Here’s Carmack’s full statement from X:
"Meta already sells the Quest systems basically at production cost, and just ignores the development costs, so don’t expect this to result in cheaper VR headsets from other companies with Quest equivalent capabilities. Even if the other companies have greater efficiency, they can’t compete with that.
What it CAN do is enable a variety of high end “boutique” headsets, as you get with Varjo / Pimax / Bigscreen on SteamVR. Push on resolution, push on field of view, push on comfort. You could drive the Apple displays from Quest silicon. You could make a headset for people with extremely wide or narrow IPD or unusual head / face shapes. You could add crazy cooling systems and overclock everything. All with full app compatibility, but at higher price points. That would be great!
This brings with it a tension, because Meta as a company, as well as the individual engineers, want the shine of making industry leading high-end gear. If Meta cedes those “simple scaling” axes to other headset developers, they will be left leaning in with novel new hardware systems from the research pipeline for their high end systems, which is going to lead to poor decisions.
VR is held back more by software than hardware. This initiative will be a drag on software development at Meta. Unquestionably. Preparing the entire system for sharing, then maintaining good communication and trying not to break your partners will steal the focus of key developers that would be better spent improving the system. It is tempting to think this is just a matter of increasing the budget, but that is not the way it works in practice – sharing the system with partners is not a cost that can be cleanly factored out.
Just allowing partner access to the full OS build for standard Quest hardware could be done very cheaply, and would open up a lot of specialty applications and location based entertainment systems, but that would be a much lower key announcement."
lol, the single comment on that article
tl;dr his take seems to be that facebook is apeing microsoft or epic when they should be taking ideas from apple instead.
Uhm, this is clearly trying to follow Google’s Android with clear previous inspiration from Apple. I don’t see how this is anything like what Microsoft or Epic does.
That said, the Apple strategy has clearly failed them so far, so now they try it a bit more Google like, neither of which is good for the users.
And the original argument from Carmack also has a gaping flaw. If software is the main problem and evidently Meta can’t solve it in house despite throwing practically infinite money at it, the only solution is to open up the software and let others experiment with it and contribute to it.
Great analysis. Meta sees what works against Apple and they are moving in that direction.
You apparently have to pay to comment so I’m not surprised lol