking a powerdrill to mine, ghetto gaming mouse weight reduction style, has crossed my mind many times.
I know! Oculus would have been great at it! lol
Better hardware, sure, but only Facebook was reckless and rich enough to risk throwing so much money at it. The reason competing headsets (index, HTC etc) are so expensive are because those companies need to turn profit from selling the headset. Facebook decided to try selling headsets basically at a loss, and hope to get money from the oculus store instead. That resulted in really cheap headsets that were much more affordable to curious people to just buy and try without a $1000+ investment and a requirement for a gaming PC.
That's something basically only Google, Facebook or Amazon, and maybe Tesla/Musk, could afford to try.