8 ms·

The main problem with Metaverse is that it it's an amusement park without any rides. Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides.

by beloch 4y ago

The main problem with Metaverse is that it it's an amusement park without any rides. Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides. A Mandalorian spin-off series of interactive VR episodes that can be experienced with a group of friends? A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. Nobody's going to buy headsets to make a goofy looking avatar and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg in a Second Life remake. Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences. The management of that rideless amusement park is also a little concerning. I'd love to see VR finally go mainstream, but I'd prefer it if pretty much anyone other than Meta were behind the platform that catches on first.

coldtea 4y ago
>is that it it's an amusement park without any rides And even if it had rides, they wouldn't be that amusing...
ar9av 4y ago
The whole metaverse thing has felt like a buzzword-without-meaning that was never going to live up to the hype (at least in any meaningful good way), but still sucks for the people losing the jobs.
- jerf 4y ago
  The metaverse is the ultimate, final instance of the "... but on a computer!" fallacy [1], even moreso than the "virtual worlds" that prompted me to originally write that article. It's reality... but on a computer! We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time. Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits. The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse". [1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)
  - ffhhj 4y ago
    Right. Second Life was the metaverse 20 years ago, they even sold real state. It slowly died for a reason.
    - flybrand 4y ago
      And for those of us who played around w 2nd life, I’ve yet to see a meta verse demo that was much different than what I remember.
      - jerf 4y ago
        I haven't played around with Second Life and it still looks like Second Life to me too. Except visibly obviously less populated. Put that one down in the history books as being way ahead of its time. More honest, too.
    - tsgagnon 4y ago
      I always preferred Active Worlds personally.
    - wruza 4y ago
      I remember on my first day teleporting into a random location around some mansion, and an expensive-looking female avatar yelled at me how dare I spawn at a private property. Later I ran through some bars and shops and never visited this swamp again.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    It may finally take off if/when VR is just another feature of portable, broadly popular AR glasses. Until then, it loses for anything but niche applications, because it's doomed by the popularity of the smartphone. Nobody wants a social network (or whatever) that can't be reached from their smartphone, or that sucks to use on there, which means nobody wants VR as the primary interface to anything, making it rather pointless. The whole market is spinning its wheels until or unless someone finally manages to get normal people excited about AR glasses, which means some serious hardware advancements. Whatever's the "next big thing" has to be as portable and usable-everywhere as smartphones, or it's doomed. The Web boom among normal folks wasn't because they started sitting at desktop computers way, way more, but because computers got ultra-portable and cellular Internet got cheap enough to actually use. They're not going to clamber to join anything that they can't comfortably and non-dorkily use at a coffee shop or in line at the grocery store or while sitting on the couch watching Netflix or what have you.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It reminds me of the brief fad when some folks really thought VRML or 3D Java or Flash interfaces to websites was going to be The Future not just for games or art project, but general web navigation. Turned out to suck for nearly everything, total dead-end.
  - kodah 4y ago
    Flash did end up influencing the animations of CSS. I'm not sure about the other technologies you mentioned, but I think the delineation here may be that the idea was the future, not the tech.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      No, I don't mean 3D animated elements, I mean 3D interfaces. Think like if you went to Amazon's website and had to navigate product categories by moving around in an FPS-like interface. This was a thing for a while—it never went big, but there was real excitement around it and some effort was put into it, only to find that (obviously) it sucks for anything but games (duh) and maybe art projects of some kinds.
numpad0 4y ago
It seems to me that everything in VR almost have to be fan-made or at least a-financial passion project, or else nothing works. Meta did not end up with that creepyverse by cutting costs, they ended up with it by throwing gold bullions at walls. There's no way Disney had not made internal studies, the problem must have been that they can't set up a management and/or production model they like && that works for VR.
- martindbp 4y ago
  I think there are plenty of small indie developers making decent money on VR, especially Quest. It just can't support AAA development yet.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  The only explanation I have for this is that to succeed in vr you need to do a lot of UX innovations. And innovation doesn't work well in most corporate environments.
atoav 4y ago
It is an amusement park without rides operated by an entity who most people actively distrust. Facebook/Meta IMO has poisoned the whole social media space to a degree, where the expectation I have for social media platforms in general has become one of "this is getting worse over time". Instagram now sucks more than it sucked before Facebook bought it. Facebook now sucks more than Facebook 15 years ago. Reddit now... You get the point. They could have done nothing except maintenance and neutral technical upkeep and the result would have been better than what we have today. And the only reason why we don't have that better thing is profits (or the lack thereof in the old platforms). This tells me that capitalism is really bad at organizing social platforms (not that this surprises me).
- fs111 4y ago
  > by an entity who most people actively distrust. I do not really think that is true. There is more than 2 billion active users on WhatsApp which is owned by Meta. Many people reading hackernews distrust them, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the general population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-unique-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I wouldn't assume using something means people trust it. I pay my taxes, but I don't trust the US government. For that matter, I don't trust my grocery store either but I still need food.
- censor_me 4y ago
  [dead]
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
You are onto something there. Karaoke already is a thing, and VR-Series reenactment might have the same appeal.
christkv 4y ago
They did that Vader thing for the Oculus (Vader Immortal). What boggles my mind is why did Facebook just not buy Second Life directly.
- blincoln 4y ago
  There was also Secrets of the Empire[1], but AFAIK The Void no longer exists. It's too bad - the haptic/physical-props-and-environment aspect worked really well IMO. [1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Secrets_of_the_Empire https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Secrets_of_the_E...
- zer00eyz 4y ago
  Have you logged into second life of late? Porn powers the second life economy. It is an interesting place, but if FB bought it the moral torchbearers would burn the investment to the ground.
  - christkv 4y ago
    I was thinking more of the platform to run a new blank world not the mess that current one is.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      What are the odds that would turn into FacePorn Life within less than six months?
      - christkv 4y ago
        Guaranteed lol
onion2k 4y ago
A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. There's a lot of VR content out there, and some of it is excellent, and some of it ties in to popular franchises (PS5 VR has a Star Wars game), and occasionally it's both (Halflife: Alyx for example) . None of it is enough to drive VR to be mainstream entertainment.
- varjag 4y ago
  Is there any porn though?
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Rule 34, if it exist there is porn of it.
    - setr 4y ago
      There is of course porn starring VR, but rule 34 says nothing of whether there is porn accessible in VR format.
      - biorach 4y ago
        Rule 34a If a format exists, then there is porn on it.
        twic 4y ago
        Which makes me think - has anyone run Bad Apple on a VR headset yet?
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      I wonder if there's a corollary about different media formats.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    Enough that Pornhub has a VR category.
sublinear 4y ago
> Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences. This is the refrain of Disney's theme park marketing, but I disagree. It's the fact that people want to say they were there. It's 100% the brand and nothing more. Marketing doesn't have to be, and often isn't, rational. This is at the absolute core of why theme park experiences sell but VR does not. Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. Until the price of VR comes down to absolute rock bottom prices, there will not be acceptance of "VR experiences" and even so it's still a gamble whether anyone cares enough to buy that to experience on a whim frequently vs plan a vacation around it... I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
- Megusto 4y ago
  Tbh as long as there is no easy to use working personal vr suite, then it is not an alternative to experience it by yourself. Vr is fun but virtual.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Not to be pedantic, but even with a personal VR suite, it's still virtual. A flight sim, regardless of how sophisticated, is still always going to be of a lesser experience than real flying unless you can actually die in the sim. I'm not suggesting that an ideal flight sim should kill the player if they crash, but rather suggesting that, as an example, a pilot behind the controls of a real plane that has to make a series of instantaneous decisions when a dangerous situation comes up like engine failure will have been "battle tested" in a very real way where his/her life was literally on the line. Of course not having to risk your life is also a big advantage of virtual as well.
- Duckton 4y ago
  > It's 100% the brand and nothing more. What is you basis for saying that? > Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. By that rationale nobody would play vide games. I believe it comes down to the experience. The experience of VR is simply not good enough to attract people.
- 4y ago
quitit 4y ago
I really like that analogy "amusement park without any rides". I really do think Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed. But back to your analogye, it applies particularly well here because Disney are a master of delivering experiences and do exactly that through every possible medium. So if one sees Disney walking away from the Metaverse, that's not something I would interpret lightly - despite the rounds of firing being interpreted as a cost saving measure, it's just 50 staff members and not all of them are leaving the company. Disney aren't short of cash, so if they saw a future in the Metaverse they'd be there for defensive reasons alone. Rather I think Disney realise that their own VR-initiatives will stand on their own, and their involvement would be propping up 3rd party platforms rather than yielding a benefit from them. I think Meta are hoping that the Metaverse would emulate the Smartphone/Soft-store model, where developers would do the heavy lifting for the platform, but the crucial difference here is that a Smartphone is useful before even loading a single piece of 3rd party software. Everyone already had a phone when smartphones became a thing - but right now no one is walking around with a VR headset, or anything even vaguely approximating that.
- shepardrtc 4y ago
  > Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed. No, this was Mark's personal Quest for the Next Big Thing. No one else in the company is delusional enough to believe it will go anywhere, they're just getting a fat paycheck.
bsenftner 4y ago
I'd say the main problem is human beings are not mature enough to be trusted with such a service, it will be a rape and pillage campaign for all your data and all your interests and all your imagination. We create predator services and pretend they are 'just services', burning the end-user's trust for any similar "services" after they sour from the treatment of the first one they tried. We have a serious maturity problem in the human species, and it is dragging all our progress down and backwards.
- censor_me 4y ago
  [dead]
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
> A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that But probably a lot less than would watch a Mandalorian animated or real life spin-off TV series - and the VR version costs a lot more to create. A lot of companies (Disney, Magic Leap etc) have spent a fortune trying to make the killer VR content but have failed. Apart from the sports/exercise apps (probably not enough to support the FB metaverse) are there any that would make people purchase a headset for?
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  > and the VR version costs a lot more to create. Would it need to? It's a video game, right? Once you have the base elements, it could be pretty cheap.
  - ljf 4y ago
    My kids and I would have been pretty happy with just access to non-game elements. They must have already made loads of 3rd spaces and models - just being able to hang out and explore them would be brilliant. Then if they started to layer gaming on top of that... my kids would be pestering me even more than they already are for a vr set-up.
stuckinhell 4y ago
VR going mainstream is difficult until they can get people to take anti-nausea meds with them. The biology of humans works against VR in a lot of ways, and most people don't like the idea of taking anti-nausea pill just to experience VR. (I take anti-nausea pills when I do VR, because VR is absolutely mindblowing)
- tomxor 4y ago
  I think you are referring to old VR experience, the tech is pretty mature now, latency is super low, tracking is good, on pretty much any model. I play a lot of VR games and never get sick. The only one where I got a little dizzy was with 6dof FPS, which isn't really due to VR specifically. Although it is true some people get sick easily in VR, those people tend to also have trouble with car sickness and sea sickness. I suppose you can say the same about cars and VR for that group.
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    I'm a woman, apparently women have a much lower tolerance for VR. Some people theorize its due to avoiding damage to the child during pregnancy. So even on my very high end setup (Index 120hz,4090 rtx), I still get nausea. It also takes a while for people to get their VR legs, and I don't have time for using VR very day, it's more like once a month.
    - tomxor 4y ago
      I'm sorry to hear that. There are definitely differences in tolerance between people. However I don't think this is specific to the tech any more, just the experience, similar to flying a plane or being on a boat. But It used to be that everyone would get nauseous due to immaturity of the technology as the parent comment was implying, and that's no longer true.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  I don't get nausea, but even without that I hate the experience of actually wearing the things. I find I get a lot of eye strain that prevents me from playing long sessions, the weight/bulk is uncomfortable, and it can get quite hot wearing a headset for any length of time. I think almost everybody will find VR goggles uncomfortable in SOME way. These things are fun to mess around with, but I think very few people will ever want to wear goggles like this for more than an hour or so at a time, which inherently limits their appeal and potential applications. My widescreen monitor has none of these issues and it's plenty "good enough" for most games.
twobitshifter 4y ago
The last time I went to Universal in LA, all the rides had a VR component to them, the real-life amusement parks are turning to VR + motion. Some of these were jiggly seats, others had flying platforms, and others pulled you in a train through VR scenes. (The ride that people liked the least was minions, which just had tipping and shaking seats, but the 3D made people sick.)
Tiktaalik 4y ago
> interactive VR episodes Sounds like a video game to me, something that Disney has weirdly struggled with, having tried on several times to get into video games big time, only to shy away at the huge expense and challenge. At the moment they've circled back to merely licensing out their IPs to other publishers. Disney should get more into video games, and VR is great for video games. VR for "metaverse" whatever it is that is. Not so sure!

by beloch 4y ago

coldtea 4y ago

>is that it it's an amusement park without any rides And even if it had rides, they wouldn't be that amusing...

ar9av 4y ago

The whole metaverse thing has felt like a buzzword-without-meaning that was never going to live up to the hype (at least in any meaningful good way), but still sucks for the people losing the jobs.

jerf 4y ago
The metaverse is the ultimate, final instance of the "... but on a computer!" fallacy [1], even moreso than the "virtual worlds" that prompted me to originally write that article. It's reality... but on a computer! We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time. Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits. The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse". [1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)
- ffhhj 4y ago
  Right. Second Life was the metaverse 20 years ago, they even sold real state. It slowly died for a reason.
  - flybrand 4y ago
    And for those of us who played around w 2nd life, I’ve yet to see a meta verse demo that was much different than what I remember.
    - jerf 4y ago
      I haven't played around with Second Life and it still looks like Second Life to me too. Except visibly obviously less populated. Put that one down in the history books as being way ahead of its time. More honest, too.
  - tsgagnon 4y ago
    I always preferred Active Worlds personally.
  - wruza 4y ago
    I remember on my first day teleporting into a random location around some mansion, and an expensive-looking female avatar yelled at me how dare I spawn at a private property. Later I ran through some bars and shops and never visited this swamp again.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It may finally take off if/when VR is just another feature of portable, broadly popular AR glasses. Until then, it loses for anything but niche applications, because it's doomed by the popularity of the smartphone. Nobody wants a social network (or whatever) that can't be reached from their smartphone, or that sucks to use on there, which means nobody wants VR as the primary interface to anything, making it rather pointless. The whole market is spinning its wheels until or unless someone finally manages to get normal people excited about AR glasses, which means some serious hardware advancements. Whatever's the "next big thing" has to be as portable and usable-everywhere as smartphones, or it's doomed. The Web boom among normal folks wasn't because they started sitting at desktop computers way, way more, but because computers got ultra-portable and cellular Internet got cheap enough to actually use. They're not going to clamber to join anything that they can't comfortably and non-dorkily use at a coffee shop or in line at the grocery store or while sitting on the couch watching Netflix or what have you.
yamtaddle 4y ago
It reminds me of the brief fad when some folks really thought VRML or 3D Java or Flash interfaces to websites was going to be The Future not just for games or art project, but general web navigation. Turned out to suck for nearly everything, total dead-end.
- kodah 4y ago
  Flash did end up influencing the animations of CSS. I'm not sure about the other technologies you mentioned, but I think the delineation here may be that the idea was the future, not the tech.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    No, I don't mean 3D animated elements, I mean 3D interfaces. Think like if you went to Amazon's website and had to navigate product categories by moving around in an FPS-like interface. This was a thing for a while—it never went big, but there was real excitement around it and some effort was put into it, only to find that (obviously) it sucks for anything but games (duh) and maybe art projects of some kinds.

numpad0 4y ago

It seems to me that everything in VR almost have to be fan-made or at least a-financial passion project, or else nothing works. Meta did not end up with that creepyverse by cutting costs, they ended up with it by throwing gold bullions at walls. There's no way Disney had not made internal studies, the problem must have been that they can't set up a management and/or production model they like && that works for VR.

martindbp 4y ago
I think there are plenty of small indie developers making decent money on VR, especially Quest. It just can't support AAA development yet.
worldsayshi 4y ago
The only explanation I have for this is that to succeed in vr you need to do a lot of UX innovations. And innovation doesn't work well in most corporate environments.

atoav 4y ago

It is an amusement park without rides operated by an entity who most people actively distrust. Facebook/Meta IMO has poisoned the whole social media space to a degree, where the expectation I have for social media platforms in general has become one of "this is getting worse over time". Instagram now sucks more than it sucked before Facebook bought it. Facebook now sucks more than Facebook 15 years ago. Reddit now... You get the point. They could have done nothing except maintenance and neutral technical upkeep and the result would have been better than what we have today. And the only reason why we don't have that better thing is profits (or the lack thereof in the old platforms). This tells me that capitalism is really bad at organizing social platforms (not that this surprises me).

fs111 4y ago
> by an entity who most people actively distrust. I do not really think that is true. There is more than 2 billion active users on WhatsApp which is owned by Meta. Many people reading hackernews distrust them, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the general population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-unique-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I wouldn't assume using something means people trust it. I pay my taxes, but I don't trust the US government. For that matter, I don't trust my grocery store either but I still need food.
censor_me 4y ago
[dead]

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

You are onto something there. Karaoke already is a thing, and VR-Series reenactment might have the same appeal.

christkv 4y ago

They did that Vader thing for the Oculus (Vader Immortal). What boggles my mind is why did Facebook just not buy Second Life directly.

blincoln 4y ago
There was also Secrets of the Empire[1], but AFAIK The Void no longer exists. It's too bad - the haptic/physical-props-and-environment aspect worked really well IMO. [1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Secrets_of_the_Empire https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Secrets_of_the_E...
zer00eyz 4y ago
Have you logged into second life of late? Porn powers the second life economy. It is an interesting place, but if FB bought it the moral torchbearers would burn the investment to the ground.
- christkv 4y ago
  I was thinking more of the platform to run a new blank world not the mess that current one is.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    What are the odds that would turn into FacePorn Life within less than six months?
    - christkv 4y ago
      Guaranteed lol

onion2k 4y ago

A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. There's a lot of VR content out there, and some of it is excellent, and some of it ties in to popular franchises (PS5 VR has a Star Wars game), and occasionally it's both (Halflife: Alyx for example) . None of it is enough to drive VR to be mainstream entertainment.

varjag 4y ago
Is there any porn though?
- blitzar 4y ago
  Rule 34, if it exist there is porn of it.
  - setr 4y ago
    There is of course porn starring VR, but rule 34 says nothing of whether there is porn accessible in VR format.
    - biorach 4y ago
      Rule 34a If a format exists, then there is porn on it.
      - twic 4y ago
        Which makes me think - has anyone run Bad Apple on a VR headset yet?
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    I wonder if there's a corollary about different media formats.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Enough that Pornhub has a VR category.

sublinear 4y ago

> Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences. This is the refrain of Disney's theme park marketing, but I disagree. It's the fact that people want to say they were there. It's 100% the brand and nothing more. Marketing doesn't have to be, and often isn't, rational. This is at the absolute core of why theme park experiences sell but VR does not. Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. Until the price of VR comes down to absolute rock bottom prices, there will not be acceptance of "VR experiences" and even so it's still a gamble whether anyone cares enough to buy that to experience on a whim frequently vs plan a vacation around it... I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

Megusto 4y ago
Tbh as long as there is no easy to use working personal vr suite, then it is not an alternative to experience it by yourself. Vr is fun but virtual.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Not to be pedantic, but even with a personal VR suite, it's still virtual. A flight sim, regardless of how sophisticated, is still always going to be of a lesser experience than real flying unless you can actually die in the sim. I'm not suggesting that an ideal flight sim should kill the player if they crash, but rather suggesting that, as an example, a pilot behind the controls of a real plane that has to make a series of instantaneous decisions when a dangerous situation comes up like engine failure will have been "battle tested" in a very real way where his/her life was literally on the line. Of course not having to risk your life is also a big advantage of virtual as well.
Duckton 4y ago
> It's 100% the brand and nothing more. What is you basis for saying that? > Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. By that rationale nobody would play vide games. I believe it comes down to the experience. The experience of VR is simply not good enough to attract people.
4y ago

quitit 4y ago

I really like that analogy "amusement park without any rides". I really do think Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed. But back to your analogye, it applies particularly well here because Disney are a master of delivering experiences and do exactly that through every possible medium. So if one sees Disney walking away from the Metaverse, that's not something I would interpret lightly - despite the rounds of firing being interpreted as a cost saving measure, it's just 50 staff members and not all of them are leaving the company. Disney aren't short of cash, so if they saw a future in the Metaverse they'd be there for defensive reasons alone. Rather I think Disney realise that their own VR-initiatives will stand on their own, and their involvement would be propping up 3rd party platforms rather than yielding a benefit from them. I think Meta are hoping that the Metaverse would emulate the Smartphone/Soft-store model, where developers would do the heavy lifting for the platform, but the crucial difference here is that a Smartphone is useful before even loading a single piece of 3rd party software. Everyone already had a phone when smartphones became a thing - but right now no one is walking around with a VR headset, or anything even vaguely approximating that.

shepardrtc 4y ago
> Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed. No, this was Mark's personal Quest for the Next Big Thing. No one else in the company is delusional enough to believe it will go anywhere, they're just getting a fat paycheck.

bsenftner 4y ago

I'd say the main problem is human beings are not mature enough to be trusted with such a service, it will be a rape and pillage campaign for all your data and all your interests and all your imagination. We create predator services and pretend they are 'just services', burning the end-user's trust for any similar "services" after they sour from the treatment of the first one they tried. We have a serious maturity problem in the human species, and it is dragging all our progress down and backwards.

censor_me 4y ago
[dead]

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

> A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that But probably a lot less than would watch a Mandalorian animated or real life spin-off TV series - and the VR version costs a lot more to create. A lot of companies (Disney, Magic Leap etc) have spent a fortune trying to make the killer VR content but have failed. Apart from the sports/exercise apps (probably not enough to support the FB metaverse) are there any that would make people purchase a headset for?

agloe_dreams 4y ago
> and the VR version costs a lot more to create. Would it need to? It's a video game, right? Once you have the base elements, it could be pretty cheap.
- ljf 4y ago
  My kids and I would have been pretty happy with just access to non-game elements. They must have already made loads of 3rd spaces and models - just being able to hang out and explore them would be brilliant. Then if they started to layer gaming on top of that... my kids would be pestering me even more than they already are for a vr set-up.

stuckinhell 4y ago

VR going mainstream is difficult until they can get people to take anti-nausea meds with them. The biology of humans works against VR in a lot of ways, and most people don't like the idea of taking anti-nausea pill just to experience VR. (I take anti-nausea pills when I do VR, because VR is absolutely mindblowing)

tomxor 4y ago
I think you are referring to old VR experience, the tech is pretty mature now, latency is super low, tracking is good, on pretty much any model. I play a lot of VR games and never get sick. The only one where I got a little dizzy was with 6dof FPS, which isn't really due to VR specifically. Although it is true some people get sick easily in VR, those people tend to also have trouble with car sickness and sea sickness. I suppose you can say the same about cars and VR for that group.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  I'm a woman, apparently women have a much lower tolerance for VR. Some people theorize its due to avoiding damage to the child during pregnancy. So even on my very high end setup (Index 120hz,4090 rtx), I still get nausea. It also takes a while for people to get their VR legs, and I don't have time for using VR very day, it's more like once a month.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that. There are definitely differences in tolerance between people. However I don't think this is specific to the tech any more, just the experience, similar to flying a plane or being on a boat. But It used to be that everyone would get nauseous due to immaturity of the technology as the parent comment was implying, and that's no longer true.
JeremyNT 4y ago
I don't get nausea, but even without that I hate the experience of actually wearing the things. I find I get a lot of eye strain that prevents me from playing long sessions, the weight/bulk is uncomfortable, and it can get quite hot wearing a headset for any length of time. I think almost everybody will find VR goggles uncomfortable in SOME way. These things are fun to mess around with, but I think very few people will ever want to wear goggles like this for more than an hour or so at a time, which inherently limits their appeal and potential applications. My widescreen monitor has none of these issues and it's plenty "good enough" for most games.

twobitshifter 4y ago

The last time I went to Universal in LA, all the rides had a VR component to them, the real-life amusement parks are turning to VR + motion. Some of these were jiggly seats, others had flying platforms, and others pulled you in a train through VR scenes. (The ride that people liked the least was minions, which just had tipping and shaking seats, but the 3D made people sick.)

Tiktaalik 4y ago

> interactive VR episodes Sounds like a video game to me, something that Disney has weirdly struggled with, having tried on several times to get into video games big time, only to shy away at the huge expense and challenge. At the moment they've circled back to merely licensing out their IPs to other publishers. Disney should get more into video games, and VR is great for video games. VR for "metaverse" whatever it is that is. Not so sure!