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?
