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The whole Metaverse thing was very strange. It should have been self evident to zuckerberg that wearing a vr headset will never be mainstream. Metaverse was “
by andrewstuart 3y ago
The whole Metaverse thing was very strange.
It should have been self evident to zuckerberg that wearing a vr headset will never be mainstream.
Metaverse was “Zucks original idea”… a billionaires pipe dream - an average idea backed by untold money.
The Metaverse showed that as they say “once you’re lucky, twice you’re good”.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lordnacho 3y agoI thought it was at best a thing to get a foothold in, not something to rename the company for. Plus if you're renaming the firm and making it the focus, maybe do a better job. Give people legs for instance? The whole thing looks ridiculously dated. Maybe spend some of the money finding out what people want.
- checkyoursudo 3y agoI felt like Zuck thought the rest of the world loved "Ready Player One" as much as he did, and that was about the extent of his market research. Presumably, they thought people would love it so much that the initial offering being visually/functionally sub-standard would not matter so much?
- JohnFen 3y agoI thought it was Snow Crash. That Facebook coopted the term "metaverse" from that dystopian world told me everything I needed to know about their intentions.
- checkyoursudo 3y agoOh, yeah, the term metaverse comes from Snow Crash. I was just recalling this incident: https://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-gives-all-its-employees-ready-player-one-2016-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-gives-all-its-employe... and Zuck referring to RPO in some interview: "I appreciate the RPO reference" here, https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-c...
- lagrange77 3y ago> an average idea backed by untold money Spot on!
- rob74 3y agoTo me the whole Metaverse thing felt like Zuck thinking "ok, now I paid two billion for Oculus, I'd better come up with a plan what to do with it to keep the shareholders happy!". And then the plan got out of hand...
- dageshi 3y ago2 billion for Facebook isn't particularly a lot of money, I doubt their shareholders would care very much so long as FB continued to be a money printing machine. The problem was tiktok. FB missed the short form video social media medium so it can't grow and if it can't grow it's no longer a "tech giant", so I think Zuckerberg desperately looked around and thought, "what comes after short form video?" and came to the conclusion it had to be VR because there isn't anything else that's obvious. And thus the pivot to the metaverse.
- typeofhuman 3y agoFB missed short-form video, but Instagram didn't. People just like TikTok better.
- nradov 3y agoZuckerberg still owns a controlling stake. The only shareholder he has to keep happy is himself. This was an attempt to get ahead of a potential disruptive innovation that might cause a strategic inflection point (as per "The Innovator's Dilemma"). Some people thought that AR/VR devices might displace smartphones in the social media space the same way that smartphones displaced microcomputers. So far that isn't happening, but I guess it's still a possibility.
- Folcon 3y ago> an average idea backed by untold money I keep finding it strange that this doesn't have to be true? A repeated question I keep hearing as well as having myself is, "what is it for?" which personally seems bizarre. There are many possible valid answers to that question, but I as someone who's spent at least a few hours hearing about it really shouldn't have that question. That personally feels like a much more significant failure than anything else. Though perhaps I've missed it, maybe there's some clear articulation somewhere of what the goal is of the Metaverse, if so, feel free to enlighten me =)...
- iamthemonster 3y agoThe goal is to serve more ads into people's retinas
- rob74 3y agoThe ultimate goal of the Metaverse can only be to have something like the Matrix, i.e. have a significant part of the population "jacked in" to the Metaverse most of the time (which would only be the logical continuation of the current state of affairs, with most of us walking around like zombies, constantly looking at our phones). But that would be a bit too dystopian for most people's tastes, so they avoid mentioning it too explicitly...
- Folcon 3y agoSure, but if that's the goal then they're failing at the first hurdle, if you want to serve ads, you need space / context that holds people's attention and interest. That's literally table stakes. You can't serve ads to nobody. So even though that may be "what it's for", that can't be the sole reason, those people need a reason to show up. So for that audience or any audience, what is it for?
- michaelt 3y agoThe theoretical sci-fi promise of things like the metaverse would be having pretty much everything reality has, but better. A metaverse concert as good as attending a real concert in person, but also your friend who lives 500 miles away is right there next to you. Business meetings as good as meeting in person, but with infinitely luxurious surroundings and no travel time. Office buildings where everyone gets a private office and a dozen huge monitors. And so on. Obviously, that's not what Facebook are offering at the moment. I would say they are nowhere close. And of course, though to you and I such a thing controlled by Facebook might seem incredibly dystopian, Zuckerberg probably has a much higher opinion of facebook than normal people!
- dom96 3y agoA VR headset no, a set of AR glasses yes. What seems to be the issue is that creating usable AR glasses that have the quality of Quest is currently not feasible. Zuckerberg's real gamble was that they could figure out a way to make this happen (maybe they still can).
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoYou also don't want AR glasses. The battery alone is a hassle, add the heating/weight of the device (same issues as VR) and a pinch of motion sickness and the faulty input haptics and you are back to the trusty ol' laptop, if you want to actually get something done, or to the smartphone if you are just consuming content. It's just a bad idea all around, perhaps it's easier to hack the optic nerve and feed images into the brain that way. There is nothing AR glasses can achieve at an industrial site (their main use currently with HoloLens) that a decent digital twin, being able to quickly zoom in/out across hundreds of yards of wiring/machineries, doesn't obtain easier/faster/better/safer/more comfortable. Just what the doctor ordered for a tired technician, crawl under the machinery to check for the AR gimmick some dude in a $4,000 chair designed, only for the thing to be completely unable to map the AR model to the physical object because there's barely any light under a 25 tonne industrial whatever.
- mschuster91 3y agoAR has its uses though. In the military, for example... imagine a squad of soldiers, with every soldier being digitally linked to a central command station that knows the precise location of each unit. A soldier could then see on their glasses - even at night - where their unit mates are, or get commands and status updates from leadership instead of by (often times barely understandable) radio.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoIf they can stop themselves from vomiting, maybe [1] [2]. I am more afraid of drone swarms with pytorch object detection obliterating everything in sight [3], or what Geoffrey Hinton said about the self-healing mine field [4]. Was reading now the "HoloLens environment considerations" [5], most funny aspect: "Wormholes. If you have two areas or regions that look the same, the tracker may think they're the same. This results in the device tricking itself into thinking it's somewhere else." [1] October 2022, "Microsoft Hololens causes US army nausea and headaches", https://www.avinteractive.com/markets/government-and-defence/microsoft-hololens-causes-us-army-nausea-and-headaches-18-10-2022/ https://www.avinteractive.com/markets/government-and-defence... [2] January 2023, "Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens", https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-off-entire-teams-behind-virtual-mixed-reality-and-hololens https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-... [3] https://fedscoop.com/darpa-drone-swarms-with-1000-unmanned-aircraft-within-5-years https://fedscoop.com/darpa-drone-swarms-with-1000-unmanned-a... [4] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/minefield.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/minefield.pdf [5] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/hololens-environment-considerations#wormholes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/hololens-environm...
- hashtag-til 3y agoTo me this Metaverse thing seems just a nice story to tell people who have no engineering knowledge at all (investors, shareholders et al), and sell them this sci-fi movie idea. It is just yet another "second life" (remember that?) software stack, plugged with social networks - the worst of the two worlds. I've jumped ship with social media stuff about a decade ago, and seeing how nasty it became, I'm just glad I ditched it. Pro tip: That common excuse "I use it to keep in touch with family blah blah blah" is not an excuse - you can keep in touch with family if you care about them. If you don't, don't waste everybody's time.
- Mindwipe 3y agoSecond Life still exists and is profitable... (Unlike Meta's efforts.)
- twelve40 3y agothere is no replacement for keeping in touch with friends from far away and yes, remote parts of family, too - fb or insta. I don't go there much anymore because the endless promoted reels drive me insane, but i do miss that aspect of those services.
- heavyset_go 3y agoJust looking at Horizon Worlds makes me wonder if the whole Metaverse thing was just a front to funnel funds into a top secret defense project and if WWIII would be preferable to playing that game.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoThe Facebook/Metaverse kerfuffle is more fitted to "first as tragedy (the damage ad-driven social media has done to fabric of society is yet unaccounted for), second as farce (VR was a sad joke from the start—proud owner of the first HTC Vive, used it 10, maybe 12 times in 7? years)". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Louis_Bonaparte#First_as_tragedy,_then_as_farce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Lou...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kypro 3y agoThe goal of the Metaverse isn't to be wearing something that feels like a VR headset though... AR/VR is likely to be the logical progression of physical screens, it's just we're not there yet. And it's not even that the current tech is that bad, it's just too clunky and cumbersome given the limited quality of the experiences at the moment. I think as the tech becomes less cumbersome and the experiences get better you'll start to see apps that people actually find interesting / useful. The whole cartoon virtual office stuff Zuck was pushing a couple of years back made it look like a joke. Given where the technology is enterprise productivity apps are clearly not the right product. If they instead invested in interesting AR/VR games and experiences I think they would have had more success. Imo the best stuff on the Oculus is the 3D video experiences and first person video games. But for some reason this isn't where Meta is investing to sell the tech.
- andrewstuart 3y ago98 out of 100 people I know would never use a VR or AR headset beyond once to see some amazing demo.
- CharlieDigital 3y agoI was going to make a counter point that the tech simply isn't there yet. Then I considered how people hate to even wear normal glasses. So even if the tech could be as seamless and compact as normal prescription glasses, uptake would be iffy.
- traceroute66 3y ago> So even if the tech could be as seamless and compact as normal prescription glasses, uptake would be iffy. Remember the glasshole era ? (The short-lived project known as Google Glass for those who don't know)
- vernon99 3y agoI wonder what would say average people of 19 century when offered to ride a car. Book reading was also not mainstream just as recently. Utility beats everything though. Is there utility in ar/vr glasses? Are you enjoying reading and typing from your small screen with your neck turned to the ground? With a friction of getting your phone in and out of your pocket 20 times a day. How could it not be obvious?
- cmsj 3y ago"was"? They're still going at it - they booked a $2.8bn loss on Meta Reality Labs in Q2.
- typeofhuman 3y agoSo much money. Seems like waste. Can you imagine a startup with that burn rate?
- nradov 3y agoMagic Leap is a startup also in the "metaverse" space and was supposedly burning $50M / month. And that was actual cashflow, not just the charges and write-downs that comprise much of Meta's number.
- NicoJuicy 3y agoMetaverse only made sense to me as: - put in a lot of money in AR/VR - develop new things/tech required - hope to find something new to do with it ( a blue ocean) Eg. The virtual version of many defense/space projects.
- CharlieDigital 3y agoIt's more than that. It comes down to owning a platform. Apple's iOS walled garden is a slap to Zuck's face. In VR, Zuck saw a chance to own an emerging platform. Remember the FB phone? Amazon's Fire phone? Both attempts to own a platform. If your revenue depends on ads, owning the platform is like adding fuel to fire.
- fatnoah 3y agoMy humble opinion is that it's about the AR endgame, and building out the technical capability to get there (via VR mixed reality, wearable devices, etc) AND owning the platform.
- karmakaze 3y agoThe reason Meta's VR/AR effort has failed is because they didn't care at the top about making it for current users. The primary focus was for making long-term profitable/business platform too soon. If they had a clue they wouldn't have stalled on the success of the Quest/Quest 2 and made a Quest 3 in time for the next Sept-holiday season. Even late the projected specs for Quest 3 are short of expectations.
- md_ 3y agoThis. I understood the project as less about the flashy ten-year vision, and more about the same thing that drove Google to build Chrome and Android: not wanting to face lockout from competing platforms. I don't think this has been _successful_, but the concern about platform access seems _reasonable_ to me. If you think it's existential, burning billions on a long-shot might even be a good strategy, though one that seems likely to fail.
- opportune 3y agoThey’ve succeeded in building a platform, but they seem to have forgotten that for it to be valuable they need users to actually want to use it
- dangerboysteve 3y agoEvery billionaire needs their own version of a Spruce Goose.
- cyanydeez 3y agoIt's such a generic pop culture idea though.