Because it's a tough sell to put a camera right in front of people's TV. IIRC, the only product managed to do this is Portal TV from Facebook...
I actually tried something like this and talked to lots of potential users about this (during 2020 pandemic). But the willingness to pay for the camera is quite low.
+1, System76's build quality is terrible. My company spent lots of $$$ on system76 workstations, only found that GPU card falls off during shipping due to the terrible design they have...
Unpopular opinion: Mozilla has some unique advantage to win the 3D Web.
1/ Hubs and spoke (https://hubs.mozilla.com/spoke) are trying to solve the problem of how to composite and deliver 3D assets over web protocol.
1.1/ Unlike jpegs that can be passively embedded into web pages, 3D assets requires active interactions with other objects.
1.2/ Traditionally, we need a 3D game engine to pack all the assets into one big binary, then build and ship the binary over cartridge, DVD, or recently Steam.
1.3/ Spoke + Hubs is the new web-based 3D engine, which can potentially revolutionize how we create and access 3D content.
2/ Being a popular, open source, and independent browser company gives Mozilla the position of leading the effort to standardize the convention of the 3D Web.
3/ This is low level tech and worth investing in. Also Mozilla makes decent money (> $500M each year) and this is something they can comfortably afford.
4/ Virtual meeting space is just one use case. Admittedly Hubs' implementation is less than super well polished, but I don't know whether they want to be the 3D Zoom in the long run. But I will say it's pretty neat if we treat it like a tech demo for their Web-based 3D engine.
1/ There is definitely potential there. Spatial audio, shared white board, avatar in HD, etc.
2/ The biggest obstacle for now is still comfort. VR is now comfortable enough for 30-min sessions for lots of people, but still not for everyone. For those who complains about Zoom fatigue, VR as of today is just 10X more painful. We need better hardware. There are obviously lots of room to improve.
3/ Horizon Workrooms is not the first and spatial.io already moving towards that direction. After some 30-mins trial, I feel Horizon is more polished and feels better than spatial.io already.
My two cents: metaverse towards gaming is like TikTok towards videos (esp. short form videos). It's all about user generated content.
Video -> Gaming
Blockbuster movie/TV show -> AAA Games
Youtube -> Indie Games
TikTok -> Metaverse
The idea is that anyone can create their own game (mini-game) easily, just like anyone can create a 10 seconds video easily. Instead of bet tens of millions into blockbuster movies or AAA games, it makes some sense to look at "short form" video or gaming. With enough users and creators, and more importantly a good recommendation system, it doesn't require too much imagination dream something big. Given that both gaming and digital video content are 100B+/yearly market, it is fair to guess that one of the next big things like TikTok is indeed something in that user-generated gaming content market.
One way to think about AR is that it can do everything your Oculus Quest can do, but in the form of a pair of glasses that you can wear all day (like those prescription glasses that people already wearing).
VR is like the PC you use at home / in office, AR is more like smartphones on the go. There is obviously quite a big technical gap :)
Properly head-mounted AR technology (ideally in the form of a pair of glasses/sunglasses) can have lots of potentials, but does require science-fiction level of imagination to visualize those use cases.
Unfortunately, this is really hard. Mark Zuckerberg calls it "one of the hardest technical challenges of the decade". There are lots of fundamental technical breakthrough required to make it a reality. In different prototype labs, people are excited to see feasibilities being proved out in individual fronts. But moving all of them into production ready consumer grade hardware is a completely different story.
Give it another 5 years, we might be able to see whether it's indeed possible.
Yeah, that's the part I don't quite appreciate what FB is doing on VR. They heavily subsidize the hardware, pushed lots of competitors out (e.g. Vive is really struggling), then start selling ads once they got dominant position.
I was wondering if https://www.jefit.com/ was going to pop up. Sounds quite similar and has been around for quite some time.
There are probably more similar solutions out there. Fitness apps are definitely an interesting space, where there are tons of them, but they seem to rarely marketing themself. Probably the customer acquisition cost would be higher than the custom lifetime value, i guess...
Would nice to see performance comparisons on M1 Mac/iPad for which way is more performance and efficient. (Admittedly TF vs TF-lite is a 100% apple to apple comparison, pun-intended).
Yet still, this post is now ranked top 1 on HN.