Let's Talk About Augments

[DaftnDirect]

Augments are the interactive spatially aware virtual objects that you'll be able to place around your space. I've just been calling them interactive objects so it's good to know they've got a name!

For those of us who used to enjoy customizing our Oculus Homes back in the day, with weird & wonderful stuff, augments should be more fun.

So, which ones are you looking forward to using and do you have an idea for what would be good augment?

[DaftnDirect]

We think there’s a chance that Augments will be released to coincide with this years Meta Connect, but that’s just a guess… I keep checking whether the creation tools are out of beta too but no!

The exciting stuff seems to take a long time to get to our headsets!

[oculusness]

@DaftnDirect 

'The exciting stuff seems to take a long time to get to our headsets!'

I thought the V66 update borkage was quite exciting, and that was rolled out almost immediately. 😉

[J40NYR]

looking like we are due some bad news according to sadly it's Bradley. Augments postponed for the foreseeable as they cannot make it look right 😐

[DaftnDirect]

mmm just checked his twitter post.

I don't quite understand the gimmicky toys comment as each augment's value would depend on the developer's imagination/skill unless the dev tools and capabilities are very limited. Performance issues could be the problem as he mentions and it's a real shame if that's true.

**bleep**, Meta really need to double-down on testing and development before announcing future features like this.

(again... if this is true!)

I've just seen the augmented reality Pool table for the Quest... surely Augments can't be more demanding than that.

[Hiro_Protag0nist]

Gutted.

Yep, Boz has confirmed it saying they "went back to the drawing board"  https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-augments-delay-meta-cto-andrew-boz-bosworth/

[DaftnDirect]

The line saying 'vision (and desire to market that vision) got ahead of its execution' seems to be exactly right.

It's great to have vision and it must be near impossible not to shout about that vision, but please, if you've shouted about it, follow it up with execution.

I guess 'more time to cook' boils down (to extend the metaphor) to delay rather than cancellation, but we've seen this before a couple times.

[J40NYR]

In other words, the Quest 3 has nowhere near the processing power needed to make it look decent and be reliable. Hopefully this cooks up an 'ultra' like headset, although rumours are also speculating that the pro 2 has now been cancelled.

Maybe they are putting all their energy into Quest 4, perhaps earlier than expected? 🤔

[DaftnDirect]

The Pro 2 cancellation is about the Meta LG partnership and thinking that LG would do the Pro 2. I think the YouTubers were conflating the two and I’m not sure that’s correct, I had always assumed Meta would do the Pro 2 including some Meta innovations, like they did with the pancake lenses and self-tracking controllers for the Pro, LG and others would do something that suits them…maybe with innovations of their own,  but what do I know!

I haven’t gone through Boz’s announcement so if he’s said it’s cancelled, I’ll stand corrected.

[J40NYR]

I do wonder now that VR has gained some momentum that Qualcomm may introduce something like a dual SOC that can give some proper horsepower to these headsets.

I keep hoping for the Valve deckard that may have an AMD soc similar to that found in the Steam deck that could then run your steam VR library

[DaftnDirect]

Yeah, I think Valve’s focus will always be pancake software sales, that’s where the big money is and that’s what Steamdeck was all about… to boost those sales, VR doesn’t have the userbase yet to compete on PC to give them enough of an incentive to do the same with a Steamdeck headset, in my opinion plus the PCVR crowd will want a gaming PC to satisfy their needs.

Headset chip advancements are going to be designed for, and abest utilised in headsets that have bespoke VR OS’s whether that be Meta’s, Pico’s or Pimax’s.