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You're really leaning your entire arm on the scale here. People have a visceral reaction to the implication that donning a computer on your head and interactin

You're really leaning your entire arm on the scale here. People have a visceral reaction to the implication that donning a computer on your head and interacting via Corporate Memphis styled cartoon avatars is any sort of future that we should seek. It's that simple. That video of a woman sitting lifelessly at her table while her avatar engages in hearty expressive conversation puts a lump of discomfort in my throat. It's a repulsively dystopian outcome for social interaction, but Meta wants to sell it as a future we're missing out on. People do not like that. I've followed VR since it's infancy, owned most of the major headsets, used it in an office environment, and I will say while VR is cool, the promise of the metaverse is deeply offensive to the senses of most people, myself included.

Aeolun 4y ago
Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable though. It could be the same as starting zoom. Like, at this price point, and with these features that isn’t it, but I can see it in a non-dystopian way. It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me.
- zo1 4y ago
  > "It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me." This is the key part. VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat. It's not just hardware that is interchangeable and multi-use with pluggable things and apps. I think a lot of the people weary of Facebook's VR headset would be put at ease to a large degree if this was an 100% open ecosystem where just one of Facebook's entities is providing the hardware.
  - supermatt 4y ago
    > VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat Thats not what happened. One of the biggest walled gardens spent a tiny portion of their massive wealth to move into another market by purchasing the market leader. Its this behaviour that needs to stop. Corps should be restricted to a single trade category.
    - ahtihn 4y ago
      > Corps should be restricted to a single trade category. Can you come up with a definition of trade category that is legally useful and would prevent Meta from getting into VR hardware?
      - supermatt 4y ago
        I dont need to come up with one - they already exist in the form of trademark (WIPO NCL) classification. I suppose the hardware would be class 28, the app store would be class 35, there are other classes that would be applicable too given they also provide services, etc. Preferably they would be even more granular than that - I believe the chinese system is a bit more detailed in that area.
  - AgentME 4y ago
    >"walled garden" The Quest officially allows sideloading apps and alternative app stores like SideQuest, which Google recently invested in.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      Yeah, lemme get the firmware under MIT or GNU and we'll talk. That's open, not side-loading.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Those of us who feel this... > Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable ... are a minority vastly overrepresented by the website we're on. The company I worked at during the bulk of the pandemic let us all expense headsets to have meetings. Getting into VR the first time is not a seamless experience in the slightest, so trying to get serious work done in meetings took weeks because of the mix of experience levels. Then there was the fact that at the end of the day we live in a flat 2D world of software. Trying to hit touch targets meant for a mouse with a magic wand is maddening. Then there's just the entire uncanniness of avatars that we're nowhere near solving. VR avatars are consistently forced to take on cartoonish proportions because we can't render convincing customizable human avatars on these headsets and won't be near that any time soon. Same goes with the backdrops, which end up being "infected" with the cartoonishness to avoid clashing. - But you know what the death knell was for our VR use? At the end of the day, even at its best, it was the same as starting Zoom. For non-enthusiasts it needs to be stomping Zoom. They don't want to strap a screen to their face just to do the stuff that they were doing by sitting in front of a laptop. At the end of the day, it was "ok enough", and that was precisely why it fizzled out. General apathy at the fact that, this was not an improvement of exactly what we had been doing for months before, was enough to get people suggesting zoom the moment an issue cropped up, and eventually we all just dropped the headsets.
binarysneaker 4y ago
Absolutely. It's about time we raised our heads and looked at where humanity is heading. I feel bad for my kids if this is it.
foxes 4y ago
That sanitized corporate dystopia wants to have the same restrictions, scarcity and limitations as real life. The theory: you could let you explore limitless worlds only bound by your imagination and current compute power. Current meta vision: Horrible outdated corporate cartoon graphics so you can go to a bland sanitized online store to buy an NFT picture of some shoes, and look at a horrible cartoon representation of the Eiffel tower. Meta should be classed as an enemy of humanity.
svnt 4y ago
The worst moment for me was after working by myself in VR logging in to a shared workspace and having a dude, muted, sat on the couch next to me. It loaded me in unmuted by default and I was talking to myself about what was happening. It wasn’t at all clear that he was muted and I was unmuted and his hands were moving disconcertingly near where his body should have been. I started describing him to someone irl and his weird avatar head turns slowly toward me, hands still pulsating. I said something like “uh shit I think he can hear me…?” and his floating weird head glitchily nodded, fingers creeping across his torso the whole time. I logged out. That was it. So many things wrong I’m not sure I could find any reason why I’d try that again.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  So you had one bad experience in the immature stage of early development of a technology. I don't understand how you extrapolate that to the entirety of every possibility it will ever have to offer. Yes Zuckerberg's metaverse vision is weird and creepy. But the underlying tech that is being developed to enable it to exist is transformational. The use cases will develop from what suceeds and people actually like. You could just as easily have painted a dystopian picture of people staring blankly at their iPhones walking down the street instead of talking to the person next to them.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    The previous comment reminds me of how older people used to describe the internet when it was slowly gaining traction. It’s obvious that there were a lot of rough edges, but it would be really short sighted not to see the future potential. The same thing happened to the first smart phones.
    - usrbinbash 4y ago
      The www did things better than anything that already existed. Many things it offered were both massively useful and simply not exist before. What exactly does "Metaverse" improve? What does it offer to the business world that cannot already be done? And are these improvements worth a 1799$ Price-Point per employee, plus all the work & expenses imposed by integrating this into existing structures, and making sure its compliant to regulations and company rules? And are these improvements worth enough to the employees themselves so they will be willing to wear a headset for 8h a day (Especially in labour markets that already face a supply problem)?
badpun 4y ago
Re: usage for work. I wonder how using VR googles can actually work in any sort of public space (like an office). Since your vision is absolutely obscured, it basically requires absolute trust of the people around you. Other people can not only steal your wallet from your bag (that could still happen in a regular office, people leave private stuff unattended), but can for example come close to you and touch your hair or do other kinds of pervy things. I can't imagine women not being worried about this. A solution would be to give each employee a tiny office with a door and a lock, which wouldn't be a bad outcome of VR to be honest...
- shubb 4y ago
  The headsets have cameras on the outside your vision can "pass through" and you can see the world around you - just with virtual objects in it. This gives you a mixed reality experience rather than a virtual world. So for example you see the cafe around you but with you laptop screen hovering above the table and your australian friend bob sat on the other side. One of the big feature improvements on this unit is that those cameras area lot better. Another feature is that the headset uses some kind of lidar to map out the space around you, so that even if you are in an immersive experience objects and people coming into the real world area you marked out will get overlayed into your virtual world, so you can see bob sneaking up behind you. These headsets are pretty cool and the consumer one is pretty cheap. Well worth getting one even if you are intending to sell it on after experimenting.

Aeolun 4y ago

Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable though. It could be the same as starting zoom. Like, at this price point, and with these features that isn’t it, but I can see it in a non-dystopian way. It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me.

zo1 4y ago
> "It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me." This is the key part. VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat. It's not just hardware that is interchangeable and multi-use with pluggable things and apps. I think a lot of the people weary of Facebook's VR headset would be put at ease to a large degree if this was an 100% open ecosystem where just one of Facebook's entities is providing the hardware.
- supermatt 4y ago
  > VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat Thats not what happened. One of the biggest walled gardens spent a tiny portion of their massive wealth to move into another market by purchasing the market leader. Its this behaviour that needs to stop. Corps should be restricted to a single trade category.
  - ahtihn 4y ago
    > Corps should be restricted to a single trade category. Can you come up with a definition of trade category that is legally useful and would prevent Meta from getting into VR hardware?
    - supermatt 4y ago
      I dont need to come up with one - they already exist in the form of trademark (WIPO NCL) classification. I suppose the hardware would be class 28, the app store would be class 35, there are other classes that would be applicable too given they also provide services, etc. Preferably they would be even more granular than that - I believe the chinese system is a bit more detailed in that area.
- AgentME 4y ago
  >"walled garden" The Quest officially allows sideloading apps and alternative app stores like SideQuest, which Google recently invested in.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    Yeah, lemme get the firmware under MIT or GNU and we'll talk. That's open, not side-loading.
BoorishBears 4y ago
Those of us who feel this... > Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable ... are a minority vastly overrepresented by the website we're on. The company I worked at during the bulk of the pandemic let us all expense headsets to have meetings. Getting into VR the first time is not a seamless experience in the slightest, so trying to get serious work done in meetings took weeks because of the mix of experience levels. Then there was the fact that at the end of the day we live in a flat 2D world of software. Trying to hit touch targets meant for a mouse with a magic wand is maddening. Then there's just the entire uncanniness of avatars that we're nowhere near solving. VR avatars are consistently forced to take on cartoonish proportions because we can't render convincing customizable human avatars on these headsets and won't be near that any time soon. Same goes with the backdrops, which end up being "infected" with the cartoonishness to avoid clashing. - But you know what the death knell was for our VR use? At the end of the day, even at its best, it was the same as starting Zoom. For non-enthusiasts it needs to be stomping Zoom. They don't want to strap a screen to their face just to do the stuff that they were doing by sitting in front of a laptop. At the end of the day, it was "ok enough", and that was precisely why it fizzled out. General apathy at the fact that, this was not an improvement of exactly what we had been doing for months before, was enough to get people suggesting zoom the moment an issue cropped up, and eventually we all just dropped the headsets.

binarysneaker 4y ago

Absolutely. It's about time we raised our heads and looked at where humanity is heading. I feel bad for my kids if this is it.

foxes 4y ago

That sanitized corporate dystopia wants to have the same restrictions, scarcity and limitations as real life. The theory: you could let you explore limitless worlds only bound by your imagination and current compute power. Current meta vision: Horrible outdated corporate cartoon graphics so you can go to a bland sanitized online store to buy an NFT picture of some shoes, and look at a horrible cartoon representation of the Eiffel tower. Meta should be classed as an enemy of humanity.

svnt 4y ago

The worst moment for me was after working by myself in VR logging in to a shared workspace and having a dude, muted, sat on the couch next to me. It loaded me in unmuted by default and I was talking to myself about what was happening. It wasn’t at all clear that he was muted and I was unmuted and his hands were moving disconcertingly near where his body should have been. I started describing him to someone irl and his weird avatar head turns slowly toward me, hands still pulsating. I said something like “uh shit I think he can hear me…?” and his floating weird head glitchily nodded, fingers creeping across his torso the whole time. I logged out. That was it. So many things wrong I’m not sure I could find any reason why I’d try that again.

zmmmmm 4y ago
So you had one bad experience in the immature stage of early development of a technology. I don't understand how you extrapolate that to the entirety of every possibility it will ever have to offer. Yes Zuckerberg's metaverse vision is weird and creepy. But the underlying tech that is being developed to enable it to exist is transformational. The use cases will develop from what suceeds and people actually like. You could just as easily have painted a dystopian picture of people staring blankly at their iPhones walking down the street instead of talking to the person next to them.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  The previous comment reminds me of how older people used to describe the internet when it was slowly gaining traction. It’s obvious that there were a lot of rough edges, but it would be really short sighted not to see the future potential. The same thing happened to the first smart phones.
  - usrbinbash 4y ago
    The www did things better than anything that already existed. Many things it offered were both massively useful and simply not exist before. What exactly does "Metaverse" improve? What does it offer to the business world that cannot already be done? And are these improvements worth a 1799$ Price-Point per employee, plus all the work & expenses imposed by integrating this into existing structures, and making sure its compliant to regulations and company rules? And are these improvements worth enough to the employees themselves so they will be willing to wear a headset for 8h a day (Especially in labour markets that already face a supply problem)?

badpun 4y ago

Re: usage for work. I wonder how using VR googles can actually work in any sort of public space (like an office). Since your vision is absolutely obscured, it basically requires absolute trust of the people around you. Other people can not only steal your wallet from your bag (that could still happen in a regular office, people leave private stuff unattended), but can for example come close to you and touch your hair or do other kinds of pervy things. I can't imagine women not being worried about this. A solution would be to give each employee a tiny office with a door and a lock, which wouldn't be a bad outcome of VR to be honest...

shubb 4y ago
The headsets have cameras on the outside your vision can "pass through" and you can see the world around you - just with virtual objects in it. This gives you a mixed reality experience rather than a virtual world. So for example you see the cafe around you but with you laptop screen hovering above the table and your australian friend bob sat on the other side. One of the big feature improvements on this unit is that those cameras area lot better. Another feature is that the headset uses some kind of lidar to map out the space around you, so that even if you are in an immersive experience objects and people coming into the real world area you marked out will get overlayed into your virtual world, so you can see bob sneaking up behind you. These headsets are pretty cool and the consumer one is pretty cheap. Well worth getting one even if you are intending to sell it on after experimenting.