John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind.

It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack.

I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworkers tried to weaponize HR to push their agenda. Every effort was eventually dismissed by HR, but there is a chilling effect on everyone when you realize that someone at the company is trying to put your job at stake because they didn't like something you said. The next time around, the people targeted are much more hesitant to speak up.

I have mixed feelings about this. In one part, JC is someone I look up to, at least from the perspective of engineering. On the other hand, putting myself in the shoes in someone who got the once in life chance to build a new OS with corp support for a new shiny device…I for hell would want to do this.

Look at the outcome of Meta's performance in AR/VR over the past few years: a fortune has been spent; relatively little has been achieved; the whole thing is likely about to be slashed back; VR, something Carmack believes in, remains a bit commercially marginal and easily dismissed; and Carmack's own reputation has taken a hit from association with it all. You can understand perfectly well why he doesn't feel that it would have been harmless to just let other people have whatever fun they wanted with the AR/VR Zuckbucks.

(Mind you, Carmack himself was responsible for Oculus' Scheme-based VRScript exploratory-programming environment, another Meta-funded passion project that didn't end up going far. It surely didn't cost remotely as much as XROS though.)

It's insane how VR has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams on the hardware front (all that hardware that goes into a VR headset either sounded like science fiction or seemed like would be exotic stuff costing tens of thousands of dollars), and the software also had standout successes, but it kinda just petered out both in the entertainment and professional realms.

Is it really that successful? I think the wildest dream is that everyone is using it but I don’t really see it happening anytime soon in the future.