Gaming: Virtual reality’s only killer app
Meta’s newest virtual-reality headset may not be exactly what Meta “promised,” said Brian Chen in The New York Times, but for game players, the new Quest Pro is stunning. It has a “higher-definition picture, receiving quadruple the number of pixels of its predecessor, the Quest 2,” with a better controller for tactile manipulation. And it supports hundreds of gaming titles, delivering “visually stunning, immersive gaming in a lightweight, wireless headset.” Of course, this isn’t what Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told us to expect. He is spending billions building out a metaverse that he envisions will “transform the way we work, collaborate, and create art.” The reality, though, is that the best of what the metaverse has to offer is gaming. “People should buy the Quest Pro for the same reasons they get PlayStations and Nintendos: to be entertained and find brief escapes from the real world.”
Yes, gamers might be Meta’s best bet, said Adi Robertson in The Verge—because its marquee virtual office “is one of the worst apps I’ve ever used.” Workrooms is “a social app in the sense that it’s built for meetings with colleagues,” but finding anybody on there “is a matter of luck.” It’s so glitchy, “it’s like spinning a roulette wheel designed by Franz Kafka, where the prize for winning is a fancy Zoom meeting.” And Workrooms is “a core part of the Meta Quest Pro strategy,” aimed at “enticing your average office worker to use a headset.” Another productivity app, Immersed, allows you to project your computer screen in VR, said Sofia Pitt in CNBC.com. “In theory, this is a great idea,” because the headset eliminates other workplace distractions. In practice, though, “I felt disoriented.” My eyes grew tired after reading a single article, “and the headset felt too heavy to wear for more than an hour.”
And the problems don’t end there, said Geoffrey Fowler in The Washington Post. The Quest Pro comes embedded with cameras that track facial movements and applies “those to your avatar in real time.” My device, however, couldn’t even “detect when I stuck out my tongue.” Supposedly, the “biggest leap” for the Quest Pro is that it incorporates “mixed reality”—a view of your immediate, real-world surroundings that you can augment or interact with virtually. But the “real world” I saw inside the Quest Pro “was more like the underwater scenes in the Aquaman movie, warped and washed out.” App developers might eventually have better ideas to overcome these technological limitations. For now, it’s hard to figure out “a compelling reason using a face computer is better than a phone or laptop.”