VR

“What they're trying to do is they're trying to kind of pull VR into existence out of thin air through force of will by pushing it out into the market and getting it to bootstrap. And maybe the theory is, well, we can get to some scale with games. And then once…”

“The bear case for VR has been if you had seen a modern games console, 30 years ago, you would have said, oh my God, this is amazing. It's part of the future. Turns out that's one hundred and fifty million people. Which is a big business. It's great, but it's n…”

“They didn't buy Oculus to make a games device. And if it's only ever games, it's a failure.”

“VR seems to be stuck as a subset of the games industry. And no one has managed to do anything on VR that anyone actually uses that isn't a game other than kind of niche, like medical and industrial applications.”

“I have a sense that gaming is going to become universal, and I'll chat about that in a second, but I don't see VR becoming a universal thing.”

“It did have a surge when the Oculus Two came out, but it did not have a surge from lockdown at all.”

“And so for Facebook, paradoxically, VR needs to not be about games.”

“VR, as we sort of said earlier, seems to be like a deeper, narrower subset of games consoles. It's not changing what the TAM is.”

“I'm afraid I am now deeply on the sort of, okay, I don't think VR is going to work except as, I mean, the school of thought that says I don't think VR is working except as a subset of games. Now clearly there's a bunch of people who think that's just because t…”

“You get a whiteboard and you write VR, AR, social, crypto, place, tradable goods, creator economy, and you draw a box around this and above the box you write metaverse. Like, okay, but that doesn't mean it exists or you can buy it or invest in it. It's just a …”

“And when they say we're building the metaverse, in the end, they want to replace PCs and smartphones with VR and pull everything into VR.”

“And like, all this time you're spending showing how I can type on an AR screen, like, do you really think the future of this is going to be typing? That just feels like such sort of, let's take what we do on our Macs and put them in VR, which is so totally not…”

“I think Facebook's probably sold 12, thirteen million of them. There's maybe five million people actually using them.”

“The challenge is at this point, we're sort of designing social networks in 10 years time. Which kind of comes back to my, you know, the more we spend time we spend saying, so this is how I think it's all going to work. The more you're like, we have no idea how…”

“And so I sort of just, I mean, I just kind of think like with all of the attention and all the buzz and hype around like metaverse and web three and crypto and DeFi and VR, we kind of stopped paying attention to AI.”

“And so even if you think that VR and AR are going to work and are going to be the universal thing, think of anything you're doing now as pure experiment, pure learning, pure interest, with no expectation that this is going to be meaningful.”

“And so you can look at VR and AR and say, like, unquestionably, these things will get way better. The displays will get better. They will get much lighter. We know that for VR. For AR, it's a little bit more open whether the optics will really get us to someth…”

“It's like, that's kind of why they're spending all this money, because they realize now actually there isn't all the stuff you need to get VR working actually isn't sort of already there waiting to be plugged together the way smartphones kind of work. and s…”

“Most people don't design cars for a living. Most people do not work in three D. Still pretty niche. Salesforce or email, or like most people are not actually editing, doing work that involves a three D object.”

“I don't think the direction of travel of software is bigger screens. I don't think the direction, or more fundamentally, is not about showing you more information. It's not about having more rows in the spreadsheet. It's having less rows in the spreadsheet and…”

“And this may be where VR is today, and you'll come back in 20 years. Crypto may be the new open source and it's plumbing. It may, you fade away, like, you know, people who thought that open source would destroy Windows and desktop Linux. This is the year of de…”

“You know, I mean, if VR works, then in five years' time, everything you do on VR will be built using large language models.”

“So the default for Oculus and for every other VR device, and that's partly because of where they came from and what was possible 10 years ago, the default for them is you put on the headset and you're somewhere else. Whereas the default for this is you put it …”

“Whereas for AR, it either looks like it's there or it looks, or it doesn't. That's the thesis. And so it has to have that base level. And so Apple is basically saying that all the stuff that's on the market now just isn't worth selling.”

“You need the screen that Apple has shipped to do text at all. And you have, and you could propose that you can't do anything other than games, maybe fitness, maybe VR, maybe, maybe, maybe TV, maybe a couple of other niche things. Without text. And so VR is not…”