As someone who worked in VR a decade ago, I can tell you that the few use cases that were earning us actual money (as opposed to hype and continuous POCs) were niche apps and tools for specific industries.

A common one is VR visits for real estate companies and travel agencies, for example. Also virtual previews for investors and C-suite execs in meetings where there was a ton of money involved - think someone trying to sell the creation of a whole neighbourhood and this is a fancy version of a powerpoint slide for their pitch.

This tech could probably have saved us a good amount of work, though It's still a head scratcher why Zuck thinks this is the one thing in which to bet the company's future.

Meta tried to make VR into a mass-market product but currently VR technologies are only successful in very specific niches and use cases.

One of those use cases is training in industrial settings like factories, mines, or construction sites. It is a lot cheaper and safer to have workers take their first steps in a VR environment rather than on the actual location.

At the moment, a lot of this training is implemented as custom 3D applications using e.g. Unity. I imagine that something like Hyperscape would make it much easier and faster to create and share VR environments for this purpose.

It seems to recreate the absolute low point for Wade in Ready Player One, when he's deeply unhappy and only has the sort of nostalgia you'll get from a photo-realistic but ultimately empty representation like this.

"Visit your local cafe, now in VR. Meet your friends in local spaces, without leaving your home!"

Either way, I don't see this taking off. I'm surprised they're still pursuing VR.

There was a demo app showing artists' studios in very high detail. It was really neat.

I imagine if you ever want to "hang out in VR", it would be nice to do it in your own virtual living room, instead of the imaginary virtual spaces.

The technology is neat. I don't know that either of those justifies the R&D effort. So just try to enjoy that neat technology exists for its own sake.

Likely, you'll want this sort of thing for easy VR video production. Once you have a backdrop scanned, you could more easily film the action with a directional camera.

At that point you can have a very convincing VR performance with cheap hardware. That handles much much more viewer IPDs and head positions etc, than one of those expensive omni-directional camera rigs.

The huge application for this I think is video games. Instead of having to create every small detail by hand, you can just create the space in real-life and then have that rendered.

AR porn will rake back those billions, lol

I would love to time travel back to some of my old apartments

I guess other people with a headset can view your spaces.

Meta has been working on this for a while. I believe one of their primary use cases was for AI training. e.g., to train robots on real world locations before letting them loose.

Imagine if you could go back and visit all the apartments you've ever lived in. I would pay big for that. That's worth more than a lots of cameras and pictures taken

What's the point of a photograph?

Can think of plenty:

Online meetup for Disney fans: each week in a different scan of the park

Online consultation with interior design or architect: takes place in you existing house and saves travel for someone billing $x hundred an hour.

Online highschool reunion planning meeting with people spread over the world: takes place at the highschool or potential venues

Deployed military personel meeting remotely on his anniversary with his wife: takes place where they had their first date

I thought we would have already had this with photogrammetry back in 2016 when the Vive released with a camera, but that usually involved too much cleanup and optimizing geometry and couldn't be done automatically, along with the issues with reflections. I was also really surprised Google Earth VR didn't add in multiplayer soon after launch for similar use cases.