8 ms·

Meta buys Within, the studio behind VR fitness app Supernatural

47 points by troydavis 5y ago

Le_Dook 5y ago
And the acquisitions begin. It's clear they're ready to throw big money at making this "metaverse" a thing. They're probably trying to prove to their investors that they're comitted
- renewiltord 5y ago
  The acquisitions have been going on for ages. BigBox VR. Sanzaru. Guys, you’re just drawing correlations based on when you started paying attention. This is some serious cognitive bias going on.
  - aierou 5y ago
    I really wish we would stop giving so much influence to popular opinion on social media. As of late, it is very undiscerning. Voting websites especially are terrible at selecting for true value at scale.
    - moneywoes 5y ago
      What is the alternative
BoumTAC 5y ago
Do people really believe in fitness VR? It feel like big over engineering BS, sport is one of such a basic thing. Just buy a pair of shoes and go for a run. Buy a bike and go for a ride. Practice any sport in a club, take a gym membership and go deadlifting. Why do they need to spend billion of dollars en VR development and then the user will have to spend hundred (thousand ?) of dollars to buy the VR headset, expensive computer just to have an activity that will be worse than a jog.
- Kiro 5y ago
  For me, VR training has been life-changing so it has already proven its worth. Prefixing something that is really hard for me to do consistently with "just..." tells me we're very different persons. VR training is amazing and after one year I'm still excited for every workout. The recent development in apps such as FitXR shows that we've just seen the start of this movement. In my opinion fitness is the killer app for VR.
- drvdevd 5y ago
  I go running and occasionally do push-ups inside and have an exercise bike. VR exercise really bridges the gap for me between not wanting to exercise or not having time, to feeling energized and/or it being a workout all it's own. Mostly just a game of Pistol Whip but also the noted Supernatural app helps a lot. I also put on 360 1st person biking videos on YouTube while I ride my exercise bike and the whole range of options expands my desire to work out exponentially...
  - bko 5y ago
    I haven't thought of that. What's your setup? Where are the videos? I saw a few on YT but was wondering if there's a different source or I'm not searching for the right thing Does the sweat mess with the gear? How is the weight of the equipment?
    - drvdevd 5y ago
      I have a fairly cheap mechanical exercise bike I bought on Amazon (not near it right now, don't have model handy). By mechanical I mean I adjust the resistance myself. As for which videos I watch - kinda just anything in the YouTube app on the quest 2 which is full 360 or 180. I recently found a good video of a ride through Seattle that was about 45 minutes or so (didn't complete the whole thing, I will probably do it again next). Quality obviously varies but I'm not picky. Also if you are prone to motion sickness in VR you might not like it. You're always at the position of the cameras of whoever was filming so that's a bit odd - but I find it's good enough for me to get into it. Any 180 video is probably fine too, but I like turning fully around like I'm on a real bike, seeing what was behind behind cyclist. The weight of the Quest 2 doesn't bother me as long as it's adjusted properly on my head and yeah it gets sweaty but I don't personally care much as long as I take breaks.
akeck 5y ago
Has anyone done exercise with a VR headset? My runner friends go through earbuds ever other year, because the sweat destroys them.
- rocmcd 5y ago
  That’s not my experience at all. I’ve been using the included wired Apple headphones every day for running (in the Texas heat, though only ~30 minutes) and I’m going on year 4 with the same pair. That being said, there are many more contact points with a VR headset, so I could see it being a bigger issue. Plus many of them are padded, which will absorb sweat and are hard to clean without considerable effort.
- gmays 5y ago
  Yeah, they have sweat guards you can add and the VR head pads are usually replacable.
- hnra 5y ago
  Tell your friends there are water resistant earbuds nowadays.
  - Raidion 5y ago
    Water resistant earbuds still don't last more than a year. I've found ~$30 wired sweat proof headphones have the best value ratio IMO. I actually could complain a crap ton about running setups. With the 'death' of mp3s and the rise of streaming services, it's becoming increasingly difficult to get music on your runs without some sort of phone/smart watch. I really miss the days where it was just an iPod shuffle. They have the Mighty, which is basically Spotify playlists in iPod shuffle form, but it's poorly made. Smart watches are cool, but needs Bluetooth headphones, which are less comfortable (heavier) than wired headphones and just add complications to something I'd rather keep simple.
    - akeck 5y ago
      Not exercise related, but I really miss the simplicity of things like the SanDisk Sansa Shake.
echelon 5y ago
The elephant in the room is VRChat. The VRChat team must be salivating. If they can't buy VRChat, they'll go after the furry VR app Neos.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Either VRChat or RecRoom at this point.
- celdon25 5y ago
  VRChat is littered with UX and network bugs, design flaws, extreme performance issues on the client-side (poor user experience with anything less than a $2000 GPU), and apparent technical debt. High-severity bugs don't get patched for weeks. Major updates often go out on Friday nights, causing much disruption for anyone who had plans there on those nights. Seriously, who even releases on a schedule like that? Not to mention its a security nightmare given that by default your client will run arbitrary GPU shader code that is uploaded by other users. People can and do take advantage of that, even as a full-time hobby. The third-party developer community that claims to combat said security issues, really misses the mark. Their approach is to attempt to centralize the governance of all third-party tools (which are badly needed because VRChat proper fails to protect its users or provide a decent UX). Then they demonize virtually anyone who doesn't get on board with their ultimatums. They even require all users of their third-party tools who want any kind of technical assistance to submit detailed log files to a bot that will sound an alarm if that user uses an "unapproved" program. The criteria for this is, to put it simply, to flag anything that wasn't created by someone named on their whitelist of developers. And if you want to see salivation, there's plenty of it there. It's a spectacle just seeing people jump on these users like dogs, quite rudely at times, for daring to download something that the gestapo didn't approve of. For a community that claims to be about creativity, they do a poor job of fostering it. Anyone who wants to have an entrepreneurial spirit in the development of such tools better have some kind of copy-protection as the tools tend to only be implemented in the form of distributed binaries that tend to require no server, or a microservice at the most. Problem is, the same group mentioned above is requiring that developers on its whitelist implement process-wide hooks that will break the copy-protection but nothing else. All in the name of keeping the children safe, I shit you not, but what it's really about is control. A determined hacker can easily defeat this measure by distributing a forked version of the mod loader with their own tools. Here's the kicker: Apparently this was all the result of some kind of back-room deal between the developer cartel and VRChat's admins, the timing of which was conspicuously not long before their $80M Series D round. Timeline of events March 30: VRChat does a large ban wave of apparently as many mod creators as they can find, by cross-referencing social media and Github names of developers of third-party tools with their own database of users. VRChat demands to the developers to take down their Github repositories if they wish to be unbanned and to get connected back with their VR social life. March 31: VRChat "admits a misstep". The accounts get unbanned, the developers may put their repositories back online, but now they "intend to start a dialogue" with said developers. https://web.archive.org/web/20210401015645/https://twitter.com/HerpDerpinstine/status/1377439651607158786 https://web.archive.org/web/20210401015645/https://twitter.c... - In the meantime however, the developers are not distributing their software for the time being. April 8: The list of whitelisted mods completes an overhaul, basically an audit, then distribution opens back up. Additionally on this date, the modding cartel says they won't be sharing any details with the public about the subject-matter of the discussions with the VRChat admins. April 24: A rogue developer ragequits the community and pushes an update to their software that amounts to prankware. Letting no crisis go to waste, the modding cartel writes a 250 word announcement to signal boost this incident, even archiving the link to the commit so they can show you how much you are at risk if you don't only install what they say you can install. June 16: MelonLoader 0.4.0 is released, and many of the tools on the whitelist are simultaneously released with 0.4.0. They also spill the news on this very day, that it is no longer backwards compatible with the previous version of the loader. So any developers who weren't colluding with the group were given no time to decide if it was a good idea to switch to 0.4.0. They weren't really given a real choice as the software became effectively unusable without adopting this version. Conspicuously absent from this announcement was the additional security measures I mentioned above, to prevent copy-protection. You'd think it would be a good opportunity to announce the supposed safety measures they implemented, but instead it seemed they were trying to avoid discussing that at first for whatever reason. June 28 (just 12 days later): VRChat raises $80M Series D. A major focus of this fundraising round relates to the implementation of a creator economy. A Machiavellian scheme to exert control under dubious pretenses is not the foundation of creativity. The above scheme did nothing substantial to mitigate the risks of piracy in the context of such a planned market. I'm not sure if a VC would have been wise to it though as it looks good enough on paper to someone who doesn't truly understand the ecosystem or the security factors involved. This to me is solid evidence that VRChat as a company likely has a top-level strategy of putting lipstick on the pig rather than building a good product. Therefore, VRChat is a toxic, toxic, poison pill, and Facebook would be wise to take notice of this and instead compete with them head on. Otherwise it would be a missed opportunity to break the stockholm syndrome that is currently widespread in its future target audience.
unclebucknasty 5y ago
Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB. There's a lot of hand-wringing and exclaiming but, at end of day, it's business as usual. Consumers and investors never punish the company in a meaningfully lasting way. With existing products built on network effects, I can at least see the rationale: where else can you go where everyone else is at scale? But, for new product categories like this, why would anyone follow them? I understand they have advantages there, based on their existing properties, but it's still an opportunity to say "hell no" to FB. In particular, with this product: the idea that we are to spend increasingly more time in a simulated universe is dystopic enough. But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst? I mean we're really just gonna' slow walk ourselves into this sci-fi movie?
- tchalla 5y ago
  > Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB. It's the same way people have gone along with 100s of acquisitions from Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036073
- dontcare007 5y ago
  Yep, to most people, comfort trumps principles.
- azangru 5y ago
  > But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst? I don't understand this sentiment. Why do we need to care how moral the man at the helm is? A leader is temporary: today's leader can be immoral, while tomorrow's leader can be moral. Or vice versa. Or a leader can be moral in such a way that you would wish he wasn't. If end users can exercise their moral choices themselves, if they can refrain from lying, or bullying, or bragging, or trolling, then so much the better. If they can't, well, then we are screwed either way.
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
rvz 5y ago
Would you already look at that. Meta is off to the races with acquisitions in VR studios for building an Apple Fitness+ competitor for the metaverse. So what are you going to do about it to compete or stop them? Maybe Peloton is next?
uptown 5y ago
Which workplace video conferencing app does Facebook acquire? Zoom? Citrix?
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Zoom is massively overvalued and technology wise doesn't have much to stand on. Why wouldn't they just develop their own as Google did? These days video codecs and special sauce for high scalability calls is (relatively) well understood. If you were going to buy something Citrix is probably the most cost effective but I doubt you are getting much there either other than existing contracts. There is a good reason Zoom was able to take so much market share from Citrix in the first place.
  - alexeldeib 5y ago
    Messenger has video, and given FB workplace I have to imagine that already is their competitor in some form. Also the portal thing.
  - uptown 5y ago
    They'll want business users and to eliminate an alternative platform at the same time. Buying something like Citrix or Zoom hands them an installed base which they can feed into using their Metaverse platform without needing to convince business users that Facebook isn't just to be used for personal social media.
dredmorbius 5y ago
They're called "Meta" because their business is selling your metadata. -- Polychrome @ Mastodon https://cybre.space/@polychrome/107191019622441552 https://cybre.space/@polychrome/107191019622441552
- dymk 5y ago
  Facebook/Meta has never sold user data or user metadata
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    I believe this to be a misinterpretation of facts. If store A posts targeted FB ad, they will know when a person clicks it on FB to get to store A. Now store A knows user on their website meets targeting parameters.
    - dymk 5y ago
      That’s not what people mean when they say “Facebook sells user data”.
      - lostmsu 5y ago
        How do you know what people mean in this case and what they don't? The details of how data gets passed are technical, and users might not be aware of them. However, the end result is the same.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    What Facebook sells is targeted advertising. Targeting is on the basis of metadata. Hair-splitting this point is disengenuous.
newacc9 5y ago
Think of all the things you can do in the metaverse: fitness, watch sports, watch a movie, work-from-home, virtual cafe. I think they will buy all these entry-points and stitch them together, might just work.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  Think about it: all these things can be done in real life.
  - void-pointer 5y ago
    I genuinely feel like I’m losing my mind over this shit. Just… Do people genuinely think that the average popular party girl/jock you knew in high school who loves going to parties and drinking, or playing sports/shopping with their friends is going to put on a bulky VR headset to do a cut-down, laggy, buggy, low res version of the same thing, getting VR sickness and a imprint on their face in the process? The way I see it, it any of this meta verse shit is going to succeed with the masses—I.e., not geeks who are already into VR—it will need to: * Be imperceptible or almost-imperceptible from real life in ALL senses (including things like touch, smell, proprioception etc.) * Have completely seamless and bug-free Software. a bug on facebook is annoying, a bug in the Metaverse—depending on the hardware—could cause serious injury or death. This is literally a plot point in Hypospace Outlaw, which is arguably the first game about metaverses. * Have hardware on the AR glasses side that is either fashionable enough for the masses to offset the bulkiness of a micro-computer on your face, or unnoticeable from regular, non-tech-filled glasses. Notice how the Apple Watch is not much larger than a regular one. (Indeed, there are regular watches larger than the Apple Watch—have a think about who wears them.) * Even if you have perfect AR glasses, some people aren’t going to want to wear glasses, so you’ll need AR contacts. If regular-looking AR glasses would be a miniaturisation marvel, then AR contacts?!… I feel like an old man yelling at clouds with this stuff, but I genuinely don’t see how it can become anything other than a gimmick.
    - newacc9 5y ago
      Its obvious how it could fail; no one wants a squid on their face, but its more interesting to speculate how/what it would look like if it succeeded.

47 points by troydavis 5y ago

And the acquisitions begin. It's clear they're ready to throw big money at making this "metaverse" a thing. They're probably trying to prove to their investors that they're comitted

renewiltord 5y ago
The acquisitions have been going on for ages. BigBox VR. Sanzaru. Guys, you’re just drawing correlations based on when you started paying attention. This is some serious cognitive bias going on.
- aierou 5y ago
  I really wish we would stop giving so much influence to popular opinion on social media. As of late, it is very undiscerning. Voting websites especially are terrible at selecting for true value at scale.
  - moneywoes 5y ago
    What is the alternative

BoumTAC 5y ago

Do people really believe in fitness VR? It feel like big over engineering BS, sport is one of such a basic thing. Just buy a pair of shoes and go for a run. Buy a bike and go for a ride. Practice any sport in a club, take a gym membership and go deadlifting. Why do they need to spend billion of dollars en VR development and then the user will have to spend hundred (thousand ?) of dollars to buy the VR headset, expensive computer just to have an activity that will be worse than a jog.

Kiro 5y ago
For me, VR training has been life-changing so it has already proven its worth. Prefixing something that is really hard for me to do consistently with "just..." tells me we're very different persons. VR training is amazing and after one year I'm still excited for every workout. The recent development in apps such as FitXR shows that we've just seen the start of this movement. In my opinion fitness is the killer app for VR.
drvdevd 5y ago
I go running and occasionally do push-ups inside and have an exercise bike. VR exercise really bridges the gap for me between not wanting to exercise or not having time, to feeling energized and/or it being a workout all it's own. Mostly just a game of Pistol Whip but also the noted Supernatural app helps a lot. I also put on 360 1st person biking videos on YouTube while I ride my exercise bike and the whole range of options expands my desire to work out exponentially...
- bko 5y ago
  I haven't thought of that. What's your setup? Where are the videos? I saw a few on YT but was wondering if there's a different source or I'm not searching for the right thing Does the sweat mess with the gear? How is the weight of the equipment?
  - drvdevd 5y ago
    I have a fairly cheap mechanical exercise bike I bought on Amazon (not near it right now, don't have model handy). By mechanical I mean I adjust the resistance myself. As for which videos I watch - kinda just anything in the YouTube app on the quest 2 which is full 360 or 180. I recently found a good video of a ride through Seattle that was about 45 minutes or so (didn't complete the whole thing, I will probably do it again next). Quality obviously varies but I'm not picky. Also if you are prone to motion sickness in VR you might not like it. You're always at the position of the cameras of whoever was filming so that's a bit odd - but I find it's good enough for me to get into it. Any 180 video is probably fine too, but I like turning fully around like I'm on a real bike, seeing what was behind behind cyclist. The weight of the Quest 2 doesn't bother me as long as it's adjusted properly on my head and yeah it gets sweaty but I don't personally care much as long as I take breaks.

akeck 5y ago

Has anyone done exercise with a VR headset? My runner friends go through earbuds ever other year, because the sweat destroys them.

rocmcd 5y ago
That’s not my experience at all. I’ve been using the included wired Apple headphones every day for running (in the Texas heat, though only ~30 minutes) and I’m going on year 4 with the same pair. That being said, there are many more contact points with a VR headset, so I could see it being a bigger issue. Plus many of them are padded, which will absorb sweat and are hard to clean without considerable effort.
gmays 5y ago
Yeah, they have sweat guards you can add and the VR head pads are usually replacable.
hnra 5y ago
Tell your friends there are water resistant earbuds nowadays.
- Raidion 5y ago
  Water resistant earbuds still don't last more than a year. I've found ~$30 wired sweat proof headphones have the best value ratio IMO. I actually could complain a crap ton about running setups. With the 'death' of mp3s and the rise of streaming services, it's becoming increasingly difficult to get music on your runs without some sort of phone/smart watch. I really miss the days where it was just an iPod shuffle. They have the Mighty, which is basically Spotify playlists in iPod shuffle form, but it's poorly made. Smart watches are cool, but needs Bluetooth headphones, which are less comfortable (heavier) than wired headphones and just add complications to something I'd rather keep simple.
  - akeck 5y ago
    Not exercise related, but I really miss the simplicity of things like the SanDisk Sansa Shake.

echelon 5y ago

The elephant in the room is VRChat. The VRChat team must be salivating. If they can't buy VRChat, they'll go after the furry VR app Neos.

astlouis44 5y ago
Either VRChat or RecRoom at this point.
celdon25 5y ago
VRChat is littered with UX and network bugs, design flaws, extreme performance issues on the client-side (poor user experience with anything less than a $2000 GPU), and apparent technical debt. High-severity bugs don't get patched for weeks. Major updates often go out on Friday nights, causing much disruption for anyone who had plans there on those nights. Seriously, who even releases on a schedule like that? Not to mention its a security nightmare given that by default your client will run arbitrary GPU shader code that is uploaded by other users. People can and do take advantage of that, even as a full-time hobby. The third-party developer community that claims to combat said security issues, really misses the mark. Their approach is to attempt to centralize the governance of all third-party tools (which are badly needed because VRChat proper fails to protect its users or provide a decent UX). Then they demonize virtually anyone who doesn't get on board with their ultimatums. They even require all users of their third-party tools who want any kind of technical assistance to submit detailed log files to a bot that will sound an alarm if that user uses an "unapproved" program. The criteria for this is, to put it simply, to flag anything that wasn't created by someone named on their whitelist of developers. And if you want to see salivation, there's plenty of it there. It's a spectacle just seeing people jump on these users like dogs, quite rudely at times, for daring to download something that the gestapo didn't approve of. For a community that claims to be about creativity, they do a poor job of fostering it. Anyone who wants to have an entrepreneurial spirit in the development of such tools better have some kind of copy-protection as the tools tend to only be implemented in the form of distributed binaries that tend to require no server, or a microservice at the most. Problem is, the same group mentioned above is requiring that developers on its whitelist implement process-wide hooks that will break the copy-protection but nothing else. All in the name of keeping the children safe, I shit you not, but what it's really about is control. A determined hacker can easily defeat this measure by distributing a forked version of the mod loader with their own tools. Here's the kicker: Apparently this was all the result of some kind of back-room deal between the developer cartel and VRChat's admins, the timing of which was conspicuously not long before their $80M Series D round. Timeline of events March 30: VRChat does a large ban wave of apparently as many mod creators as they can find, by cross-referencing social media and Github names of developers of third-party tools with their own database of users. VRChat demands to the developers to take down their Github repositories if they wish to be unbanned and to get connected back with their VR social life. March 31: VRChat "admits a misstep". The accounts get unbanned, the developers may put their repositories back online, but now they "intend to start a dialogue" with said developers. https://web.archive.org/web/20210401015645/https://twitter.com/HerpDerpinstine/status/1377439651607158786 https://web.archive.org/web/20210401015645/https://twitter.c... - In the meantime however, the developers are not distributing their software for the time being. April 8: The list of whitelisted mods completes an overhaul, basically an audit, then distribution opens back up. Additionally on this date, the modding cartel says they won't be sharing any details with the public about the subject-matter of the discussions with the VRChat admins. April 24: A rogue developer ragequits the community and pushes an update to their software that amounts to prankware. Letting no crisis go to waste, the modding cartel writes a 250 word announcement to signal boost this incident, even archiving the link to the commit so they can show you how much you are at risk if you don't only install what they say you can install. June 16: MelonLoader 0.4.0 is released, and many of the tools on the whitelist are simultaneously released with 0.4.0. They also spill the news on this very day, that it is no longer backwards compatible with the previous version of the loader. So any developers who weren't colluding with the group were given no time to decide if it was a good idea to switch to 0.4.0. They weren't really given a real choice as the software became effectively unusable without adopting this version. Conspicuously absent from this announcement was the additional security measures I mentioned above, to prevent copy-protection. You'd think it would be a good opportunity to announce the supposed safety measures they implemented, but instead it seemed they were trying to avoid discussing that at first for whatever reason. June 28 (just 12 days later): VRChat raises $80M Series D. A major focus of this fundraising round relates to the implementation of a creator economy. A Machiavellian scheme to exert control under dubious pretenses is not the foundation of creativity. The above scheme did nothing substantial to mitigate the risks of piracy in the context of such a planned market. I'm not sure if a VC would have been wise to it though as it looks good enough on paper to someone who doesn't truly understand the ecosystem or the security factors involved. This to me is solid evidence that VRChat as a company likely has a top-level strategy of putting lipstick on the pig rather than building a good product. Therefore, VRChat is a toxic, toxic, poison pill, and Facebook would be wise to take notice of this and instead compete with them head on. Otherwise it would be a missed opportunity to break the stockholm syndrome that is currently widespread in its future target audience.

unclebucknasty 5y ago

Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB. There's a lot of hand-wringing and exclaiming but, at end of day, it's business as usual. Consumers and investors never punish the company in a meaningfully lasting way. With existing products built on network effects, I can at least see the rationale: where else can you go where everyone else is at scale? But, for new product categories like this, why would anyone follow them? I understand they have advantages there, based on their existing properties, but it's still an opportunity to say "hell no" to FB. In particular, with this product: the idea that we are to spend increasingly more time in a simulated universe is dystopic enough. But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst? I mean we're really just gonna' slow walk ourselves into this sci-fi movie?

tchalla 5y ago
> Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB. It's the same way people have gone along with 100s of acquisitions from Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036073
dontcare007 5y ago
Yep, to most people, comfort trumps principles.
azangru 5y ago
> But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst? I don't understand this sentiment. Why do we need to care how moral the man at the helm is? A leader is temporary: today's leader can be immoral, while tomorrow's leader can be moral. Or vice versa. Or a leader can be moral in such a way that you would wish he wasn't. If end users can exercise their moral choices themselves, if they can refrain from lying, or bullying, or bragging, or trolling, then so much the better. If they can't, well, then we are screwed either way.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago

rvz 5y ago

Would you already look at that. Meta is off to the races with acquisitions in VR studios for building an Apple Fitness+ competitor for the metaverse. So what are you going to do about it to compete or stop them? Maybe Peloton is next?

uptown 5y ago

Which workplace video conferencing app does Facebook acquire? Zoom? Citrix?

jpgvm 5y ago
Zoom is massively overvalued and technology wise doesn't have much to stand on. Why wouldn't they just develop their own as Google did? These days video codecs and special sauce for high scalability calls is (relatively) well understood. If you were going to buy something Citrix is probably the most cost effective but I doubt you are getting much there either other than existing contracts. There is a good reason Zoom was able to take so much market share from Citrix in the first place.
- alexeldeib 5y ago
  Messenger has video, and given FB workplace I have to imagine that already is their competitor in some form. Also the portal thing.
- uptown 5y ago
  They'll want business users and to eliminate an alternative platform at the same time. Buying something like Citrix or Zoom hands them an installed base which they can feed into using their Metaverse platform without needing to convince business users that Facebook isn't just to be used for personal social media.

dredmorbius 5y ago

They're called "Meta" because their business is selling your metadata. -- Polychrome @ Mastodon https://cybre.space/@polychrome/107191019622441552 https://cybre.space/@polychrome/107191019622441552

dymk 5y ago
Facebook/Meta has never sold user data or user metadata
- lostmsu 5y ago
  I believe this to be a misinterpretation of facts. If store A posts targeted FB ad, they will know when a person clicks it on FB to get to store A. Now store A knows user on their website meets targeting parameters.
  - dymk 5y ago
    That’s not what people mean when they say “Facebook sells user data”.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      How do you know what people mean in this case and what they don't? The details of how data gets passed are technical, and users might not be aware of them. However, the end result is the same.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  What Facebook sells is targeted advertising. Targeting is on the basis of metadata. Hair-splitting this point is disengenuous.

newacc9 5y ago

Think of all the things you can do in the metaverse: fitness, watch sports, watch a movie, work-from-home, virtual cafe. I think they will buy all these entry-points and stitch them together, might just work.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
Think about it: all these things can be done in real life.
- void-pointer 5y ago
  I genuinely feel like I’m losing my mind over this shit. Just… Do people genuinely think that the average popular party girl/jock you knew in high school who loves going to parties and drinking, or playing sports/shopping with their friends is going to put on a bulky VR headset to do a cut-down, laggy, buggy, low res version of the same thing, getting VR sickness and a imprint on their face in the process? The way I see it, it any of this meta verse shit is going to succeed with the masses—I.e., not geeks who are already into VR—it will need to: * Be imperceptible or almost-imperceptible from real life in ALL senses (including things like touch, smell, proprioception etc.) * Have completely seamless and bug-free Software. a bug on facebook is annoying, a bug in the Metaverse—depending on the hardware—could cause serious injury or death. This is literally a plot point in Hypospace Outlaw, which is arguably the first game about metaverses. * Have hardware on the AR glasses side that is either fashionable enough for the masses to offset the bulkiness of a micro-computer on your face, or unnoticeable from regular, non-tech-filled glasses. Notice how the Apple Watch is not much larger than a regular one. (Indeed, there are regular watches larger than the Apple Watch—have a think about who wears them.) * Even if you have perfect AR glasses, some people aren’t going to want to wear glasses, so you’ll need AR contacts. If regular-looking AR glasses would be a miniaturisation marvel, then AR contacts?!… I feel like an old man yelling at clouds with this stuff, but I genuinely don’t see how it can become anything other than a gimmick.
  - newacc9 5y ago
    Its obvious how it could fail; no one wants a squid on their face, but its more interesting to speculate how/what it would look like if it succeeded.