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Honest question: what is Facebook trying to accomplish? What exactly is the "Metaverse?" Their Superbowl ad was just straight-up weird & confusing. I'm honestly

by dvt 5y ago

Honest question: what is Facebook trying to accomplish? What exactly is the "Metaverse?" Their Superbowl ad was just straight-up weird & confusing. I'm honestly not sure what their product team's vision is. Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG? I have an Oculus and other than Beatsaber and Alyx and a few other titles/apps, it's just not that exciting. The Nintendo Switch is at least an order of magnitude more fun.

handol 5y ago
I think it really boils down to, they need a near future myth for investors to speculate their stock price up. That myth is, ubiquitous, always-on AR is just around the corner, and they're going to be the platform it runs on.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  This seems like the most plausible explanation to me. But Zuckerberg does also seem weird and unsocialized enough to actually believe there's potential in the metaverse.
- ericabiz 5y ago
  Yes, exactly. This is just like Uber and self-driving cars…only instead of “this will lower our costs and finally make us profitable!” it’s “this is another platform where we can have infinite growth!” It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the days of wild growth for their existing platform are over.
- bko 5y ago
  A future myth? They've been printing money for over a decade now. Their first positive net income was 2009. Apart from last quarter, they're still gaining users every year, sometime double digit percentages. They were able to squeeze multiple times the revenue out of their user base than other social networks. If they execute on VR half as well as they did their core product than the hype is real
  - handol 5y ago
    > A future myth? Yes, a story about the future that he wants to generate a collective social belief in.
- potatolicious 5y ago
  Reminiscent of the Uber play - once it was widely noticed they couldn't drive costs down enough to achieve profitability, there needed to be another narrative to maintain optimism in the company. And so the narrative changed, from: "through the magic of {pixie dust technology} we can make providing chauffeur services so cheap it would be hugely profitable" to "we will replace all the human drivers with robots, any day now" Of course, that future was much, much further away than purported, but it certainly was useful for pumping up optimism in a company where the present-day situation isn't necessarily favorable. FB's money-printing products seem to be facing major headwinds. They're scandal-wracked, user growth is plateauing heavily especially in the most profitable markets, and a fast-moving competitor is rapidly eating into their most coveted growth areas and they seem unable to convincingly fight the trend. A narrative shift is certainly needed for them.
  - jonfromsf 5y ago
    which competitor are you thinking of?
    - largbae 5y ago
      Bytedance (TikTok) is the one most often discussed.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    Problem is, if Uber recent news are anything to go by, in the current environment investors aren't interested in promises, they want to see results and they want to see them now. Uber literally just forecasted positive cash flow by the end of this year, and the stock tanked. FB banking on a far future R&D move is not likely to fly well with investors. Most certainly not in the near future.
    - potatolicious 5y ago
      Oh I fully agree, investors won't be nearly as credulous with FB as they were with past companies with wildly optimistic visions (and not nearly such rosy results in reality) like WeWork or Uber. I think it's both a function of investors having been burned in the recent past with unicorns failing to deliver on their lofty promises, but also the reality that FB has suffered significant (read: catastrophic) reputation damage from the endless stream of scandals. FB employees seem to have an inexhaustible belief that they can weather any storm without permanent harm, but I suspect that isn't actually true. More than that, the narrative shift isn't convincing. At least with Uber they had fancy robot cars to show off, even if they didn't work. What does FB have to convince us of the metaverse future? A lot of expensive CGI-rendered "concept reels" and very little actual product that is actually here (or imminent). The recent Superbowl ad did not contain a single frame of actual product footage - nor did the "fake" product in any way resemble anything FB has announced! And the little that does exist (Horizon Worlds) is... really... really... painfully bad. The fact that FB has even let the public at these experimental products (rather than iterate internally) is baffling. As someone who's been in the consumer tech space for a really long time the strategy here is just mind-boggling. The company continues to pitch no actual product - it has remained frustratingly vague about what the metaverse even is - but also insist at the same time that the entire company is reorienting around it. What little is released is shockingly poor - to the point where one wonders if these half-baked products will poison the well against a better thought-out and genuinely useful product further down the line. It reeks not of visionary thought and more dragging whatever you can out of the experimental arm of the company to try to cement the narrative shift.
emilsedgh 5y ago
Pretending like they have something for the future, which they don't.
- nr2x 5y ago
  To be fair, most Big Tech companies stopped pretending a while ago.
- nomel 5y ago
  > Pretending like they have something for the future, which they don't. I've been following some of their research with their VR/AR hardware, and it appears to me they definitely have something for the future. They're investing massive amounts of money, and they seem to be miles ahead of everyone else (well, it doesn't seem like there is anyone else). To me, they clearly do have something for the future, with what seems like a very natural progression of technology and interacting with computers, with something like the Metaverse being an eventual end goal, maxing out that technology. Maybe Metaverse isn't what people want, but there's so much between the computers we use now and the Metaverse that they can dip their toes in, along the way. I'll say it with naive confidence: AR/VR is the future of display technology/use.
  - criddell 5y ago
    Something being the future isn’t very interesting if it’s always in the future. After playing the VR game Dactyl Nightmare in 1992 I figured VR was the future of video games. Thirty years later it’s still the future of gaming. By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error.
    - the_snooze 5y ago
      >By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error. I think the big thing VR has going against it is just how antisocial it is. It's hard to have shared experiences around the technology unless enough people are already bought in.
wmeredith 5y ago
They'd like to own the dystopia's present in Ready Player One and Snowcrash. It's a cynical bet, at best. Related: when was the last time Facebook had a non-acquired "good idea"?
- wbl 5y ago
  The radioactive waste dump that was the exclusion zone is where SF is putting all its middle class housing.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  Marketplace? In the ads space, I think you'd be hard pressed to find an innovation that didn't start at FB.
ninth_ant 5y ago
> Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG? The straightforward answer is that FB leadership sincerely believes that yes, that will happen. Conspiracy theories about alternative motivations may be fun, but this is precisely why they purchased Oculus in the first place and they’ve been pretty clear and consistent about this.
- asveikau 5y ago
  Seems more like a speculative investment to me. If it becomes big, they want to own it and be involved. If it isn't, ok. Some investments lose money.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    I don’t think it’d be ok if not. They’ve spent many billions and their stock price is partially hinged on them owning “the next big thing.”
    - asveikau 5y ago
      I think you're touching on why corporate America doesn't understand what r&d is supposed to be. Expecting certain returns in specific places is not the point. You fund a lot of stuff and you don't know which is going to pay off.
      - azinman2 5y ago
        This isn’t R&D at this point. They’re pointing the entire direction of the company at it, publicly committing to it, renaming the company after it, and spending many billions.
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    Naming your company after something is generally a sign you believe in it and it's not just one of many bets you're making.
deeviant 5y ago
He is trying to accomplish Ready Player One, it really is that simple.
pkdpic 5y ago
I was under the impression (from other HN threads) that the simplest explanation for their erratic seeming rebranding / behavior was related to some kind of red herring optics narrative manipulation for stockholders or something. Like I know what that even means.
grishka 5y ago
There's only so much to do when all your products are feature-complete but you're too scared to acknowledge this fact.
dboreham 5y ago
It doesn't need to be anything. It's the FB equivalent of ActiveX or self-driving cars or "the network is the computer". A thing that spinmeisters can use to generate spin.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  FB already has an equivalent to those things: Libra, the DoA cryptocurrency
nootropicat 5y ago
>Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG? I do, although it's very possible current attempts are too early for tech reasons and will remain relatively niche for years. Fundamentally the appeal of vr isn't games, it's to have communication and control ability on the level of a real life activity (or even better) but online. I'm not sure if that can be achieved without brain implants (not for vision - that's likely to remain external for a long time - but for everything else, especially motor control, sense of touch). If brain implants are needed Facebook's attempts are at least a decade too early. Regardless of Facebook's/Meta's current attempts, in the future majority of work and social activity will happen in vr, but the timeline is unclear. Well - at least in the timeline in which technical civilization doesn't collapse.
imroot 5y ago
No, but, I see great trends in threat reduction in using stuff like Oculus in military and space applications -- let's build some crazy robots, get some low-latency links between the front line and an operating base, and let the COD trained kids go ape-shit on whatever enemy might be out there. They use Oculus' (or similar VR technology) to stay on base where they can be well protected, vs the (hardened) robots that are on the front line. I've completely written off FB and IG -- deleted my FB account about 7 years ago, I still have a 'legacy' IG account that I might log into once a year with a name that nobody would be interested in...and that's my extent of the Meta I have in my life. I have zero desire to get into VR (until they come out with something that will work for the guys like me that have poor vision), but, who knows what the world might bring in the next 40 years.
imiric 5y ago
Playing devil's advocate, I think they're betting on the long game. Eventually, when XR headsets become the size and have the practicality of sunglasses, they will become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today. It would be naive to think that the current smartphone design is the end-all-be-all of personal computing devices. We're already seeing small drops in smartphone sales worldwide, some of which are undoubtedly related to the global crisis, but let's be real: the design has hardly improved from the glass slab of the iPhone. We've lost bezels and the tech has seen iterative upgrades and small innovations, but in general it's a stagnated market with no clear path forward. Current generations of XR headsets are still far away from mass adoption, but once the tech is drastically easier to adopt, possibly within the next decade, companies will flock to fulfill the demand, and Meta will already have an established platform. That's their bet anyway, and while I dislike everything they stand for, I can't say they're wrong in this case. Facebook might be dying, but they're seeing the writing on the wall and trying to pivot to an—as of yet—nonexistent market.
- Lamad123 5y ago
  You might be a little overoptimistic! Remember you've been promised flying cars, but cars today look almost identical to those from 130 years ago.
  - Banana699 5y ago
    Cars can't get any smaller because they are constrained by a much more fundamental size limit than computers: the size to fit the driver and the passenger(s) and still have an engine. Formula 1 cars are as small as it gets. They didn't get any faster than 1960s-1970s limits because of efficiency and safety considerations, as well as the fact that a faster car means absolutely nothing on a jammed road, and traffic jams happen for reasons entirely unrelated to the speed of the cars involved. They didn't fly because of a complex mix of challenging engineering, tricky economics and the naivety of cultural expectation. Computers are different. They are mainly limited by the size of the UI and other IO, the actual "computer" is inconceivably, inhumanly, unimaginably small. Most of our devices is just places for your fingers to touch and your eyes to see. We can keep shrinking until we get to the point where computers are things we put inside our brains cells and inject in our bloodstream, and perhaps even more. They can absolutely get faster and more efficient than they are today. The brain that made them makes do with 100W and makes a mockery of GPT3 and CNNs. Yes it's a specialized architecture, that's the whole point. The easy money of moore's law and Dennard scaling blinded us to a whole landscape of possible computer architecture and programming paradigms, we haven't made a dent in that mine yet.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
edave64 5y ago
Metaverse means they can bring real world limitations to a virtual world that has no need for them, so they can profit of these limitations.
akselmo 5y ago
I just find it funny how this whole metaverse thing has been around since worlds.com and Second Life. Now FB took that and slapped VR on top of it. I think that sex workers will rejoice about this, nobody else will really care, and "metamate" will mean something completely different in future.
scsilver 5y ago
When people get paid to do it. Younger me would rather be trading my data for training their ai, doing whatever quests they set up, hanging out in that environment if it can pay close to a minimum wage job. (Note this is easier to do in poor parts of the world, and they are just as human, with similar ai teaching potentials to those in the wealthiest nations.) Then when all my friends are there, "working" I'll have plenty social incentive to get me to strap on the Oculus and be part of the group even if I wasn't getting paid/or didn't live the game. I remember wasting soooo many hours of my young life watching my friends play boring games of fifa, just because I wanted to part of the group. I really don't love meta, they are insidious. but I'd rather my kid work the metaverse for extra cash than work as a "essential" worker.
torginus 5y ago
Playing with VRchat, or some multiplayer video game on a VR headset (I'd recommend you try Population One), social interaction with other humans feels really natural, I've met countless strangers around the world, and started talking about random stuff as we've tried to hunt down enemy players. VR just breaks down some barrier that makes social interaction feel lot more natural than a text-based interface ever could.
lithos 5y ago
VR and AR solves every problem advertisers have with browsers. Browsers are: sandboxed away from the OS, are easy for users to manipulate with addons, lacking in new data streams to monetize. Meanwhile in VR land: Root/super user/driver level access to the system (worst of drm and anticheat software), tons of new data streams (full camera, and microphone access to the room. Some day to have eye tracking, mouth tracking , and anything you fit on health tracking watches), and of course the user can only use the device through the advertisers own software (no skipping of engagement features, no more noscript, and a nice little walled garden App Store).

by dvt 5y ago

handol 5y ago

I think it really boils down to, they need a near future myth for investors to speculate their stock price up. That myth is, ubiquitous, always-on AR is just around the corner, and they're going to be the platform it runs on.

Enginerrrd 5y ago
This seems like the most plausible explanation to me. But Zuckerberg does also seem weird and unsocialized enough to actually believe there's potential in the metaverse.
ericabiz 5y ago
Yes, exactly. This is just like Uber and self-driving cars…only instead of “this will lower our costs and finally make us profitable!” it’s “this is another platform where we can have infinite growth!” It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the days of wild growth for their existing platform are over.
bko 5y ago
A future myth? They've been printing money for over a decade now. Their first positive net income was 2009. Apart from last quarter, they're still gaining users every year, sometime double digit percentages. They were able to squeeze multiple times the revenue out of their user base than other social networks. If they execute on VR half as well as they did their core product than the hype is real
- handol 5y ago
  > A future myth? Yes, a story about the future that he wants to generate a collective social belief in.
potatolicious 5y ago
Reminiscent of the Uber play - once it was widely noticed they couldn't drive costs down enough to achieve profitability, there needed to be another narrative to maintain optimism in the company. And so the narrative changed, from: "through the magic of {pixie dust technology} we can make providing chauffeur services so cheap it would be hugely profitable" to "we will replace all the human drivers with robots, any day now" Of course, that future was much, much further away than purported, but it certainly was useful for pumping up optimism in a company where the present-day situation isn't necessarily favorable. FB's money-printing products seem to be facing major headwinds. They're scandal-wracked, user growth is plateauing heavily especially in the most profitable markets, and a fast-moving competitor is rapidly eating into their most coveted growth areas and they seem unable to convincingly fight the trend. A narrative shift is certainly needed for them.
- jonfromsf 5y ago
  which competitor are you thinking of?
  - largbae 5y ago
    Bytedance (TikTok) is the one most often discussed.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Problem is, if Uber recent news are anything to go by, in the current environment investors aren't interested in promises, they want to see results and they want to see them now. Uber literally just forecasted positive cash flow by the end of this year, and the stock tanked. FB banking on a far future R&D move is not likely to fly well with investors. Most certainly not in the near future.
  - potatolicious 5y ago
    Oh I fully agree, investors won't be nearly as credulous with FB as they were with past companies with wildly optimistic visions (and not nearly such rosy results in reality) like WeWork or Uber. I think it's both a function of investors having been burned in the recent past with unicorns failing to deliver on their lofty promises, but also the reality that FB has suffered significant (read: catastrophic) reputation damage from the endless stream of scandals. FB employees seem to have an inexhaustible belief that they can weather any storm without permanent harm, but I suspect that isn't actually true. More than that, the narrative shift isn't convincing. At least with Uber they had fancy robot cars to show off, even if they didn't work. What does FB have to convince us of the metaverse future? A lot of expensive CGI-rendered "concept reels" and very little actual product that is actually here (or imminent). The recent Superbowl ad did not contain a single frame of actual product footage - nor did the "fake" product in any way resemble anything FB has announced! And the little that does exist (Horizon Worlds) is... really... really... painfully bad. The fact that FB has even let the public at these experimental products (rather than iterate internally) is baffling. As someone who's been in the consumer tech space for a really long time the strategy here is just mind-boggling. The company continues to pitch no actual product - it has remained frustratingly vague about what the metaverse even is - but also insist at the same time that the entire company is reorienting around it. What little is released is shockingly poor - to the point where one wonders if these half-baked products will poison the well against a better thought-out and genuinely useful product further down the line. It reeks not of visionary thought and more dragging whatever you can out of the experimental arm of the company to try to cement the narrative shift.

emilsedgh 5y ago

Pretending like they have something for the future, which they don't.

nr2x 5y ago
To be fair, most Big Tech companies stopped pretending a while ago.
nomel 5y ago
> Pretending like they have something for the future, which they don't. I've been following some of their research with their VR/AR hardware, and it appears to me they definitely have something for the future. They're investing massive amounts of money, and they seem to be miles ahead of everyone else (well, it doesn't seem like there is anyone else). To me, they clearly do have something for the future, with what seems like a very natural progression of technology and interacting with computers, with something like the Metaverse being an eventual end goal, maxing out that technology. Maybe Metaverse isn't what people want, but there's so much between the computers we use now and the Metaverse that they can dip their toes in, along the way. I'll say it with naive confidence: AR/VR is the future of display technology/use.
- criddell 5y ago
  Something being the future isn’t very interesting if it’s always in the future. After playing the VR game Dactyl Nightmare in 1992 I figured VR was the future of video games. Thirty years later it’s still the future of gaming. By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    >By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error. I think the big thing VR has going against it is just how antisocial it is. It's hard to have shared experiences around the technology unless enough people are already bought in.

wmeredith 5y ago

They'd like to own the dystopia's present in Ready Player One and Snowcrash. It's a cynical bet, at best. Related: when was the last time Facebook had a non-acquired "good idea"?

wbl 5y ago
The radioactive waste dump that was the exclusion zone is where SF is putting all its middle class housing.
disgruntledphd2 5y ago
Marketplace? In the ads space, I think you'd be hard pressed to find an innovation that didn't start at FB.

ninth_ant 5y ago

> Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG? The straightforward answer is that FB leadership sincerely believes that yes, that will happen. Conspiracy theories about alternative motivations may be fun, but this is precisely why they purchased Oculus in the first place and they’ve been pretty clear and consistent about this.

asveikau 5y ago
Seems more like a speculative investment to me. If it becomes big, they want to own it and be involved. If it isn't, ok. Some investments lose money.
- azinman2 5y ago
  I don’t think it’d be ok if not. They’ve spent many billions and their stock price is partially hinged on them owning “the next big thing.”
  - asveikau 5y ago
    I think you're touching on why corporate America doesn't understand what r&d is supposed to be. Expecting certain returns in specific places is not the point. You fund a lot of stuff and you don't know which is going to pay off.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      This isn’t R&D at this point. They’re pointing the entire direction of the company at it, publicly committing to it, renaming the company after it, and spending many billions.
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  Naming your company after something is generally a sign you believe in it and it's not just one of many bets you're making.

deeviant 5y ago

He is trying to accomplish Ready Player One, it really is that simple.

pkdpic 5y ago

I was under the impression (from other HN threads) that the simplest explanation for their erratic seeming rebranding / behavior was related to some kind of red herring optics narrative manipulation for stockholders or something. Like I know what that even means.

grishka 5y ago

There's only so much to do when all your products are feature-complete but you're too scared to acknowledge this fact.

dboreham 5y ago

It doesn't need to be anything. It's the FB equivalent of ActiveX or self-driving cars or "the network is the computer". A thing that spinmeisters can use to generate spin.

cuteboy19 5y ago
FB already has an equivalent to those things: Libra, the DoA cryptocurrency

nootropicat 5y ago

>Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG? I do, although it's very possible current attempts are too early for tech reasons and will remain relatively niche for years. Fundamentally the appeal of vr isn't games, it's to have communication and control ability on the level of a real life activity (or even better) but online. I'm not sure if that can be achieved without brain implants (not for vision - that's likely to remain external for a long time - but for everything else, especially motor control, sense of touch). If brain implants are needed Facebook's attempts are at least a decade too early. Regardless of Facebook's/Meta's current attempts, in the future majority of work and social activity will happen in vr, but the timeline is unclear. Well - at least in the timeline in which technical civilization doesn't collapse.

imroot 5y ago

No, but, I see great trends in threat reduction in using stuff like Oculus in military and space applications -- let's build some crazy robots, get some low-latency links between the front line and an operating base, and let the COD trained kids go ape-shit on whatever enemy might be out there. They use Oculus' (or similar VR technology) to stay on base where they can be well protected, vs the (hardened) robots that are on the front line. I've completely written off FB and IG -- deleted my FB account about 7 years ago, I still have a 'legacy' IG account that I might log into once a year with a name that nobody would be interested in...and that's my extent of the Meta I have in my life. I have zero desire to get into VR (until they come out with something that will work for the guys like me that have poor vision), but, who knows what the world might bring in the next 40 years.

imiric 5y ago

Playing devil's advocate, I think they're betting on the long game. Eventually, when XR headsets become the size and have the practicality of sunglasses, they will become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today. It would be naive to think that the current smartphone design is the end-all-be-all of personal computing devices. We're already seeing small drops in smartphone sales worldwide, some of which are undoubtedly related to the global crisis, but let's be real: the design has hardly improved from the glass slab of the iPhone. We've lost bezels and the tech has seen iterative upgrades and small innovations, but in general it's a stagnated market with no clear path forward. Current generations of XR headsets are still far away from mass adoption, but once the tech is drastically easier to adopt, possibly within the next decade, companies will flock to fulfill the demand, and Meta will already have an established platform. That's their bet anyway, and while I dislike everything they stand for, I can't say they're wrong in this case. Facebook might be dying, but they're seeing the writing on the wall and trying to pivot to an—as of yet—nonexistent market.

Lamad123 5y ago
You might be a little overoptimistic! Remember you've been promised flying cars, but cars today look almost identical to those from 130 years ago.
- Banana699 5y ago
  Cars can't get any smaller because they are constrained by a much more fundamental size limit than computers: the size to fit the driver and the passenger(s) and still have an engine. Formula 1 cars are as small as it gets. They didn't get any faster than 1960s-1970s limits because of efficiency and safety considerations, as well as the fact that a faster car means absolutely nothing on a jammed road, and traffic jams happen for reasons entirely unrelated to the speed of the cars involved. They didn't fly because of a complex mix of challenging engineering, tricky economics and the naivety of cultural expectation. Computers are different. They are mainly limited by the size of the UI and other IO, the actual "computer" is inconceivably, inhumanly, unimaginably small. Most of our devices is just places for your fingers to touch and your eyes to see. We can keep shrinking until we get to the point where computers are things we put inside our brains cells and inject in our bloodstream, and perhaps even more. They can absolutely get faster and more efficient than they are today. The brain that made them makes do with 100W and makes a mockery of GPT3 and CNNs. Yes it's a specialized architecture, that's the whole point. The easy money of moore's law and Dennard scaling blinded us to a whole landscape of possible computer architecture and programming paradigms, we haven't made a dent in that mine yet.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

edave64 5y ago

Metaverse means they can bring real world limitations to a virtual world that has no need for them, so they can profit of these limitations.

akselmo 5y ago

I just find it funny how this whole metaverse thing has been around since worlds.com and Second Life. Now FB took that and slapped VR on top of it. I think that sex workers will rejoice about this, nobody else will really care, and "metamate" will mean something completely different in future.

scsilver 5y ago

When people get paid to do it. Younger me would rather be trading my data for training their ai, doing whatever quests they set up, hanging out in that environment if it can pay close to a minimum wage job. (Note this is easier to do in poor parts of the world, and they are just as human, with similar ai teaching potentials to those in the wealthiest nations.) Then when all my friends are there, "working" I'll have plenty social incentive to get me to strap on the Oculus and be part of the group even if I wasn't getting paid/or didn't live the game. I remember wasting soooo many hours of my young life watching my friends play boring games of fifa, just because I wanted to part of the group. I really don't love meta, they are insidious. but I'd rather my kid work the metaverse for extra cash than work as a "essential" worker.

torginus 5y ago

Playing with VRchat, or some multiplayer video game on a VR headset (I'd recommend you try Population One), social interaction with other humans feels really natural, I've met countless strangers around the world, and started talking about random stuff as we've tried to hunt down enemy players. VR just breaks down some barrier that makes social interaction feel lot more natural than a text-based interface ever could.

lithos 5y ago

VR and AR solves every problem advertisers have with browsers. Browsers are: sandboxed away from the OS, are easy for users to manipulate with addons, lacking in new data streams to monetize. Meanwhile in VR land: Root/super user/driver level access to the system (worst of drm and anticheat software), tons of new data streams (full camera, and microphone access to the room. Some day to have eye tracking, mouth tracking , and anything you fit on health tracking watches), and of course the user can only use the device through the advertisers own software (no skipping of engagement features, no more noscript, and a nice little walled garden App Store).