Carmack criticises state of Quest and Meta’s VR direction

Earlier this week, the Meta Connect conference kicked off, bringing the Meta Quest Pro headset and some smaller pieces of news. During the event, former Oculus CTO and current Meta advisor, John Carmack, had the chance to speak, and he used that time to express a number of frustrations with Meta's progress and direction. 

Carmack has never been shy about speaking his mind. As reported by Ars Technica, Carmack isn't a big fan of the lack of progress on the metaverse. During the conference, Carmack hoped to be speaking to a room of thousands of virtual attendees, but as it currently stands, he was a lone virtual avatar in a virtual space talking to others in video form, which is basically the same as being on a video call.

Part of this lack of progress is due to criticism of Facebook Horizon's avatar graphics. When Zuckerburg first revealed his virtual avatar, it spawned a wave of memes. After that, the developers had to pivot to improving quality, rather than improving scale. Carmack would prefer to “lean towards optimising for quantity and not quality”.

Finally, Carmack also had a good quote about the current state of the Quest 2. The headset gets regular updates and has had several feature enhancements since launch. However, Carmack says these updates are frequent, to the point where users have to install updates too often when picking up the headset and turning it on. Beyond that, slow app loading times and GUI glitches are also hurting “the basic usability of Quest”.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Do you agree with Carmack's criticisms? 

Become a Patron!