HTC's standalone and Carmack's parting words

Hello!

It's been quite the week. Plenty to cover before the long holiday weekend (hope that's the case for you), so let's get straight to it.

HTC's windup to CES

Rather than keep up the stream of teaser images, HTC decided to be a bit more upfront about its upcoming VR headset before a full reveal is made at CES. In an interview with Adi Robertson of The Verge, Global Head of Product Shen Ye confirmed that the headset HTC first hinted at in October will be a standalone with support for color passthrough mixed reality–a product the company intends, Ye said, to be "something that's meaningful and that's appealing for consumers."

So, a Vive that can go toe-to-toe with the likes of the Quest 2 and Pico 4 then? Maybe not. Between the hardware details Ye confirmed and last month's leaks, my feeling is that the price tag is going to leave the biggest impression on consumers watching the CES pitch, and HTC is already managing expectations on that front.

At any reasonable price point, I don't doubt that many of the people who've been holding out for an HTC standalone will leap at the chance to buy one. Ye's point that other consumer headsets are "massively subsidized" by companies with intent to build an ads business around them will only go so far in helping HTC, though. That might sway a significant number of purchases if the headset is somewhere within one or two hundred dollars of a Quest 2 or PS VR2 on the high end, but if the new device is closer to four figures then HTC will need to work significantly harder to expand its consumer base beyond people who simply refuse to buy from Meta or Bytedance.

As for the features HTC is promising, it's too early to know if this headset will be able to notch a key differentiator or two. We know it's supposed to be slim like the Vive Flow, will sport a depth sensor, and that HTC is claiming a two-hour battery life. Each of those raises questions about the headset's potential appeal, i.e. we don't know if it'll be compact enough to emerge as a significantly more practical device, if it's tailored to deliver mixed reality that justifies the added sensor cost, or if it'll support tethering or battery swaps such that it'll tempt folks who use VR for hours on end. CES is only a couple weeks away, though, so we don't have to wait long to find out whether HTC's small headset will feel like more than just a small step forward.

So long, John

John Carmack's departure from Meta is undoubtedly, to borrow the man's fondness for emphatic capitalization, A Big Deal. Announced last Friday, the id Software co-founder's choice to leave and focus on his AGI startup not only sees Meta losing the CTO who elevated Oculus in its early days, but also its most visible and credible internal critic in the years since the acquisition.

Carmack released his own resignation post in full in response to the press publishing "a few choice bits," but he was also right to note that his harshest words here aren't exactly new. A line like "when you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul" could plausibly have been dropped by Carmack publicly in reference to Meta any time in the last five years. Carmack had an annual Connect talk to vent his frustrations because the fact that he was allowed to helped it seem like products like Quest were being developed with integral, Facebook-atypical perspective and pushback.

If Carmack's unhappiness with certain processes and initiatives (remember his metaverse comments last year?) served as evidence that he only had so much sway inside Meta, then his exit raises the question of who else might now play a similar role, however limited it may be. Who has power inside Reality Labs paired with opinions that don't align with the vision we've seen advanced consistently by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Michael Abrash and the like?

"I thought that the 'derivative of delivered value' was positive in 2021, but that it turned negative in 2022," Carmack tweeted Friday. "There are good reasons to believe that it just edged back into positive territory again, but there is a notable gap between Mark Zuckerberg and I on various strategic issues, so I knew it would be extra frustrating to keep pushing my viewpoint internally."

Pointing directly to a gulf between his views and Zuckerberg's as well as changes over the past year might make it tempting to think that Carmack was more upset with what Meta is doing than with how it's going about doing it. However, absent more specifics on efforts Carmack would've sooner killed, let's focus on what Carmack says consistently pained him the most: efficiency.

"We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort," he wrote in the resignation post. "There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy."

As criticism goes, what Carmack said back in October about Horizon Worlds, the Quest Pro and Meta's problems with "basic usability" all cut deeper, I think. Wishing to make the same or more progress with fewer employees and resources is not a sentiment that's terribly unique in tech–and as a parting shot, it's not just offset by Carmack's belief that Meta got close to "The Right Thing" with Quest 2 and his closing rally to fill products with "Give a Damn," but by the fact that Meta will be in a better position to argue it's heeding Carmack's advice with him gone. Should Meta eliminate more jobs in the near future, it wouldn't be out of the question for the company to frame the cuts as necessary for efficiency's sake.

In the event of a change like that, without someone like Carmack to regularly speak their mind, it'll be harder to know whether the processes inside Reality Labs are evolving as well.

A new "MR" and new Meta AR details

On the subject of Meta messaging, Monday saw the release of Andrew Bosworth's annual post reflecting on the past year, this time titled "Why we still believe in the future." The Reality Labs CTO opened the letter with nods to the "perfect storm of skepticism" around Meta's investments and "tough calls" the company has made in response, but spent most of the post talking up tech shipped in the Quest Pro while introducing some new names coined for two of them: "Meta Reality" and "Infinite Display."

Two things up top: first, as Wagner James Au notes, Bosworth didn't use the word "metaverse" here once, a conspicuous absence. Second, you'll not see me sticking to the "Meta Reality" branding to discuss the company's mixed reality solutions for Quest Pro or other devices so long as I can avoid it. As others have pointed out, doubling up on the existing MR acronym might be intentional, but in the context of an industry newsletter, using it would get annoying fast (example: calling the Quest Pro a Meta Reality device tells you nothing about the device experience upfront, but does make it sound like "Reality" is a Meta product line).

In the post, Bosworth stated that Meta is directing 20% of its investment toward Reality Labs, with half of the division's operating expenses devoted to AR. We also got a better sense of where some of that AR investment is going on Monday morning thanks to a new report from Sylvia Varnham O'Regan for The Information detailing Meta's struggles to develop companion devices that would support eventual AR glasses. While work on one smartwatch was canceled earlier this year, the report mentions more recent work on a simpler watch design and development of a pocketable phone-like device that could pair with glasses for control and extra compute power.

The takeaways from this Bosworth post and the check in on Meta's AR hardware efforts? For one, we're ending 2022 with a reminder that while the company's in a relatively strong spot with VR, mixed reality's now a landrush so busy that Meta wants in on the acronym. With AR, as we also recently saw with Qualcomm's co-processing talk, the challenges ahead go beyond glasses to the devices that will need to support them until full standalone models are feasible.

Yes, Bosworth also made mention of Quest 2's successor coming next year, and there's little reason to doubt that'll be a formidable and fairly affordable VR headset in spite of all Meta's 2022 setbacks. But for its MR and AR efforts, Meta definitely has its work cut out for it in getting others to believe in its future too.

More news:

• Case in point regarding Carmack's approval of Quest 2 and Meta's VR strength: today Meta announced a software update boosting the available GPU compute power on the headset by 7%. [Official developer blog]
• Meta's not the only company looking back–here's a 2022 wrap-up from Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson, who says the company has seen "an incredible amount of interest" in licensing IP and optics tech this year. [Official site]
• The FTC's record $520 million fine for Epic Games, split between a COPPA violation and refunds for Fortnite purchases attributed to dark design patterns, is almost certainly going to lead to changes in other platforms and games that operate similarly. [Sarah E. Needleman / The Wall Street Journal]
• Spatial launched its new Unity SDK-powered Creator Toolkit last week and announced that more than half a million creators have registered with the platform. [Press release]
• Adobe's Substance 3D Modeler 2023 was released on Steam with new VR support for Valve Index. [Ben Lang / Road to VR]
• New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan sent a letter to Valve's Gabe Newell asking for answers as to why Steam lets an abundance of white supremacist content reside on the game distribution and social platform. [Matthew Gault / Motherboard]
• Niantic launched a free Christmas-themed WebAR experience showing off new sky effect features called See Santa Fly. [Official website]
• Here's a bit of fun from Jasmine Roberts, who combined ChatGPT and mixed reality to make a virtual Clippy companion that, well, no one asked for.