18 ms·

Who is still inside the metaverse?

135 points by jkestner 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ar9av 4y ago
this is a great biased TLDR article full of misconceptions as one can tell from the headline. I read through part of it and I had enough. I quote one of the many misleading statements: "So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold" The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no?
- mattl 4y ago
  Are they being actively used or are they just sitting in a closet somewhere?
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I'm a gamer, my spouse is a gamer, and we have a Quest in the house because of my spouse's job. We're free to use it to play games or whatever, but we never do. We both tried Beat Saber the day she got the rig, and haven't done anything with it since. That was months ago. I have a gamer friend with a gamer spouse with multiple VR rigs from his spouse's job, similar situation, job doesn't care if they play with the hardware. He says he played them a bit for a couple months a couple years back, did the very small number of must-play games (mostly just Alyx and SuperHot, I think) and that was it, all of it's sat unused since then. Maybe we're not representative, but that's four-for-four of not really giving a shit about VR even when we're all gamers and the hardware's free.
    - mattl 4y ago
      What's the rig? Is that more than the headset?
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        In our case, just the headset. I think my friend has at least two or three, and whatever the "good one" is requires some sensors around the room or something, so there's a bit more to that one.
        mattl 4y ago
        I played an HTC Vive once, it was fun but it was a lot of stuff to play... I don't have the space for anything like that. Happy with consoles and Steam Deck (mostly in desktop mode) for video games lately.
  - conorcleary 4y ago
    The future of VR may be so intoxicating that the best proponents of it will be inside the virtual world instead of outside promoting it.
- dtagames 4y ago
  It's pretty much an accepted reality that VR has not been a big success for anyone. Disney failed early with DisneyQuest. Second Life hasn't become popular even though VR hardware has existed for a long time. There's the complete joke called Magic Leap. MS decided to pivot to military applications because theirs didn't sell. Google gave up on Daydream. And Facebook just laid of 10,000 people, many of them in the metaverse department. The most likely reason is physics. These devices aren't fun to use. They're disorienting and make people sick. In practice, they add nothing to the experience -- certainly not the experience of a business meeting! It seems quite ridiculous to think that would ever have been a use case. So, the article really isn't a hit piece but perhaps a rather late and rather obvious commentary on something that even Zuck has to admit isn't a thing.
  - trasz3 4y ago
    I’d say PSVR did quite well. Your examples above - from FB or Google - failed for the same reason everything else they try ends in failure - it’s a problem with those corporations and their “engineering culture”, not with VR.
  - iamleppert 4y ago
    Microsoft recently laid off nearly the entire HoloLens team. Even groups working on AI/ML for things like computer vision and scene detection / 3D understanding weren't spared. All they care about is a Chatbot these days.
    - eclipxe 4y ago
      That’s not accurate
    - lib-dev 4y ago
      Sound business decisions.
  - eclipxe 4y ago
    It’s not accurate that many were from the metaverse org.
  - 4y ago
- senttoschool 4y ago
  >The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no? Meta spent $100 billion[0] on VR to sell 20 million Quest headsets that most people have put in the closet. That's 30 years of total Sony R&D budget, including all the Playstations, Walkmen, VCRs, DVDs, Blu Rays, cameras, sensors, TVs, speakers, headphones, and even their own VR device. [0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/metas-shares-dip-is-proof-metaverse-plan-never-really-had-legs-facebook https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/metas-sha...
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    I just can't believe figures like $100bn. How? On what? Spending $100bn is _hard_. For comparison, the Mars Science Laboratory project had a $2.5bn budget and sent a spacecraft that landed a rover on another planet. Yes, the MSC built on existing NASA infra and previous rover R&D ... but so did Meta's VR division.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I saw a post here yesterday praising Meta for drastically raising salaries for devs. Perhaps that has something to do with it?
    - eclipxe 4y ago
      Lots of fundamental investment in hardware and tech that is multiple years out. Displays, chipsets, input devices, etc. multiple lines of hardware beyond what you see today. Multiple OSes, lots of application teams, middleware, services, frameworks, etc etc.
  - rajman187 4y ago
    It wasn’t $100bn spent on VR. There is a ton of research happening inside of RealityLabs, which accounts for the vast majority of the investment, but yes the only product so far is the VR headset. Here’s a roadmap (supposedly based on leaked presentations) of what’s on the horizon—no pun intended https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-ar-glasses-smartwatch-plans https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-a...
- endisneigh 4y ago
  The amount of headsets sold isn’t a good measure. Better to look at total ecosystem revenue.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Does Facebook have any significant VR revenue outside of headsets? What is their total ecosystem revenue? They didn't break that out in their last filing, so I can't tell.
    - simiones 4y ago
      I think the point was exactly that - even it the Quest numbers don't look so bad when compared with XBox / PS5, they Quest ecosystem is actually peanuts when compared to the XBox or PS5 ecosystems.
- ketchupdebugger 4y ago
  Its different. Arguably all 3 is sold at a loss, they make it up with additional game/application purchases. Most game developers are making their games for xbox, ps5, and/or pc. They aren't making it for vr. There is a lack of application development for the metaverse. This is why zuck is spending 13 billion a year. They are trying to make the applications themselves. There's a lack of third party app/game developers
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  > I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no? I think most Quests are doing what mine is doing: sitting in a drawer unused. In my case it was because my pupillary distance is too wide for the Quest (and almost every other VR headset) so everything looks blurry all of the time no matter what. It sucks being only slightly smaller than Hafþór Björnsson. Every person I know who has a Quest bought Beat Saber and Job Simulator, played for a couple of weeks, and then put it away.
philipov 4y ago
The metaverse went away when I defeated the final boss, but then I started the sequel and now it's back. Who would have thought.
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  You killed Bob Rife? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
  - philipov 4y ago
    Nah, it was god. https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Metaverse https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Metaverse
irrational 4y ago
Has anyone actually met anyone who has visited the metaverse? Admittedly, I don’t live in SV (or CA), but I do know a lot of developers, tech people, nerds, etc. and none of them have visited the metaverse. I keep assuming it doesn’t actually exist yet. It’s like a story of this far off land that people have heard of, but nobody has actually visited.
- Delento 4y ago
  I watched a few discovery videos about it and the only positive was a comedy club people liked to go to. Everything spontaneous was empty. So more like event based like cinema than a hang out space
- Ylmaz 4y ago
  My employer bought a few VR headsets (from meta). I see them lying around in the office but no one ever used them.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  You're correct, nobody has. It's so dumb. I saw ads for the Metaverse in SJC today... there is no product to show. It's not even a scam or pyramid scheme, they're just burning money selling nothing for no money. It's like those oil company ads showing random stock video with voiceover about synergy and sustainability, except at least they sell oil.
- lithos 4y ago
  Closest is VRChat, the most excessive users are there from their morning workout, maybe a work meeting, to their evening socialization. Though everyone pretends the game doesn't exist, especially Facebook (too embarrassing to not match such a small team) Thankfully it's not the dystopian warning of being a "browser" with unlockable ads, tracking (including new stuff like always on cameras, eye tracking, and everything you fit in a fitness watch/ tracker), and all wrapped up by like a proprietary walled garden.
- explaininjs 4y ago
  There is no the metaverse currently, but there are many metaverses. The definition itself is shaky and contradictory across sources. But to summarize, a metaverse is a "set of digital spaces that you can move seamlessly between", it will include "familiar 2D experiences, as well as ones projected into the physical world and fully immersive 3D ones too". It can be accessed via your phone or computer, or a VR reset for "full immersion". Fortnite is a metaverse, but some say Roblox and Minecraft aren't. I couldn't tell you how that distinction was drawn. My favorite metaverse is RuneScape, but I unfortunately haven't visited in a decade or more. Steam might also be considered a metaverse. Which would imply Xbox Online and all that are too. [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meaning-of-metaverse https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meaning-of-met... [2]: https://about.meta.com/what-is-the-metaverse/ https://about.meta.com/what-is-the-metaverse/ [3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/23/fortnites-epic-games-makes-a-metaverse-investment-to-scale-up-even-further/?sh=3a9105d2cfd0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/23/fortnites-...
bvrmn 4y ago
I own Valve Index. State of the industry is not very bright. The best VR game so far is HL2 VR mod. Alyx the second. Looks like investors are pretty shy to put money in VR game studios to make big and story rich content.
poisonborz 4y ago
The worst will be that when somebody, sometimes actually creates an actual immersive small-to-be-worn VR/AR glass - one that will be very much unlike the current generation of headsets - journalists along with these companies will trumpet "this was the idea we had, the product was there but before its time". No sir. The idea of virtual reality and "holograms" is at least here since the early 20th century. It's just that these people burnt billions of dollars on some tacky tech demos and empty marketing promises, and the industry believed them for years.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I'm convinced this is why Apple and Microsoft (among others) keep putting money into AR development. It clearly sucks to use right now, so it doesn't make a lot of sense that they're putting significant money into it... but when someone (possibly one of those two companies!) finally puts out AR glasses that aren't awful, they'll be ready. I remain unsure whether Zuck is running that same playbook, or if he legitimately thought bulky-ass VR goggles were the way of the future and expects to have a smash-hit before marketable AR glasses exist.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    I had an inside view of things, but all of the work being done is actually a long term roadmap towards building AR devices that don't suck. There many complicated issues to deal with, including batter life, processing power, input and control, heat management, placement of self and objects in a virtual world, safety, and on and on. That's all on top of figuring out what content is interesting and compelling. Devices being made by these companies all embody elements of solutions to these challenges, but they all recognize it's a long road, and there's a lot of learning still to be done.
    - darkerside 4y ago
      I've never understood why we aren't putting those hard problems into a backpack that you wear and is connected to a very lightweight head device.
haspok 4y ago
This essay brought back memories from the last millenia, from the IRC / ICQ / webchat days. Except things were much simpler then, and the whole point of chatting with someone was to meet them IRL (OK, I was young back then, maybe older people had different motives). And the least important thing about it was how "realistic" of an experience it was, because of the textual interface things were very restricted anyway, but in hindsight it was all the better for it.
TatersGonnaT8 4y ago
As with all of these articles that follow this same script, the author conflates "the metaverse" and all of the monetary investment being made in Reality Labs with just Horizon Worlds. Makes it hard to take anything said in this article seriously. As others have already commented, most of that money has gone towards longer-term bets on hardware and other investments. A small percentage of that $36 billion mentioned by the author was directed towards Horizon Worlds.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  > As with all of these articles that follow this same script, the author conflates "the metaverse" and all of the monetary investment being made in Reality Labs with just Horizon Worlds. Makes it hard to take anything said in this article seriously. The author wrote about his experience using the system as designed and promoted towards end users. This isn't some deep business analysis or some investigation into the lesser-known corners of VR development, it's a normal user wanting to try out "the metaverse" as promoted by the global megacorporation "Meta." It's reasonable to want other kinds of reporting as well, but there's a lot to learn from a user recounting their own personal experiences in the space. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and if this is what users on the happy path will see, their disappointment is completely understandable.
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  If Horizon worlds is not the entire meta verse, can you name any other metaverses? Can a regular person? And don't say things like RecRoom, because those exist independent of the billions Facebook spent on meta
  - T-A 4y ago
    > can you name any other metaverses? [...] don't say things like RecRoom, because those exist independent of the billions Facebook spent on meta You seem to believe that only things financed by Facebook qualify as "metaverse", a concept which existed long before Facebook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
revlolz 4y ago
No one's 'still in' the METAVERSE cause zuckbuckland isn't what people who have VR devices actually want.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  This is true. Horizons is so polished and manicured. I don't want that. Plastic life is not fun, VR is better when you can explore the rough edges like on other platforms.
asciimov 4y ago
For me the biggest failure of all the VR headsets is there is no demo units at big box store and the lack of a TV app to see what the user is doing. People don't want to blindly buy an unproven expensive gaming system without trying it out first. You can't go into a local Best Buy, Walmart, or Target and try the units out. You have to wait till someone you know gets it an is kind enough to let you give it a go. With all the money Zuck has spent on developing these devices, it is surprising that no money was spent on demo kiosks.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I think that the reason for this is that the devices aren't (yet) suitable for the mass consumer market.
- cheeselip420 4y ago
  Yeah I'd love to press my face into a greasy demo headset at the local Walmart. The hygiene aspect of VR is under-appreciated.
- edent 4y ago
  I refer you to this delightful paper: "Bacterial Load of Virtual Reality Headsets" > The results of these tests indicated that the Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from the headsets possessed high levels of antibiotic resistance. https://doi.org/10.1145/3385956.3418958 https://doi.org/10.1145/3385956.3418958
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    I suddenly realize how I got sick after visiting Legoland in San Jose with my niece - there's a virtual reality "ride" there.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    I'm sure the shared controllers on demo units back in the day were just as bad.
    - 4y ago
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
https://www.curbed.com/2022/10/winter-house-jessica-stocker-metaverse-real-estate.html https://www.curbed.com/2022/10/winter-house-jessica-stocker-... I used to watch this reality TV show with my girlfriend. Metaverse was such a big deal in 2022 that one of the main characters of the season was a Metaverse real estate agent. https://www.bravotv.com/people/jessica-stocker https://www.bravotv.com/people/jessica-stocker > Jess is a beautiful Metaverse real estate agent, investor and entrepreneur from Los Angeles. After Jason slid into her DM’s, she was excited to join the house and show off her wild side to a completely new group of friends. While her party girl behavior gets her into hot water with some of her housemates, she’ll also explore a romance that has the potential to last beyond the winter vacation. I wonder if that's still her job now that it isn't as relevant anymore. Just checked Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/blondesbuildingequity/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/blondesbuildingequity/?hl=en Blondes Building Equity "Best friends building a Real Estate empire" They have a podcast. Titles of recent episodes: "Financially free by age 25 through real estate investing" "70 rental units in under 4 years" "The rule breaker who broke the real-estate industry"
- tsunamifury 4y ago
  This is what a decade of effective 0 rate interest created. Flippers and nonsense that contributes nothing to society. Same in China with ghost real estate.
- bitwize 4y ago
  I'm reminded of Aggretsuko where Retsuko and Fenneko become obsessed with a VR app that features a virtual romantic partner who flirts with you, and after a short while, nags you into buying DLC in the form of scenery and outfit packs. The subtly funny bit is, in this world of talking cartoon animals, the virtual romantic partner was an impossibly handsome male unicorn.
ivix 4y ago
[flagged]
elisk 4y ago
Nobody seems to mention the fact that most of VR games out there require using the hard-to-familiarize hard-to-memorize joysticks to interact with the game. I own a Valve Index and I mostly don't play it because of it's just really a hassle to have to physically stand up (or even seated) and to wave your arms around, only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing. I wish that people built simple keyboard-and-mouse VR games that I could enjoy the VRness of the experience using my fingers and palms like I'm used to in the past 30 years. I want CSGO VR, not a good-looking-cheap-knock-off that I need to figure out how to reload each gun and where to draw the grenade from. I want Cities Skylines VR where I can see my city from above wherever I look. I want Red Alert VR. The most enjoyable games I currently have that is worth whipping VR out for are those I can play with a regular XBox controller which I'm quite familiar with already.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- benoliver999 4y ago
  This is why I'm really tempted by Gran Turismo on PS5 with VR. You just use your normal controller or wheel.
  - freeone3000 4y ago
    Mapping can still be fairly iffy... Project Cars gets it right, but Forza Horizon has way too much "slop".
- spudlyo 4y ago
  Any game where you're seated in some kind of cockpit is my idea of a perfect VR game. This way you can be comfortably sit at your desk with familiar controls, but still have immersive head tracking. For me, I'd love to see a WWI or WWII air combat kind of game like the old Red Baron or IL-2 Sturmovik.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    VTOL VR is fucking amazing for this. You're right there in the cockpit, and you have to reach out and hit buttons and fiddle with dials around the MFDs and everything. Its so, so, so good.
ivix 4y ago
What I find absolutely mystifying about Meta's VR experiment is that they did not leverage the colossal advantage they have in that for facebook users, they know your friend network and interests. Why is the Meta product so catastrophically naff? What went wrong?
- sli 4y ago
  Nothing went wrong. Meta owns 90% of the VR space.
tonymet 4y ago
The "$39B for Horizon" is misleading. Most of that went to shared R&D and infra shared with other products .
havblue 4y ago
There have been studies available for years now that show people only spend about twenty minutes at a time in vr. It's ludicrous that Zuck was willing to bet the future of his company knowing that.
chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago
It's disappointing to not see any mention of VRChat in articles like this. It's niche, but vrchat has a pretty large and consistent fanbase. Meta gets all the headlines because they tried to create the same thing and ended up lighting billions of dollars on fire.
- steveylang 4y ago
  They should have literally lit the billions on fire instead and made an NFT of it, then they might actually have something of 'value'.
- thequadehunter 4y ago
  I never understood the metaverse thing. Was Zuck unaware of vrchat? I was always confused why they thought users of a niche market geared towards hackers and nerds would gravitate towards the soul-less corporate solution as opposed to the existing one.
  - buzzert 4y ago
    Safety? One of those things people say they want, but don’t actually want.
  - rolenthedeep 4y ago
    He bet the farm on VR being "the next big thing". I very much think he's right on that count. The plan was most likely to try and disrupt the VR market like they did social media, and attempt to capture (hold hostage) a significant share of VR users. But they forgot that users need a reason to use the product. It wasn't fun, the avatars are bland, sterile Mii-like characters that nobody likes, and the disclaimers about legs are absurd beyond reason. They failed at every turn. VRchat was the main competition, and Facebook forgot that they needed to be competitive. Even inside the VR industry, the metaverse is regarded as an abject failure. It's more or less the antithesis of what makes a good VR experience: fun, engaging, immersive. Facebook went with bland, boring, and intrusive. The only good thing Facebook has done in the VR space is getting Quest headsets onto millions of heads. This drastically lowered the barrier to entry for new users, which increases the audience for good developers. The quest hardware isn't good by any stretch, but it's good enough for people to judge whether VR is for them without spending $1000.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Mostly I want to move to Dublin now.
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  Assuming the writer is talking about Dublin, Ireland.. that is where I live. I don't know my neighbours at all.
Kyragem 4y ago
VR sickness is still the largest barrier to large scale adoption. I've been following research by Meta/Reality labs closely but despite them investing billions in VR they seem to have not bothered investigating VR sickness at all.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Still waiting for a polished multi-monitor replacement option for macOS that would allow me to travel with a headset and a laptop and not have to worry about finding a large external monitor to plug into for my dev work. Please someone make this a thing.
- brnewd 4y ago
  Also excited for the first glasses that can achieve this. The Nreal Air looks close, but text is apparently still not good enough. Would love to just attach it to my phone over USB-C/HDMI and be good to go.
  - lagniappe 4y ago
    It works fine in normal mode, albeit 1080p, but when you do multi monitors, essentially it is still using that same pixel density to render those 3 screens, so that's why text looks bad. single screen though, I use it all the time for code.
    - brnewd 4y ago
      That makes sense, thanks for clearing that up.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rabf 4y ago
  Big screen beyond may be a solution: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/ https://www.bigscreenvr.com/
- aprilnya 4y ago
  there’s an app called immersed that does this also, meta has their own virtual monitor thing but it’s only on quest pro iirc (and not on quest 2)
asow92 4y ago
Thinking about those still trapped the metaverse is giving off Bioshock vibes
WhiteNoiz3 4y ago
I really wish people would stop writing articles about how bad Horizon Worlds is. There are so many better and more popular VR experiences out there.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  > so many better and more popular VR experiences out there. such as?
  - WhiteNoiz3 4y ago
    Rec Room and VR Chat are examples, but personally I'm in the camp that you should focus on building fun games that people want to play first then worry about turning it into an evergreen experience if you really want to make a 'Metaverse' (ex: like what Fortnite has done).
  - thequadehunter 4y ago
    VRchat. It's the best or worst VR experience depending on who you are.
- chankstein38 4y ago
  Right? It's always just "I got on Horizon Worlds and it sucked" like completely ignoring VRChat and RecRoom and all the really cool stuff a VR headset can do in favor of just bashing Meta. I'm all for bashing Meta but it's so boring at this point. Yeah, they suck and Zuck's stuff sucks but VR isn't the metaverse. Zuck kind of ruined VR to some degree by buying Oculus then locking it to facebook accounts then doing all this garbage branding about The Metaverse making it sound like some sort of dystopian nightmare for him to mine data from when realistically VR games are COOL AS HELL. Like I've killed the battery on my Q1 multiple times playing Minecraft in VR (vivecraft + a host app for Quest) or the TWD games. Heck even beat saber. Sure they're not all magical social experiences but I hate that Meta turned VR into that. That's why I didn't want to link to facebook. I don't play VR to play with people I play it to be immersed in the game I'm playing.
phonescreen_man 4y ago
This quote tickled me the most - His curious IRL appearance — of a human designed by a computer or of a Styrofoam cup that a wizard decided to turn into a person but then changed his mind about halfway through — adapts unexpectedly well to the Meta-cartoonization algorithm All in all a great bit of writing and commentary on something shit. The metaverse.
agentultra 4y ago
Flashbacks to Second Life, New World Notes, Active Worlds, LambdaMOO... the writing in this piece is brilliant. But it's the same old story again and again. Different time, different technology, same old loneliness.
- atomicfiredoll 4y ago
  Thank you for knowing what Active Worlds is.
notbeuller 4y ago
I've enjoyed a few VRChat things of watching movies with a random group of mst3k like mindset - but I'm not social enough to have created any contacts, so it's hit or miss if you'll find one of those rooms with a compatible mindset. The Meta Horizons stuff though - was creepy. There seemed to be people that must've been paid to be there to excite the newcomers, and once I sort of got away from that I ran into the "these are obviously children" problem. I can't help but think that there's a huge COPA fine at the end of that rainbow.

135 points by jkestner 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

this is a great biased TLDR article full of misconceptions as one can tell from the headline. I read through part of it and I had enough. I quote one of the many misleading statements: "So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold" The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no?

mattl 4y ago
Are they being actively used or are they just sitting in a closet somewhere?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I'm a gamer, my spouse is a gamer, and we have a Quest in the house because of my spouse's job. We're free to use it to play games or whatever, but we never do. We both tried Beat Saber the day she got the rig, and haven't done anything with it since. That was months ago. I have a gamer friend with a gamer spouse with multiple VR rigs from his spouse's job, similar situation, job doesn't care if they play with the hardware. He says he played them a bit for a couple months a couple years back, did the very small number of must-play games (mostly just Alyx and SuperHot, I think) and that was it, all of it's sat unused since then. Maybe we're not representative, but that's four-for-four of not really giving a shit about VR even when we're all gamers and the hardware's free.
  - mattl 4y ago
    What's the rig? Is that more than the headset?
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      In our case, just the headset. I think my friend has at least two or three, and whatever the "good one" is requires some sensors around the room or something, so there's a bit more to that one.
      - mattl 4y ago
        I played an HTC Vive once, it was fun but it was a lot of stuff to play... I don't have the space for anything like that. Happy with consoles and Steam Deck (mostly in desktop mode) for video games lately.
- conorcleary 4y ago
  The future of VR may be so intoxicating that the best proponents of it will be inside the virtual world instead of outside promoting it.
dtagames 4y ago
It's pretty much an accepted reality that VR has not been a big success for anyone. Disney failed early with DisneyQuest. Second Life hasn't become popular even though VR hardware has existed for a long time. There's the complete joke called Magic Leap. MS decided to pivot to military applications because theirs didn't sell. Google gave up on Daydream. And Facebook just laid of 10,000 people, many of them in the metaverse department. The most likely reason is physics. These devices aren't fun to use. They're disorienting and make people sick. In practice, they add nothing to the experience -- certainly not the experience of a business meeting! It seems quite ridiculous to think that would ever have been a use case. So, the article really isn't a hit piece but perhaps a rather late and rather obvious commentary on something that even Zuck has to admit isn't a thing.
- trasz3 4y ago
  I’d say PSVR did quite well. Your examples above - from FB or Google - failed for the same reason everything else they try ends in failure - it’s a problem with those corporations and their “engineering culture”, not with VR.
- iamleppert 4y ago
  Microsoft recently laid off nearly the entire HoloLens team. Even groups working on AI/ML for things like computer vision and scene detection / 3D understanding weren't spared. All they care about is a Chatbot these days.
  - eclipxe 4y ago
    That’s not accurate
  - lib-dev 4y ago
    Sound business decisions.
- eclipxe 4y ago
  It’s not accurate that many were from the metaverse org.
- 4y ago
senttoschool 4y ago
>The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no? Meta spent $100 billion[0] on VR to sell 20 million Quest headsets that most people have put in the closet. That's 30 years of total Sony R&D budget, including all the Playstations, Walkmen, VCRs, DVDs, Blu Rays, cameras, sensors, TVs, speakers, headphones, and even their own VR device. [0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/metas-shares-dip-is-proof-metaverse-plan-never-really-had-legs-facebook https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/metas-sha...
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I just can't believe figures like $100bn. How? On what? Spending $100bn is _hard_. For comparison, the Mars Science Laboratory project had a $2.5bn budget and sent a spacecraft that landed a rover on another planet. Yes, the MSC built on existing NASA infra and previous rover R&D ... but so did Meta's VR division.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I saw a post here yesterday praising Meta for drastically raising salaries for devs. Perhaps that has something to do with it?
  - eclipxe 4y ago
    Lots of fundamental investment in hardware and tech that is multiple years out. Displays, chipsets, input devices, etc. multiple lines of hardware beyond what you see today. Multiple OSes, lots of application teams, middleware, services, frameworks, etc etc.
- rajman187 4y ago
  It wasn’t $100bn spent on VR. There is a ton of research happening inside of RealityLabs, which accounts for the vast majority of the investment, but yes the only product so far is the VR headset. Here’s a roadmap (supposedly based on leaked presentations) of what’s on the horizon—no pun intended https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-ar-glasses-smartwatch-plans https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-a...
endisneigh 4y ago
The amount of headsets sold isn’t a good measure. Better to look at total ecosystem revenue.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Does Facebook have any significant VR revenue outside of headsets? What is their total ecosystem revenue? They didn't break that out in their last filing, so I can't tell.
  - simiones 4y ago
    I think the point was exactly that - even it the Quest numbers don't look so bad when compared with XBox / PS5, they Quest ecosystem is actually peanuts when compared to the XBox or PS5 ecosystems.
ketchupdebugger 4y ago
Its different. Arguably all 3 is sold at a loss, they make it up with additional game/application purchases. Most game developers are making their games for xbox, ps5, and/or pc. They aren't making it for vr. There is a lack of application development for the metaverse. This is why zuck is spending 13 billion a year. They are trying to make the applications themselves. There's a lack of third party app/game developers
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
> I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no? I think most Quests are doing what mine is doing: sitting in a drawer unused. In my case it was because my pupillary distance is too wide for the Quest (and almost every other VR headset) so everything looks blurry all of the time no matter what. It sucks being only slightly smaller than Hafþór Björnsson. Every person I know who has a Quest bought Beat Saber and Job Simulator, played for a couple of weeks, and then put it away.

philipov 4y ago

The metaverse went away when I defeated the final boss, but then I started the sequel and now it's back. Who would have thought.

Tangurena2 4y ago
You killed Bob Rife? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
- philipov 4y ago
  Nah, it was god. https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Metaverse https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Metaverse

irrational 4y ago

Has anyone actually met anyone who has visited the metaverse? Admittedly, I don’t live in SV (or CA), but I do know a lot of developers, tech people, nerds, etc. and none of them have visited the metaverse. I keep assuming it doesn’t actually exist yet. It’s like a story of this far off land that people have heard of, but nobody has actually visited.

Delento 4y ago
I watched a few discovery videos about it and the only positive was a comedy club people liked to go to. Everything spontaneous was empty. So more like event based like cinema than a hang out space
Ylmaz 4y ago
My employer bought a few VR headsets (from meta). I see them lying around in the office but no one ever used them.
hot_gril 4y ago
You're correct, nobody has. It's so dumb. I saw ads for the Metaverse in SJC today... there is no product to show. It's not even a scam or pyramid scheme, they're just burning money selling nothing for no money. It's like those oil company ads showing random stock video with voiceover about synergy and sustainability, except at least they sell oil.
lithos 4y ago
Closest is VRChat, the most excessive users are there from their morning workout, maybe a work meeting, to their evening socialization. Though everyone pretends the game doesn't exist, especially Facebook (too embarrassing to not match such a small team) Thankfully it's not the dystopian warning of being a "browser" with unlockable ads, tracking (including new stuff like always on cameras, eye tracking, and everything you fit in a fitness watch/ tracker), and all wrapped up by like a proprietary walled garden.
explaininjs 4y ago
There is no the metaverse currently, but there are many metaverses. The definition itself is shaky and contradictory across sources. But to summarize, a metaverse is a "set of digital spaces that you can move seamlessly between", it will include "familiar 2D experiences, as well as ones projected into the physical world and fully immersive 3D ones too". It can be accessed via your phone or computer, or a VR reset for "full immersion". Fortnite is a metaverse, but some say Roblox and Minecraft aren't. I couldn't tell you how that distinction was drawn. My favorite metaverse is RuneScape, but I unfortunately haven't visited in a decade or more. Steam might also be considered a metaverse. Which would imply Xbox Online and all that are too. [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meaning-of-metaverse https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meaning-of-met... [2]: https://about.meta.com/what-is-the-metaverse/ https://about.meta.com/what-is-the-metaverse/ [3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/23/fortnites-epic-games-makes-a-metaverse-investment-to-scale-up-even-further/?sh=3a9105d2cfd0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/23/fortnites-...

bvrmn 4y ago

I own Valve Index. State of the industry is not very bright. The best VR game so far is HL2 VR mod. Alyx the second. Looks like investors are pretty shy to put money in VR game studios to make big and story rich content.

poisonborz 4y ago

The worst will be that when somebody, sometimes actually creates an actual immersive small-to-be-worn VR/AR glass - one that will be very much unlike the current generation of headsets - journalists along with these companies will trumpet "this was the idea we had, the product was there but before its time". No sir. The idea of virtual reality and "holograms" is at least here since the early 20th century. It's just that these people burnt billions of dollars on some tacky tech demos and empty marketing promises, and the industry believed them for years.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I'm convinced this is why Apple and Microsoft (among others) keep putting money into AR development. It clearly sucks to use right now, so it doesn't make a lot of sense that they're putting significant money into it... but when someone (possibly one of those two companies!) finally puts out AR glasses that aren't awful, they'll be ready. I remain unsure whether Zuck is running that same playbook, or if he legitimately thought bulky-ass VR goggles were the way of the future and expects to have a smash-hit before marketable AR glasses exist.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  I had an inside view of things, but all of the work being done is actually a long term roadmap towards building AR devices that don't suck. There many complicated issues to deal with, including batter life, processing power, input and control, heat management, placement of self and objects in a virtual world, safety, and on and on. That's all on top of figuring out what content is interesting and compelling. Devices being made by these companies all embody elements of solutions to these challenges, but they all recognize it's a long road, and there's a lot of learning still to be done.
  - darkerside 4y ago
    I've never understood why we aren't putting those hard problems into a backpack that you wear and is connected to a very lightweight head device.

haspok 4y ago

This essay brought back memories from the last millenia, from the IRC / ICQ / webchat days. Except things were much simpler then, and the whole point of chatting with someone was to meet them IRL (OK, I was young back then, maybe older people had different motives). And the least important thing about it was how "realistic" of an experience it was, because of the textual interface things were very restricted anyway, but in hindsight it was all the better for it.

TatersGonnaT8 4y ago

As with all of these articles that follow this same script, the author conflates "the metaverse" and all of the monetary investment being made in Reality Labs with just Horizon Worlds. Makes it hard to take anything said in this article seriously. As others have already commented, most of that money has gone towards longer-term bets on hardware and other investments. A small percentage of that $36 billion mentioned by the author was directed towards Horizon Worlds.

JeremyNT 4y ago
> As with all of these articles that follow this same script, the author conflates "the metaverse" and all of the monetary investment being made in Reality Labs with just Horizon Worlds. Makes it hard to take anything said in this article seriously. The author wrote about his experience using the system as designed and promoted towards end users. This isn't some deep business analysis or some investigation into the lesser-known corners of VR development, it's a normal user wanting to try out "the metaverse" as promoted by the global megacorporation "Meta." It's reasonable to want other kinds of reporting as well, but there's a lot to learn from a user recounting their own personal experiences in the space. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and if this is what users on the happy path will see, their disappointment is completely understandable.
GenerocUsername 4y ago
If Horizon worlds is not the entire meta verse, can you name any other metaverses? Can a regular person? And don't say things like RecRoom, because those exist independent of the billions Facebook spent on meta
- T-A 4y ago
  > can you name any other metaverses? [...] don't say things like RecRoom, because those exist independent of the billions Facebook spent on meta You seem to believe that only things financed by Facebook qualify as "metaverse", a concept which existed long before Facebook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

revlolz 4y ago

No one's 'still in' the METAVERSE cause zuckbuckland isn't what people who have VR devices actually want.

wkat4242 4y ago
This is true. Horizons is so polished and manicured. I don't want that. Plastic life is not fun, VR is better when you can explore the rough edges like on other platforms.

asciimov 4y ago

For me the biggest failure of all the VR headsets is there is no demo units at big box store and the lack of a TV app to see what the user is doing. People don't want to blindly buy an unproven expensive gaming system without trying it out first. You can't go into a local Best Buy, Walmart, or Target and try the units out. You have to wait till someone you know gets it an is kind enough to let you give it a go. With all the money Zuck has spent on developing these devices, it is surprising that no money was spent on demo kiosks.

JohnFen 4y ago
I think that the reason for this is that the devices aren't (yet) suitable for the mass consumer market.
cheeselip420 4y ago
Yeah I'd love to press my face into a greasy demo headset at the local Walmart. The hygiene aspect of VR is under-appreciated.
edent 4y ago
I refer you to this delightful paper: "Bacterial Load of Virtual Reality Headsets" > The results of these tests indicated that the Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from the headsets possessed high levels of antibiotic resistance. https://doi.org/10.1145/3385956.3418958 https://doi.org/10.1145/3385956.3418958
- smallerfish 4y ago
  I suddenly realize how I got sick after visiting Legoland in San Jose with my niece - there's a virtual reality "ride" there.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I'm sure the shared controllers on demo units back in the day were just as bad.
  - 4y ago

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

https://www.curbed.com/2022/10/winter-house-jessica-stocker-metaverse-real-estate.html https://www.curbed.com/2022/10/winter-house-jessica-stocker-... I used to watch this reality TV show with my girlfriend. Metaverse was such a big deal in 2022 that one of the main characters of the season was a Metaverse real estate agent. https://www.bravotv.com/people/jessica-stocker https://www.bravotv.com/people/jessica-stocker > Jess is a beautiful Metaverse real estate agent, investor and entrepreneur from Los Angeles. After Jason slid into her DM’s, she was excited to join the house and show off her wild side to a completely new group of friends. While her party girl behavior gets her into hot water with some of her housemates, she’ll also explore a romance that has the potential to last beyond the winter vacation. I wonder if that's still her job now that it isn't as relevant anymore. Just checked Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/blondesbuildingequity/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/blondesbuildingequity/?hl=en Blondes Building Equity "Best friends building a Real Estate empire" They have a podcast. Titles of recent episodes: "Financially free by age 25 through real estate investing" "70 rental units in under 4 years" "The rule breaker who broke the real-estate industry"

tsunamifury 4y ago
This is what a decade of effective 0 rate interest created. Flippers and nonsense that contributes nothing to society. Same in China with ghost real estate.
bitwize 4y ago
I'm reminded of Aggretsuko where Retsuko and Fenneko become obsessed with a VR app that features a virtual romantic partner who flirts with you, and after a short while, nags you into buying DLC in the form of scenery and outfit packs. The subtly funny bit is, in this world of talking cartoon animals, the virtual romantic partner was an impossibly handsome male unicorn.

ivix 4y ago

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elisk 4y ago

Nobody seems to mention the fact that most of VR games out there require using the hard-to-familiarize hard-to-memorize joysticks to interact with the game. I own a Valve Index and I mostly don't play it because of it's just really a hassle to have to physically stand up (or even seated) and to wave your arms around, only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing. I wish that people built simple keyboard-and-mouse VR games that I could enjoy the VRness of the experience using my fingers and palms like I'm used to in the past 30 years. I want CSGO VR, not a good-looking-cheap-knock-off that I need to figure out how to reload each gun and where to draw the grenade from. I want Cities Skylines VR where I can see my city from above wherever I look. I want Red Alert VR. The most enjoyable games I currently have that is worth whipping VR out for are those I can play with a regular XBox controller which I'm quite familiar with already.

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benoliver999 4y ago
This is why I'm really tempted by Gran Turismo on PS5 with VR. You just use your normal controller or wheel.
- freeone3000 4y ago
  Mapping can still be fairly iffy... Project Cars gets it right, but Forza Horizon has way too much "slop".
spudlyo 4y ago
Any game where you're seated in some kind of cockpit is my idea of a perfect VR game. This way you can be comfortably sit at your desk with familiar controls, but still have immersive head tracking. For me, I'd love to see a WWI or WWII air combat kind of game like the old Red Baron or IL-2 Sturmovik.
- Arrath 4y ago
  VTOL VR is fucking amazing for this. You're right there in the cockpit, and you have to reach out and hit buttons and fiddle with dials around the MFDs and everything. Its so, so, so good.

ivix 4y ago

What I find absolutely mystifying about Meta's VR experiment is that they did not leverage the colossal advantage they have in that for facebook users, they know your friend network and interests. Why is the Meta product so catastrophically naff? What went wrong?

sli 4y ago
Nothing went wrong. Meta owns 90% of the VR space.

tonymet 4y ago

The "$39B for Horizon" is misleading. Most of that went to shared R&D and infra shared with other products .

havblue 4y ago

There have been studies available for years now that show people only spend about twenty minutes at a time in vr. It's ludicrous that Zuck was willing to bet the future of his company knowing that.

chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago

It's disappointing to not see any mention of VRChat in articles like this. It's niche, but vrchat has a pretty large and consistent fanbase. Meta gets all the headlines because they tried to create the same thing and ended up lighting billions of dollars on fire.

steveylang 4y ago
They should have literally lit the billions on fire instead and made an NFT of it, then they might actually have something of 'value'.
thequadehunter 4y ago
I never understood the metaverse thing. Was Zuck unaware of vrchat? I was always confused why they thought users of a niche market geared towards hackers and nerds would gravitate towards the soul-less corporate solution as opposed to the existing one.
- buzzert 4y ago
  Safety? One of those things people say they want, but don’t actually want.
- rolenthedeep 4y ago
  He bet the farm on VR being "the next big thing". I very much think he's right on that count. The plan was most likely to try and disrupt the VR market like they did social media, and attempt to capture (hold hostage) a significant share of VR users. But they forgot that users need a reason to use the product. It wasn't fun, the avatars are bland, sterile Mii-like characters that nobody likes, and the disclaimers about legs are absurd beyond reason. They failed at every turn. VRchat was the main competition, and Facebook forgot that they needed to be competitive. Even inside the VR industry, the metaverse is regarded as an abject failure. It's more or less the antithesis of what makes a good VR experience: fun, engaging, immersive. Facebook went with bland, boring, and intrusive. The only good thing Facebook has done in the VR space is getting Quest headsets onto millions of heads. This drastically lowered the barrier to entry for new users, which increases the audience for good developers. The quest hardware isn't good by any stretch, but it's good enough for people to judge whether VR is for them without spending $1000.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Mostly I want to move to Dublin now.

gardenhedge 4y ago
Assuming the writer is talking about Dublin, Ireland.. that is where I live. I don't know my neighbours at all.

Kyragem 4y ago

VR sickness is still the largest barrier to large scale adoption. I've been following research by Meta/Reality labs closely but despite them investing billions in VR they seem to have not bothered investigating VR sickness at all.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

Still waiting for a polished multi-monitor replacement option for macOS that would allow me to travel with a headset and a laptop and not have to worry about finding a large external monitor to plug into for my dev work. Please someone make this a thing.

brnewd 4y ago
Also excited for the first glasses that can achieve this. The Nreal Air looks close, but text is apparently still not good enough. Would love to just attach it to my phone over USB-C/HDMI and be good to go.
- lagniappe 4y ago
  It works fine in normal mode, albeit 1080p, but when you do multi monitors, essentially it is still using that same pixel density to render those 3 screens, so that's why text looks bad. single screen though, I use it all the time for code.
  - brnewd 4y ago
    That makes sense, thanks for clearing that up.
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rabf 4y ago
Big screen beyond may be a solution: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/ https://www.bigscreenvr.com/
aprilnya 4y ago
there’s an app called immersed that does this also, meta has their own virtual monitor thing but it’s only on quest pro iirc (and not on quest 2)

asow92 4y ago

Thinking about those still trapped the metaverse is giving off Bioshock vibes

WhiteNoiz3 4y ago

I really wish people would stop writing articles about how bad Horizon Worlds is. There are so many better and more popular VR experiences out there.

zabzonk 4y ago
> so many better and more popular VR experiences out there. such as?
- WhiteNoiz3 4y ago
  Rec Room and VR Chat are examples, but personally I'm in the camp that you should focus on building fun games that people want to play first then worry about turning it into an evergreen experience if you really want to make a 'Metaverse' (ex: like what Fortnite has done).
- thequadehunter 4y ago
  VRchat. It's the best or worst VR experience depending on who you are.
chankstein38 4y ago
Right? It's always just "I got on Horizon Worlds and it sucked" like completely ignoring VRChat and RecRoom and all the really cool stuff a VR headset can do in favor of just bashing Meta. I'm all for bashing Meta but it's so boring at this point. Yeah, they suck and Zuck's stuff sucks but VR isn't the metaverse. Zuck kind of ruined VR to some degree by buying Oculus then locking it to facebook accounts then doing all this garbage branding about The Metaverse making it sound like some sort of dystopian nightmare for him to mine data from when realistically VR games are COOL AS HELL. Like I've killed the battery on my Q1 multiple times playing Minecraft in VR (vivecraft + a host app for Quest) or the TWD games. Heck even beat saber. Sure they're not all magical social experiences but I hate that Meta turned VR into that. That's why I didn't want to link to facebook. I don't play VR to play with people I play it to be immersed in the game I'm playing.

phonescreen_man 4y ago

This quote tickled me the most - His curious IRL appearance — of a human designed by a computer or of a Styrofoam cup that a wizard decided to turn into a person but then changed his mind about halfway through — adapts unexpectedly well to the Meta-cartoonization algorithm All in all a great bit of writing and commentary on something shit. The metaverse.

agentultra 4y ago

Flashbacks to Second Life, New World Notes, Active Worlds, LambdaMOO... the writing in this piece is brilliant. But it's the same old story again and again. Different time, different technology, same old loneliness.

atomicfiredoll 4y ago
Thank you for knowing what Active Worlds is.

notbeuller 4y ago

I've enjoyed a few VRChat things of watching movies with a random group of mst3k like mindset - but I'm not social enough to have created any contacts, so it's hit or miss if you'll find one of those rooms with a compatible mindset. The Meta Horizons stuff though - was creepy. There seemed to be people that must've been paid to be there to excite the newcomers, and once I sort of got away from that I ran into the "these are obviously children" problem. I can't help but think that there's a huge COPA fine at the end of that rainbow.