Venture Step

Dalton Anderson (00:01.548)
Welcome to Venture Step Podcasts, where discuss entrepreneurship, intro trends, and the occasional book review. Today, we are going to be discussing a wow technology, something that you show your grandparents and they're like, hold on, let me sit down. I don't want to break something or a technology that makes people potentially punch their TV on accident. Today, we are going to be talking about Metis Quest 3 and

my experience over 30 hours of using the product, the things I liked and the things I didn't like and the pros and cons of buying this device.

Of course, before we dive in, I'm your host, Alton Anderson. I'm not going to do a full intro. I want to make things quick. I was getting frustrated with how long these things were taking and I don't like those videos or podcast episodes where five minutes in, I'm not even at the topic that I wanted to listen to in the first place. So that's why everything has been substantially condensed and going forward, that's how we'll be doing things.

Occasionally I'll do a full intro for the new listeners, but I know you're a regular and I appreciate being here.

Okay, so we're going to be talking about VR. What are the things I didn't like or did like? Where are things going and what are some of the use cases for myself? But before we do that, let's clearly define what is VR and what is MR.

Dalton Anderson (01:46.838)
VR is virtual reality or a immersive reality that is alternate to the one that you're in right now. Virtual reality, you have to be careful with your surrounding areas because you will be lost and you'll lose track of where you're going, what you're doing in your reality. And you are going to be interacting in this virtual reality and you can't see

what is going on outside of your virtual reality, which Meta does a great job with the boundaries you set. And when you are in virtual reality or VR, you set these boundaries in your room or your space. And it will even remember like, Hey, I'm in my room. Here's the boundary I set up. And then it will scan your boundary and say, Hey, like you've moved some furniture around here. Does this look right? Or should we edit our boundaries before we get started?

So it's pretty smart and it will let you know when you've exited your boundary and the game will pause and

it will no longer be in virtual reality. And I think a good way to explain it is if you were getting your car washed and your windshield is got clouds, rainbows, music's playing. You're like, yes, this is it. Like this is awesome. And then you step out of your boundary, the car wash stops, the windshield wiper cleans off the rainbow clouds and you can see what's going on.

that that was what would happen if you left your boundary.

Dalton Anderson (03:30.888)
MR is mixed reality, which is a reality overlaid on your reality. And I feel like this is really cool in my opinion. Very interesting on how these games or artifacts interact with the real world, like your reality. And the one game that in particular that was really cool was first encounters where 3d scans your room and then it

asks you what kind of room this is, is it your bedroom? Is it the living room, dining room? And then the game will start and then a spaceship falls out through your ceiling. And then aliens start breaking through your walls and your walls are knocking down and then there's a whole other world outside of your walls. So within your house, there's this game and then on the boundaries of your walls, once the walls get broken down, there's another world.

And the enemies, these little alien monster people, they interact with the objects that you scanned in your space. And so they'll jump on your couch, they'll jump around, they'll go under your shoe place or wherever you're storing your shoes, your shoe locker, your shoe chest. They'll go behind your plants.

It's pretty cool how these enemies interact with your space, like your environment. Very interesting in its own regard. So that's VR and MR. The next thing that we want to discuss is MetaQuest 3 features. So MetaQuest comes with many features, but I'm not going to talk about like the specs. Oh, it's one thing I will point out though.

they specify 4K as the resolution. One thing that I don't like is that it's 4K resolution split between two lenses. So you have a left lens and a right lens, one for both eyes. It's 2K in each one and they add them together and say, it's 4K. But it's really 2K. So it's just a little bit above HD. It's not the same thing as 4K, which would be

Dalton Anderson (05:55.158)
4k in each lens, which would be technically in the VR headset world, AK. I find it very confusing and not very clear. I almost got caught on that because I was like, wait,

You're saying in the specs, if you go to like the additional details, it says 2K for the lens and it says like each lens is like the resolution is split per lens. And I was like so confused, like, okay, so then why are you saying 4K? It's not 4K. Don't want to get too caught up on that, but I didn't like that. Like I thought that that was not cool for sure.

Dalton Anderson (06:40.962)
But with the Quest 3, you can do VR, MR, you can stream movies, games, you can even connect to your computer and work. can eat, Bluetooth connect to your keyboard and type things out. And then you could also have these VR screens set up for your workspace. So could, you could be interacting with both your workspace that's in your reality and in your

virtual or MR workspace, you have these screens set up and the resolution of the screens are very good and they can be huge. And I do think that there'll be a cool thing to tech out when I travel somewhere, I bring my headset and I connect my computer and instead of bringing these external monitors or these flip out screens, I just have my headset and I do the

more extensive work with my VR headset pair of my computer. And then when I'm doing like, oh, just emails or some ad hoc stuff that, that, you know, I don't need three screens or a massive screen on, then I could do that. But the caveat of the VR headset is that your eyes get tired pretty quick, but I'm talking features here. So you can connect to a computer, play video games, you could work, you can

do MR, VR, you do all sorts of stuff. And there's so much stuff that I don't even know. I probably haven't even discovered yet, but you can do quite a bit. It's basically a mobile computing headset that you can either watch movies on, do stuff, design things, build stuff, play video games, work. So it's quite versatile in that regard.

There are some cons. I would say the main con is that your eyes get pretty tired fast. And maybe that I'm just a boomer and not built for VR headsets, but my eyes get tired after a bit. And recently, maybe it was from today, because I was doing a lot of strenuous, not strenuous, I would say meticulous, very tedious work.

Dalton Anderson (09:04.096)
and I was constantly like staring at the screen like all day. Not to say that I'm not doing that when I'm doing other work, but like this was very detailed work and I was like constantly like locked in on the screen. And so my eyes are quite tired. And then I was in VR today and man, was like, my eyeballs. I can't take this.

So definitely point that out. Like if you're thinking that you're going to be able to take this and work remotely for 10 hours on your VR headset, good luck. Like no shot. Like this not happening. You could probably wear it four hours at max, but it would be pretty uncomfortable. It'd be definitely pretty uncomfortable. Also, your headset doesn't come with a case. So I had to buy a case. And if you're looking on video, you get this.

kind of soft hard case, soft cloth material. Like this is my, I wouldn't say microfiber, it's like.

don't know. It kind of looks like a cat bed or something like that. Like it's very soft and fuzzy. It's hard, but not too hard. It's like a semi hard case. And when you buy the headset that is like 500 bucks, it doesn't come with a case, you know, except to buy a case. I the case is like 50 bucks. So I was like, wait, why doesn't this come with a case? Cause one of the things that you have to be careful about with your headset is you can't leave it out in the sun. And

That means like if you left it on your table and you've got your window open and the sun is hitting your lenses, it will fry your lenses and basically ruin your headset. So you don't want that to happen. And so you want to make sure that the lenses are covered up and protected. And you also want to make sure your headset is protected because the thing's not cheap. So yeah, you just need a case. was just just a bit confused on on the thought process there.

Dalton Anderson (11:09.645)
but in general.

It's pretty good. Like it's a really cool product that has that wow factor. So cool. Some of the stuff that you can do and some of the stuff that I want to do. And so let's get into the stuff that I want to do. And so the things I want to do is I want to learn some skills. I would love to be better at drawing and not that I need to be some kind of world renowned artist and be regarded as

the one who's one with the pencil or something like that. I just want to be able to draw something and I see myself as a builder and a builder of things and I like to create stuff. And I would love to be able to make a detailed drawing of something I'm thinking about. Like if I have this mental image of this sketch that I'm thinking about for this product, I can build a process flow, like a 50 step process flow.

But if I was talking about a physical product and understanding how to draw a physical product, I can't do that. But if you, if you're talking about how all of these different processes and people and things and technology all link up to this, this product and how that all flows through to, to the end user, I can design that no problem in my head. Then I could write it down. Then I can make a process flow. But what about a,

a physical product that you had an idea about, like you wanted to make some kind of sign or some kind of device to hold something or, whatever it is. I can't do that at the moment. And can't's a bad word. I'm not very good at it. I can't, it's not that I can't do it. It's just that I can't do it well. And once again, I don't need to be perfect, but I would love to have that in my toolbox.

Dalton Anderson (13:08.838)
and something I could pull out and draw something and sketch something out. Because it's not that I have any plans for physical product, it's just that it's cool. It's cool to be able to say that you're a builder and to be able to build stuff and be able to build stuff in any regard. Like I don't want to just be a builder of digital things. Why can't I be a builder of physical things? And so that is one of my main motivations. I want to be better at sketching

drawing, and then there's these 3D art apps, not 3D art, but 3D design collaboration apps like Campfire. There's Digital Sketch. There is one more that I have downloaded on my headset that I'm gonna try out. I'm blanking on the third one, but I have these apps downloaded and you can use them to create

3D objects and design things collaboratively. And to my understanding that they're free, but if you want to do X thing and load certain cat files, cat files into the system, you'd have to pay an enterprise license, which is pretty expensive. It's like, I think some of the reviews were saying 1500, but there's like, oh, that's like for $1,500. This is a no brainer. Like this is such a good deal. Love it.

it's increased our company's production so much. So that's one thing that I would love to be able to do well. And I would love to 3D design something, sketch it out, have a rough idea, then go into the 3D design app, make a 3D version of my sketch, then send it over to a 3D printer and make something like it. I think that'd be cool. And then you could use like a different app.

you could overlay Mixed Reality app of your room and you could design, you could design stuff, like do 3D design for your room. Like Meta has an app called Layout that you 3D design your room and you can overlay furniture, do different things and you could, you could design your whole room or what if you were like, like we want to remodel the room and we want to put the bed here and this there and do all these things.

Dalton Anderson (15:32.27)
or if we wanted to make a built-in bookshelf, how big do we want to have it? Like what height would look good? Or the width, like how far do we want it out from the wall? And being able to see it is so nice.

And I haven't used that app in that regard before, but it is a very cool app. So in general, I'm more bullish on learning skills and doing things and building stuff than I am playing the games in VR. And I'm not bashing video games. play video games all the time in my free time. Currently I've been playing Overwatch 2. That's what I've been liking so far. And Baldur's Gate I'm trying to finish and

I am on the like the last two missions of Starfield. So those are the games that I have in my list. One of my favorite games ever is Cyberpunk 2077.

I yeah, I'm at loss of words how beautiful that game is, but VR video games like Asgard's Raft 2 or Batman Arkham Shadow. I didn't get that same feeling as I did from Cyberpunk or I did from Skyrim playing that the first time or these other really cool games. And maybe that's the wrong standard to have.

I liked the games, but I never felt that they were overly interesting where I was like, my gosh, I can't wait to get off work or I can't wait to finish all the chores that I assigned myself today and play for a couple hours. Like I'm so excited. Like this all that's on my mind. I never had those feelings.

Dalton Anderson (17:25.902)
And I spent a good amount of time trying out those games and never got hooked. But the games are very cool in their own regard and the developers did a great job like making everything and designing the designers, designing the environment for Ag Arts. was really, really cool. Cool stuff. I was...

more excited about First Encounters, which is that alien game I talked about in the beginning of this episode. And then Meta Horizons is sick. It's just that there's a lot of little kids. So many little kids. It's not very relaxing, I would say. I'm pretty sure that there's something you can do in your settings where you can age restrict the people you play with.

but I didn't do that. So I was playing with all these little kids and they're loud and yelling and screaming. And so,

didn't like that as much. But I would like to learn how to do our 3D design music, those of you to play the guitar. And the only reason I want to play the guitar was that video game cyberpunk 2077. There's an apartment that you buy in that apartment has a guitar that you could play this, these songs on the guitar. And it's, it is amazing. It, that

That scene on its own made me want to play an electric guitar. was like, wow, this is so cool. I'm going to learn how to do this one day. Haven't done it yet, but it's on my list. And that scene is just burned into my mind. And then there's some educational stuff. I saw some apps on the app store related to public speaking to, and there's another app called engage where you can go to

Dalton Anderson (19:24.216)
company seminars, networking events. You can learn from historical figures and ask them questions and go to their classes. You can go to teaching classes. And then there's another app that I thought was really cool that you could go to somewhere else in the world and then you could pretend to order food and then they would critique your language, like how you pronounce the words in their language and learn a new language. There's just a whole world out there that you can

explore and dream up or build that is available in VR and in mixed reality. That's what I'm excited about and the technologies and the tracking like the tracking for your hands is incredible. When it's tracking your hands for the MetaQuest 3, it can see your individual fingertips, your fingernails, your fingers.

you can move them around in the tracking. just doesn't lose track your hands. And it's probably from the CoTracker 3 paper that I talked about many episodes ago. And a lot of this technologies are probably integrated with MetaQuest 3 and their VR platform.

but there's a lot of cool stuff and we're just scratching the surface on what could be done or what VR could be. There's stuff related to healthcare. I was going to say travel. Travel is cool where you could go and explore like museums or places that you could never see on your own and see the world. But healthcare is a good one.

related to one either therapy or with training, healthcare, would say healthcare and work, right? So, and I say training because there's a whole line of apps that help train people on how to do tasks. Like, okay, if you were some kind of person that had to pack up packages and put them on a, on a bus in a certain order,

Dalton Anderson (21:39.724)
You could have VR training on that and make sure that the person knows what they're doing on their own, have, have test scenarios for them. Okay. If this scenario happens, like what do do? How do you react?

And then there's healthcare where you can have practice surgeries and then things could go wrong in your surgery, in your VR surgery. Like doctor, it's not Dr. Doolittle, it's Doctor Who. I think that's the game where you have the, there's like pieces of like pieces of his body are available and you can fish them out. And if you touch the edge that buzzes, pretty sure it's doctor.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting mixed up with just people that are named themselves doctor. Not sure. But the game, you know, I'm talking about anyways. So surgeries, you could have these practice surgeries that are way more realistic. Like if you had a 3D scan of a body that had the layers of skin and the organs and the veins and all the blood that comes with it and you had someone, another person using VR in this kind of online room.

that was sucking up the blood and giving you the tools and devices that you request, like a legitimate surgery, you're way more prepared for scenarios that when things aren't going right, you know how to react. You can do all the training you want, but until you get into those scenarios, you never really know. And the closest that you can get to that scenario, the better. And VR, you could have this hyper realistic scenario played out.

where you have say a schedule of 20 surgeries and of those 20, maybe four of them, like things really don't go right. And it's just a horrific, not horrific, you don't wanna give people trauma, but the things that are supposed to go right go wrong and they've got to troubleshoot it on the fly to keep the patient alive.

Dalton Anderson (23:48.802)
That is a good way to improve and...

prepare doctors or people in healthcare, nurses, whatever you want to do. I it could be a whole bunch of different scenarios. I was talking about surgeries.

And also get people in a mindset of like, this is what it's like. Like this is what your job could be like. Is this something you're interested in? And if you're not, then you can try something else. Like it's no big deal.

And the jobs where you are doing those kind of things, where it's high stress, high risk.

Like I guess surgeries aren't high, not all surgeries are high risk, but definitely high stress. Like are you up for this? And everyone might say, yeah, yeah, I am, I am. But are they? And you could try it out for yourself and be like, wow, like that was really not for me. Yeah, this is not what I want. And then you would know. And...

Dalton Anderson (25:04.334)
It just gives you an increased perspective of what this reality that you're dreaming of could be in playing that out.

Another application of VR and this is not breaking news or something that has happened recently, but certain states have

contracted with and use VR headsets to help rehabilitate their prisoners when before they go to the outside world and back into society, they will use VR. Okay, here's how you use a smartphone or this is how you shop at a grocery store now that itself checkout like the world is trained. Like if you, if you were in prison for 20 years,

The world has substantially changed. just the shock of, you were from, say you were from

What's a city that's really blown up? Austin, Austin, text. Austin, if you were from Austin, went to prison for 20 years, and then came out of Austin, like came out and you saw Austin, you'd probably freak out. Like 20 years ago, Austin's a completely different place. And just five years ago, Austin's a completely different place. So 20 years ago, like it's just such a large,

Dalton Anderson (26:31.448)
Like difference is sticker shock. People freak out. People freak out. Like the world's completely different. People are communicating differently. There's like the phones are different. Cars are different. The world is operating it and on different societal rules. And people really freak out. Like they feel so uncomfortable in this new world that they're in. So certain states have used VR to rehabilitate their prisoners, like long time prisoners.

before they get released and it's to help them not have as much anxiety when they are out of prison. Because in prison, if you're doing that for 20 years, you get into a schedule, you're told when you go to sleep, when you eat, when you get to go outside and play. And so everything is very scheduled and rigorous. And then once you go outside of prison, you don't have this.

schedule of what to do, when to do it and where to be. So you could do whatever. And then on top of that, the world is scary because this isn't what they're used to. And so it's like, I want to go back or I want to, I don't want to leave the house. And this isn't the case for everybody. This is just a conversation that we're having and the research and the stuff that the reason why the States have

done these things for rehabilitation of long time prisoners. So there there's those opportunities and then there's the social interaction aspect of being able to connect with people on a on a different level. Once the fidelity of these avatars increase right now, it's it's not as good, but it can pick up somehow. It picks up your smile and your your eyes and the things that you're doing and people can dance and stuff. It's freaky that you could

you could like it picks up your smile like the way that your eyes are looking in your VR headset your avatar will start smiling when you're

Dalton Anderson (28:33.717)
Which I think is.

bonkers if you ask me and yeah the socialization factor is is cool if you're socializing with your age group and can find them I had more trouble than maybe a 12 year old would have but I did find some folks that were new to VR and

was it was interesting interaction with them. Like, why are you here? What are you doing? What are you up to?

in a journal.

I had a Yon and in general, what things are you are you are you doing? Why do you why do you like VR? And are you impressed with it? Also in the Meta Horizon worlds, they have like meta employees that are there in VR, where the meta employee like helps you navigate VR. You can ask questions to them. You can report the things that you felt weren't safe.

Dalton Anderson (29:39.008)
And so there's in, in, in VR, there's, there's a meta employee per horizon world and a rise in world has a max of 32 players. And so they, they probably have thousands of employees that are just admins of these horizon worlds and help you navigate the metaverse.

Dalton Anderson (30:03.096)
crazy stuff. Another thing that I didn't touch on that I liked and actually love is using VR to watch movies or sports.

So I have Amazon prime and peacock downloaded on my VR headset and the feeling that you can get from just pulling up your favorite sports team, throwing that video in theater mode and just letting it, letting it go for the whole game and just watching your, your stuff. I was gonna say show, but it's not really a show cause it's sports sports game.

It is a show. It can be a show under the lights, but yeah.

It really is something like you gotta think about, well, I have a nice TV. Like, why do I need to do that, darling? Well, think about a theater and your favorite team or your favorite show. And it's. It's the size of your your whole wall or your ceiling or. Or your or your place like the screen is massive, like it's legitimately.

I don't know, a seven foot by 10 foot screen that I have in my room when I put it in theater mode. And so it's huge. And then get to watch the game and it looks great. It's awesome. And yeah, my other TV might be, I think my TV is like 50 something. Like it's not big, but it's definitely not small. And then you've got this seven foot by

Dalton Anderson (31:54.446)
10 foot screen, I mean, it's night and day. It's not even close. It's not even close to the same experience. And it puts it in theater mode where it dims everything. It dims the lights, dims your surroundings, but you can still kind of see it's buttery. It's very nice. Same thing with watching your shows. Like if you had a nice show on Amazon Prime that you like to watch, personally, I like The Boys. The Boys is a great show.

throw that in theater mode or if you're going to catch a flight, download those things beforehand and watch your show or movie on the plane. Yeah, I haven't done that yet, unfortunately, but I'll be getting there soon. And that is a key key thing. Like, it's going to be so nice where everyone's miserable. We're in some crowded crowded

airplane or shoulder to shoulder and we're sweaty probably potentially or not necessarily sweaty, but I just add it to the fact and I just pull out my VR headset and just start, start watching a movie on this. I don't know. Eight by six screen. Cause it's not going to go outside the airplane. The airplane's only so wide, but

Dalton Anderson (33:18.146)
Just very nice, highly recommend. I personally like the VR headset for learning new skills. I plan on learning how to do 3D design and getting better at art. And then watching sports games and movies or your show or whatever.

Dalton Anderson (33:41.614)
But that's about it for me. I didn't necessarily like the games. I tried the big games, tried the small ones. There's some that are cool. I don't like doing fitness on my VR headset. I think there's some aspects of VR fitness that is cool or MR fitness that is cool, but it's not for me. I'd rather go run, no headphones, out in the sun where it's brutal. I am dehydrated, near death experience.

and I barely make it out and I'm like, yeah, that's a great run. That's my workout where I'm just punishing myself. Can't do that in VR. Maybe you could, but my VR headset would be soaked and I wanna be able to wear this in a nut smell. So I don't work out in my VR headset, but I'm sure that people do and they love it. I don't. I wanna be outside nearly dying.

I don't work out my VR headset. I don't necessarily like playing the video games. I do like the skills and the consumption of content. Speaking of content, actually, the UI and UX on the Instagram app is phenomenal in VR. When someone adds multiple photos, when you scroll these photos, it has this beautiful snap animation.

Wow. I don't use Instagram like that, but if I were an Instagram freak and loved Instagram, I might just buy a headset just so could use Instagram. Like it was so nice.

Dalton Anderson (35:27.992)
But overall, think VR is an awesome technology and the things that need to be done to make this happen, all the compute and the power and the things that it does, tracking in such a small lightweight device is incredible and is a feat in itself. And where this is going, I'm very excited, but I personally like the idea of using this to interact and

into become more comfortable in things that you potentially are insecure about or that you need to touch up on before your big presentation or you want to learn a new skill. That's where I think the real power for VR is. And that's what I'm going to lean into. And I hope you do too. And I appreciate you listening today. So the shorter episode right there on the, on the mark there, just, just under 40 minutes. It's just a nice, nice light crisp.

Ease the Ears episode about my opinions of VR headset that you may or may not be interested in. But I appreciate you listening in today. And as always, wherever you are in the world, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and I hope you have a great day. And can't wait for you to tune in next week. Bye.