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by allanrbo·3y ago·view on hn ↗
I've been a fan of SimulaVR for a while, but this sour attitude, trying to put Quest down by giving arguments for how superior SimulaVR is, is low.
2 comments
A sour attitude definitely wasn't intended. Meta has some misleading marketing and we wanted to correct that. Apart from that we're just comparing our products, as the Quest Pro (unlike the Quest 2) does indeed intrude on our niche.
Wasn't the whole point of the initial subpoena complaint, "we're not a competitor to Meta?" and now that it's dropped, you're arguing why you're a competitor?
The Quest Pro wasn't announced when they subpoenaed us.
Come on. It wasn't announced officially, but it was leaked all over the place and there were almost no surprises in the official announcment, including that they're going to focus more on work not only gaming.

As others have said, I love what youre doing with Simula, and the subpoena was out of place from Meta, but you've got to work on your communication.

It seems strange to think they were compelled to compare themselves to a potential product in a court case.
Okay, so if you got re-subpoenaed for being a competitor tomorrow, will you comply with the subpoena given that your original argument is now invalid?
(On behalf of lawyers everywhere, I encourage OP not to reply to this question. I am not their lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
do you think this was a sneaky trap set up by meta?
whether it is or not doesn't make "don't respond to internet trolls", "don't make public comments about ongoing litigation", etc bad advice.
The Quest Pro wasn't a shocking development. Meta has been openly talking about their productivity VR/AR ambitions.
But we've also been openly declaring these claims to not have any teeth, for almost a year now: https://simulavr.com/blog/we-dont-want-the-metaverse/

TLDR: That post is from 2021, and we basically said that Meta's product vision is to start with a social network/gaming platform first, and then backwards engineer productivity into it as a third use case; whereas we want to start with productive VR computing as our first and only focus, and engineer everything we do around that.

FWIW, "intrude on our niche" sounds pretty sour. It's not _all_ bad to have competition, especially someone with a bad rep like Meta/Facebook.
The Quest 3 will be really interesting. If they can really lower the price of the Pro to $300. I'm excited for the Deckard as well but doubt it will be near $400.

My main concern with the future is Ergonomics. We are practically talking about a cybernetic-interface here. It isn't cheap or easy to solve. Above all else I feel like people really just hate having a thing strapped to their face.

Thanks for the feedback.

Our intention is to offer constructive criticism of Meta's product vision, not a sour attitude. Meta is marketing the Quest Pro as a productivity device, but to us it doesn't seem to have much teeth: it can't replace someone's laptop, requires WiFi tethering to a host machine to be used as a VR Desktop machine, caps the # of screens it can emulate to 5, and has poor pixel density.

Are these not fair things to point out?

The Quest Pro will be (very soon) on shelves for customers to purchase. It's a product that exists with an app ecosystem and other users. As far as I can tell, SimulaVR won't have a product ready until at least Q4, and even then I'm sure volume will be low.

Imo the most damning part of this article for SimulaVR is this annotation:

>[6] There are lots of tradeoffs involved in battery life vs. headset weight that we still need to decide on.

The Quest Pro has already made these trade-offs, and exists as a real device with specs that are available, while Simula is still trying to figure out the balance of your device?

It's unfair to compare a released product to something that might be available to consumers sometime in the next year.

> SimulaVR won't have a product ready until at least Q4

How much closer to Q4 do we have to be for it to qualify as "real soon" in your book? I'm asking as it is Oct 24 with Q4 starting Nov 1. Unless, I'm not business savvy and have my fiscal confused with physical again?

I would forward this question to Simula, since their website still says:

"We expect units to ship no earlier than Q4 2022, with priority given to Founders Editions."

Given that, as you've said, we're in Q4 and there's no updated information available on their purchase page, I doubt it's going to be any time in the next few weeks.

No, absolutely not Q4. We need to update that, but Q1-Q2 23 depending on how things go with suppliers.
They started out very restrictive on their vision and ecosystem - but nowadays isn't all that made up marketing?

You can't install Linux on it sadly but like... can it run any Android app? Can it connect to a PC Linux software in any way a power user would want? Can it run any program that can practically be built for it? I feel like it can but I obviously want more and something better.