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The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. Adding advertising and branded content and maki

The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. Adding advertising and branded content and making it cost more because of high end hardware requirements and making it slower and more difficult to interface with because it's VR/AR instead of using existing interfaces is not an improvement; just like adding branded content and sticking it in the skeletal husk of a bad shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an improvement when Epic did it. All the CEOs who buy into this metaverse shit keep talking about the universe of possibilities, but the only possibility they're pursuing is building a Times Square Wal-Mart. Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No, I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future. It's a bummer because I think there probably are legitimate uses of VR/AR telepresence as the next frontier of video calling, which would seem to be right in line with Facebook's stated mission of connecting the world. But no, we'll get an exceedingly shitty videogame instead. Can't wait for them to power it all by NFTs.

Kiro 5y ago
Long comment just to say it's not for you. I am excited but wish it was pioneered by someone else than Facebook.
- nikk1 5y ago
  We are pioneering on Twitter and Discord. Look into Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
mchaynes 5y ago
Fundamentally the profit motive ruins true innovation
browningstreet 5y ago
Made me wonder what Scoble’s on about these days. This was his latest obsession last time I looked.
hvidgaard 5y ago
Your comment was going pretty well until you wrote > Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No, I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future. Is pretty much as far from what actually happens in the book as you can get and completely misses the point on why it's used as a reference point to this metaverse stuff.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Did we read a different book? GP's description is how I remember it, too.
- jsemrau 5y ago
  The book is even worse than the movie, IMHO. Shamelessly plugging my own article [1] But the movie had the potential to be a cultural game-changer in the same way as Hackers and surely The Matrix had to the adoption and "coolness" of the Internet at the turn of the century. [1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/hackers-vs-ready-player-one-b6ad0f117814 https://medium.com/@jsemrau/hackers-vs-ready-player-one-b6ad...
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    > I was one of these young software engineers that saw Hackers back in 1995 and was totally blown away by the potential shown of network technology. > … Hackers (1995), which after more than 20 years, holds still up amazingly well. I’m not sure you’re demonstrating any appreciable sense of objectivity here. Hackers was an absolute joke of a movie; an exaggerated snapshot of ridiculous, misinformed 1990s pop culture thinking on technology. Ready Player One is pop culture fan service, played out amidst a dystopian corporate future. It’s not even really trying to discuss technology at all.
    - 5y ago
AlexandrB 5y ago
There's also an inherent contradiction to it all. If you create a world where users can create their own content and have a lot of freedom - they will create lots of digital penises (see the aforementioned Second Life). But if you want an environment where "brands" are comfortable to "engage" with users you need to keep the space as penis-free as possible. Given Facebook's history of prudishness I suspect their metaverse will be closer to "Fortnite -shooting +ads" rather than Ready Player One.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Do you mean penis-free as in beer, or penis-free as in speech?
  - pjerem 5y ago
    > penis-free as in beer Oh do I hope it is.
  - carols10cents 5y ago
    This is the best comment I have ever read on this entire website.
- dwild 5y ago
  I don't know, our own world is pretty much penis-free and brands are confortable here. Freedom doesn't give penis, anonymity give penis, and considering the amount of people that get banned regularly from Facebook for not having a real name... Now does I believe Facebook has any chance of succeeding in that sphere? Not at all, but it won't be because of virtual penis everywhere. To be frank I don't even believe Facebook will still be relevant in 10 years (and maybe they agree with it and it's why they are trying to push that hard toward something else).
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > But if you want an environment where "brands" are comfortable to "engage" with users you need to keep the space as penis-free as possible. As always, advertising is the root of all the evils we face today in our technological society. When is this industry gonna be regulated out of existence?
ramesh31 5y ago
>just like adding branded content and sticking it in the skeletal husk of a bad shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an improvement when Epic did it. I'm pretty sure it was though. Fortnite is one of the most popular games in history and is single handedly responsible for Epic's financial success over the last 5 years.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Popular, successful == improvement?
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >Popular, successful == improvement? What other criteria do you have for improvement?
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      Surely you're not arguing that popularity/profitability equates to quality? If so, McDonalds represents the best hamburger and fries in human history. There are more dimensions than popular appeal.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - ramesh31 5y ago
        >There are more dimensions than popular appeal. In the context of a consumer product, not really. Everything is always a tradeoff to optimize for multiple factors. Mcdonalds may not be the highest quality, but they've sold billions of hamburgers for a reason. Their product is what the market wants, with enough acceptable tradeoffs to operate at a scale that fulfills demand. tl;dr: The customer is always right.
      - Kiro 5y ago
        What is quality?
codefreakxff 5y ago
Ready Player One movie was terrible. The book was fun. Felt more genuine and didn’t have silly stuff like the movie AR/VR does run the high risk of creating a super dystopian and fragmented real world. It’s definitely something to watch out for
- pharke 5y ago
  I really hope that VR simply replaces screens and results in us being somewhat less sedentary. You're right that there is a great danger it could replace a lot more of the real world leading to a dystopian nightmare, things like real social interaction, time spent in nature, and making physical things but these are also the things that have been most severely impacted by screens, mass media, and the internet.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    AR is probably the bigger threat to social interaction, allowing us to use our phones without even looking down. VR lends itself more to MMORPG-like experiences, which are quite social. Similarly, Ready Player One didn't lack social interaction or real friendship. For time spent in nature or making physical things it's probably the other way around. AR could make these things much more accessible (even if "less pure"), while VR doesn't exactly promote them.
    - pharke 5y ago
      AR will likely be a subset of VR enable by pass through. Check out https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ Until we can perfectly simulate physical reality, virtual interactions will never be as real as real world interactions.
      - wongarsu 5y ago
        > virtual interactions will never be as real as real world interactions I'm not quite sure what makes an interaction more or less "real". The people on both ends of the interaction are real, so surely if they interact that is a real interaction? So far all virtual interactions lack some aspect of communication, but with full-body tracking and eye-tracking VR already offers the closest analog to face-to-face communication we have. Mapping all the tiny facial expressions will remain a challenge, but isn't really that far fetched.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
I think what's even worse about Ready Player One is that everyone seems so bogged down in the minutia of the book of a poorly written 15 year old being in infatuated with a young woman without an eating disorder, they miss the whole distopian aspect of a world run by monopolistic corporations and corrupt governments powerless to stop them.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  I was more "bogged down" by the alluring dog whistle of GenX early stage hacker cultural references: 2112, Tomb of Horrors, Atari, Joust, etc. Of course they left most of that out of the pathetic film...
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I think it’s because the monopolistic corporation meme has been done to death, so the focus is instead on the mindless “fun” adventure aspect.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Doesn't matter. Monopolistic corporations are one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (alongside the climate, income inequality, and social justice) so we must be constantly reminded of them.
    - advrs 5y ago
      "social justice" ? Explain
      - bitwize 5y ago
        That LGBTQ/BIPOC/etc. are oppressed must be fronted as a theme in media, just like the climate, income disparities, and huge corporations controlling everything.
        lazyhummingbird 5y ago
antiterra 5y ago
> just like adding branded content and sticking it in the skeletal husk of a bad shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an improvement when Epic did it. The reductive ‘Fortnite is for kids’ dismissal reminds me of the angry reaction by a particular cohort to the first cel-shaded Zelda game on the Gamecube. They dreamed of ‘realistic’ graphics targeted toward serious gamers and even claimed they were betrayed by WIP footage that teased their dream. Fortnite is a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling around its building mechanic. I watched Jonathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendell (who is currently a 40-year-old and one of the earliest professional gamers) struggle in deep concentration on trying to incrementally improve his building speed and technique. I know many adults who play and enjoy the game, and they seem to enjoy the branded tie-ins. They are mature enough for their ego to be unaffected by the game’s cartoon art style, chosen instead of a gritty Call of Duty realism. It has solid mechanics and the content has been highly polished, even when not tied in to branded content. Even so, I’m still not clear how that connects to Ready Player One being a dull and cynical exploitation of nostalgia shoutouts/callbacks.
- merlincorey 5y ago
  Everything you are saying about the skill ceiling in Fortnite, I completely agree from watching as well as playing the game over the years. Another point is that Creative mode in Fortnite is thought to soon allow full Unreal Engine Blueprints and open modding. The "mode selection" screen recently was turned into Netflix or Hulu like "tiles" with the majority of the tiles being Creative maps made by the community. Fortnite is making a pretty strong "metaverse" play with Creative and the recently released by Epic Games "Imposters" mode shows that you will soon be able to play nearly any game "in Fortnite".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  If you have 20 minutes, this video[1] presents a good critique without mentioning aesthetics. It's especially notable how central the shop is to the whole experience. I personally found Fortnite to be a huge slog to play - with tons of downtime compared even to games like CS: GO, let alone old-school arena shooters like Q3. The only thing that kept me coming back is the season pass reward tracks and daily missions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
deleted 5y ago
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leesec 5y ago
Literally what are you on about lol. The Quest 2 was the first breakout VR system and they've already got Quest 3 and AR glasses coming down the pipe. I for one am glad a big company is taking this space seriously.
- jasondigitized 5y ago
  This. I’ll be the first to signup for the ad free Sony or Microsoft metaverse. I pay for cable and Netflix. I will have no problem paying the equivalent to pop into VR and experience whatever this becomes. My hunch is a hybrid of MUDs, Fortnite, Subreddits, Tinder and Peloton.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I’ll be shocked if we don’t see a touch of Clubhouse.
    - neartheplain 5y ago
      That's what VRChat has been for 4 years now. Though it's less Clubhouse rooms packed with celebrities and clout-chasers, and more improv comedy meets "Humans of New York": https://www.youtube.com/c/syrmor/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/syrmor/videos VRChat as a platform has (enormous) problems of its own, but right now it's the best way to meet and chat with interesting people in VR.
  - smolder 5y ago
    It's honestly making me depressed that this recoining of the term metaverse is being taken seriously and is likely to stick the way "cloud" stuck, and worse, that the things development will be driven by a company like FB. I'm not the slightest bit interested in Mark Z's vision of a metaverse. Instead, I am afraid about how many more wrong turns we can take with how we develop our information technology and apply it across society. The FOSS vision of computing where software progress is shared and acts an equalizer, and where people control their softwares behavior is what we need, not new and better attention-whoring surveillance-economy user-hostile junk. (Now in 3D!)
gfodor 5y ago
AR is going to be bigger than mobile and the PC, and you should be very worried if Facebook succeeds. Dismissiveness is foolish.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > AR is going to be bigger than mobile and the PC AR will be a niche product constrained primarily to industrial applications. There, we've both made our blind predictions, now we get to see who's right!
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Mine isn’t blind but based on the emotional connection I’ve seen happen in VR between family members.
    - CarelessExpert 5y ago
      No, that's just a different kind of blindness: not recognizing your own experiences might not extrapolate to others. I'm sure there was pockets of people who thought 3D TV was the greatest thing ever, and look how far that technology has come. Alexa and Siri were once upon a time going to be the greatest things ever, until everyone realized how very meh the experience was in practice. Smart watches were similarly going to change the world and have since largely pivoted to being niche products for health nuts. BTW, I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong! I just don't think there's any reason to believe you're right, either, and a lot of reasons you might not be, including sky-high costs, practical technology limitations, the lack of killer applications, social barriers to adoption (see: Google Glass), etc.
      - gfodor 5y ago
        Once I saw a father who was separated from his kids by an ocean get down on the floor with them and draw together in VR, I realized that basic human needs are going to be met by VR technology eventually. The removal of physical proximity as a pre-requisite for social presence is about as disruptive development as they come. It’s not 3D TV, and it’s not about tech: it is about the human experience of being together when physically apart. This is why Facebook is repositioning the whole company behind it. Zuck has understood this for a long time.
ttepasse 5y ago
> The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Tangentially: If I remember Snow Crash correctly, the Metaverse/Internet in that novel belonged to only one person – who was the villain of the piece. He wanted to use the metaverse to distribute a “mind virus” which would enslave the world population to him. Somehow I do think Facebooks PR flunkies have not read the same novel as I.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I'm getting more of a "This Perfect Day" vibe from it, with how self-important Mark Zuckerberg treats himself. Christ, Mark, Wood and Wei, Led us to this perfect day. Mark, Wood, Wei and Christ, All but Mark were sacrificed. Wood, Wei, Christ and Mark, Gave us lovely schools and parks. Wei, Christ, Mark and Wood, Made us humble, made us good.
- pbw 5y ago
  The metaverse was an open standard in Snowcrash. The villain L. Bob Rife was distributing a mind virus in the metaverse and in real life using a drug, but he didn’t create or own the metaverse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
  - ttepasse 5y ago
    I took another look. In one way yes … > The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Global Multimedia Protocol Group. > In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist. … but in another way this: > „I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse—the entire Street—exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.“ So somewhat the moneychanger-in-Klondike approach. (“He” = Bob Rife, the villain; CIC = privatised CIA)
fullshark 5y ago
I'm not going to bash anyone interested in shaking up the status quo of the internet, cause a Times Square Wal-Mart is what we have right now and it seems to be getting worse.
this_was_posted 5y ago
I sincerely hope this ages better than the comments rejecting the initial announcement of Dropbox saying no one will need it. I'm afraid that Facebooks best bet to grow even bigger is to try and force themselves in the aspects of our life that are now still mostly "offline". Facebook doesn't have to get everything right from the start it just has to be able to use its resources to outpace the competition.
- d3ntb3ev1l 5y ago
  I don’t use Dropbox and never have. Jobs was right
  - humantorso 5y ago
    Do you use any cloud storage service?
    - pram 5y ago
      Dropbox didn't invent uploading stuff to the internet.
thesausageking 5y ago
A different view: they've lost the narrative and this is a way to reset it. Facebook used to be seen positively by users as it connected the world and brought people together. That's no longer the case. There's been scandal after scandal and users now associate Facebook with all of the negative things Facebook has become. At this point, they can't win the war on changing people's minds on these issues. So, instead, they need a new narrative to build around. They're ditching the Facebook name and branding, and focusing on a new vision around the Metaverse. It doesn't matter if this is real or not, or if VR/AR doesn't become the next computing paradigm. The narrative itself is a new, interesting thread to build their brand around.
- fsociety 5y ago
  Agree with this. To add, I think they initially tried to rebrand as a privacy/security-first company but that, IMO, failed because they didn’t commit to being a radically transparent company. Now they are trying to rebrand as something bigger. I still think they should just take a leap of faith and become radically transparent.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > It doesn't matter if this is real or not, In a way it does; because if it is widely perceived as phony and yet another distracting ploy, then it much less chance of actually changing the narrative around the reputation of "the company formerly known as FaceBook". In fact, further "sleight of hand" manoeuvres would fortify the dodgy reputation.
  - thesausageking 5y ago
    They need to convince people to buy into, but the technology itself doesn't need to be real. Not in the 5 year time frame. Tesla's self-driving product is a great example of this. They got consumers to buy into the vision of self-driving cars way before it was actually ready. This allowed them to sell a lot more cars and pre-orders as well as have a narrative for investors to pump their stock. If they get FSD to work, it will be great. But, even if it never is a successful product, they've benefitted tremendously from the narrative itself and have been able to turn it into sales and cheap capital to invest in the business.
mbesto 5y ago
This is pretty simple. Facebook is taking bets on the next big Platform™ because they cannot afford to miss out on determining what comes after mobile. The FOMO is insane here.
- kibwen 5y ago
  On that note, taking bets that their new brand name is "Facebook+".
- VRay 5y ago
  Yeah.. I’m a bigger VR fan than most, but nobody has figured out the UX for it or any killer use cases yet. I don’t think Facebook is particularly likely to be able to ship something that can compete with whatever Microsoft or Apple can put out, either BUT if it only costs then a few dozen billion to take a stab at it, they may as well. We can see what a disaster the mobile platforms locking down Facebook’s spying has been for their ad business
  - kaibee 5y ago
    The issue is that we have like 40 years of UX improvement for desktops and now have super high resolution monitors that make that UX experience usable. We have like 5 years for VR and 0 years with a high enough resolution to make it usable. I think once high resolution enough VR comes out it'll pretty much be "oh I don't need monitors anymore, but keyboards/mice are still pretty much ideal for text entry/knowledge work, so lets keep those. probably more standing desks also." The metaverse thing is a solution in search of a problem, and in Facebook's case, clearly a solution in search of more money.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > I don’t think Facebook is particularly likely to be able to ship something that can compete with whatever Microsoft or Apple can put out, either Yes, but the Oculus Quest 2 is pretty good for the price, and fact that its probably 5 years earlier than anything anyone else is putting out. They're really actually trying it seems, which is pretty welcome. I honestly think the coolest aspects of it are the simple AR-ish things they're doing (hand tracking, keyboard tracking, the camera based zone for where you can walk, etc).
peter_retief 5y ago
VR makes most people nauseous and this is going to be far worse. I am watching from afar and seeing the B grade movie that is Facebook crash and burn.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  I call maximum shenanigans on "most people", especially given the success of the Quest.
  - VRay 5y ago
    The guy has a point, any experiences that move you around will make almost everyone who tries them sick after 10 to 30 minutes. Nobody’s found a perfect solution yet. On the upside, even a boring “stand around and talk to people” game will be more immersive and fun in VR than most action-packed run-and-gun games without it
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      I think it's a bit like complaining that GUI operating systems aren't a good fit for text adventure games. It's a completely different paradigm. Shifts in dominant genres should be expected.
      - VRay 5y ago
        Amen.. The only reason I keep playing pancake games is because all my friends are there. It'll be awesome when they're all in VR someday
    - jonny_wonny 5y ago
      That’s absolutely false. Many people do experience discomfort when they are new to VR, but with time most people adjust, and are able to play for any amount of time with no negative side effects.
      - VRay 5y ago
headphoneswater 5y ago
I find relating things to litature like that kind of silly but VR is pretty amazing these days and the quest2 shockingly nice to use 3d interaction clicks with people, i'm not suprised they are doubling/tripling down while leading the market
- lm28469 5y ago
  No matter how good VR is it still is no competition for the real, and will never be. It might be a nice entertainment gadget or working tool but that's all, anyone believing in the VR revolution is a fool. The TV or internet could have been amazing things, but we all see how it turned out: ad infected, mega corps ruled, consumerism oriented, echo chambers of the dominant ideology
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    That is an extremely privileged world view. I work on a social VR product for learning foreign language. Yes, VR language immersions are never going to replace real life, in-country immersions. But moving halfway around the world to study a language is just not a realistic prospect for the vast majority of people. For one, it's expensive and extremely disruptive to the rest of your life. Our students aren't college students who can take a semester abroad, they're professionals already in their careers, with kids and mortgages. For another, most of our students are studying languages where they wouldn't be allowed to move to the target country--either by the target country itself or the students' employers.
    - VRay 5y ago
      Man, that’s a great point. Most of the commenters here can afford to just hop on a plane wherever they want with their limited vacation time, and of course a real trip is usually going to be better than a VR one.
    - lm28469 5y ago
      Your argument falls in the "nice gadget" category. Learning foreign languages ranks kind of high on the "privilege" ladder btw, it's very far from a "need", plus you don't need VR for that, we have video chats, youtube, instant translation tools, &c.
wdb 5y ago
There is a lot of fuss on Youtube about Earth 2.0 metaverse
DonHopkins 5y ago
Metaverse is supposed to mean poetry about poetry. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/poems-about-poetry https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/poems-about-poetry https://poets.org/lesson-plan/poems-about-poetry https://poets.org/lesson-plan/poems-about-poetry http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/ http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/
jugg1es 5y ago
I can't think of a worse company than Facebook to be the first one to create a legit metaverse. The appeal of the VR in Ready Player One was that it was created from a core of sincerity. Facebook's approach would create it around their business model, which is arguably poisonous.
- serverholic 5y ago
  This is why Ethereum is so important. With technology like NFTs, it creates a common, standard platform for these companies to build on.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    NFTs, aka StarCatalog 2.0 where you can pay some database owners to keep a record of your name next to some set of data?
    - serverholic 5y ago
      Yes a database of digital assets that you control. Forcing facebook to use a standard instead of full lock-in is good IMO.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    How do NFTs help in any way?
    - serverholic 5y ago
      An NFT can represent any digital asset. Digital assets are a key part of any "metaverse". If NFTs become the standard then you could theoretically take your assets off Facebook into another Metaverse without losing your items. NFTs help avoid lock-in and put pressure on Facebook to play nicely with others.
      - nikk1 5y ago
        I am shocked how this stuff hasn't made its way into HN yet. Everyone PLEASE DYOR and start by researching Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, you can spread out your NFT horizons from there.
TrevorJ 5y ago
>The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. I suspect it's less about a new incarnation of second life, and more about what happens when we've all got access to an AR layer while traversing the real world.
ModernMech 5y ago
> Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. Sorry this is tangential, but anyone remember Active Worlds from Circle of Fire circa 1995?
- veqz 5y ago
  Sure do. Was lots of fun, even though my skyscraper plans failed as there was a limit to how man objects we were allowed to stack in the Z-axis.
aaroninsf 5y ago
It's comments like this that make it worth wading through HN each morning. Huzzah!
adam_arthur 5y ago
I dunno. From my perspective it seems inevitable that somebody will create a killer VR app/world. If FB is really dedicating a large amount of resources to this, I'm sure they will be successful at some point. Their budget can be orders of magnitude higher than even the most expensive game ever developed, if they wanted to. I just hope they take cues from game designers and focus on making it "fun". I mean, a VR office could conceivably be a new normal setting to perform work in. The technology is not far enough along at this point though... imagine trying to code on a virtual screen in low res, hah. And many prefer the privacy of the new remote work normal, and probably wouldn't want to be "physically" present, even if in virtual form. Haven't really followed what their intention is with metaverse, but I imagine they are trying to build an actual endless/seamless virtual world where you'd spent a large amount of time in, and possibly even work in. But again, gonna be kinda hard to make it that engaging with current tech. And the amount of assets that would need to be created is enormous. Maybe they start with just VR meetings/office.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  I don't think there is any chance of Facebook becoming the company that hosts the most widely popular metaverse in 20 years. Facebook, under Zuck's leadership in particular, is driven by greed and control. They repeatedly demonstrate a willingness to make user hostile decisions for short term gain: they build to commodify their audience, not to satisfy them. Times Square Wal-Mart is Mark's idea of a virtual wonderland, and that's why it won't win. The successful metaverse will be led by someone with the spirit of Willy Wonka - it must be whimsical and empowering and sincere. Facebook simply lacks that spirit and heart, and I see no path to them changing company culture that drastically.
- peter303 5y ago
  Pokeman GO was an earlier killer AR app. Made Niantic a boatload.
  - cardosof 5y ago
    Pokemon GO was a hit because of Pokemon, not be because of AR. Players will use the AR feature one time and then disable it and play like there's no AR in the app at all.
enos_feedler 5y ago
Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Epic, etc, etc are all grabbing onto this metaverse thing and it is super embarassing. They say its about “not one company”. There is only one reason why they all talk about this. Apple. Apple is obviously building its own metaverse and isn’t inviting some of these companies to the party (NVIDIA) or making them pay high fees to join (Microsoft xbox, epic, etc). The kicker is going to be when all of these companies realize metaverse isn’t a thing and Apple wasn’t working on it all along. Instead, Apple builds up AR technology so they can make useful products that actually sell to everyone.
- serverholic 5y ago
  This is one of the reasons Ethereum is so important. It creates a common foundation that no single company owns.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Your argument doesn't follow. Besides, Buterin and the other whales "own" Ethereum. Does someone with no money own any stake in Ethereum? No. They don't. Ethereum isn't a socialist paradise.
    - serverholic 5y ago
      How do they "own" it exactly? Are they able to control people's transactions? No They do influence the development of ethereum, however what's great about blockchain is that the community can "fire" the developers and choose new ones if they want. This almost happened after the DAO rollback drama in-fact. Does someone with no money own any stake in Ethereum? I don't understand your point. Why would you think Ethereum is supposed to be a socialist's paradise?
prepend 5y ago
> a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future. Sadly, I think this may be the future where we don’t solve climate change so more and more people just check out from reality. In Snow Crash, I don’t think people liked the meta verse so much as their life in a shipping container sucked being in the meta verse was better.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  The same could be said of social media, games, streaming entertainment, etc. in the modern day.
jnsaff2 5y ago
https://youtu.be/67sfZfreOrU https://youtu.be/67sfZfreOrU
Animats 5y ago
The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. As a Second Life user and creator, and client developer, I agree. I think Second Life could be bigger if the technology was improved, and can see ways to do that. But the concept will not scale to Facebook levels. Besides, we have no way to do full dive technology in a home environment. (Location-based, maybe. The Star Wars Experience and omnidirectional treadmills indicate it's not impossible with enough space and machinery.) What will scale, and I suspect this is Facebook's vision, is AR goggles. Facebook, in your face, all the time. The dystopian vision of this is the "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's all too achievable, and very much in line with Facebook's business model. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
- disqard 5y ago
  Every time you mention this video, I will thank you for posting it! It is a brilliant distillation of the commercialization of AR, and a "must watch" for all fanboys of the m-word. Many of us saw the potential of the Internet, the WWW, and have lived long enough to see its trajectory from pure promise and world-changing potential, into mostly commercial milking medium. I see no reason to assume that Zuck's vision will be any different.
  - wj 5y ago
    I wrote a blog post recently that touched on this very disappointment with the potential that was the Internet and how I hope that the metaverse is a new opportunity for that early creativity to be unleashed. However, in my mind that will require either decentralization or a different gatekeeper than Facebook.
  - Animats 5y ago
    That's what worries me. We can't do Ready Player One level immersion yet, but the Hyperreality level of AR is very close. About two more generations of Ray-Ban displays. And it's so Facebook. Business opportunity: "METADWEEB.COM" is unregistered.
gonehome 5y ago
I think you're mostly wrong. AR is an obvious candidate for the next platform and superior UX (if the hardware is possible) when it's ready. "Metaverse" branding doesn't matter, UI in line of site and ability to manipulate things in the real world just by looking at them and gesturing has obvious massive potential and appeal. I don't care about Ready Player One and the fiction stuff is irrelevant. The ability to have interactive virtual overlays in the real world is big, the potential for new things given that platform is enormous. If you think that hardware is impossible that's one thing, but to not even see it is just short sighted and a classic knee-jerk HN dismissal that can end up a joke ten years later.
outworlder 5y ago
> Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. Eh. My mother learned English in Second Life by paying an actual company that provided classes in Second Life. Instead of a boring chapter with some canned dialogue about, say, an airport scenario, they would take the class to a virtual airport, and roleplay there. Having a setting where everyone could interact led to organic conversations and seemed much more effective than the textbook approaches. Not sure I would call it a novelty.
- ajdegol 5y ago
  That’s actually pretty brilliant.
yurlungur 5y ago
I think it's either an embarrassingly stupid business move made by execs who have no idea what they are doing (best case). Or worse it'll be a success and make Facebook an even more dystopian force. The potential for VR/AR to deeply damage society and sow discord is huge...assuming it's ever a thing.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Once somebody figures how to emulate all the five senses in VR, it's going to happen. Drink whatever you want, eat whatever you want, feel whatever you want, for as long as you want, from your La-Z-Boy? The whole world will rush to virtual reality. I agree that a VR helmet is not going to significantly change anything, but one day we will absolutely plug ourselves into the matrix and never leave.
bitwize 5y ago
RPO was obviously written by Cline's inner geek: https://youtu.be/CknjDqOeRnU https://youtu.be/CknjDqOeRnU The concept of a "metaverse" comes from Snow Crash, which was a more realistic and cooler depiction of large-scale networked VR environments -- cooler because it reflected the early 90s internet, full of freaks and weirdos. If we're going to have a real metaverse, can it be the one from Croquet? I've always liked saying Alan Kay was building the metaverse, but only as a stepping stone to his true goal of building the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age...
015a 5y ago
Its especially ironic how none of the CEOs seem to recognize the entire story of Ready Player One being about an evil corporation desiring complete control of the "metaverse" in order to push advertisements, while enslaving people in virtual to pay their debts.
scotuswroteus 5y ago
Seems to me like a play for patents -- the more they move forward in this direction, and file patents that are crucial for doing so, the more shareholders can profit off of the inevitability that something like a Ready Player One dystopia is indeed in America's near future. The embarrassment is the society that can't take ourselves off that track. Which I guess is just another way of saying 'don't hate the player, hate the game.'
wanderer2323 5y ago
Execrable — extremely bad or unpleasant I looked it up so you don’t have it
wanderer2323 5y ago
Execrable - extremely bad or unpleasant. I looked it up so don’t have to
13415 5y ago
It's more than embarrassing, it's in my opinion kind of crazy. Zuckerberg seems to be obsessed with "governing people" and "leadership", he mentions this in almost every interview. He really seems to believe that he's "governing people" on Facebook and that there will be even more governing to do in the "metaverse." I'm not blaming him personally, he might just have happened to have surrounded himself with a few too many people who lost touch with reality, but the metaverse and these plans to "govern people" seems to have gotten to his head. He sounds more and more like a lunatic. Not enough people are interested in virtual reality and even less people are going to be interested in one based on Facebook's arbitrary and vague rules (aka "governing people") and their algorithmic discrimination. Not to forget about actual governments who will also have a few things to say about some aspects of the planned metaverse such as its economy and payment systems.

Kiro 5y ago

Long comment just to say it's not for you. I am excited but wish it was pioneered by someone else than Facebook.

nikk1 5y ago
We are pioneering on Twitter and Discord. Look into Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.

mchaynes 5y ago

Fundamentally the profit motive ruins true innovation

browningstreet 5y ago

Made me wonder what Scoble’s on about these days. This was his latest obsession last time I looked.

hvidgaard 5y ago

Your comment was going pretty well until you wrote > Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No, I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future. Is pretty much as far from what actually happens in the book as you can get and completely misses the point on why it's used as a reference point to this metaverse stuff.

moron4hire 5y ago
Did we read a different book? GP's description is how I remember it, too.
jsemrau 5y ago
The book is even worse than the movie, IMHO. Shamelessly plugging my own article [1] But the movie had the potential to be a cultural game-changer in the same way as Hackers and surely The Matrix had to the adoption and "coolness" of the Internet at the turn of the century. [1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/hackers-vs-ready-player-one-b6ad0f117814 https://medium.com/@jsemrau/hackers-vs-ready-player-one-b6ad...
- teakettle42 5y ago
  > I was one of these young software engineers that saw Hackers back in 1995 and was totally blown away by the potential shown of network technology. > … Hackers (1995), which after more than 20 years, holds still up amazingly well. I’m not sure you’re demonstrating any appreciable sense of objectivity here. Hackers was an absolute joke of a movie; an exaggerated snapshot of ridiculous, misinformed 1990s pop culture thinking on technology. Ready Player One is pop culture fan service, played out amidst a dystopian corporate future. It’s not even really trying to discuss technology at all.
  - 5y ago

AlexandrB 5y ago

There's also an inherent contradiction to it all. If you create a world where users can create their own content and have a lot of freedom - they will create lots of digital penises (see the aforementioned Second Life). But if you want an environment where "brands" are comfortable to "engage" with users you need to keep the space as penis-free as possible. Given Facebook's history of prudishness I suspect their metaverse will be closer to "Fortnite -shooting +ads" rather than Ready Player One.

DonHopkins 5y ago
Do you mean penis-free as in beer, or penis-free as in speech?
- pjerem 5y ago
  > penis-free as in beer Oh do I hope it is.
- carols10cents 5y ago
  This is the best comment I have ever read on this entire website.
dwild 5y ago
I don't know, our own world is pretty much penis-free and brands are confortable here. Freedom doesn't give penis, anonymity give penis, and considering the amount of people that get banned regularly from Facebook for not having a real name... Now does I believe Facebook has any chance of succeeding in that sphere? Not at all, but it won't be because of virtual penis everywhere. To be frank I don't even believe Facebook will still be relevant in 10 years (and maybe they agree with it and it's why they are trying to push that hard toward something else).
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> But if you want an environment where "brands" are comfortable to "engage" with users you need to keep the space as penis-free as possible. As always, advertising is the root of all the evils we face today in our technological society. When is this industry gonna be regulated out of existence?

ramesh31 5y ago

>just like adding branded content and sticking it in the skeletal husk of a bad shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an improvement when Epic did it. I'm pretty sure it was though. Fortnite is one of the most popular games in history and is single handedly responsible for Epic's financial success over the last 5 years.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Popular, successful == improvement?
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Popular, successful == improvement? What other criteria do you have for improvement?
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    Surely you're not arguing that popularity/profitability equates to quality? If so, McDonalds represents the best hamburger and fries in human history. There are more dimensions than popular appeal.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ramesh31 5y ago
      >There are more dimensions than popular appeal. In the context of a consumer product, not really. Everything is always a tradeoff to optimize for multiple factors. Mcdonalds may not be the highest quality, but they've sold billions of hamburgers for a reason. Their product is what the market wants, with enough acceptable tradeoffs to operate at a scale that fulfills demand. tl;dr: The customer is always right.
    - Kiro 5y ago
      What is quality?

codefreakxff 5y ago

Ready Player One movie was terrible. The book was fun. Felt more genuine and didn’t have silly stuff like the movie AR/VR does run the high risk of creating a super dystopian and fragmented real world. It’s definitely something to watch out for

pharke 5y ago
I really hope that VR simply replaces screens and results in us being somewhat less sedentary. You're right that there is a great danger it could replace a lot more of the real world leading to a dystopian nightmare, things like real social interaction, time spent in nature, and making physical things but these are also the things that have been most severely impacted by screens, mass media, and the internet.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  AR is probably the bigger threat to social interaction, allowing us to use our phones without even looking down. VR lends itself more to MMORPG-like experiences, which are quite social. Similarly, Ready Player One didn't lack social interaction or real friendship. For time spent in nature or making physical things it's probably the other way around. AR could make these things much more accessible (even if "less pure"), while VR doesn't exactly promote them.
  - pharke 5y ago
    AR will likely be a subset of VR enable by pass through. Check out https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ Until we can perfectly simulate physical reality, virtual interactions will never be as real as real world interactions.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      > virtual interactions will never be as real as real world interactions I'm not quite sure what makes an interaction more or less "real". The people on both ends of the interaction are real, so surely if they interact that is a real interaction? So far all virtual interactions lack some aspect of communication, but with full-body tracking and eye-tracking VR already offers the closest analog to face-to-face communication we have. Mapping all the tiny facial expressions will remain a challenge, but isn't really that far fetched.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

I think what's even worse about Ready Player One is that everyone seems so bogged down in the minutia of the book of a poorly written 15 year old being in infatuated with a young woman without an eating disorder, they miss the whole distopian aspect of a world run by monopolistic corporations and corrupt governments powerless to stop them.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
I was more "bogged down" by the alluring dog whistle of GenX early stage hacker cultural references: 2112, Tomb of Horrors, Atari, Joust, etc. Of course they left most of that out of the pathetic film...
notreallyserio 5y ago
I think it’s because the monopolistic corporation meme has been done to death, so the focus is instead on the mindless “fun” adventure aspect.
- bitwize 5y ago
  Doesn't matter. Monopolistic corporations are one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (alongside the climate, income inequality, and social justice) so we must be constantly reminded of them.
  - advrs 5y ago
    "social justice" ? Explain
    - bitwize 5y ago
      That LGBTQ/BIPOC/etc. are oppressed must be fronted as a theme in media, just like the climate, income disparities, and huge corporations controlling everything.
      - lazyhummingbird 5y ago

antiterra 5y ago

> just like adding branded content and sticking it in the skeletal husk of a bad shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an improvement when Epic did it. The reductive ‘Fortnite is for kids’ dismissal reminds me of the angry reaction by a particular cohort to the first cel-shaded Zelda game on the Gamecube. They dreamed of ‘realistic’ graphics targeted toward serious gamers and even claimed they were betrayed by WIP footage that teased their dream. Fortnite is a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling around its building mechanic. I watched Jonathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendell (who is currently a 40-year-old and one of the earliest professional gamers) struggle in deep concentration on trying to incrementally improve his building speed and technique. I know many adults who play and enjoy the game, and they seem to enjoy the branded tie-ins. They are mature enough for their ego to be unaffected by the game’s cartoon art style, chosen instead of a gritty Call of Duty realism. It has solid mechanics and the content has been highly polished, even when not tied in to branded content. Even so, I’m still not clear how that connects to Ready Player One being a dull and cynical exploitation of nostalgia shoutouts/callbacks.

merlincorey 5y ago
Everything you are saying about the skill ceiling in Fortnite, I completely agree from watching as well as playing the game over the years. Another point is that Creative mode in Fortnite is thought to soon allow full Unreal Engine Blueprints and open modding. The "mode selection" screen recently was turned into Netflix or Hulu like "tiles" with the majority of the tiles being Creative maps made by the community. Fortnite is making a pretty strong "metaverse" play with Creative and the recently released by Epic Games "Imposters" mode shows that you will soon be able to play nearly any game "in Fortnite".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
AlexandrB 5y ago
If you have 20 minutes, this video[1] presents a good critique without mentioning aesthetics. It's especially notable how central the shop is to the whole experience. I personally found Fortnite to be a huge slog to play - with tons of downtime compared even to games like CS: GO, let alone old-school arena shooters like Q3. The only thing that kept me coming back is the season pass reward tracks and daily missions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

leesec 5y ago

Literally what are you on about lol. The Quest 2 was the first breakout VR system and they've already got Quest 3 and AR glasses coming down the pipe. I for one am glad a big company is taking this space seriously.

jasondigitized 5y ago
This. I’ll be the first to signup for the ad free Sony or Microsoft metaverse. I pay for cable and Netflix. I will have no problem paying the equivalent to pop into VR and experience whatever this becomes. My hunch is a hybrid of MUDs, Fortnite, Subreddits, Tinder and Peloton.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I’ll be shocked if we don’t see a touch of Clubhouse.
  - neartheplain 5y ago
    That's what VRChat has been for 4 years now. Though it's less Clubhouse rooms packed with celebrities and clout-chasers, and more improv comedy meets "Humans of New York": https://www.youtube.com/c/syrmor/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/syrmor/videos VRChat as a platform has (enormous) problems of its own, but right now it's the best way to meet and chat with interesting people in VR.
- smolder 5y ago
  It's honestly making me depressed that this recoining of the term metaverse is being taken seriously and is likely to stick the way "cloud" stuck, and worse, that the things development will be driven by a company like FB. I'm not the slightest bit interested in Mark Z's vision of a metaverse. Instead, I am afraid about how many more wrong turns we can take with how we develop our information technology and apply it across society. The FOSS vision of computing where software progress is shared and acts an equalizer, and where people control their softwares behavior is what we need, not new and better attention-whoring surveillance-economy user-hostile junk. (Now in 3D!)

gfodor 5y ago

AR is going to be bigger than mobile and the PC, and you should be very worried if Facebook succeeds. Dismissiveness is foolish.

CarelessExpert 5y ago
> AR is going to be bigger than mobile and the PC AR will be a niche product constrained primarily to industrial applications. There, we've both made our blind predictions, now we get to see who's right!
- gfodor 5y ago
  Mine isn’t blind but based on the emotional connection I’ve seen happen in VR between family members.
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    No, that's just a different kind of blindness: not recognizing your own experiences might not extrapolate to others. I'm sure there was pockets of people who thought 3D TV was the greatest thing ever, and look how far that technology has come. Alexa and Siri were once upon a time going to be the greatest things ever, until everyone realized how very meh the experience was in practice. Smart watches were similarly going to change the world and have since largely pivoted to being niche products for health nuts. BTW, I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong! I just don't think there's any reason to believe you're right, either, and a lot of reasons you might not be, including sky-high costs, practical technology limitations, the lack of killer applications, social barriers to adoption (see: Google Glass), etc.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Once I saw a father who was separated from his kids by an ocean get down on the floor with them and draw together in VR, I realized that basic human needs are going to be met by VR technology eventually. The removal of physical proximity as a pre-requisite for social presence is about as disruptive development as they come. It’s not 3D TV, and it’s not about tech: it is about the human experience of being together when physically apart. This is why Facebook is repositioning the whole company behind it. Zuck has understood this for a long time.

ttepasse 5y ago

> The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Tangentially: If I remember Snow Crash correctly, the Metaverse/Internet in that novel belonged to only one person – who was the villain of the piece. He wanted to use the metaverse to distribute a “mind virus” which would enslave the world population to him. Somehow I do think Facebooks PR flunkies have not read the same novel as I.

smoldesu 5y ago
I'm getting more of a "This Perfect Day" vibe from it, with how self-important Mark Zuckerberg treats himself. Christ, Mark, Wood and Wei, Led us to this perfect day. Mark, Wood, Wei and Christ, All but Mark were sacrificed. Wood, Wei, Christ and Mark, Gave us lovely schools and parks. Wei, Christ, Mark and Wood, Made us humble, made us good.
pbw 5y ago
The metaverse was an open standard in Snowcrash. The villain L. Bob Rife was distributing a mind virus in the metaverse and in real life using a drug, but he didn’t create or own the metaverse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
- ttepasse 5y ago
  I took another look. In one way yes … > The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Global Multimedia Protocol Group. > In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist. … but in another way this: > „I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse—the entire Street—exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.“ So somewhat the moneychanger-in-Klondike approach. (“He” = Bob Rife, the villain; CIC = privatised CIA)

fullshark 5y ago

I'm not going to bash anyone interested in shaking up the status quo of the internet, cause a Times Square Wal-Mart is what we have right now and it seems to be getting worse.

this_was_posted 5y ago

I sincerely hope this ages better than the comments rejecting the initial announcement of Dropbox saying no one will need it. I'm afraid that Facebooks best bet to grow even bigger is to try and force themselves in the aspects of our life that are now still mostly "offline". Facebook doesn't have to get everything right from the start it just has to be able to use its resources to outpace the competition.

d3ntb3ev1l 5y ago
I don’t use Dropbox and never have. Jobs was right
- humantorso 5y ago
  Do you use any cloud storage service?
  - pram 5y ago
    Dropbox didn't invent uploading stuff to the internet.

thesausageking 5y ago

A different view: they've lost the narrative and this is a way to reset it. Facebook used to be seen positively by users as it connected the world and brought people together. That's no longer the case. There's been scandal after scandal and users now associate Facebook with all of the negative things Facebook has become. At this point, they can't win the war on changing people's minds on these issues. So, instead, they need a new narrative to build around. They're ditching the Facebook name and branding, and focusing on a new vision around the Metaverse. It doesn't matter if this is real or not, or if VR/AR doesn't become the next computing paradigm. The narrative itself is a new, interesting thread to build their brand around.

fsociety 5y ago
Agree with this. To add, I think they initially tried to rebrand as a privacy/security-first company but that, IMO, failed because they didn’t commit to being a radically transparent company. Now they are trying to rebrand as something bigger. I still think they should just take a leap of faith and become radically transparent.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> It doesn't matter if this is real or not, In a way it does; because if it is widely perceived as phony and yet another distracting ploy, then it much less chance of actually changing the narrative around the reputation of "the company formerly known as FaceBook". In fact, further "sleight of hand" manoeuvres would fortify the dodgy reputation.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  They need to convince people to buy into, but the technology itself doesn't need to be real. Not in the 5 year time frame. Tesla's self-driving product is a great example of this. They got consumers to buy into the vision of self-driving cars way before it was actually ready. This allowed them to sell a lot more cars and pre-orders as well as have a narrative for investors to pump their stock. If they get FSD to work, it will be great. But, even if it never is a successful product, they've benefitted tremendously from the narrative itself and have been able to turn it into sales and cheap capital to invest in the business.

mbesto 5y ago

This is pretty simple. Facebook is taking bets on the next big Platform™ because they cannot afford to miss out on determining what comes after mobile. The FOMO is insane here.

kibwen 5y ago
On that note, taking bets that their new brand name is "Facebook+".
VRay 5y ago
Yeah.. I’m a bigger VR fan than most, but nobody has figured out the UX for it or any killer use cases yet. I don’t think Facebook is particularly likely to be able to ship something that can compete with whatever Microsoft or Apple can put out, either BUT if it only costs then a few dozen billion to take a stab at it, they may as well. We can see what a disaster the mobile platforms locking down Facebook’s spying has been for their ad business
- kaibee 5y ago
  The issue is that we have like 40 years of UX improvement for desktops and now have super high resolution monitors that make that UX experience usable. We have like 5 years for VR and 0 years with a high enough resolution to make it usable. I think once high resolution enough VR comes out it'll pretty much be "oh I don't need monitors anymore, but keyboards/mice are still pretty much ideal for text entry/knowledge work, so lets keep those. probably more standing desks also." The metaverse thing is a solution in search of a problem, and in Facebook's case, clearly a solution in search of more money.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > I don’t think Facebook is particularly likely to be able to ship something that can compete with whatever Microsoft or Apple can put out, either Yes, but the Oculus Quest 2 is pretty good for the price, and fact that its probably 5 years earlier than anything anyone else is putting out. They're really actually trying it seems, which is pretty welcome. I honestly think the coolest aspects of it are the simple AR-ish things they're doing (hand tracking, keyboard tracking, the camera based zone for where you can walk, etc).

peter_retief 5y ago

VR makes most people nauseous and this is going to be far worse. I am watching from afar and seeing the B grade movie that is Facebook crash and burn.

Karunamon 5y ago
I call maximum shenanigans on "most people", especially given the success of the Quest.
- VRay 5y ago
  The guy has a point, any experiences that move you around will make almost everyone who tries them sick after 10 to 30 minutes. Nobody’s found a perfect solution yet. On the upside, even a boring “stand around and talk to people” game will be more immersive and fun in VR than most action-packed run-and-gun games without it
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    I think it's a bit like complaining that GUI operating systems aren't a good fit for text adventure games. It's a completely different paradigm. Shifts in dominant genres should be expected.
    - VRay 5y ago
      Amen.. The only reason I keep playing pancake games is because all my friends are there. It'll be awesome when they're all in VR someday
  - jonny_wonny 5y ago
    That’s absolutely false. Many people do experience discomfort when they are new to VR, but with time most people adjust, and are able to play for any amount of time with no negative side effects.
    - VRay 5y ago

headphoneswater 5y ago

I find relating things to litature like that kind of silly but VR is pretty amazing these days and the quest2 shockingly nice to use 3d interaction clicks with people, i'm not suprised they are doubling/tripling down while leading the market

lm28469 5y ago
No matter how good VR is it still is no competition for the real, and will never be. It might be a nice entertainment gadget or working tool but that's all, anyone believing in the VR revolution is a fool. The TV or internet could have been amazing things, but we all see how it turned out: ad infected, mega corps ruled, consumerism oriented, echo chambers of the dominant ideology
- moron4hire 5y ago
  That is an extremely privileged world view. I work on a social VR product for learning foreign language. Yes, VR language immersions are never going to replace real life, in-country immersions. But moving halfway around the world to study a language is just not a realistic prospect for the vast majority of people. For one, it's expensive and extremely disruptive to the rest of your life. Our students aren't college students who can take a semester abroad, they're professionals already in their careers, with kids and mortgages. For another, most of our students are studying languages where they wouldn't be allowed to move to the target country--either by the target country itself or the students' employers.
  - VRay 5y ago
    Man, that’s a great point. Most of the commenters here can afford to just hop on a plane wherever they want with their limited vacation time, and of course a real trip is usually going to be better than a VR one.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    Your argument falls in the "nice gadget" category. Learning foreign languages ranks kind of high on the "privilege" ladder btw, it's very far from a "need", plus you don't need VR for that, we have video chats, youtube, instant translation tools, &c.

wdb 5y ago

There is a lot of fuss on Youtube about Earth 2.0 metaverse

DonHopkins 5y ago

Metaverse is supposed to mean poetry about poetry. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/poems-about-poetry https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/poems-about-poetry https://poets.org/lesson-plan/poems-about-poetry https://poets.org/lesson-plan/poems-about-poetry http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/ http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/

jugg1es 5y ago

I can't think of a worse company than Facebook to be the first one to create a legit metaverse. The appeal of the VR in Ready Player One was that it was created from a core of sincerity. Facebook's approach would create it around their business model, which is arguably poisonous.

serverholic 5y ago
This is why Ethereum is so important. With technology like NFTs, it creates a common, standard platform for these companies to build on.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  NFTs, aka StarCatalog 2.0 where you can pay some database owners to keep a record of your name next to some set of data?
  - serverholic 5y ago
    Yes a database of digital assets that you control. Forcing facebook to use a standard instead of full lock-in is good IMO.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  How do NFTs help in any way?
  - serverholic 5y ago
    An NFT can represent any digital asset. Digital assets are a key part of any "metaverse". If NFTs become the standard then you could theoretically take your assets off Facebook into another Metaverse without losing your items. NFTs help avoid lock-in and put pressure on Facebook to play nicely with others.
    - nikk1 5y ago
      I am shocked how this stuff hasn't made its way into HN yet. Everyone PLEASE DYOR and start by researching Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, you can spread out your NFT horizons from there.

TrevorJ 5y ago

>The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. I suspect it's less about a new incarnation of second life, and more about what happens when we've all got access to an AR layer while traversing the real world.

ModernMech 5y ago

> Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. Sorry this is tangential, but anyone remember Active Worlds from Circle of Fire circa 1995?

veqz 5y ago
Sure do. Was lots of fun, even though my skyscraper plans failed as there was a limit to how man objects we were allowed to stack in the Z-axis.

aaroninsf 5y ago

It's comments like this that make it worth wading through HN each morning. Huzzah!

adam_arthur 5y ago

I dunno. From my perspective it seems inevitable that somebody will create a killer VR app/world. If FB is really dedicating a large amount of resources to this, I'm sure they will be successful at some point. Their budget can be orders of magnitude higher than even the most expensive game ever developed, if they wanted to. I just hope they take cues from game designers and focus on making it "fun". I mean, a VR office could conceivably be a new normal setting to perform work in. The technology is not far enough along at this point though... imagine trying to code on a virtual screen in low res, hah. And many prefer the privacy of the new remote work normal, and probably wouldn't want to be "physically" present, even if in virtual form. Haven't really followed what their intention is with metaverse, but I imagine they are trying to build an actual endless/seamless virtual world where you'd spent a large amount of time in, and possibly even work in. But again, gonna be kinda hard to make it that engaging with current tech. And the amount of assets that would need to be created is enormous. Maybe they start with just VR meetings/office.

cwkoss 5y ago
I don't think there is any chance of Facebook becoming the company that hosts the most widely popular metaverse in 20 years. Facebook, under Zuck's leadership in particular, is driven by greed and control. They repeatedly demonstrate a willingness to make user hostile decisions for short term gain: they build to commodify their audience, not to satisfy them. Times Square Wal-Mart is Mark's idea of a virtual wonderland, and that's why it won't win. The successful metaverse will be led by someone with the spirit of Willy Wonka - it must be whimsical and empowering and sincere. Facebook simply lacks that spirit and heart, and I see no path to them changing company culture that drastically.
peter303 5y ago
Pokeman GO was an earlier killer AR app. Made Niantic a boatload.
- cardosof 5y ago
  Pokemon GO was a hit because of Pokemon, not be because of AR. Players will use the AR feature one time and then disable it and play like there's no AR in the app at all.

enos_feedler 5y ago

Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Epic, etc, etc are all grabbing onto this metaverse thing and it is super embarassing. They say its about “not one company”. There is only one reason why they all talk about this. Apple. Apple is obviously building its own metaverse and isn’t inviting some of these companies to the party (NVIDIA) or making them pay high fees to join (Microsoft xbox, epic, etc). The kicker is going to be when all of these companies realize metaverse isn’t a thing and Apple wasn’t working on it all along. Instead, Apple builds up AR technology so they can make useful products that actually sell to everyone.

serverholic 5y ago
This is one of the reasons Ethereum is so important. It creates a common foundation that no single company owns.
- echelon 5y ago
  Your argument doesn't follow. Besides, Buterin and the other whales "own" Ethereum. Does someone with no money own any stake in Ethereum? No. They don't. Ethereum isn't a socialist paradise.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    How do they "own" it exactly? Are they able to control people's transactions? No They do influence the development of ethereum, however what's great about blockchain is that the community can "fire" the developers and choose new ones if they want. This almost happened after the DAO rollback drama in-fact. Does someone with no money own any stake in Ethereum? I don't understand your point. Why would you think Ethereum is supposed to be a socialist's paradise?

prepend 5y ago

> a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future. Sadly, I think this may be the future where we don’t solve climate change so more and more people just check out from reality. In Snow Crash, I don’t think people liked the meta verse so much as their life in a shipping container sucked being in the meta verse was better.

Apocryphon 5y ago
The same could be said of social media, games, streaming entertainment, etc. in the modern day.

jnsaff2 5y ago

https://youtu.be/67sfZfreOrU https://youtu.be/67sfZfreOrU

Animats 5y ago

The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. As a Second Life user and creator, and client developer, I agree. I think Second Life could be bigger if the technology was improved, and can see ways to do that. But the concept will not scale to Facebook levels. Besides, we have no way to do full dive technology in a home environment. (Location-based, maybe. The Star Wars Experience and omnidirectional treadmills indicate it's not impossible with enough space and machinery.) What will scale, and I suspect this is Facebook's vision, is AR goggles. Facebook, in your face, all the time. The dystopian vision of this is the "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's all too achievable, and very much in line with Facebook's business model. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

disqard 5y ago
Every time you mention this video, I will thank you for posting it! It is a brilliant distillation of the commercialization of AR, and a "must watch" for all fanboys of the m-word. Many of us saw the potential of the Internet, the WWW, and have lived long enough to see its trajectory from pure promise and world-changing potential, into mostly commercial milking medium. I see no reason to assume that Zuck's vision will be any different.
- wj 5y ago
  I wrote a blog post recently that touched on this very disappointment with the potential that was the Internet and how I hope that the metaverse is a new opportunity for that early creativity to be unleashed. However, in my mind that will require either decentralization or a different gatekeeper than Facebook.
- Animats 5y ago
  That's what worries me. We can't do Ready Player One level immersion yet, but the Hyperreality level of AR is very close. About two more generations of Ray-Ban displays. And it's so Facebook. Business opportunity: "METADWEEB.COM" is unregistered.

gonehome 5y ago

I think you're mostly wrong. AR is an obvious candidate for the next platform and superior UX (if the hardware is possible) when it's ready. "Metaverse" branding doesn't matter, UI in line of site and ability to manipulate things in the real world just by looking at them and gesturing has obvious massive potential and appeal. I don't care about Ready Player One and the fiction stuff is irrelevant. The ability to have interactive virtual overlays in the real world is big, the potential for new things given that platform is enormous. If you think that hardware is impossible that's one thing, but to not even see it is just short sighted and a classic knee-jerk HN dismissal that can end up a joke ten years later.

outworlder 5y ago

> Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. Eh. My mother learned English in Second Life by paying an actual company that provided classes in Second Life. Instead of a boring chapter with some canned dialogue about, say, an airport scenario, they would take the class to a virtual airport, and roleplay there. Having a setting where everyone could interact led to organic conversations and seemed much more effective than the textbook approaches. Not sure I would call it a novelty.

ajdegol 5y ago
That’s actually pretty brilliant.

yurlungur 5y ago

I think it's either an embarrassingly stupid business move made by execs who have no idea what they are doing (best case). Or worse it'll be a success and make Facebook an even more dystopian force. The potential for VR/AR to deeply damage society and sow discord is huge...assuming it's ever a thing.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

Once somebody figures how to emulate all the five senses in VR, it's going to happen. Drink whatever you want, eat whatever you want, feel whatever you want, for as long as you want, from your La-Z-Boy? The whole world will rush to virtual reality. I agree that a VR helmet is not going to significantly change anything, but one day we will absolutely plug ourselves into the matrix and never leave.

bitwize 5y ago

RPO was obviously written by Cline's inner geek: https://youtu.be/CknjDqOeRnU https://youtu.be/CknjDqOeRnU The concept of a "metaverse" comes from Snow Crash, which was a more realistic and cooler depiction of large-scale networked VR environments -- cooler because it reflected the early 90s internet, full of freaks and weirdos. If we're going to have a real metaverse, can it be the one from Croquet? I've always liked saying Alan Kay was building the metaverse, but only as a stepping stone to his true goal of building the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age...

015a 5y ago

Its especially ironic how none of the CEOs seem to recognize the entire story of Ready Player One being about an evil corporation desiring complete control of the "metaverse" in order to push advertisements, while enslaving people in virtual to pay their debts.

scotuswroteus 5y ago

Seems to me like a play for patents -- the more they move forward in this direction, and file patents that are crucial for doing so, the more shareholders can profit off of the inevitability that something like a Ready Player One dystopia is indeed in America's near future. The embarrassment is the society that can't take ourselves off that track. Which I guess is just another way of saying 'don't hate the player, hate the game.'

wanderer2323 5y ago

Execrable — extremely bad or unpleasant I looked it up so you don’t have it

wanderer2323 5y ago

Execrable - extremely bad or unpleasant. I looked it up so don’t have to

13415 5y ago

It's more than embarrassing, it's in my opinion kind of crazy. Zuckerberg seems to be obsessed with "governing people" and "leadership", he mentions this in almost every interview. He really seems to believe that he's "governing people" on Facebook and that there will be even more governing to do in the "metaverse." I'm not blaming him personally, he might just have happened to have surrounded himself with a few too many people who lost touch with reality, but the metaverse and these plans to "govern people" seems to have gotten to his head. He sounds more and more like a lunatic. Not enough people are interested in virtual reality and even less people are going to be interested in one based on Facebook's arbitrary and vague rules (aka "governing people") and their algorithmic discrimination. Not to forget about actual governments who will also have a few things to say about some aspects of the planned metaverse such as its economy and payment systems.