Facebook has so far tried, and failed, to do this. Twice.
First was Facebook Spaces. Opened 2017, closed 2019. This was a VR world. Not a very good one. It was mostly a 3D approach to a desktop.[1] You could hand other people flat pictures. Sharing! Total flop.
Second was Facebook Horizon. Opened 2020, still running, but not getting much attention. It's a 3D cartoon level VR world. Works OK, not very interesting or pretty. Big emphasis on "safety", which means no sex. Avatars have no legs; nothing below the waistline. Plus there's a panic button which puts you in a "personal safe zone", where you're in a bubble until Security gets there to rescue you from whomever is annoying you. While it's still running, Facebook doesn't mention Horizon any more.
Zuckerberg's vision is probably more like that video I've linked before, "Hypereality". The real world, with overlays from augmented reality. Overlays of more ads.
> Plus there's a panic button which puts you in a "personal safe zone", where you're in a bubble until Security gets there to rescue you from whomever is annoying you. While it's still running, Facebook doesn't mention Horizon any more.
It's just bullshit marketing for a pause button and a standard reporting feature almost all social sites and apps have already so they can claim they're doing something the next time Zuck gets dragged in to testify again. It's just going to be a absolute shitshow like Facebook.
You are responding to a silly comment. With that said, I think straight black hair often implies non-european ancestry. I'd just assume main woman is Spanish, one in white is Asian. The non-black males are all pretty ambiguous (shrug)
The fact that people have to speculate this shows IMHO nicely not just that there are no clear borders between peoples "race" but that the concept of race seems pretty pointless.
> The fact that people have to speculate this shows IMHO nicely not just that there are no clear borders between peoples "race" but that the concept of race seems pretty pointless.
We are talking about cartoons, so we're really talking about symbols and coding. You're taking too much of a leap by inferring that much about the underlying concept from the use of symbols. You might have a point, but you need different support.
There are so many people out there screaming for more censorship.
Second Life, which has been at this a while, has a reasonably workable solution - a rather strong notion of individual property rights. By default, anyone can enter anyone else's property. The property owner can change that. They can block everybody from entering. They can block individuals. They can eject people already there. They can set time limits. They can create groups and only allow members of that group in. They can charge to get in. They can delegate those powers to a program of their own. All those options are in use.
So, for most land in Second Life, Linden Lab doesn't have to get involved. Linden Lab itself owns land, but it's mostly roads, water, and open space. Almost all the places where people congregate are privately owned. Club owners routinely eject people, and are not required to justify their decisions to anyone. There are more complaints about "I was ejected from ..." than "I was harassed at ..." To which the Linden Lab stock answer is "we don't get involved in resident to resident disputes".
There's still some trouble at Linden Lab's own "safe hubs", which are probably the worst places in Second Life. Linden Lab does not police those much. So they're jerk magnets. This is mostly a problem for new users who haven't figured out not to hang out there much.
There's a paid "governance" team, of about six people. They do sometimes ban people for griefing. Most of what they do is deal with real estate complaints - "There's a 60 meter tall rotating, floating, glowing FOR RENT sign at REGION/X/Y/Z, which violates ad policy", or "There's a big tree at REGION/X/Y/Z which goes over the edge of private property onto a public road and has a solid branch too low for trucks." (You can usually build stuff only on your own property, but it can stick out over the edge. The owner of the parcel encroached upon can remove the object if they want, but that's not automatic, because a bit of encroachment makes the shared landscaping look better. It really works like real life as much as possible.) Governance has public meetings, and it's like going to your local board of zoning appeals.
This rather low-key approach works well in practice, and it doesn't require an army of "moderators".
I mention all this because almost nobody making "metaverse" noises seems to get this.
Of course, Decentraland has only 200-300 concurrent users, so they don't have the scale to get these scaling problems. The worlds that are divided into little disconnected rooms don't have neighbor problems. Roblox has a huge moderator staff, but their target demographic is aged around 13. If you can't solve this problem, your biggest labor cost is your paid goon squad.
That's amazing, first think which came to my mind was:
> I can go to any time--in the past. I don't want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people because we're gonna pay hard for this shit, you got to know that. We're not going to just fall from number one to two. They're gonna hold us down and fuck us in the ass forever. And we totally deserve it. But for now, wheeeeeeee!
"Wanking in front of random people" makes it sound much more sex pest than it seemingly was – they were people who he invited back to his hotel room, who willingly went, and then once in the hotel room he asked if he could wank in front of them and reportedly they just kinda... giggled. So he did.
Not my cup of tea, but let's be real: there are a finite number of things people do when invited back to hotel rooms. The idea that this is shocking or even surprising behavior is fairly divorced from reality.
VR/AR is such a new paradigm for interacting with computers I think that its inevitable companies will make many failures before finding the apps and hardware that clicks with customers.
In 2017, we had only had mainstream non-beta VR headset hardware in the marketplace since 2016 (original consumer Rift, HTC Vive), lets not forget the 20 years of PDA hardware/software attempts we lived through before the mainstream smartphone designs we all use appeared in 2007. I expect a very similar arc will be followed for VR/AR, especially as the interaction model is so different from screen based.
I'm happy to see some development out "in the open", and wouldn't be so quick to criticize small project flops; VR/AR needs to begin somewhere. Zuck isn't trying to pretend VR/AR is ready for primetime either yet, he's made it clear he wants to be in a very strong position when/if the market does heavily move to VR/AR hardware, which he obviously believes strongly it will over time.
VR/AR is such a new paradigm for interacting with computers.
Not really. I tried Jaron Lainer's original VR rig back in the 1980s. The Autodesk system from the 1980s. The W Industries system ... the HTC Vibe. The Microsoft HoloLens. There's been progress, but usability really hasn't improved all that much.
You can shoot at people. That works fine. You can sort of use swords. Everything else, not so much. That's why Beat Saber is still the most successful VR game.
Some Autodesk people once thought that VR would make it easier to use CAD, because selection in 3D with a mouse is such a pain. Didn't work out, and 3D selection with a mouse got much better.
If anybody gets this right, it might be NVidia Omniverse. That's an attempt to do for 3D what shared text editors do for text documents.
I'm still waiting for a coder's VR IDE, but the pixel resolution isn't there yet. I want to be surrounded by my code and use gestures to run it, simulate it, explore it, debug it. I want to be able to "feel" a keyboard under my fingers and see them typing on it. I want spatial audio cues so I can hear my chokepoint inner loops grinding. I want a live gource-like [0] tree that lets me fly through my repo history.
I think the biggest selection problem is the Minority Report UI problem: hanging hands are not precise tools, nor are they comfortable to hold up for > ~a minute. In particular, it is very hard to do even one pixel-perfect point+grab+release in 3D space, let alone do it over and over -- in large part because you can't easily lock a dimension or the position and rest your hand. Touch-screens are hard to get precise-clicks on for a similar reason: with a mouse I can line it up and hit fire, with touch I'm firing until I let go.
If someone gets the right metaphor going there, I think it could work great, but the naive solution of 1:N direct scaling the position of your hand to a co-ordinate in space isn't it. I imagine it'll be something like direct correlation to get 'in the neighbourhood' and then an easy modal toggle to a 'precision' mode, where you move something in small increments along just 1 or 2 dimensions, using a comfortable binary gesture.
Or maybe AI will get really good at guessing what alignment the user wants.
As far as control interface goes, it seems almost inevitable that we'll eventually have a breakthrough/refinement for some sort of mental control without physical movement (similar to how some amputees control their advanced prosthetics). It would be a game changer for VR.
I think the biggest selection problem is the Minority Report UI problem: hanging hands are not precise tools, nor are they comfortable to hold up for > ~a minute.
Right. The Autodesk people figured that out by 1990. It's like trying to draw while wearing mittens. And they had fingered gloves as input devices.
During the 1990s, there were many attempts at tactile interfaces. None of them ever caught on. My favorite was the levitated metal ball. It rested over a shallow bowl, and offered all 6 degrees of freedom, plus it could resist your movement and push back.
VR is good for looking at 3D models, but not for working on them.
The Autodesk system ran on what, a pair of RS/6000? I got to chat with some of their guys showing that off at a trade show in off moments over a few days; they were great at running the demo but were umm... unenthused about the prospects of anyone keeping the system running for any time without high grade help.
The most useful thing you'll probably ever be able to do in it will probably be using a web browser and software on a virtual computer in a virtual environment. Essentially just making certain interactions virtual but stay the same.
Oh my, reading your comment I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. I too tried the old VR headsets, played doom on one and got a massive headache. I thought VR was bad and stupid after that. Then I tried the HTC Vive and holy molly I almost cried after trying it. Now I own an Oculus Quest II and… it is the future. I’m sorry but this is it.
> Avatars have no legs; nothing below the waistline
This is the biggest mistake a lot of VR developers made and are still making. People want to look cool in VR. They don't want to look like flying blobs (unless that's their actual chosen aesthetic). This affects their platform and purchase choices to a degree that many don't seem to fully comprehend.
It’s easy to say that because they’ve failed twice they’ll fail again. But I could just as easily see that in a few years the success of the meta verse was due to these failures.
I don't know why the no legs thing seems so incredibly frightening to me. It's like a really bad "uncanny valley" feeling - everyone walking around, chatting normally, but seeming to not realize they've all been sawed in half.
I'm in the beta and I have played Horizon. I'm not impressed at all. The worlds are tiny and uninteresting. The color pallet is cartoony. Audio has enough delay still to be unnatural (a problem with cell phones too, btw, but made much worse when the person is standing in front of you).
Their world building tools are kind of interesting, and surely were difficult to implement, but lack any real purpose or traction.
All in all, I'm surprised more by how basic and bad Horizon is than I am by how good it is. Its been in development for a long time, and by now, I expected a lot more.
The fact they failed twice, as you point out, is only more reason to believe they will succeed. There isn't much that success first contact with reality.
A trillion dollar company with the temerity to endure will eventually succeed.
Yes, it demonstrates they're confident this is a direction things are taking and that they are in a good position to achieve it. I don't use Facebook so it all makes me a bit uncomfortable, but I think they'll get there. Solid VR option, massive userbase, stable of smart employees, warchest, etc.
I gave it a try in a web browser. To be honest it barely seemed to work, had a frame rate of about 1fps in very simple scenes, and there didn't seem to be anything actually there, just a few empty low-poly rooms. I didn't see any sign of social or metaverse features. The mouse controls are backwards, and that combined with massive lag means looking around is pretty difficult. If you're serious about making such a product, some screenshots and description of the good bits (if you're serious there must be some somewhere) on the home page would be way more effective than making people go into it and mostly just be confused and frustrated.
Thanks for the feedback! What device did you try on?
Love the blunt and honest feedback. The platform comes alive in VR btw, but understand if you don’t have a headset. You can start building using the editor tool and share your room with others to view it in a social manner.
If there’s any features you’d think would make this more like a proper metaverse, please let me know.
I tried it on a desktop PC, Chrome on Linux, Nvidia GPU several years old (seems to work well for most WebGL things though). I think what's missing from the current presentation is the "why". Why would I build something with it, and why would other people want to join in? I'm not saying there aren't good reasons, but the empty home page doesn't provide any, and nor did a few minutes playing around.
I think interoperability is what would really make a metaverse experience, so I'm pretty doubtful any single company could do it, even with Facebook's resources. I think the web itself is the closest thing to a metaverse we have, but it's still far away in terms of actual experience. I think that it's become universal because of the interoperability and common standards that mean it doesn't matter what software or hardware is used to create, interact with, or consume content, so it's a level playing field without one organisation controlling it, and so people are free to go nuts making stuff, without threat of losing it or losing access.
You can't wait for there to be even more ads in this world? You want them to physically follow you around? You can't wait for corporations to see your every move? No thanks.
We need to fix our current internet before allowing it to permeate our lives any deeper.
Android apps are binary blobs of dalvik bytecode, yet simply blocking a bunch of domains at the DNS level is surprisingly effective to get rid of most ads.
I you talk about hyperreality I think you were referring to this (1) video, but given the downvotes you received I guess not many people got the reference
I'm surprised how negative the comments here are, even if it is true that 'metaverse' is turning into a pretty silly buzzword. I think there's still coherent concepts defined by it (interfaces becoming much more inline with what humans find natural, integration of VR+AR capabilities, and the 'Internet' becoming more and more 'real life' in general).
Facebook is absolutely one of the best-positioned companies to be able to become a long-term market leader in these areas and has been investing heavily into R&D in all related categories. Although some of us dislike many ways the company operates, this still does seem like a very well thought-out and aggressive long-term mission that is worthy of being pursued, and I'm pretty excited to continue to see innovation in the more difficult areas like AI and VR here.
>the 'Internet' becoming more and more 'real life' in general
>Facebook is absolutely one of the best-positioned companies to be able to become a long-term market leader in these areas
I think the reason for the negativity is possibly because maybe a company that's managed to create a massive platform where reality is massively distorted and manipulated algorithmically to maximize ad revenue and engangement, whatever the quality or lack thereof, should not be a leader in trying to make the internet 'real life' or whatever you want to call having ar/vr avatars that will allow you to participate in the new virtual corporate consumer world.
It’s simple natural selection that the most engaging social media platforms became the most profitable, influential, and popular. There’s no guarantee that VR/AR will have the same selection pressure, and if the tech does have the same selection pressure than whoever wins will be engaging as well.
IMO Facebook creating the metaverse is like Xerox creating the GUI. Most likely the things that made Facebook successfully in social media will not make them as successful in VR/AR and they’ll either pivot hard or (more likely) lose their market leader position.
(I’m holding FB stock until their AR offering is announced, and possibly for a few years afterwards but I’m doubtful I’ll have their stock in 15 years.)
That’s my worry as well, that they’re not capable of capturing the market due to being a software company. But… they have hired like crazy and at this point I’m assuming most people working there have no link whatsoever with fb, so if they own all the experts there’s a good chance they’ll capture the market. As long as they keep iterating they’ll be fine.
> I'm surprised how negative the comments here are
Honest discussion about Facebook on tech-centric forums is nearly impossible these days. Facebook and Zuckerberg are favorite villains in the tech discourse in 2021. I don't agree with everything Facebook has done, but the vitriol directed at Facebook has become so disconnected from reality that it's getting hard to take it seriously.
> this still does seem like a very well thought-out and aggressive long-term mission that is worthy of being pursued,
I agree. Once you get past the anti-Facebook hyperbole, it's interesting to read about where they're headed next. They have a lot of excellent engineers and a lot of revenue, so I'll be keeping an eye on where they invest their R&D spend.
Every community needs a villain, but ask yourself this: whatever happened to Libra? Portal? (Or Building 8 in general.) Did you know that Facebook built its own drone (Aquila) that it abandoned in 2018? M? Facebook Home? Parse? Wirehog?
As seen with Google, just having excellent engineers and revenue are insufficient to building lasting products, much less fulfilling an aggressive long-term mission.
>whatever happened to Libra? Portal? (Or Building 8 in general.) Did you know that Facebook built its own drone (Aquila) that was abandoned in 2018? M? Parse? Wirehog?
Agree with your point - to a limit. Some of facebook experiements flopped but not all. Also, unlike Google, fb mostly marketed them as experiements.
Replying mostly for sharing purposes since not all of these products' histories are common knowledge. Not to one-up anyone...
> Libra
Government Blocking. Seemed interesting, especially in a crypto world. Unclear if world needs more crypto projects. Some economists suggested the "basket of currency" approach at scale would just be an arbitrage opportunity for someone to drain the bank-of-facebook. I'm guessing this project existed partially as a vanity project or honeypot for hiring.
> Portal?
Still sold, still developed (uses alexa and amzn develops alexa-for-portal work still), still used. IMO it was good tech no one trusted (understandably).
> Or Building 8 in general
IIRC they have build a few internal products for fb and probably a lot of learning that goes into oculus/portal/etc.
> M
I think this was never GA and only a test trial? Would've been cool but again, because fb it couldn't be trusted.
> Parse?
Open sourced and available, but obviously mostly unused. FB doesn't really have a b2b sales team for this sort of product so it wasn't sustainable since it was not really invest-more-effort quality. I think it was a huge missed opportunity for fb to enter the data center race against aws/gcs/azure. If fb built a benign cash cow, maybe they'd taper down their scummy social network ambitions. Or at least the value extraction. AWS cash seems to fund cool amzn loss leaders (alexa, etc). I think the same thing applies to wit.ai and other AI products they buy - if they could commercialize them into an "AWS for AI" product suite maybe they'd find a new profit center. They have world class ML work already, so seems a good place to do this.
> Wirehog
I never heard of this one so i googled it [1]. Apparently it was a legal risk to continue at the time (ha!). Very similar to napster. Makes sense that a startup business (< 2 yo) would kill a controversial product. Ironic now that they seem to be above caring about legal risks.
> Also, unlike Google, fb mostly marketed them as experiements.
Fair enough. Though I'd argue that with these big internet companies, the line between actual product and perpetually in beta experiment is blurred, more often by Google than others.
> IMO it was good tech no one trusted (understandably).
And as a consequence, the adoption of Portal seems pretty negligible.
> I think it was a huge missed opportunity for fb to enter the data center race against aws/gcs/azure. If fb built a benign cash cow, maybe they'd taper down their scummy social network ambitions. Or at least the value extraction. AWS cash seems to fund cool amzn loss leaders (alexa, etc). I think the same thing applies to wit.ai and other AI products they buy - if they could commercialize them into an "AWS for AI" product suite maybe they'd find a new profit center.
Very intriguing point that provides useful thought for both a what-if (Facebook didn't kill Parse) and potential future opportunities- if only Facebook cared for them.
> Makes sense that a startup business (< 2 yo) would kill a controversial product.
Yeah, I just threw it in to get a full category range and historical range of different products killed by Facebook. I also edited in Facebook Home as well to touch upon smartphone software.
My main point is that it's all well and good for a corporate behemoth like FB to make the claim that they're getting into a new speculative field, but it's natural to be skeptical given how many of their experiments or (attempts at) products don't stick around. So as exciting as this sounds like, I give it as much credence as, say, IBM saying that Watson is going to revolutionize and transform healthcare through artificial intelligence.
It also goes in line with my cousin comment in another subthread about how Facebook's history is littered with retired replications of existing products. I didn't even mention Facebook cloud gaming (Facebook Gaming - admittedly still in progress), video streaming (Facebook Live), Clubhouse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580014), even HQ Trivia (Confetti). So that makes one wonder- does Zuckerberg really care about the metaverse idea, or is he just getting into it because Apple supposedly is?
I’m wondering about numbers for portal actually. It’s hard to believe that it didn’t turn a profit during covid. I had one to talk to my parents (who had one too) and it was too small but it was still great to have. If the big version wasn’t so expensive I would have bought it in a heartbeat for me and my oldies.
I wouldn't characterize people as being dishonest when they talk about the societal-scale issues posed by platforms like Facebook. It's tough to separate those emotions from a purely analytical discussion of their technology.
Excellent engineers and revenues that massively dwarf FBs can be found at AT&T too but tell us how much attention you pay to whatever bullshit comes out of their CEOs 6 inch chimp brain.
Though I haven't been a customer of AT&T since the 1990s, I can see they run a large physical infrastructure operation that delivers communications services. I understand where their revenue comes from and what they mostly spend it on (ie I understand that as well as I do FB's business despite having no contact with AT&T).
Also, AT&T isn't constantly spamming me with disinformation and bad memes, nor do I have the impression that they're tracking my every move across the internet.
While knowing nothing about AT&T's CEO, I'm pretty sure that s/he doesn't sit atop a weird corporate governance structure where the CEO holds a majority of the voting shares and is thus a dictator-for-life.
>the vitriol directed at Facebook has become so disconnected from reality
It has completely poisoned discussion on a number of virtual reality communities, since Facebook owns Oculus and the Quest 2 is very commercially successful. The /r/virtualreality community has become incredible negative, tribal, and toxic over the last couple years, mostly revolving around conspiratorial speculation about the future of the oculus platform as owned by Facebook. Almost any discussion about any topic is guaranteed to have at least a couple comments somehow relating it back to why Facebook is evil and "destroying VR."
I find that very sad. Talked to a friend today who really want a Quest but didn’t buy one because facebook. I told him to just create a fake account, but heh. People are scared of cookies nowadays.
Is it hyperbole to say that Facebook helped enable genocide in Myanmar? Or that it has been an incredibly useful tool for political propaganda, more so than traditional media ever was?
They have not done anything to meaningfully address the very real issues their platform has, and are forging ahead regardless to become even more ubiquitous. The negativity is very understandable.
>Is it hyperbole to say that Facebook helped enable genocide in Myanmar?
I'm not knowledgeable or qualified to judge the facts, but for the sake of discussion, probably not. No more than the thing people always bring up about IBM punch cards and the holocaust.
That doesn't make the negativity understandable.
I'm not sure what more can be said without triggering an accusation of "whataboutism". To be clear, I think equating any context or comparison of anything with whataboutism is a flagrant misuse of the word, but it does seem to be a popular way to have the last word.
By this logic, FAANG is best positioned to every tech innovation because they have the resources and know-how to pursue it.
I think it's a dangerous line of thinking as the power these company wields absolutely corrupts their governance. Sure they give us cool toys, and they have the marketing budget to make sure know it, but real talk: we need restrictions on their ability to dominate every area instead of cheerleading the horizontal economies of scale that erode our privacy, kneecap the next generation of startups, and consolidate power in ever smaller group of global corporate oligarchs.
> FAANG is best positioned to every tech innovation because they have the resources and know-how to pursue it.
This isn't what I've seen. FAANG, and all large corporations, have many layers of bureaucracy that are required for approval of projects. "New" and "innovative" are "different" and "not well understood" by definition. As the bureaucracy get crusty, and more risk adverse, the ability to get these "unknowns" approves becomes harder and harder. Instead, you see buyouts of small companies, who didn't have that layer of bureaucracy to dig through, as the larger source of innovation. Going forward in time, like Intel, these small and innovative acquisitions get integrated and destroyed by that overwhelming bureaucracy, before they can even be fruitful.
Governments do the same thing. They can't do much by themselves, so they issue RFPs, vendors bid then do for them. Many of these vendors don't make it (1/20? no idea). Is that also bad for the economy?
Our democratic Governments are ultimately held accountable by voters and not their fiduciary obligation to maximize profit for shareholders. There is a more humanist element to governments.
I'm not sure the negative comments are due to some tribal rationalization. The social network-ization of society hasn't had great effects in a lot of cases like increased depression and affecting the course of democracy. I think facebook has proven that the only thing that they care about is the all mighty dollar and their leadership seems to have machiavellian like reasoning of the ends (connecting the world) justifying the means (monopolistic like market dominance by assimilation, duplication and/or crushing of competition). The guy at the helm literally models himself after caesar and has absolute control over the company.
They are proposing to further mold and control society. To me, that sounds a lot like some kind of dystopian future and not something I would enjoy being part of. It may sound nice and all butterflies and flowers, but I don't think it would be prudent to just ignore their track record and say "o, it will probably be fine".
> long-term mission that is worthy of being pursued
Sure, it's worthy of being pursued, but Facebook doing it means that the end result is likely to be dystopian, not something that leads to a better future.
The Metaverse is just a mmo, except some of the characters are real, the world is a parallel of ours, the bad guys are whoever is trending as a villain (good for engagement), and the quests are ads.
The end goal would be primarily to have this digital world leak over to the real one as much as possible, having untold profound influences on human life
The negativity is because it will be awful if they succeed.
Imagine logging in to your job via this metaverse or some small country using it for voting in 50-100 years, or not being able to take part in conversations because you are not logged in to your ar.
Imagine the data collection and potential for manipulation and censorship in the distant future
>Facebook is absolutely one of the best-positioned companies to be able to become a long-term market leader in these areas and has been investing heavily into R&D in all related categories. Although some of us dislike many ways the company operates, this still does seem like a very well thought-out and aggressive long-term mission that is worthy of being pursued, and I'm pretty excited to continue to see innovation in the more difficult areas like AI and VR here.
I agree, and I'm sure it may even end up as a great/fun experience, but I'm just concerned about what's likely to come along with it. There was a recent article linked on HN titled "even if you're paying, you're still the product", and that's pretty much how I see this going.
Facebook lost all good will years ago. It's not about the product quality, but the monetization strategies and what those entail.
Whenever some form of immersive "universe" under corporate control is described in fiction, it tends to be a fairly dystopian tale. Every so many years VR is going to "finally be here" ... and then it never materializes. Add to that the head of the corporation in question is a hop, skip and a jump away from near Bond-villain status.
It would be remarkable if the gut reaction of most people were not negative. Which makes your surprise at the negative remarks remarkable.
> Facebook is absolutely one of the best-positioned companies to be able to become a long-term market leader
No its not, and Mark knows it: "Critically, no one company will run the metaverse"
Its not in Facebook interest to have competitors and they will act accordingly.
My guess is Facebook will first try to buyout the 'metaverse', then it will try to 'emulate but different', and then they will switch to being an over-engineered data hosting provider.
The problem is what is the premise of this metaverse.
I will be data collection for FBs core business.
Imagine something like Horizon for Oculus in big, a virtual world observed and controlled by FB.
Before Sky Net we will get the Matrix.
I get the feeling that it's all going to look immensely stupid until Apple releases a VR headset, and Facebook is the first company with a native client on it. From there, this "metaverse" concept introduces a virtually limitless amount of content. They could start porting over original VR titles, creating first-class video sharing tools and more.
I despise Facebook, but I wholeheartedly agree here: this is an incredibly well-thought-out move from a company that has money to burn.
The Google Graveyard gets all the attention but Facebook has built and retired more clones of existing products and attempts to break into other people's moats than anyone can remember.
Investing in "metaverse" is just ticking a sub-category box after they've already ticked off "VR" with their Oculus acquisition. It's doubtful that all the money they have to burn on this boondoggle will actually go anywhere.
There is no need for a partnership beyond the one that allows Facebook to be hosted in the App Store. I think the point is being ready on day one to take advantage of whatever Apple delivers in this space. Facebook switched from web-first to mobile-first/native relatively slowly when the first mobile App Stores, and I think the point is they don't want to be second movers in the future.
Now that Facebook has announced their intentions, it seems like Apple would be motivated to construct precautionary measures against intrusive data collection and user tracking into their hypothetical imminent AR platform.
A metaverse is just the republic of facebook. Its really uncomforting for such an entity devoid of humanistic incentives(and rather a asocial ceo with a fiducial obligation to his share holders) will be able to create a plane of virtual reality that much of the world will have no better option but to leverage. Its one thing to provide advertising subsidized internet. But a metaverse Is where our future children will be spending alot of their time, and if not our children, our childrens friends.
"Meta verse" to me, includes some type of discussion, a "verse", but these days Facebook as a website does not have much "worthy" discussion going on at all, if anything to me this rebrand reads as "metaspying" (we can spy on you from a meta multitude of gadgets, scripts and bots)
I hate to be the one to bang on about standards, but the cyberpunk vision of the Metaverse -- and I am aiming at kind of a bog-standard middle ground of it -- will depend on some very open standards that are decentralized at the core, starting at Snow Crash and ending in the John C. Wright "The Golden Oecumene" sense of things.
Anything but an open and radically-decentralized interoperable set of standards and you're Running On Someone's Specific Hardware. That means that they and the country (or other municipal structures) might have opinions on what you can run on their hardware, and thus the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse will be invoked at the start.
As you slide toward less interoperability and more corporate/government control, you're going toward the Johnny Mnemonic territory (maybe without the cyberdolphin). You'll have to hack your way around the place, and that means that the ordinary folks are left out. They might not have the smarts, the hardware, the wetware, and so on.
Further levels of control and you're into Second Life -- one platform, one company, but perhaps some local rules/anarchy. And if you're still thinking of the children, the Metaverse eventually looks like Club Penguin. You can finally rest assured that the concept is functionally dead when we are all sending each other only various emojis of unrealistic skin tones.
So, the question then becomes, does anything in the Facebook/Zuckerberg history suggest where on that spectrum we will land?
As a side note, I believe that pretty much any version of this Metaverse means targeted ads. On the controlled side, the people running the hardware will want money, and that means ads. On the uncontrolled ads, randos will want money, and that means that they'll do whatever they can to sniff your activity and monitor you, and then send you ads.
will depend on some very open standards that are decentralized at the core
There's a performance problem. The open Web only works because we have enough compute power to tie up multiprocessor computers with a few gigaflops per CPU and gigabytes of RAM to display 2D text with a few pictures on the screen. A good 3D game world pushes the limits of what current hardware can do. The level of inefficiency associated with Javascript/HTML/CSS won't work for an interesting 3D world. It was tried. See X3D.
Oh, I have no illusions about how well the radically decentralized business works out. It is wildly inefficient, the content could be anything, and so on. Think Freenet. And I have watched the VR promise die enough deaths to make a cat envious.
The founding text is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992). It's short, funny, entertaining, and full of new ideas in a freewheeling early 90's spirit. The list in the comment you are replying to is not bad, since most interactions you will ever have with someone about a metaverse will hinge on shared descriptions you have with them of a metaverse, so whichever books you hear about the most are by definition the most useful ones to read.
Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal.
Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.
Aside from what I mentioned, you're looking at Bruce Sterling, maybe a little Stross. I hesitate to recommend Doctorow -- he is faddishly distracted and senselessly optimistic. Vinge's
"True Names" stands out. Maybe When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One for the AI side of things. The amusing Headcrash, writings by Pat Cadigan, Jeter's deliciously dystopian Noir is a favorite if you want to see how bad it might get. Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams, but that one has been a while.
This makes a lot of sense. And given the Oculus, they already have a pretty decent foothold in the AR/VR world.
So as a reaction for Apple becoming “the” gatekeeper for a metaverse platform, Facebook is now doubling down on becoming “the” metaverse platform. Whatever that means.
I wonder whether Facebook is going to try to accomplish this using their existing social networks, or do some acquisitions in the space.
I doubt Facebook really needs to worry about Apple's upcoming AR/VR push. They're the people who sell $300 VR headsets, if anything they should be encouraging Apple to drive the price of their headset up.
I seriously hope enough people are still grounded enough in this reality to reject AR/VR bullshit besides as a fun playground like VRchat or what have you. Integrating either or both into daily life would be fucking godawful.
To me, VR is really cool. I wouldn't want to give it up. It functions as a game console with a different input/display device. I'm not too keen on the metaverse concept, and I don't use it for social stuff.
Agreed on that, but I don't want it to become like a smartphone where it almost becomes a necessary component of a majority of your waking life. I already take in enough digital content and am tracked by enough things as it is.
After having tried out PSVR, which I found kind of awful, so much so that the smartphone VR seemed like a step forward compared to it, I was highly skeptical of the whole ordeal. Then my friend showed me Microsoft’s Mixed reality headsets and I was on board with some slight misgivings about the feasibility of using it for longer than 20 minutes at a time, plus it still came with a bit of a hassle.
This year I purchased a Quest2 after reading through the feature list and I was honestly really impressed. Oculus managed to create a truly viable mass market capable rendition of a VR headset. Unfortunately Facebook itself is kind of the biggest enemy when it comes to their own product. From what I’ve seen as a general response and my personal experience also is that people would like a VR headset to experience VR stuff; games, videos, the likes. Facebook would like you to strap a Facebook machine to your face and watch ads, hyper-targeted to you with as much highly personal information used to target as possible. And that’s where the disconnect seems to be. Because Oculus is clearly capable of making VR happen as a viable platform - the question really is: will Facebook let them?
Another way of saying this is "Ad Company wants to be present during every part of your life (and all those pesky non-Ad Company users they can't currently reach), so they can surveil and monetize your entire existence, finally completing the panopticon."
I'm thinking that chances of Facebook turning into a 'metaverse' are less than the chances that Facebook will turn into the next MySpace. But perhaps I'm overly cynical.
It was pretty clear to me that had Blizzard a bit more vision they might have been able to pull this trick off with World of Warcraft but at this point I think that too is off the table.
One of the more interesting things I've learned over the course of my career is that the ability of an organization to "change" is tightly governed by the ability of its leadership to "see". Truly the most fascinating part of my time at IBM after it had acquired Blekko was seeing a company from the inside that actively at war with itself between the folks who wanted to modernize it and the "old guard" who wanted to keep the status quo.
As an executive it is important to understand that in order for change to happen, all of your leadership has to see their own role in the new vision and how they will be successful, otherwise they will treat it as a threat and work against it, both actively and passively.
Given how Zuckerberg has handled the disinformation problems at Facebook (essentially by throwing other executives under the bus rather than take ownership) it seems unlikely they would be able to pull of such a transformation. Mostly because the other executives would be sabotaging efforts for fear they would be thrown out.
Both scenarios can be true. FB could be at the forefront of AR/VR with Oculus and maybe related things like Identity. And on the social network side, they could be a in a slow decline. My bet is something more akin to AOL/Yahoo rather myspace, where the remain relevant in certain niches (older people more focused on the legacy experience, mom & pop stores that currently use facebook pages as their webfront, etc ...). That said, it seems entirely likely that they would make an acquisition like instagram once one gains traction and stay relevant that way.
I doubt it will end like this for two reason: it’s a money printing machine AND there’s a strong engineering culture. I think fb has more chance to turn like wechat, especially with their move towards payment.
> probably going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it
Opensimulator (the open source version of second life server) already exists, it is decentralized, self-hosted, and a few thousands of people re already living in it : https://opensimworld.com/
Serious question regarding my flagged comment in this thread since I'm new here:
What's wrong with it? Is it not ok to express that I feel a phenomenon is sad? Did I need to go into more detail about how the phenomenon arose? Is criticism of capitalism or our societal systems unacceptable?
The comment's kind of puzzling. Second Life has its own passionate community but was niche even in the mid 2000s when it came out, dwarfed by the MMORPG craze exemplified by World of Warcraft. What's so sad or consequential about Second Life, in comparison? It had its own niche and its own fans and never even became mainstream.
My thoughts: your username starts the same as a very culturally sensitive word for USA. You come in and leave a short comment that does not really contribute to the discussion, just brings about negativity. That's kind of like running up to someone and punching them, then running away. Not cool - you should engage in rational discourse rather than snipe. Fight, but fight fairly. You have a green username (new)?
People see things like this and think, "Troll", hence the flagging. I did not flag or downvote in this case, as I came across it hours after it already occurred.
Why is it sad? Surely the people who built it and use it think its cool. As others said "late stage capitalism" is a very opinionated and loaded phrase.
Your comment is very negative, without inviting room for critique or feedback. It does not open a discussion, just judgement and derision.
I can see how it's a bit short and simply makes a claim without going into more detail, but clearly there is enough there for people to be able to reply and disagree and why (as the few of you replying to this have). I just don't see the point of flagging such a comment so that it can no longer be replied to. I think it's unfortunate that downvoting and reporting seem to be merged together on this site, since those are separate functions (downvote- this is a shitty take or I strongly disagree, report- this is a garbage rule-breaking post that needs to be removed).
As for why SL is sad, is because it offers a shallow alternative to RL for people for whom RL is either unaccessible due to economic conditions (hence the late-stage capitalism thing) or for those who just want to escape it altogether (but replace it with a frankly shittier version, as opposed to some completely different fantasy world where you can do stuff you couldn't do in RL such as the aforementioned WoW). Not to mention that vast swathes of the userbase are creepy perverts, but perhaps it is for the best that they've chosen to confine themselves there. Hence, the sum total of this is quite sad imo. In the early stages when it was a fun and novel type of thing and alternatives for similar things were much less widespread, my points don't apply as much, but in 2021, they absolutely do.
SL was a milestone in what it's trying to do but I'm not all that sure if its intentions are any more crazy or sad than AOL-era chat rooms and online communities- some of which were also graphical. VRML was developed for chat rooms in the late '90s. The only difference with SL is that it was developed later on in history and further along late capitalism, I guess.
I'm not referring to the intentions or what it was/is trying to do, but to the reality of its userbase and how they play the game and live their life. I mean, as a whole gaming tends to be similarly 'sad', but not to as large an extent as SL (in my opinion, of course).
yeah, sure, Mark, I'll believe in this "unprecedented interoperability" when I can follow someone on Facebook using an open standard like RSS without having an account, and when I can have my personal Wordpress site auto-post to my personal Facebook account.
I'll believe in this "unprecedented interoperability" when you're not constantly trying to get me to pay a ransom to have my posts shown to people who have said they wanna follow me, either.
Facebook the company or Facebook the platform? The thing with Facebook owning Instagram is even as Facebook itself becomes less and less relevant to younger generations, the company still owns the platform those younger generations favor. And as Instagram inevitably becomes itself irrelevant, I'm sure Facebook will just buy the next social media platform.
I think Instagram has more staying power than TikTok as TikTok users start aging and the next generation moves onto their own platform. There's a good chance I'm wrong, but my guess is that publishing videos of yourself as a primary communication format gets less appealing with age as social circles shrink.
Personally as a 31 year old male, I could never get into Instagram. Always just felt like a shopping catalogue posing as social media, and the discovery is terrible, no matter how much data I try to feed it.
I love TikTok though, and not only do I feel like it "got me" after only a few hours of use without hearting anything or having any friends that use it. I've learnt about a lot of local events, restaurants and days out - in a way that seems way more organic than Instagram paid influencers.
Honestly, their algorithm has been great for me, in a way that only really Spotify has rivalled.
^ this. I would think of snapchat as a competitor to instagram, but not tiktok. You don’t go on tiktok to talk to your friends or see what’s up. Tiktok is the new 9gag rather.
In light of all the details that has come out with regards to buying out Instagram to prevent them from being a competitor, it's a massive uphill regulatory approval climb even if money is not an issue.
If Facebook buys the next TikTok as a small startup when they have minimal market share then the federal government would have no legal basis to block a sale.
I still wish Oracle took over TikTok. It would have been an amazing plot twist. Would they come up an Oracle style licensing agreement for all the tweens on TikTok?
Just like how Gen Z realized much faster than millennials that the economy and their future is hogwash, they would learn the consequences of agreeing to an Oracle license agreement much faster than their older peers.
Young people look at Instagram the same way they look at Twitter: it's a platform filled with millennials and older people that take it way too seriously.
Things are different this time around, I don't think we can assume that... probably no company has ever had access to so much cheap money combined with the global reach they have.
Yeah but (1) it is not the only one and (2) what you bankrupt Facebook will be a different leverage, not access to cheap money (or access to even cheaper money?)
Metaverse seems like the new buzzword for the VC companies. Nowadays everyone is building metaverse type games just because of Roblox but reality is it is a limited market with high competition and only few players are interested about such games.
Yet again it’s the old jwz point of people focusing on the irrelevant tech details of why something’s successful. Roblox isn’t successful because it’s a ‘metaverse’, it’s successful because it’s got a crapload of games that shut my kids up.
Seems there could be a business for corporate style services within a meta verse now that more people are working remotely. Think meetings, conferences, etc. I know second Life did this before all the degenerates moved in...
So much hate on the comments, sure their business model may be questionable but this guy has half the world's population using his social products. They are well positioned to pull something off in this space, however their walled garden model is going to limit their aspirations unless they change it.
I also feel like there is some confusion between the "metaverse" concept and spatial computing in general. In the article he describes working and collaborating in the metaverse, but you have other companies also claiming they are building a metaverse around gaming (Fortnite, Roblox). I think just like we have a clear separation between work and entertainment applications, there should be a clear distinction here too.
I could imagine there being a spatial computing layer (like the web) that facilitates both, but I think calling it the "metaverse" is confusing given the mixed usage of the concept. I'm not sure Facebook is the company that would build something as an open protocol layer, given their track record with building walled gardens.
I do agree with him that these possibilities are entirely dependent on better smaller hardware, that isn't a cumbersome headset. Entertainment seems like a no-brainer, given some success in the VR space with early hardware. The experience would have to be more efficient and productive than desktop and mobile computing to be adopted in the workplace.
Does he really believe his own bullshit? I mean, I realize FB is literally the internet in some countries, but that's because they are essentially the only water in the desert so to speak. FB needs competition, badly.
This is so prevalent that there are many study groups on facebook just because of that: it is the only place they can "freely" exchange ideas, and voluntaries from other countries (without these limitations) help by copying and pasting info and documents so others can 'freely' download it.
If Facebook is to build this sort thing, sure why not, we can choose not to use it.
Where Zuckerberg goes of the rails for me is: " I think it’s about being engaged more naturally."
If he truly believe that, he should start by fixing Facebooks algorithms. There is nothing natural about the way people interact with Facebook anymore. Initially it was keeping up with friends, family old work buddies and so on. As Facebook tweaked the snot out out of their algorithms to keep people "engaged", everything natural went right out the window.
Facebook should built whatever they believe will keep them relevant, just to lie about the motives or use deceptive language to make it sound like something it's ostensibly not.
Zuck wasn't wrong when he said this, I just don't think the change he had in mind was giving a platform to anti-vax conspiracy theorists and helping Russian troll farms influence U.S. elections. That is one way to change the world though.
Second Life was awesome, but it owes a ton of intellectual debt to The Palace from the 1990s, which had a robust and functional version of FORTH built into it.
The main value Facebook ever had to me was a way to reach people that were otherwise hard to reach. Over the years, literally every other possible benefit eroded away as the platform changed.
Therefore, I make sure people I care about know how to reach me outside Facebook so that it really does not matter if I log in to Facebook. In other words, I no longer need it even to reach people.
That's a good point. I suppose that Snow Crash is only a fun story as long as it's fictional. If reality comes too close to it, it would stop being fun and start being depressing.
To enter the Facebook metaverse, you need to abandon whatever preconceptions you had about humanity, ignore all social and political problems around you, and trascend all previously established limits of ignorance, arrogance and technological naivete past the gates of cyberhell. Oh, and you need love ads because, oh boy, are you getting some.
>> “A good vision for the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability”, Mr Zuckerberg said, adding that there should be protocols like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) internet standards for defining how experiences will be built.
Except defined by Facebook, so not really anything like W3C.
Hyperscale tech was smart in the way they designed their business to wrap around existing anti-trust law (via creating captive markets inside of larger markets and spanning multiple market categories).
We'll see if they're smart enough to outflank Antitrust 2.0, or if they make the same mistakes as Big Railroad / Oil -- assuming they're more powerful than government and/or believing their own PR about how they're not a monopoly.
Are there any facebook products that have "the sense of interoperability and portability"? Seems like most of their properties strive for the opposite...
I got a quest 1 for as a gift a couple years back. They frequently automatically installed updates that break mods. Now, my headset is currently bricked and I need to figure out how to factory reset or something to fix it.
Maybe its just indifference, but given facebook's history it feels intentional.
Both Twitter and Facebook had much more open and developer friendly APIs in their early growth stages, which they slowly reduced as their reliance on 3rd parties diminished, as they in-housed features and killed off third party integrations, and in FB's case, after they got fucked by their permissive APIs and open standards in the Cambridge Analytica debacle.
oh man. there have been at least three efforts i'm aware of to standardize the metaverse in the last 30 years. none of them really went anywhere. fb was invited to participate in the last one i paid attention to (VWRAP), but they politely declined.
And now they'll take all the ideas from the previous efforts, pick the ones that will make them the most profit (revenue - development costs) and tada a new propriety, privately controlled ecosystem that slowly replaces whatever is out there. See, for example, Open Graph replacing Dublin Core.
A week or so ago I unfriended every one of my 'friends' on Facebook, many there since 2007. I'm now just squatting my own identity for the handful of community and sports clubs that use Facebook as a bulletin board. These people are 'acquaintances', I know most of them by sight, but don't see what they're having for breakfast or when their baby does something amazing. So, basically neighbours in a village.
I realised I did not want to be the reason people were using Facebook, posting their curated/fictional 'best self'. Basically, friends don't encourage friends to use Facebook[1].
Write that email if you expect someone to read it, write a blog post if you don't. But I'm over being party to mining other people's attention spans and identity for personal gratification and someone else's profit.
Right on. I quit Facebook about 2 years ago for the exact same reason and never looked back. I think you're on to something here. Network effects work both ways. If each new user on a platform compounds it's utility and desirability, then the reverse is also true. This means even a relatively small, but non-trivial, number of people shunning Facebook can drastically reduce it's desirability and power.
I saw a little tiny glimpse of this when an organization I'm in wanted to use Facebook to schedule events and communicate. There were perhaps 30 of us in the group and myself and one other person spoke up and said we weren't on Facebook, so we would either need to be emailed the events or simply not participate. The head of the org decided it was easier just to send everyone an email. So two stubborn people out of 30 changed the way an organization decided to interact with it's members.
> I realised I did not want to be the reason people were using Facebook
I gave up my Facebook account about a decade ago. Not for this reasons (although I very much agree with it), but because I realized that I wasn't using it. Friends and family would try to communicate with me over it, and they wouldn't get a response because I wasn't looking.
A lot of them thought I was ignoring them, so I figured it was better to not have a presence there at all, to eliminate any possible misunderstanding.
> A lot of them thought I was ignoring them, so I figured it was better to not have a presence there at all, to eliminate any possible misunderstanding.
This is how I feel about email. I’m not sure it’s possible to function in modern society without an email address though.
I was recently forwarded a big comment thread from a while ago on that site where a bunch of people I haven't talked to for like 5-8 years were figuring I blocked them when really I just deleted my account a long while back¸ which was pretty funny.
I didn't bother reaching out to correct this at all. I think I value the ability to keep people who think their time is best spent staring into nightmare rectangles and pretty much just gossiping their way into hell experience out of my life, and the people who aren't into that as much in.
“WE WILL EFFECTIVELY TRANSITION FROM PEOPLE SEEING US AS PRIMARILY BEING A SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY TO BEING A METAVERSE COMPANY”
But, Facebook already transitioned to being an advertising company.
The social media aspect became a funnel to direct members towards advertising, changes to Facebook are not about the social aspect, they're about eyeballs on ads and more page views, which are actually distractions away from the social network roots of Facebook.
Mark goes on about building an economy within this metaverse:
"And this is something that I hope eventually millions of people will be working in and creating content for — whether it’s experiences, or spaces, or virtual goods, or virtual clothing, or doing work helping to curate and introduce people to spaces and keep it safe. I just think this is going to be a huge economy and frankly, I think that that needs to exist. This needs to be a rising tide that lifts a lot of boats. We can’t just think about this as a product that we’re building."
I'm obviously very cynical, but this feels like Facebook's app store play: 30% please creators. In addition to the advertising dollars.
What I hope comes out of this is an advancement of the technology for building a "metaverse" and that open source alternatives can keep up, or at least nip at the heels constantly.
I was thinking of buying an Occulus Rift, and Facebook buying Occulus is the thing that guaranteed I'd never buy one. People said it wouldn't be a problem, and now you must log in with a Facebook account in order to use your Occulus hardware. No way.
Ready Player One would probably be the goto example of what we envision as metaverse. But I wasn't particularly wowed by its presentation in the film. I personally found this a more cohesive vision of what the metaverse could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTfdO5hQUw.
Of course, this could just be a difference in cinematic/storytelling approach. The director's upcoming feature also deals with these themes. Interestingly, in neither case is a VR/AR headset seemingly the preferred means of access... The advantage is that you don't look like a complete doofus like in RP1 when you maneuver in real life using VR headsets/haptic accessories.
Most people have to constantly remind themselves they can't change the world, and adjust their expectations and priorities accordingly. Some tiny fraction of people find themselves in the position where they actually can change the world. I'm not surprised they try to; I'm more surprised that more of them don't.
Man whatever that means, I am sure nothing good will come of it. Society is not ready for all access, all communication, mass, thought influencing media controlled by an ethically ambiguous mega corporation.
It's an excellent opportunity to remind everyone about a truly great book by Lem: "The Futurological Congress" [0] and its interesting movie adaptation "The Congress" [1].
It's my startup's take on what the metaverse should look like - entirely web-based, so it works everywhere. It's a 3D/VR social platform where you can upload photos, videos, and even 3D models into rooms. Complete customizability plus easily configurable avatars.
I know the article mentions that it goes “beyond AR and VR”, but all that means is that Facebook will have flat pancake screen versions of their meta verse apps
That's one hell of a way to brand "extending the tentacles of our monopoly into your daily life".
> Mr Zuckerberg has made such comments before, hypothesizing that humans should “be teleporting, not transporting ourselves” into various environments through virtual and mixed reality environments.
"You will live in a pod and you will be happy with VR"
I feel "metaverse" is turning into a buzzword like "AI" or "Big Data".
To me the "metaverse" is always there at least since the introduction of affordable personal computer in the late 70s. In the 80s you already got a "metaverse" with the computer at center surrounded by BBS/FTP/etc.
I think and have thought for along time we are indeed headed for a few competing "metaverses", but having ruminated on the topic for a long time, I could tell you all kinds of reasons a metaverse created by someone like facebook will inherently not be the one metaverse aka the one that actually makes a paradigm shift.
Ive pitched metaverse style training systems to the department of education for example. There is a lot of really good progress to be had in the space.
If done right, a good metaverse will be the next WoW. Thats billions of dollars. Im not surprised facebook is doing this, Im surprised they all didnt start their own metaverse programs much sooner...
The killer app of VR has always been virtual sex. We have made no progress towards this.
You can't do reality with just sight and sound. I suspect a 100 years from now people will look at us talking about the metaverse and virtual reality with any kind of headset as ridiculous as the old videos of people flapping wings attempting to fly. It just doesn't work.
The "metaverse" is scam. Talking about it is just a way signal that you're a lord not a serf, i.e. "I can get a girlfriend, but most can't and they'll use the metaverse to drown their sorrows."
Facebook should make something they themselves want. I want an iPod not a VR concert.
Our species needs to be more mature for a Metaverse not to be a wholesale rape of all one's data and everything one does. Facebook, Google, E.A., Apple or NASA... it don't matter, the problem is us humans and how we treat one another at scale.
Let us see about the rumors that Apple will launch Apple glasses this fall. If I wanted AR I much rather have it from Tim Cook than Zuckerberg, and Apple knows how to build hardware. Zuckerberg does not.
Like you, I will probably buy Apple’s new AR headset. Both of us are privileged enough to be able to easily afford it, but can most people do the same?
Before you dismiss Facebook’s hardware effort, you should actually try the Oculus Quest 2. At $299 for a full, standalone VR system; imo it even beats some PCVR VR headsets on more than just price.
I can't edit the above comment, so I am adding this as a reply.
I had completely forgot that Facebook had a VR headset. When I said they didn't know how the built hardware I was thinking of their attempt to build an Android phone.
I loathe Facebook - but trying to say Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot at this point is pretty hilarious. A bachelor's level of academic training is essentially irrelevant by the time you're thirty - a master's by the time you're thirty five. Academic credentials are a very silly thing to get out the rulers over.
There's no question that there's some kind of vision involved, but what part of this is conceivably philanthropic? FB and Zuckerberg have an immediate vested interest in capturing the maximum of attention spans of these people.
To be fair, given that FB are the 4th biggest company in the S&P 500, almost everyone on this site is probably a shareholder through their retirement plan.
I think having IG and FB is a liability for them. Imo Epic Games is making better choices right now with their acquisitions and marketing strats. Seems more appealing to me.
it always seemed weird to me that fb, that sort of defined "casual interaction", was doubling down on such an immersive technology. the "metaverse" described by Rosedale & Ondrejka was nothing if not immersive.
Wasn't that book supposed to be a bit of a dystopian/cautionary tale against VR? I thought the resolution of the character arc was that the guy decides to take the headset off and engage in the real world more.
This sort of disruption will probably be considered virtual terrorism one day... Imagine the CIA torturing some poor soul over dicks in the zuckerverse.
Given that Israel already called a "new type of terrorism" when an ice cream company didn't feel comfortable working on the country anymore, then I'd say that we are not far from that at all
One has to tread very carefully when mentioning Israel in any context.
That said, I couldn't follow the logic of that; how exactly is it that Ben and Jerry's deciding not to sell ice cream in the occupied palestinian territories a "new type of terrorism" against Israel? (esp. as the B&J factory is apparently in Israel).
Basically Israel is the real life embodiment of Seinfeld's uncle Leo who says anything and everything is antisemitism except it's also terrorism.
These labels have existing very negative meanings that they would both like to court with their own behavior and accuse others of thoughtlessly.
I feel like that singular statement is like watching an entire country jump the shark and that we ought to stop taking their phone calls. They have absolutely nothing we need and they don't require our help to survive anymore.
Anti BDS laws in US states are so baffling to me. The idea that American citizens could be criminalized for choosing not to do business or invest in a foreign power would be laughable if so many current politicians weren't supporting it.
> The spread of anti-BDS laws in U.S. states is largely due to the lobbying of the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF), an umbrella group of Israel lobbies headquartered in Jerusalem that has received funding from the Israeli government.
They are just mad that that their claim to fame in the consumer packaged product industry is a company that puts bubbles in water and not something better like delicious ice cream. /s
In the "post-scarcity" world of 2021, tweets by influencers are Porsches and offhand comments by Zucks are a few lifetimes of earnings of the average underling.
Index funds are so convenient but Facebook is in the top 10 holdings of Fidelity’s 500. It makes me very uneasy. Is there an index fund that one can opt out of certain companies.
And reading through the companies on several of the main fidelity index funds, there’s too many fissile fuel and tobacco companies for my taste.
Sure, there are lots of industry and region specific funds. You can go for a small cap fund, a foreign fund, a developing markets fund, a real estate fund, a heavy industries fund, retail, food, whatever.
I for one can't wait for people to start having AR-enabled QAnon propaganda beamed directly into their homes!
Every time Facebook has a press conference to the tune of "what if we were even more immersive" it strikes me as incredibly tone deaf given how many problems they engender already just with a regular web app.
My fake FB account just shows TikTok videos and left wing propaganda and its even paid post promotion. I don't know how the advertisers make money off of that.
ITS NOT META IF IT'S CLOSED. It's only a constellation of services.
Facebook is welcome to become whatever Zuckerverse it can be.
But they do not seem to have the play-well-with-others ability to encompass multiple different universes of possibility. They will remain distinctly within their own singular sphere, best I can tell.
Can't say enough how much I despise the term 'metaverse', mainly because it can mean pretty much whatever the speaker wants it to mean, and it's usually used to hype with obscurity (i.e. it sounds cool but nobody really knows what it means), as opposed to clarifying with specifics of what something actually does.
>>> "“I think [it] is probably going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it”, Mr Zuckerberg also said. One of the benefits of this ecosystem would be that, “if you go back 20 or 30 years, a lot of people’s individual opportunities and experience was dictated by their physical proximity”, and that easy movement through a virtual space could avoid such barriers."
He seems to be saying they're getting (more) into the Black Mirror game.
First was Facebook Spaces. Opened 2017, closed 2019. This was a VR world. Not a very good one. It was mostly a 3D approach to a desktop.[1] You could hand other people flat pictures. Sharing! Total flop.
Second was Facebook Horizon. Opened 2020, still running, but not getting much attention. It's a 3D cartoon level VR world. Works OK, not very interesting or pretty. Big emphasis on "safety", which means no sex. Avatars have no legs; nothing below the waistline. Plus there's a panic button which puts you in a "personal safe zone", where you're in a bubble until Security gets there to rescue you from whomever is annoying you. While it's still running, Facebook doesn't mention Horizon any more.
Zuckerberg's vision is probably more like that video I've linked before, "Hypereality". The real world, with overlays from augmented reality. Overlays of more ads.
[1] https://youtu.be/_kGRpSd4vnc
[2] https://youtu.be/Uf_9J_EdzZw
[3] https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs