The main problem with Metaverse is that it it's an amusement park without any rides.
Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides. A Mandalorian spin-off series of interactive VR episodes that can be experienced with a group of friends? A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. Nobody's going to buy headsets to make a goofy looking avatar and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg in a Second Life remake. Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
The management of that rideless amusement park is also a little concerning. I'd love to see VR finally go mainstream, but I'd prefer it if pretty much anyone other than Meta were behind the platform that catches on first.
A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that.
There's a lot of VR content out there, and some of it is excellent, and some of it ties in to popular franchises (PS5 VR has a Star Wars game), and occasionally it's both (Halflife: Alyx for example) . None of it is enough to drive VR to be mainstream entertainment.
IMO the hardware simply isn't good enough for the mass market yet.
* Motion sickness is still a really big problem
* If you're short-sighted and wear glasses, then the picture will be blurry for you. The original PSVR worked around the issue by pushing the lends out so you could comfortably wear glasses and the headset, but none of the modern headsets afaik include this affordance. Wearing contacts isn't an option for a lot of people.
* Way too expensive. I can afford one pretty easily, but most people can't. For roughly the same price as a Quest you can get an iPhone SE which is going to offer significantly more value to the average person
* They're too heavy! People complain about a 240g iPhone being too heavy in the hand. The Quest is 503g on your head, and this headset in particular doesn't distribute weight very well. PSVR is slightly heavier, but is at least slightly more comfortable than the Quest due to its weight distribution.
I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
I really enjoyed using my friend's VR headset to slowly play through Half-Life: Alyx. I could manage about one level at a time before needing to take the headset off and take a break, because of motion sickness + how uncomfortable the whole thing was. I think there's still a lot of R&D to do before headsets are really in a position where regular people start buying them up en masse.
>IMO the hardware simply isn't good enough for the mass market yet.
>I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
Forgive my ignorance, this is a genuine question.
Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse? I see this massive push from the tech industry, a lot of public disinterest, and companies are still insisting that we want this. Do we have public polls that confirm people do crave the metaverse to the extent that tech wants us to? What is making them so confident beyond just hope?
1) People’s tastes vary. But millions of units have sold so people are open to it.
2) My non-techy 60+ year old aunt tried my Quest and kept raving about it and bought one.
3) It has potential to be more immersive. Having messed around with Quest, there are demos of things that are step functions of experience beyond what you get with a TV experience: the eye opener for me was front row seat in a small venue with your favorite band, up close and personal. When the video+3d resolution get better, it will get way more compelling.
Entertainment is all about feelings. An immersive experience provides even more ability for evoking them. People do seem to value more-immersive where possible if you look at the history of TV+movies… if the distractions can be eliminated.
But if the packaging tells you not to let people under 13 years to use it (because their eyesight is still developing?) (and I love the honesty), it’s fair to say the tech isn’t fully there and you aren’t going to capture the next generation of kids with spare time on their hands, among many other factors.
There is also not a lot of free compelling content on Quest unlike the internet; rather they are very geared towards selling you $20 apps in their store. I respect the need to monetize but there is also a fair bit of learning still needed on marketing and business model side for both the platform and apps to drive me to keep opening the wallet. I felt like I explored most of the free content and apps in under 10 hours. Value for money just wasn’t there for me.
I did feel like the tech was “good enough” that this tech would get there eventually. That is a key threshold to cross and imho has been crossed. But I am also reminded of my old (pre-iPhone-eta) WindowsCE mobile phone with stylus and web browser in my pocket. There was value there… but it was also greatly mitigated by being cumbersome in various ways.
> 1) People’s tastes vary. But millions of units have sold so people are open to it.
Is this an indication that people want the Metaverse, specifically, or are open to VR in general?
I am not much of a gamer, and probably the last person who would ever be interested in a VR headset. But I can see the appeal of VR games. I can't, for the life of me, see the appeal of "the Metaverse."
I see "the metaverse" as the liminal space between actual VR apps (games, business, whatever). If you're between rounds of a VR game you don't want to remove the helmet while waiting and chatting so you'll hang out in a VR-enabled lobby where you see each other in your in-game outfits. Eventually enough games will have VR lobbies that you'll hang out with people in other games' outfits as you all wait for your game to start.
Ditto business. If you're in VR because you're reviewing architectural renderings or whatever, you'll probably keep the helmet on for a few minutes between meetings and as such, seeing your coworkers come out of other virtual meeting rooms and hang around at a virtual water cooler gives you a bit of that hallway conversation that you're now missing, and provides a continuity of experience.
None of this is where the money is though, at least not now. You're still playing a game, or using business software, and that's what you pay for - not the lobby. That's why, I think, Meta and stuff seems so silly. They seem to expect that you're going to want to use it for its own sake, as opposed to it being equivalent to the Facebook UI - something you use to get the real value, not the value itself.
This is also a great question. Beyond that, of the millions of units sold, I'd be curious to know how many of those are upgrades from the same early adopters vs first-time buyers. Also, what has the trajectory of new user adoption looked like?
> Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?
To answer that, we first need a good answer to the question: "What the hell is the 'Metaverse' supposed to be?"
Because as long as that isn't answered, the question reads: "Do people, on the whole, even want another corporate buzzword?", and I think we all know the answer to that one.
People don't want the metaverse for themselves, but Meta's customers have never been its users.
What people (the customers) want is a dashboard that lets them dispatch memes to other people (the users). Meta already sells that. But they want those memes to affect the users' behavior, and Meta is betting that they can turn a stream of user biometrics (collected by the headset) into a way to better tune the meme-delivery-to-desired-behavior pipeline.
Or at least that's what they've convinced the decision makers. It's probably a long way off from working and instead that narrative is just being used to justify building something sci-fi.
> Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?
My take?
As a general question, no, they don't. And they won't.
However, they may want it for niche applications. Games would be the big one, but also perhaps certain industrial applications and other business functions. Although the business uses are probably better served with just AR instead of a whole "metaverse" (depending on your definition of "metaverse").
Which brings up the definitional problem. We have the metaverse and people love it -- we just call it the internet. So I'm assuming that when people say "metaverse", what they really mean is "VR worlds".
0% interest rates make companies throw money at useless products looking for returns because there wasn't any better use for the money. It's been like that for 5+ years, but this whole NFT/Bitcoin/Metaverse/AI meme series is the peak.
Here's to hoping that these higher interest rates make companies make actually useful and profitable products instead of a bunch of meme products.
I do anyway. I find the entire concept oddly compelling. To fabricate a completely immersive online world is just fascinating to me. I would love to see this work someday.
Unfortunately, today I can't even use VR for more than a few minutes before I'm ready to vomit and my eyes feel like they're being pulled out of my head.
Hmm I could be wrong about this. My personal experience with the Index was that glasses were really uncomfortable, and I've heard from friends that they've had issues with other headsets. Maybe we all have large glasses? :)
I didn't know about the lens inserts. Those are cool and definitely fix the issue if people can find them.
Just another datapoint - I've never had issues with glasses either.
My larger reading glasses tend to come off when I remove the headset because they touch foam padding but my regular glasses fit in every headset I've tried (other than Magic Leap's stupid "goggles" form factor - the Vive Elite XR however is fine).
Also I’ve used the Oculus 2 for many hours and never had issues wearing glasses or getting motion sick. Maybe that was your VR device or a personal thing?
> Also I’ve used the Oculus 2 for many hours and never had issues wearing glasses or getting motion sick. Maybe that was your VR device or a personal thing?
Same thing with the Index.
The only issues I had, despite wearing glasses, were:
- Nearly going through a glass door while trying to take cover, and ending up in the hallway.
- The cable. Too short. Easy to tangle. Easy to trip over.
- Wondering why I suddenly had arms and where my awesome gloves had gone whenever I looked at my hands in the half-hour following any long session in Alyx.
The motion sickness thing is a person-by-person thing, but it’s a significant percentage of folks who experience it. Enough that it would probably prevent VR from becoming anywhere near as widespread as TV or smartphones, unless it can be solved for.
Any research on how many people experience it? I’m not convinced it’s as wide spread as people say. Usually the people on HN who always say this (usually in doomer VR will never work posts) never seem to be people who have spent much time using VR, and either relay hearsay or only played around with VR once with some old device for a short period. It takes time to get used to VR and not all devices/content are the same.
I’d be surprised if it was more than 5-15% of people after long term exposure and across a wide variety of content… which would be a problem yes but hardly a market killer and the tech is always getting better.
The only world vr would work the way meta wanted is a world where everyone social distances forever. There's a slight chance if it's a hyperrealistic environment where you can actually see people in the eyes. No one will replace akwardly looking at the ground as everyone directs the attention to you with a bobbling 3D avatar as their main interaction with other people.
For MOST people, the motion sickness is caused by your real world motion not matching the motion your eyes see. As a result, games that don't make you use the controller to move around (Beat Saber, Space Pirate Trainer, Pokerstars VR, and more) don't usually make people sick.
But games where you move through the in-game world without moving in the real world (Any racing or flying game, any game where you make your character walk using the controllers) are nearly guaranteed to cause sickness. Many games that require your character to walk around get away with this by using teleportation.
This is why I've always said that putting someone into a racing game or roller coaster simulator or something like that as their first VR experience is doing a major disservice to VR adoption.
Ok, fair enough. I'm imagining a room with all 6 sides covered in OLED panels. The hard part is to implement binocular vision. Shutter glasses could work I suppose, maybe even allow multiple people to use it. Refresh rate 2*n*120 Hz, where n is the number of people in the holodeck.
I think there is also a different issue - in a time where some people seem to be keenly aware of how much time they spend looking at screens and are making efforts to reduce that, the Metaverse (and any VR, really) wants to dial that up even more, instead consuming your full attention when using it
It doesn't matter how good the VR output is if I can't recline in my comfy chair with a VR helmet on and then run around a fantasy world fighting monsters and throwing fireballs while lying motionless in the real world.
That's the VR future science fiction has promised.
3D TV's didn't catch on, I think part of the issue is to get over the early adopters into mainstream there is the hurdle of wearing something over your eyes for hours at a time. The vast majority of people (aka mainstream) don't enjoy it. If people don't enjoy simple lightweight 3D glasses, they aren't going to enjoy the VR form factors out there.
I'm choosing the word enjoy because its not something like a car dashboard being touchscreen where people deal with it, this is entertainment and hobbies. If people don't enjoy it, they'll go do something else. VR will have niche use cases for sure and there will be some people that enjoy it but its not going to be mainstream.
I really like that analogy "amusement park without any rides". I really do think Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed.
But back to your analogye, it applies particularly well here because Disney are a master of delivering experiences and do exactly that through every possible medium. So if one sees Disney walking away from the Metaverse, that's not something I would interpret lightly - despite the rounds of firing being interpreted as a cost saving measure, it's just 50 staff members and not all of them are leaving the company. Disney aren't short of cash, so if they saw a future in the Metaverse they'd be there for defensive reasons alone.
Rather I think Disney realise that their own VR-initiatives will stand on their own, and their involvement would be propping up 3rd party platforms rather than yielding a benefit from them.
I think Meta are hoping that the Metaverse would emulate the Smartphone/Soft-store model, where developers would do the heavy lifting for the platform, but the crucial difference here is that a Smartphone is useful before even loading a single piece of 3rd party software. Everyone already had a phone when smartphones became a thing - but right now no one is walking around with a VR headset, or anything even vaguely approximating that.
> Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed.
No, this was Mark's personal Quest for the Next Big Thing. No one else in the company is delusional enough to believe it will go anywhere, they're just getting a fat paycheck.
VR going mainstream is difficult until they can get people to take anti-nausea meds with them.
The biology of humans works against VR in a lot of ways, and most people don't like the idea of taking anti-nausea pill just to experience VR.
(I take anti-nausea pills when I do VR, because VR is absolutely mindblowing)
I don't get nausea, but even without that I hate the experience of actually wearing the things. I find I get a lot of eye strain that prevents me from playing long sessions, the weight/bulk is uncomfortable, and it can get quite hot wearing a headset for any length of time. I think almost everybody will find VR goggles uncomfortable in SOME way.
These things are fun to mess around with, but I think very few people will ever want to wear goggles like this for more than an hour or so at a time, which inherently limits their appeal and potential applications. My widescreen monitor has none of these issues and it's plenty "good enough" for most games.
I think you are referring to old VR experience, the tech is pretty mature now, latency is super low, tracking is good, on pretty much any model. I play a lot of VR games and never get sick. The only one where I got a little dizzy was with 6dof FPS, which isn't really due to VR specifically.
Although it is true some people get sick easily in VR, those people tend to also have trouble with car sickness and sea sickness. I suppose you can say the same about cars and VR for that group.
I'm a woman, apparently women have a much lower tolerance for VR. Some people theorize its due to avoiding damage to the child during pregnancy.
So even on my very high end setup (Index 120hz,4090 rtx), I still get nausea.
It also takes a while for people to get their VR legs, and I don't have time for using VR very day, it's more like once a month.
I'm sorry to hear that. There are definitely differences in tolerance between people.
However I don't think this is specific to the tech any more, just the experience, similar to flying a plane or being on a boat. But It used to be that everyone would get nauseous due to immaturity of the technology as the parent comment was implying, and that's no longer true.
I'd say the main problem is human beings are not mature enough to be trusted with such a service, it will be a rape and pillage campaign for all your data and all your interests and all your imagination. We create predator services and pretend they are 'just services', burning the end-user's trust for any similar "services" after they sour from the treatment of the first one they tried. We have a serious maturity problem in the human species, and it is dragging all our progress down and backwards.
> A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that
But probably a lot less than would watch a Mandalorian animated or real life spin-off TV series - and the VR version costs a lot more to create.
A lot of companies (Disney, Magic Leap etc) have spent a fortune trying to make the killer VR content but have failed. Apart from the sports/exercise apps (probably not enough to support the FB metaverse) are there any that would make people purchase a headset for?
My kids and I would have been pretty happy with just access to non-game elements. They must have already made loads of 3rd spaces and models - just being able to hang out and explore them would be brilliant.
Then if they started to layer gaming on top of that... my kids would be pestering me even more than they already are for a vr set-up.
It seems to me that everything in VR almost have to be fan-made or at least a-financial passion project, or else nothing works. Meta did not end up with that creepyverse by cutting costs, they ended up with it by throwing gold bullions at walls.
There's no way Disney had not made internal studies, the problem must have been that they can't set up a management and/or production model they like && that works for VR.
The only explanation I have for this is that to succeed in vr you need to do a lot of UX innovations. And innovation doesn't work well in most corporate environments.
It is an amusement park without rides operated by an entity who most people actively distrust.
Facebook/Meta IMO has poisoned the whole social media space to a degree, where the expectation I have for social media platforms in general has become one of "this is getting worse over time". Instagram now sucks more than it sucked before Facebook bought it. Facebook now sucks more than Facebook 15 years ago. Reddit now... You get the point. They could have done nothing except maintenance and neutral technical upkeep and the result would have been better than what we have today. And the only reason why we don't have that better thing is profits (or the lack thereof in the old platforms).
This tells me that capitalism is really bad at organizing social platforms (not that this surprises me).
I do not really think that is true. There is more than 2 billion active users on WhatsApp which is owned by Meta. Many people reading hackernews distrust them, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the general population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
There was also Secrets of the Empire[1], but AFAIK The Void no longer exists. It's too bad - the haptic/physical-props-and-environment aspect worked really well IMO.
Sounds like a video game to me, something that Disney has weirdly struggled with, having tried on several times to get into video games big time, only to shy away at the huge expense and challenge.
At the moment they've circled back to merely licensing out their IPs to other publishers.
Disney should get more into video games, and VR is great for video games.
VR for "metaverse" whatever it is that is. Not so sure!
The last time I went to Universal in LA, all the rides had a VR component to them, the real-life amusement parks are turning to VR + motion. Some of these were jiggly seats, others had flying platforms, and others pulled you in a train through VR scenes. (The ride that people liked the least was minions, which just had tipping and shaking seats, but the 3D made people sick.)
> Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
This is the refrain of Disney's theme park marketing, but I disagree. It's the fact that people want to say they were there. It's 100% the brand and nothing more. Marketing doesn't have to be, and often isn't, rational.
This is at the absolute core of why theme park experiences sell but VR does not. Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. Until the price of VR comes down to absolute rock bottom prices, there will not be acceptance of "VR experiences" and even so it's still a gamble whether anyone cares enough to buy that to experience on a whim frequently vs plan a vacation around it... I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
I am going to sorta disagree. I see your point and I am sure there is some of that. But hands down Disney parks are some of the best parks I have been to. With universal being a very close second. I am also probably never going back (price ratio is wrong and getting worse).
In this case a VR exp would have to feel like going to a park. However, there is something that is missing (or many somethings). You hanging with your friends and family. Now they could also all go get headsets and you hang together. But that seems oddly not the same. Buying that overpriced popcorn and basically 'fair food' is also part of it. Disney would have the best shot at making a park into a game. As most of their rides are 'dark rides'. Basically trains going thru experiences. A fixed park is little more than a carnival but in a fixed location and cleaned up nicely with theming. VR strips out the carnival aspects and is only theming. That strips out part of what you are going for.
I have also been to parks all by myself. That is what wearing a VR headset would feel like. It is not a good experience. You could say 'oh all your friends could get headsets too'. True but at that point you are now looking at similar costs as just going to the parks.
Oh man, this is not correct. As a dad who just went back to Disney after not having gone since I was 11 years old... We made fun of, "the brand" the entire time. All our friends would look down on us for handing over our hard earned money to a pretty gross fascist organization like Disney. We posted pictures, but only of our experiences.
For myself (a sample size of 1) it is all about the magical experiences and memories my child gets from experiencing a fantasy world of fun rides and adventure.
My son cried tears of joy after getting off the Cars ride. His childhood imaginary friends were brought to life in such a compelling, thrilling, nostalgic way that he was brought to tears at 15.
He got to build a droid and he went outside and used it to entertain and enthrall another smaller child for 45 minutes.
He got to live, for a day, in an immersive and joyous world he never imagined he could see and touch and be a part of.
Its not irony. I bought the magic DESPITE a poisoned brand.
Not to be pedantic, but even with a personal VR suite, it's still virtual.
A flight sim, regardless of how sophisticated, is still always going to be of a lesser experience than real flying unless you can actually die in the sim.
I'm not suggesting that an ideal flight sim should kill the player if they crash, but rather suggesting that, as an example, a pilot behind the controls of a real plane that has to make a series of instantaneous decisions when a dangerous situation comes up like engine failure will have been "battle tested" in a very real way where his/her life was literally on the line.
Of course not having to risk your life is also a big advantage of virtual as well.
The whole metaverse thing has felt like a buzzword-without-meaning that was never going to live up to the hype (at least in any meaningful good way), but still sucks for the people losing the jobs.
The metaverse is the ultimate, final instance of the "... but on a computer!" fallacy [1], even moreso than the "virtual worlds" that prompted me to originally write that article. It's reality... but on a computer!
We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time.
Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits.
The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse".
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)
It may finally take off if/when VR is just another feature of portable, broadly popular AR glasses.
Until then, it loses for anything but niche applications, because it's doomed by the popularity of the smartphone. Nobody wants a social network (or whatever) that can't be reached from their smartphone, or that sucks to use on there, which means nobody wants VR as the primary interface to anything, making it rather pointless.
The whole market is spinning its wheels until or unless someone finally manages to get normal people excited about AR glasses, which means some serious hardware advancements. Whatever's the "next big thing" has to be as portable and usable-everywhere as smartphones, or it's doomed. The Web boom among normal folks wasn't because they started sitting at desktop computers way, way more, but because computers got ultra-portable and cellular Internet got cheap enough to actually use. They're not going to clamber to join anything that they can't comfortably and non-dorkily use at a coffee shop or in line at the grocery store or while sitting on the couch watching Netflix or what have you.
I remember on my first day teleporting into a random location around some mansion, and an expensive-looking female avatar yelled at me how dare I spawn at a private property. Later I ran through some bars and shops and never visited this swamp again.
I agree, and one can say “but videogames” however that doesn’t seem to be what any of this is reaching for. People play “realistic” videogames, which has an element of reality in creating a 3D world, but it tries to tell a story that one can escape into away from our everyday lives. Instead the point for the Zuckerberg metaverse is in mirroring reality but with even more control given to the corporate machine to feed you ads and convince you to buy more things. Who wants a hyperreality built by advertisers? That sounds like hell.
It reminds me of the brief fad when some folks really thought VRML or 3D Java or Flash interfaces to websites was going to be The Future not just for games or art project, but general web navigation. Turned out to suck for nearly everything, total dead-end.
Flash did end up influencing the animations of CSS. I'm not sure about the other technologies you mentioned, but I think the delineation here may be that the idea was the future, not the tech.
No, I don't mean 3D animated elements, I mean 3D interfaces.
Think like if you went to Amazon's website and had to navigate product categories by moving around in an FPS-like interface. This was a thing for a while—it never went big, but there was real excitement around it and some effort was put into it, only to find that (obviously) it sucks for anything but games (duh) and maybe art projects of some kinds.
What is fascinating about that there is just absolutely nothing good there. It isn't a case of a decaying thing, or a thing that contained a scam. The entire thing is nothing, rotten, worse than any videogame. It's really quite amazing.
It would be not notable at all except, there is a huge amount of money being passed around in it in order to achieve basically nothing.
The dreams about the metaverse discussed at the beginning are also just wild and bizarre. It seems to me that a lot of tech people and investor types are just bored and letting their imaginations run wild. AI taking over the world, living fully inside the metaverse, every object in the world being inside the metaverse to the point where the metaverse is considered more accurate than reality etc. They may as well be talking about time travel or faster than light travel. In reality we have...a worse version of second life
It's a shame that decentraland got millions to create a cold empty place , while open source 3d worlds like opensimulator which have a few thousand enthusiastic users, even willing to pay for their digital lives, remain completely unfunded and abandoned
Also watched it yesterday and I really can just summarise the video like this:
Massive crypto scam by people who are now bound to overhype the whole thing. Regular folks fall for it because they buy into the vision and have to believe otherwise everything falls apart. Companies fall for it because FOMO. Incredibly cultish.
The video is good but I don’t think it is worth the watch unless you have morbid curiosity about that particular project, or you want some crypto related cathartic release. I don’t feel better knowing the gory details of how terrible everyone and everything is in this circle.
If you're like me, it's probably because of the "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs"[1] video he did. I think it might be the only long YouTube video I watched more than once.
That's very relevant: some people here are discussing the viability of VR and/or online games - these already exist, and are not commonly thought of as the meta verse. You don't need the meta verse to create a game!
The metaverse is businesses pushing for a platform which brings nothing of value, just for them to extract rent from those using it.
Facebook's approach to the Metaverse is a classic example of building based on "what's in it for us", not "what's in it for them?"
Thinking "what's in it for us" leads you to build a universe that you get to lord over. Putting interesting things that people want in it is someone else's problem.
Thinking "what's in it for them" leads you to build a single interesting thing people want. Then you expand it into a universe from there.
I think Zuckerberg assumed that what's in it for the user would be the same as it's always been at Facebook - socialize with your family and friends.
But why would I expect VR to be better than a Zoom call when Zoom calls with family and friends are already so wonky? Do I want to endure the same weird audio/video connectivity crap, only made even more uncanny by being immersed in it? Seems more honest to just keep it on a screen.
It wouldve been cool if they weren't so bloated/incompetent. The glorified skype usecase was always lame to me.
The potential for workflow efficiency (you can effectively have as many monitors as you want with the profile of a VR headset, remote work is even more portable than a laptop, looking at another desktop can be just as intuitive as another monitor on your own, more immersive and tune-able environment to focus on work) & display of data in 3d that is otherwise too unnavigable in 2D were really promising. Maybe we'll get there in another 10 years when the VR tech cycle completes its orbit again.
I havent really tried to use monitors in VR, but is it possible to read small text on what would be a monitor possible? With my pure guess, I imagine the resolution makes it difficult to read unless the monitor is massive in the world, which im not sure is something I would enjoy.
Not saying its something that couldn't be improved, id just be interested in hearing from someone that has tried it
The monitor can be any size you want it to be. Thats the best part, it's entirely virtual and customizable. It's really not much different than a physical one except for the hardware buttons and individual brightness/contrast settings.
But it's not really about the size, it's about the resolution and image quality. You are rendering a monitor inside another monitor, and you simply can't "display" an IPS 4K 144hz monitor through a LCD FHD 50hz one.
Fair point, though I wouldn't draw such a direct equivalent since VR is positional. What is the resolution x360degrees?
I didn't experience any clarity issues personally but yeah the resolutions aren't always as high (which is why abandoning it at this stage is a shame) and refresh rate certainly isn't high enough.
It's worse, why would I expect VR to be better than facebook video. I think facebook video is worse than zoom, to the point that internal employees will use zoom for meeting sometimes.
I feel like they should have built the world's best group video/audio product in 2 months, made it free, and used that momentum for metaverse
Also completely missing the part of the population who likes async communication with friends and family via any sort of messenger or text, and deliberately not anything interactive like video. But ok, we might be a minority.
Went in expecting to see at least a 1000 employees laid off.. but 50? Can that even be called a 'Division'? Is that Division on par with other divisions Disney runs, like Disney Studios (Marvel Studios, Disney, Pixar...), Streaming (Disney+, ESPN+) or the Theme Park division?
I don't think Disney had any metaverse building ambitions. This "metaverse" team was probably working on designing NFTs and digital "assets" for any metaverse that emerges.
This is an uninformed take based on recollections of what they've released and my understanding of Disney's competencies.
Somebody watching closely will hopefully have more insight.
Which sounds like it could be why it isn't a "division" any more. VR feels like an all-or-nothing play where Disney throwing a bunch of Disney IP, +AAA quality worlds, PR & marketing dollars and carefully-selected hardware partnerships could mainstream VR as family friendly entertainment, whereas making assets for other people's open worlds participated in by a niche group of adult men seems like the sort of thing that's more likely to lead to reputation damage than significant revenue streams
My guess from having worked in close proximity to the executives involved is that it was more of a skunkworks/prototyping group, possibly partnering with ILMxLab, Pixar, Disney Animation, and the streaming group. While Disney is not really a tech company, there are pockets of high end expertise which I think are relevant to the loosely defined “metaverse.”
Mike White, the exec leading the group, reported into Kareem Daniel, who was central to Chapek’s vision of Disney. So it was a significant role. Mind you, Daniel was fired about five seconds after Iger returned.
Terminology varies widely between companies but terms like "division" are usually based on position in the org chart rather than size. It looks like the metaverse division was organized under Mike White, whose title appears to have been "SVP of next-generation storytelling." It's common for a group that reports at the SVP level to be called a division, even if its small. The higher up in the org chart you find a group, the more important it probably is to the strategic focus of the company, even if it's small.
That not how the word "division" works when talking about business, Instagram was made of 10 people when it already had billions of users and if Disney or anyone else had bought them it would certainly be a "division" given that their tasks are a separate entity from their rest of the org.
When I onboarded at IBM, during legal and compliance training they said “the easiest way to get promoted to executive at IBM is to do something wrong, and get quoted in the press about it”. The idea being: the media will refer to anyone who works for a company as an ‘executive’ regardless of how accurate that term is to their actual role.
Similarly, in news reporting, every department is a ‘division’.
It was one of Bob Chapek's visions, so as expected was extremely half arsed.
He had very little concept of what Disney should be doing so just thew out a bunch of ideas with very little budget and expected them to work, whilst also penny pinching beyond belief.
VR, meta verse always seemed overhyped to me. Combine real time 3D model generated from MetaHuman + AR + ChatGPT + voice and you have a business that will dwarf Apple. I bet people would easily pay 100/month for AR companion based on their celeb crush or whatever other AR companion they crave.
Seriously, anyone with an interest in AR/VR and even a passing tolerance for anime ought to give Dennou Coil a chance. For those curious, it's better than just safe for work, it's a family friendly series that you could watch with your kids (or your parents).
With both series written and directed by Mitsuo Iso, who also contributed to storyboards, key animation, and digital effects. Iso had a remarkable career and notable animation style even well before Dennou Coil. It's only unfortunate that there's such massive gap between productions of his own original works.
My biggest issue has always been that users are really damn good at immersing themselves using just a screen and a controller, and that's about a hundred times more convenient than any VR system.
> users are really damn good at immersing themselves using just a screen and a controller
Not only that, but VR/AR doesn't solve any incremental immersion blockers. My brain is very good at 'not looking away from the screen,' it's awful at overriding my inner ear balance, temperature sense, smell sense, circadian rhythm, etc.
Right. When a twenty year old Gameboy advance game can make someone let out a blood-curdling scream, how are you supposed to convince them that now they need strap something to their head and hands?
VR is absolutely breathtaking at transporting you. Oculus Welcome with its cosy camper van and robot was almost a religious experience for me. But VR doesn't make video games one iota more fun to play. At least not enough to justify the expense and inconvenience. Especially since the price of admission seems to be going up.
The only game I’ve played on VR that is worth standing for two hours is Population One, and then only when you have a good squad that will talk and strategize.
I don’t know what it is exactly about that game, but it’s really the only good VR game (and it’s great!)
that limits you to things you can do while watching the screen. Wanna to actually go rollerblading with Margot Robbie or have Tony Hawk teach you to do tricks? or ...
> Wanna to actually go rollerblading with Margot Robbie or have Tony Hawk teach you to do tricks?
Is anyone expecting this as a realistic possibility? As AR glasses are today they would need to become much more powerful while also much smaller. (With the current glasses it feels one might snap their neck in a rollerblading tumble very easily just because of the added weight and lever arm on the head.)
Sure but that limits the applications. Want to have Gordon Ramsey to advise you while you are cooking? Or have r2d2 roaming your house? or play poker at your actual house with lock stock and two smoking barrels characters? and so on ...
That would be fucking wild. Gordan Ramsey standing next to you treating you like shit while you're trying to cook. Screaming at you like on the show and making jokes along the way
good then you don't use it. I personally would find talking to say Richard Feynman seating in my living room way more engaging for learning physics than some boring prof in a huge lecture hall.
Sure, and having Niccolo Paganini playing violin in your personal concert hall would be better than going to a random orchestra.
But that is not what you'd be getting. You can very well listen to Feynman's pre-recorded lectures on YouTube today, and that's the best than can be done. Listening to the same clip being played while some image of him is projected on your glasses to make it look like he's in your living room will not improve the experience.
Have you used chatGPT 4 much? I'd try it before coming to this conclusion. And yes you can train a model for Feynman's voice and movements based on video's that we have.
You seem be be claiming that having a conversation with GPT-4 would be as enlightening as having a conversation with Richard Feynman, and that the only missing piece is AR good enough to replay it in your living room instead of on a screen. I promise you, you are much more confident in GPT-4's abilities if you really think thia than it's most adoring creator.
I'm a physicist and would be beyond thrilled to talk with Richard Feynman in my living room, it feels like VR only solves the "in my living room" part of the equation. I would fully appreciate just having a video call with Prof. Feynman (that's how I speak to most living physicists I know). Is this tech actually out there?
The closest I've seen is tech that would put his face and voice over the answers that come from chat GPT. Again, with no respect to the late professor, but his appearance is again the least interesting part "talk with Rchiard Feynman" is his appearance and voice. If I could get his help on some of my research, I wouldn't care if he looked like a blob fish and had the voice of Foghorn Leghorn. On the other hand, if I'm just getting ChatGPT answers, then there's no reason not to just make it look like the Crypt Keeper.
> Want to have Gordon Ramsey to advise you while you are cooking?
We got that way back when god invented the book. Or I could prop my phone up against the back of the counter and have a little youtube in my field of view.
To do those things you're already going to have to make VR an order of magnitude more convenient than it currently is, which means it's not relevant to my comment.
The immersive VR rides that they are coming up with at the amusement parks are pretty good. The Avatar Dragon ride, Rise of the Resistance, etc...Universal Studios is going in this direction more aggressively, however it seems (just check out the new Mario ride).
I think you're confusing rides, Flight of Passage (Avatar) to the best of my knowledge is not VR (maybe traditional 3D glasses), Rise is definitely not VR (not even 3D) and Mario Kart is AR with a headset overlaying graphics over physical sets. None of them are VR in the traditional sense of the word.
The biggest test of VR at theme parks in the US came with various Six Flags around the country strapping VR goggles (Samsung IIRC) on some of their coasters and drop towers. They're pretty widely regarded as failures. I got to try two of them and they definitely were not a plus to the ride experience, especially on a drop tower where the view from the top is half the fun.
They are immersive, not using glasses, but projected environments and some kind of movement device being ridden. Why not just call it more expensive VR without headgear at that point?
The Mario kart ride is probably the most disappointing I’ve ridden in my life. It’s just a slow roller coaster with an overlay of other karts using HoloLens.
The point of useful technology is to make things more convenient. This is less convienient than typing queries on a keyboard, even if there were no HMD involved.
I'm now imagining a "Talk with your AI-powered pets" interface that is a pseudo-ChatGPT style interface that just responds to everything you say with "woof" or "miaow" :D
(I'm surprised that afaik nobody has really cracked the "Tamagotchi" pet care formula on smartphones, which seemed ideally suited to a visually and sonically enhanced version of the same basic ritual)
I think part of the problem of doing it on a smartphone is that software-only breaks the illusion in a way that makes it necessary to go further to counter it. I think people find it harder to connect to something they see as "just software" without any embodiment to the point that we connect more easily to something "dumber" if it's embodied in some way or other or we can imagine it to be.
For that reason, I suspect that to do it with a smartphone, you'd do better with a chatbot talking to users via e.g. Whatsapp or another messenger than a custom app, because people associate messengers with real people rather than a "game".
Pretty sure people had the exact reaction when online dating came out thinking you must be some social outcast. Or when some people chose to WFH way before it became remotely normal and were branded antisocial for choosing to not be in the office with the colleagues.
Why be such a hater? I don't get it.
Just because some people are into different things than you or what society deems 'normal' doesn't make them weirdoes.
i do think having a relationship with an ai is pretty weird, but i can kind of understand it - a meme that has been around a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru . and it doesn't mean i hate people who want to do this.
>i do think having a relationship with an ai is pretty weird
Mate, have you seen how much money onlyfans girls are raking in from just talking to simps or other lonely and desperate men online? Can be as high as millions USD per month. And they don't even do any explicit nudity for their money, they just send ludes and texts. And the texts are usually written by some people the girl hired since she can't reply to all of them. Those guys are getting taken to the cleaners.
Seems like a niche that could be filled via an AI for cheaper. ChatGPT-3 had some awesome humor before it got lobotomized to be a mundane question answering drone. Could probably replace some standup comedians too.
Or lonely or bored. Want a cyberpunk cyborg dog that can speak in a voice of darth vader? Want Cara Delevingne to be your english lang tutor? Want to pair program with Linus Torvalds? Want Neytiri from Avatar to be your personal Yoga instructor?
No but I heard Alexa had proved useful for elderly loneliness and I imagine this tech will improve there - I agree I don’t see them sat in an Oculus at a gaming rig lol
I find it hard to believe that you can not come up with a single AR scenario that will either make learning process, work process or entertainment option more fun.
For me, I think it's that I consume text much faster than e.g. video or someone talking, and it doesn't distract me.
I just want to be left alone when I want to focus and learn things. I love using ChatGPT to explore a subject now, though, because it's pure text and I am driving it, so I can totally see people who are more visual and social learners want something similar "packaged up" in an avatar.
isn't this about vr rather than ar? i can certainly think about situations where ar would be useful, though none have been demonstrated to be viable yet - rather the reverse when you think of things like google glass.
i don't think that, lovely though she is, i wan't cara to pop up in my glasses (which, because of bad eyesight, i wear all the time) and no, i do not think we have the technology, particularly batteries.
i will admit that if i could ask my glasses "where is the nearest atm?" and it then popped up an arrow pointing at it, i might pay for that. but that means stuffing a lot of hardware into the frames - about the equivalent of a high-end smartphone.
Forget Disney and Meta. Epic just shipped the metaverse. It's here. Now.
Epic just shipped the Unreal Engine editor as a plug-in for Fortnite. Most of the things you can do with Unreal Engine as a game developer are now available to Fortnite users. What's created doesn't have to look anything like Fortnite.
Pretty cool. Reminds me a bit of Cube 2: Sauerbraten, which had realtime collaborative editing, too. Pretty cool thing for the age it came out in, and it's open source.
I mean fortnite has had already had film festivals, and "concert" experiences you can experience with your friends. I've been through some, and its kinda fun.
They seem to be wanting to build the tools, to build that. They know its a tough road, and being resourced starved (compared to facebook) they're trying to do it a more "open" way with the other game engines participating (He mentions Godot, Unity in his talk), artists etc. Its part of Tim Sweeney's thing to break down walled gardens. Epic being privately held, sort of doesn't have to deal with shareholders...
Not really. Epic has Unreal Editor, is a game development company, and runs the
largest MMO. So they know what they're doing in that space. Facebook didn't.
Here's Matthew Ball VC's feature list for a metaverse.
* Be persistent.
Epic has that. That's a basic property of a metaverse.
* Be synchronous and live
Like any MMO, yes.
* Be without any cap to concurrent users
At 3.5 million concurrent users, they're #1 at scaling.
* Be a fully functioning economy – individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others.
They kind of have that, although it's mostly game objects.
* Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms
That's talked about, but not currently delivered.
* Offer unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content, and so on across each of these experiences – your Counter-Strike gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite
Technically, maybe. Operationally, no. They prohibit imports which violate intellectual property law. But you can create a mesh yourself and upload.
* Be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors...
They have that.
What makes it all work is that they can deliver this experience with the visual quality and responsiveness gamers expect. Facebook failed at that. So did Decentraland. Those looked like games from 1990.
Nobody even knew what the Metaverse was actually supposed to be, but once Facebook renamed itself to Meta every big company wanted to have their part of the Metaverse too. If Zuckerberg spends billions on it, it must be important after all.
It was quite ridiculous how everybody suddenly kept talking about Metaverse without there even being as much as a vague idea how it would look like. Even Facebook's own presentation on the Metaverse was devoid of vision and just kept repeating stuff that Playstation Home did 10 years ago or that Habitat did over 35(!) years ago. Avatars, customization, multiplayer and that was it. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not a Metaverse, that's just a regular old multiplayer social app of which we had numerous in the last few decades, both inside and outside of VR. There was no vision of how to evolve that beyond that, even the really obvious stuff was nowhere to be seen (online shopping in VR, anybody?).
Some companies tried to mix some crypto bullshit into it to make another Second Life happen, but even that's not new, LindenLabs already had their own VR game that failed with Sansar.
Metaverse was really hype about nothing, just Zuckerberg spending billions on something trying to stay relevant and everybody else wanting their piece of the cake too. Took them a while to realize that there never was any cake to begin with.
Meanwhile people that care about VR just hang around in VRChat or play VR games, without any of that Metaverse nonsense.
Zuckerberg is cornered. His company has bought too many upstarts who became ginormous; Instagram, WhatsApp. So regulatory-wise, if he ever tries that again he'll be stopped. The purchase of upstart social graphs was the whole Facebook strategy to stay relevant and display aggressive growth to justify the insane valuation.
Now without that ability, you need to demonstrate you can aggressively grow in newer, exciting markets. What underdeveloped technology markets with social media potential exist outside of this vague idea around VR? Can you name any?
The problem with the metaverse is not that Zuckerberg went in that direction, it's that he executed so poorly and so publicly that he's lost any sort of goodwill from that attempt at a new market. If he wasn't literally un-firable, he'd be have long lost his CEO position.
I'm excited by the idea, but repelled by Facebook's vision of it. An open-standards metaverse would be interesting, especially with the prospect of infinite AI-generated content.
Folding Ideas released an excellent video essay recently examining the concept of the metaverse and how it suffers from somewhat of a “No True Scotsman Problem” https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q
Afaik Meta is a founding member of The Metaverse Standards Forum: https://metaverse-standards.org/
Not sure how much of it is built into Horizon Worlds.
The problem is that Facebook and Instagram are "the old thing" and WhatsApp monetization ja hard without pushing users to Signal (or Apple iMessage) while kids spend their time on TikTok instead. Facebook needs to find the next thing after TikTok to pull future generations of users in. And from their view a new world offers tons of ways to monetize.
No end-users I asked over the years knew IG was an FB product. FB could have managed the same thing if building whatever the next big thing needed to happen again.
The wholesale rename of everything is necessary when you're trying to distance yourself from a poisoned past. It's not just about end-users, it's about recruiting and retaining talented employees. The sooner they can make folks disassociate the entire operation from the bad FB name the better. Many engineers aren't interested in telling their friends/family they work for FB, that awful company that enabled the CA scandal etc. Now they'd be able to say they work for Meta, that VR company.
I’ve looked at the few things out there like decentraland and they’re hilariously bad. Like I can’t tell if they’re being serious. Even Metas offerings are extremely amateurish and unimpressive after who knows how many billions. The headset is impressive but not ready for the general public for some years
VRChat exists, and a lot of companies(Meta included) are excited, to be able to make their own fan-made continuations; which are so massive in number it is collectively called the Metaverse.
I’ve seen random people on the train talking about ChatGPT. Even groups of middle aged women talking about going to a cafe and suddenly bringing up chatgpt and nobody was confused by the topic. Old people who’ve never mentioned tech to me out of nowhere talked about chatgpt.
ChatGPT doesn’t require “getting”. It just responds in a freakishly human way by standards that have existed up to now.
But literally nobody “intuitively gets” metaverse. It just looks like a crappy Wii edition of Second Life, but proponents (Facebook staff) always seem to say “no dude it’s not like that it all it’s like dude you gotta listen it’s going to dude like revolutionize dude are you listening it’s uhhhhh” and nobody knows wtf it is
The metaverse is a platform. ChatGPT is a product.
Platforms that aren't products for end users are nerdy, especially ones that don't even exist yet.
You aren't going to find an old person start talking to you about a new functions Microsoft added to the Windows SDK, but you could hear them talk about a new feature in a Windows app they use.
>It just looks like a crappy Wii edition of Second Life
The metaverse doesn't exist yet. Someone could make a product like that for the metaverse, but that is just one product. Not all products will look the same, and not all product will boolean heavy into being like second life.
> Random ladies on the train are not using ChatGPT.
They most definitely are. Normies find ChatGPT absolutely fascinating for a variety of purposes, whether that's creative or just asking questions. It's basically magic to them.
Meta's "the metaverse" is just any random obscure retro PS1-style game for them.
GPT will be an integral part of the metaverse. AI assistants make content much easier to create, and the whole point of the metaverse is aggregating all the content everyone in the world makes. These products are complements and in fact GPT might be meta's saving grace since 3D content is so tedious to make currently.
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find any information about the phrase “the Indians are collecting firewood like crazy”. Could you provide more context or details about where you heard or saw this phrase?
I find this whole thing fascinating. Lots of companies making seemingly bad decisions where the "metaverse" is concerned.
Meta/FB dedicating so many resources to this as-yet-truly-defined thing seems silly to me, I'm not sure how they expect to recoup their losses even if a metaverse is established. Disney, as an entertainment company, is actually well set up to see results pretty quickly.
I'm no metaverse fan. I think the simplest question one can ask any corp type talking up the metaverse that cuts through the BS is "what is the metaverse, and how do you get there?" I'm fully aware of the hardware limitations - someone on HN in the last few months has described the hardware challenge as on par with "build me a completely see-through phone," and while not perfect it's a pretty good comparison. I don't see this as something people will decide to enter and remain in for extended periods of time.
But there are definitely use cases, and Disney, of all companies, is placed to take advantage of those use cases, and they decide to drop it.
I think there's some delusion, but there's also some sense to it. Facebook is slowly dying - pushing for a new concept could be a way to regain relevance. They already have a platform for games, so this can be seen as ambitious next step.
My instinct is that VR and the metaverse will only find real success in the adult entertainment industry.. And some one will try to release AR products, like public speaking confidence aid, that makes everyone around you naked and we'll all feel like we need a break from it all for a few hype-cycles.
VR perhaps, but why would you need a "metaverse" for adult entertainment?
It's not like the ability to build and decorate your office impacts your ability to enjoy porn.
I mean sure, perhaps onlyfans will evolve the ability for a model to have some virtual background in which you can attend the show live, but that will never be "your life online connected to everyone" that the metaverse is supposed to be.
VR technologies and "virtual worlds" mostly attracts creepy people. General public don't want to deal with that kind of people hence they aren't interested in VR, real life is fun enough for them.
The only non creepy people owning VR headsets are those who use it to play racing and flying simulators.
One of the big hits on the web back in the day was webcams. They are still kind of a big deal. It seems like there would be value in a VR equivalent. Set up observation stations in public places that allow people to visit in VR through the net. That does not seem to be happening yet, at least not in a big way. Given how much modern media is about the weather and related climate trends that seems like some open potential.
Then there is traffic and since we already have automated taxis then why not turn them into remote cameras, at least when not occupied delivering rides or food.
Weird to see all these articles about VR/"the metaverse" being dead right before Apple's offering. Surely they'd want to check out what Apple puts out at least.
Long before the metaverse or meta even existed, I had this idea: A movie, which is explorable. You and a group of friends or even alone go to the movie and get a time budget, maybe like 5h or so. In that time you can explore the world of the movie in 3D virtual reality. Also you would be able to influence the story of the movie by acting as some characters in the movie.
Of course this could have huge production costs associated with it and might not be realistic any time soon. But maybe one day ...
No, regular games just sit around and wait for the player to do something. Nothing ever happens without the player actively triggering it. This is quite different from a movie, which will play from start to finish without the viewer ever lifting a finger.
I don't think there is anything that matches what OP is looking for perfectly, but games like The Last Express, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask or Invisible Hours get somewhat close. In those the story plays out in real time with all the NPCs playing their roles, the player can observe and interact, but he isn't the central trigger for everything, the story will reach the end even without the player doing anything. Fahrenheit and most of the other stuff Quantic Dream has done also go in that direction, in those games you often switch characters, so you are really playing "the story", not a specific person in that story, however they are much more linear than the other games mentioned and don't leave that much room for exploration.
Haha you gave such a big explanation and invented games again.
Still my point stands, all you are asking for is an interactive game that may not need user action to complete. But movies still need a script, without an actor performing an action the movie just doesn't complete it doesn't make sense at all.
What you are describing is an open world like GTA, where NPCs just go around, gangs fight, police run behind, etc etc. It's just a game, it already exists. OP started with the expectation of an interactive movie. It's called GAMES.
"The Invisible Hours" is pretty close to that. You can't interact with it, but you can freely explore what is happening while all the characters do their own thing. It's basically a theater play that is spread around a whole house.
"The Last Express" for an earlier non-VR example, this one is a bit closer to a regular adventure game, but the events in it still play out in realtime without the other characters waiting around for the player to do something.
That actually sounds fun. It's like karaoke but more than singing songs... even without the acting aspect, it sounds fun to experience the story unfold while you're in it. Not sure if people will feel bogged down by the additional effort they'll have to put in and prefer to just stare at a screen though.
There is a concept like this in the Clarke novel The City and the Stars. One of the entertainments in the far future is essentially playing out pre-scripted stories in a VR kind of system with your friends (although it's a full brain integration kind of thing, not just sensory input).
To loosely paraphrase Gabe Newell, the metaverse is video games made by people who don't play video games for people that don't play video games, pretending it's not video games so as to conjure up a "growth market".
One of my earliest experiences with VR was from Disney as a child. They’d built a VR “magic carpet” ride for Aladdin where you sat on a saddle shaped seat, wore a headset, and could navigate around an Aladdin-like world on the virtual carpet. That was when I was a small child, down at Disney World. 30 years later, it’s interesting to see them pull back on what still isn’t a sure thing for home use. I believe VR will succeed in some form but I suspect live sports will be the first industry where it succeeds. Event tickets are already insanely expensive and an immersive experience to be “at” every game will be an easy sell for some.
Sex, porn and/or getting laid is the first emergent viral use case for every planetary-successful b2c tech platform. I made a small fortune on Facebook’s IPO and liquidated immediately after realizing Zuck was betting the farm on skipping this inevitable step and was attempting to launch a nipple-free advertiser-optimized virtual reality.
The way I see it, VR is no different than what 3D was to TVs. Yeah, sure it's cool once in a while, but I don't want to spend time in it or put something on my head every single time I want to do something. It's impossible to beat a phone in that sense. There are very few things I care about that have a life in VR. So that is the biggest limiting factor, VR will always be a niche. They need to find killer use cases, and pushing cartoonish characters and marketing it as a second life equivalent is absolutely the wrong way to go.
During the Pandy every business talking head was hyping the Metaverse almost as if they had a vested interest. When talk of the the Metaverse at the time had hit a fever pitch, they were even saying that many FAANG and FAANG adjacent companies were overpaying talent to keep them away from Meta and the Metaverse.
I wonder what percent of the layoffs are a result of the Metaverse folly.
At least with Apple, they've been working on a "good" AR experience for over a decade - whereas any department calling itself "metaverse" is a low-interest-rate phenomenon
Reminds me of so many corporate "innovation" initiatives with vague goals and lack of connection to core business that end up flailing around helplessly before someone puts them out of their misery. Only work on innovations that improve the core business within a short time frame or be ready to look for another job elsewhere.
Guess when 3d and VR started? When I was in college, i.e. 1990s. Now, how many problems did it solve? Metaverse is just a vanity project that the board of Meta does not have the power to stop, well no they might have the power but not the will given the stacking of that board.
I can't agree. From a hedonism perspective, I've had incredible experiences.
My dad retired and has basically grown into the VRchat community over the last few years. He has met people with different social values than himself and has grown significantly more open minded. Sure you could get that stuff from other places, but he chooses to use VRchat for some reason.
Don’t their board executives overlap in some way or other?
Maybe this is a mix of descending faith that Meta can pull it off with insider info on what that other SV company might be trying to pull off this summer.
