VR Competition on the horizon?

[spreckair]

Ars Technica reports:

"Meta will open up the operating system that runs on its Quest mixed reality headsets to other technology companies, it announced today.

...

"The announcement named three partners to start. Asus will produce a gaming headset under its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand, Lenovo will make general purpose headsets with an emphasize on "productivity, learning, and entertainment," and Xbox and Meta will team up to deliver a special edition of the Meta Quest that will come bundled with an Xbox controller and Xbox Cloud Gaming and Game Pass."

 

So we now have some new players in the VR game.  Fingers-crossed, it might get interesting.

[Aapje]

I've been waiting for someone to try to create a standard OS for VR, similar to what Android has become for most phones. This is a lovely position to be in, since they control the store and thus earn 30% from each sale, even when people use headsets made by other companies.

 

The upside for consumers is that they can switch to different hardware makers and still use all the software they bought. So they don't get locked into hardware from a single vendor.

 

The downside is that the person who made the software can abuse that position, although the EU is cracking down on that a little bit for Android. But Google is still making billions from the app store, even though they sell very few Android phones.