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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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A lot of these problems are individually solved -- the Bigscreen Beyond weighs 150 grams, consistent 90hz framerate is the low end of new headsets and 120hz the up-and-coming standard, low-latency wireless video is a (admittedly even dweebier) SpaceX when it comes to doing what a lot of people were calling impossible five years ago, even cheap sensors are vastly improved and hardware sensor fusion is the default option -- and there's incoming tech that'll merge most of these.

(Long battery life + wireless + ultralightweight is, admittedly, hard)

The intermediate trouble is that the people interested in the current tech are a tiny community, they're near-invisible to outsiders while what portals into the world are available give a poor or actively misleading grasp on the state of current tech, and the minimum cost of buyin for a not-awful experience ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

The bigger problem for Meta, specifically, is that even if they get past all that, it's not clear how they make money off it. There are business models for VR that make sense, for better or worse -- but none of them make sense for Meta; they're either things Meta are actively bad at, have competitors that are eating their lunch with Meta's own hardware, or could easily have a million competitors in three years.