On top of the three problems of any AR/VR tech: UX, UX and UX.
I'm honestly not sure if Apple Vision would fare much better if they had a device that costs $100. Like, sure, they'll sell more units that way. But how many of those units would end up collecting dust?
Playing Beat Saber on the MQ3 I meet people who are enthusiastic about VR, who share immersive content (pano video shot with https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-3) and there are plenty of games in the store... compared to other gaming platforms where I meet a lot of younger people, I find there are a lot of older and retired people using VR, which is not what Meta is looking for for a Facebook replacement.
My take is the MQ3 is pretty good for UX. I regularly use my image sorter and RSS reader in a web browser with a huge number of windows open, bringing my click targets up to the WCAG AAA standards made them very usable in this environment. The Apple Magic Keyboard pairs perfectly, as does a mouse. The controller work great for games and other immersive applications.
I'd say though that my game backlog on the MQ3 is long as is my game backlog in Steam, and there is just a huge amount of competition from flat content so I don't play as many VR games as I could.
Survivorship bias. You don't tend to meet people who played Beat Saber 2 times and put the headset on the shelf forever.
The metrics are brutal, for Quest 3 and for every other headset. Meta worked hard to bring the costs down and improve the UX, and it still isn't enough. They wanted "the next smartphone" and fell so short it's not even funny.
If the AVP were cheaper, I think you'd have a lot more people willing to use them together. The social features are useless if nobody owns one or wants to use one.
You'd also have more of a critical mass of people with accessories. A used market for lenses and accessories, people with spare batteries about, etc.
Not to mention an app ecosystem. For every person like me lamenting what could be, there are a dozen people with more mainstream desires, like Instagram 3D or Temple Run 3D or whatnot.
i’m afraid i’ll look back and regret that i didn’t capture 3d memories of parents and grandparents when it was technically feasible because of a few dollars…
Well, there are stereo cameras… The digital ones came and went with 3D TVs though so you have to go to eBay. I am enjoying the stereo cameras I have accumulated though.
It eats batteries but you can get a charger and more batteries the way you would have a few mirrorless generations ago.
My trouble is not really having a system to show these to people, red/green anglyohs sometimes work fret but aren’t consistent, there doesn’t seem to be an ‘instagram’ for sharing stereo photos, it ought to be easy to make a WebXR application to show stereograms but I haven’t seen a fully realized one and found texture memory limits are a bitch in the MQ3 so my first attempt to make one got stuck.
I've taken to (tediously) printing stereogram cards for the better 3D photos.
I wrote this to take the .MPO files (a common file format on the earlier commercial digital stereo cameras) and convert them to print-ready stereograms: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer
I'm honestly not sure if Apple Vision would fare much better if they had a device that costs $100. Like, sure, they'll sell more units that way. But how many of those units would end up collecting dust?