The FTC's swing at Meta with Beat Saber
Virtual Vector's Thanksgiving-week dispatch.

Hello!
A shorter newsletter today given the usual holiday slow down. If you're celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I hope you get a chance to slow down too and relax for a bit.
Fit for the job
In the course of the Federal Trade Commission's attempt to block Meta's ~$400 million acquisition of Within, the agency's argument shifted a while back on a key point: though Beat Saber gets users working up a sweat, it's not a fitness app. That doesn't help make the case that Meta buying Within for its VR fitness app Supernatural would be anticompetitive.
But as Bloomberg was first to report, a new filing contends that Meta had considered expanding Beat Saber into a fitness app, then pulled back before moving to acquire Within in early 2021. The FTC is now angling to show that Meta planned to and could have made an "organic" entry into VR fitness and that buying Within therefore lessens actual and perceived potential competition. The suit has been viewed by critics as a long-shot for the FTC since the start. Now the outcome might hinge on these discussions around Beat Saber.
If you haven't been following all the back and forth, here's a quick rundown: after Meta and Within announced their agreement a day after Meta's rebranding, the FTC began an in-depth probe. The FTC sued in July, later dropping Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant and narrowing its claims to focus on potential anticompetitive effects in VR fitness should the deal go through. Meta filed to dismiss the FTC's complaint in October and has stood by the arguments in support of the Within deal that it made publicly earlier this year.
In late July, Meta stated that it had "looked into building a fitness-specific service" and decided that it was not "in a position to do so." Based on the new FTC filing, and setting aside other questions–like whether Within worried Meta might compete or if Meta just wanted to nab Within before Apple could–it's worth wondering how Meta could find incidental fitness success with Beat Saber and yet conclude that expanding from there was a nonstarter.
Cue this line from Meta's recent opposition filing that made the rounds on Twitter last week: "Meta has no fitness expertise, limited and non-fungible VR engineering resources, and no history of successfully building VR apps from scratch."
as someone who worked there for a couple years and helped build a bunch of VR apps from scratch (Farlands, Bogo, Prologue, Oculus Home 1.0) this is honestly an extremely funny own of that entire internal app building period. the "successfully" doing a lot of heavy lifting here https://t.co/eftWX2xZlW
— Katie Chironis (@kchironis) November 15, 2022
There's an idea here worth chewing on besides the seemingly harsh dismissal of the VR apps Meta has created in-house. Beat Saber was already a hit when the Beat Games was made. At the time I even called the studio "about as attractive an acquisition as you can get." For all that's changed since the acquisition, the core appeal and gameplay of Beat Saber remains the same. That's a hands-off, if it ain't broke, don't fix it approach that might reasonably follow from Meta's struggles to find success with VR apps internally.
Fast forward to fitness. If you'd like, you can find the FTC's proposed findings of fact right here courtesy of Free Law Project's CourtListener. Pages 24 through 28 cover the arc of the Beat Saber discussions. Though this filing is heavily redacted, it points Meta talking for months about the notion of working Beat Saber into plans "to get serious about doing something big in fitness."
We may never find out how close Meta really was to changing course with Beat Saber before moving to buy Within, but that may end up being the heart of the matter here. If Meta can make the case that these Beat Saber discussions amounted to little–and perhaps that they resulted in Meta recognizing that it shouldn't mess with a successful rhythm game it didn't build in order to chase fitness usage–then it's likely to score Within and a win over the FTC.
All hands on… these Deckard controllers?
My usual stance on hardware patents is that they're fun to think about but rarely deserving of deep analysis. There are so, so many examples of intriguing and weird things from patent-land that never make it into products. That's why I actually want to dwell on today's Valve patent news for a bit: it's conspicuously boring.
Valve Deckard Controllers pic.twitter.com/h77d3q8fsC
— Brad Lynch (@SadlyItsBradley) November 22, 2022
First surfaced by Brad Lynch and a group of Deckard VR headset hopefuls (or "copium addicts" if you prefer), the patent mostly concerns the hand strap design depicted in the drawing above. Similar to the straps on the Index controllers, the design detailed for a "linear hand strap adjuster" would let users release their grip on the controllers without dropping them, which can work well for hand interactions when combined with finger tracking. The chief distinction between this strap design and that of the Index controllers is that the linear adjusting action looks like it may better accommodate different sizes and shapes of hands.
Yes, other intriguing things leap out: the controller pictured in the drawing looks more like newer VR controllers from Meta, HTC, and others than it does Valve's, even lacking a touchpad. The patent's descriptions take care to note that the tracking elements in the controller ring could either emit or receive signals, which is to say this patent does not point strongly toward Valve either tracking controllers from the headset or from Lighthouses.
Taking all of this with the usual caveats, it doesn't amount to much. We know Valve spent years refining the Knuckles design that led to the Index controllers, and some further tinkering with the strap design might warrant going down the patenting path and not much else.
And yet, I'm swayed by Lynch's reasoning that drawings as distinct as these suggest Valve is exploring different controller designs. Improving upon the key differentiators of the Index controllers (the strap and finger tracking) while moving toward a now fairly standard positioning of tracking elements would make sense in a way that some of the more out-there rumors and theories surrounding Deckard do not. Maybe it's the holiday cheer getting to me, but I see less reason to shrug off this bit of patent news than I do normally.
More news:
- Earlier today, in that same FTC filing linked above, Janko Roettgers spotted that Meta-owned studio Camoflaj was listed as developing a yet-unannounced Batman VR title for Quest. An updated filing redacts the project.
- With the World Cup underway, Snap rolled out new AR Lenses utilizing a neat upper-body garment transfer method for swapping a user's shirts to the kit of their favorite team. [Andrew Hutchinson / SocialMediaToday]
- On December 16, Horizon Worlds will host a VR concert centered on the late Notorious B.I.G., appearing "in hyper-realistic avatar form" alongside other guest artists. Definitely read K. Guillory's thoughts on the ethical issues at play here, and remind yourself what happened with the last high-profile show in Horizon. [Oculus Blog Post]
- Meta's latest update to Horizon Worlds enables a feature (for just half of creators for now) allowing for the placement of doors from one world to any publicly listed world. [Oculus Blog post]
- Lynx founder Stan Larroque posted some histograms comparing the photon-to-photon passthrough latency between Quest 2, Quest Pro, and the Lynx R-1. Of course, we shouldn't draw conclusions straight from these–I'm looking forward to seeing some rigorous third-party testing of the R-1 against similar headsets.
- Japanese VR game developer Thirdverse announced a $15 million funding alongside plans to bring two titles to PlayStation VR2. [Scott Hayden / Road to VR]
- Volumetric capture startup Arcturus raised an $11 million Series A round with participation from Epic Games and Autodesk, among others. [Press release]
- New York-based startup inCitu, which aims to use mobile AR to help people "visualize the future of their own neighborhoods and cities," announced $2 million in funding, half of it coming from Schmidt Futures. [Press release]
- This week, Google began rolling out its Search with Live View AR feature in Maps in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo. [Jay Peters / The Verge]