I dislike so many things about Meta and the people who run it. If they and everything they created disappeared tomorrow, I think there is exactly one product I would actually miss.
Yes, those darn VR headsets.
Without them, I am pretty sure I would not just have spent a blissful half hour or so on my sofa playing the most immersive version of Tetris there is.
(I also noticed or rediscovered only today that you can re-map the controls in Tetris effect, meaning I will now stop dropping pieces by accidentally pressing up when trying to move left and right. A fantastic improvement.)
I also would not have filled my rings playing Beat saber in the hall.
All that is great, but it also keeps impressing me how they keep improving things in large and small ways. Even this far after the VR hype blew over for this time. Even for my headset which is a generation (or two, depending on how you count) behind their latest and greatest. Putting it on and getting to the activity I want has only got faster and more reliable in the past year.
I do not know how or why - except I have noticed the system updates being installed every now and then - but I like it. The same goes for the remote desktop experience, it too feels somther and better, mainly in ways I can not put my finger on.
I wonder how many people are working on Quest stuff over there. I wonder if they have something great coming up.
I hope they keep at it.
I feel like VR was the last sane science fiction technology from when I was small to arrive in real life. You know, those things which you could read about and find magical and cool while at the same time seeing clear and meaningfully different ways of doing things with them. It still feels magical to me to have VR available and this good, and I want to use it more and see it get even better. The technology does not need to do anything magical to do so either, it just has to keep improving. Lighter, faster, higher resolution, probably a million sensor improvements. It can all come in stages, every gradual improvement will be nice.
The point is that it works and delivers things, the useful version is not perpetually being pushed off into the future, at a point where a unclear miracle needs to have happened to make the pieces fall into place.
(So no: AI as it was in science fiction has very much not arrived if you ask me. And I doubt it will, which might be best for everyone.)