Club PA Newsletter #86 (Patreon)

There's still little border skirmishes between VR and AR here and there, but in general it seems like people generally don't really care too much about either of them. I think they're focused on other things, like how the world got shut down, but even before the plague it has remained surprisingly inside baseball. I am routinely situated inside such balls.

The old Rift had a significant downside, which was that it required these USB (optimally, USB 3.0) sensors all over the place, and another one behind you if you wanted to do roomscale, and that's a very long USB 3.0 cable. The Vive's hand controllers weren't as legit early on, but all the sensing was built into the headset itself, so you put up a couple weird little boxes and you were off to the races even for roomscale interactions. The Quest kinda breaks all that in half.  It has built in sensing, but it also has a whole computer in it so you don't need a machine to render at all.  Except… you can hook it up to a machine via USB-C and do that if you want. The device is a result of all the trends being braided effectively into a durable cord. It's the endpoint of the process.

The reason I won't upgrade my headset is ultimately because I don't want to support Facebook anymore. Sometimes people will try to get hold of me there and I feel bad but I'm not gonna do it. Even with an Oculus account, they're forcing their core ecosystem more and more on the VR part of it. There's a lot of reasons why you might not want to support them, they're plentiful enough that I could create a custom bouquet for each of you. My personal bugaboos are things you can search for easily - for fun, try "pivot to video lawsuit" or "advertising duopoly."

In the end, as you can see in the strip, I was made complicit anyway. That's essentially the plot of The Good Place. I'm living the plot of The Good Place.

Yours in rage,

(CW)TB