VR isn’t a bad idea.
…Zuckerberg is just an idiot.
That’s really what it comes down to. Facebook has some neat branches and employees, but at the end of the day, its head decision maker is chronically flakey and makes catastrophically bad financial choices, repeatedly.
He’s just so freaking rich it doesn’t even matter.
I still remember the original Metaverse pitch basically being ‘We’re going to copy VRChat but without any of the bits people enjoy’
Having only seen videos of VR Chat, your avatar can be a 6 foot penis or a anime girl or a skeleton with a trumpet. And I think Metaverse was trying to provide that for businesses and the general public?
How can you create a social hub where you can’t be a 6 foot penis?
The original concept was more or less a virtual shopping mall with a character creator. Imagine VR chat but made by EA.
There will be a $12.99 monthly fee for imaging that
So WorldsAway but twenty years later?
I don’t know how to tell you but Worlds Away was 20 years old… a decade ago.
!Released September 1995!<
Delete this
Like it should be, as Neil Stephenson depicted it in Snowcrash, 1992…
Yeah and tied to your fucking meta account so next data breach your colleagues at work can learn that you chatted for hours with a 15 year old with a lewd anime avatar (or as lewd as meta would ever allow something to be) about your fursona.
And, in practice, take forever, don’t really promote it, and make it look like no one at Facebook has ever laid eyes on a video game.
He’s so stupid if he really thought companies were willing to buy a VR headset for every employee so they can go to virtual meetings (like actual meetings are not already a chore)
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Including Facebook.
Zuck loves a bandwagon.
He made WoW but corporate, deanonymized, and lacking anything interesting to do in it.
I can’t imagine why it failed.
Yeah, I don’t like the idea that failed ideas are a waste, because that kind of thinking stifles technological advancement.
I do like thinking that we can have both technological advancement and healthcare.
I mean, it was doomed from the beginning. There was no vision, no problem to be solved, no benefit for the user.
Why would the world need this VR space? For meetings or chats? We have virtual meetings and this adds nothing of value. For games? The graphics are bad (to allow more people to use it) and there are better VR games. For companies to advertise? You would need something to get people to go there.
They should have created a benefit for the user first and if that is successful add more.
They could have started with a Sims clone or a WOW clone to get people interested and invested before adding the rest. Selling virtual land only makes sense if it’s worth something.
Should have led with porn
Sure, if they had created for example a ‘second life’ clone with a very lax custom content policy it would have drawn in the pervert community to build their dream harem / larp orgies AND the house builder / interior design community AND the second life larper community.
The question is, if big companies would still have wanted to advertise there. At least the virtual land would have been a bit more interesting.
One thing I would love for the Quest to be able to do would be to create a 3D model of my home’s interior and let me do things like knock down walls or place furniture.
There’s no technical reason it can’t do this except that nobody’s done it because it’s been pitched as a collaboration/NFT selling tool.
I think you can sort of do that with Hyperscape?
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/meta-horizon-hyperscape-capture-beta/8798130056953686
So apparently facebook is funding research into that, still: https://facebookresearch.github.io/ShapeR/
Who knows what they’ll actually do with the tech.
I’m glad they’ve at least thought of it, but I’m amazed they didn’t think this was a killer app for VR. Just the real estate market alone would have been huge.
Kinda ironic that he got the enshittification order right with facebook and instagram, but completely forgot it for VR. You need the people first, then you start banning porn to be “family friendly” and nice with big companies
It is weird that nobody pointed out to him that a meeting in VR is worse than a Zoom call in every practical way. I guess he reached the “surround yourself with Yes-Men” stage too long ago.
It’s also just not an option if someone has a medical condition that makes them predisposed to dizziness, vertigo, etc. Even without a medical condition, users frequently experience motion sickness with VR. And if certain team members can’t use the meeting software, it ceases to have any value as a meeting software.
It always happens with any delusional fool.
They get lucky and so they hire smart people. Then those smart people no longer align with the fool. So they hire more people in hopes of changing the smart people’s minds. But then smart people leave.
And now. All that’s left is the people who were hired who think every time the fool farts, it’s a blessing.
I don’t even like video calls. The only value of it is to see if someone started talking while still muted.
I guess if you count screen-sharing as video calling, but that’s distinct from the camera part.
They did worse than that imo. I was a very early consumer of VR; had the original oculus headset and absolutely loved it. Then zuck bought them out, mandated that all oculus headsets would need a meta account, and effectively dropped support for anything other than the mobile headset. I was legitimately the kind of consumer that would put 5 figures into that hobby over a few years, but I set it down and never looked back after that. Im sure I’m not the only one who fits that description
Same. I was one of the original kickstarter backer. Never touched it again after the meta account got mandatory.
I might get the Steam Frame and see how much has changed in the VR space.
Oh boy, if you haven’t played Half Life Alyx you’re in for a treat.
To play the devil’s advocate: this did happen during the crypto rush, when huge monetary value was assigned to nothings. If you buy into the idea that a JPEG of a monkey created by some algorithm brute-forcing KiSS can be worth a small fortune - it’s not hard to see how VR “real” estate can be valuable.
Digital nothing CAN have value. Like imagine having a central plot on a long running popular Minecraft server, or having a large housing plot in final fantasy XIV, or a sick mount in WoW or any other MMO. The thing is that those are desirable not just because they’re limited, but because the game is a desirable place to begin with. Artificial scarcity with nothing backing it is useless, like monkey jpegs and beanie babies.
So if the metaverse wasn’t dogshit and actually drew in at least tens of thousands of regular users, yeah he could’ve made some money selling digital real estate. Instead, he led with “you can buy real fake land!” with no real reason other than exclusivity.
Most reasonable explanation for this crap I heard:
- facebook is just a website that makes money through tracking and ads
- people need to use a device to access facebook, so they can get tracked and see ads
- apple and google own all your devices and started to block tracking and ads (except their own)
- Zuck saw a risky chance by investing in VR. The vision was to get everyone on their VR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads
cuckedberg bet that VR headsets were going to take over, which even back in 2018 seemed far fetched. He’d have had a better chance to fortify his stranglehold by spending all that money making fb’s own custom android and securing deals with phone manufacturers.
These tech bros call them moonshots.
Which I can see them repurposing all the Metaverse stuff into glasses.
But not that I would touch that and feed the Zuck machine.
All this time, effort, and money spent to convince you to buy things you don’t need.
Now the vision is to get everyone on their AR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads through your smart glasses.
is that a fucking ai generated image of the metaverse
I just realised what Zuck looks like in the metaverse: the evil kid from toy story!
Still looks more human than the original.
React bot
What’s really dumb is that VR could actually take off if it was done correctly, but these billionaires can’t think of literally anything besides profit so they base the entire model around that and just expect people to want it. If he had dumped an iota into further development of VR tech, and invested in some actual original VR content, games, etc then people would flock to it. That and actual affordable VR since everything is still overpriced since it’s considered a niche market.
It’d be super cool if it were self-contained and wireless…
Well it kinda is? Most of the time I’ve been using VR has either been on the headset itself or wirelessly streaming from a PC. My headset is old so the quality isn’t amazing, but by and large its always worked well.
That’s the Quest headsets whole thing. The games run on the device, and it has cameras for AR stuff, which is surprisingly intuitive. That being said, what impressed me the most was how solid streaming VR games from my PC (over Wifi 6) is. Pretty much indistinguishable from wired.
Valve’s upcoming new VR headset should be a little better at running games and will probably be great at Streaming, though it won’t do AR.
It wasn’t even obvious how to get into this thing. We got a Quest headset, the kids use the heck out of it for gaming and hanging with friends, and I poked around in it trying to find this Zuckerberg World and you have to work to find it. I mean, if he wanted this thing to be big it should be the default, but nope. Anyway, the headsets are a ton of fun for gaming with others, but as far as VR interaction with other’s avatars for the purposes of social interaction? Nope.
as far as VR interaction with other’s avatars for the purposes of social interaction? Nope.
Except vrchat is actually HUGE. Now I’m sure the metaverse could never have unseated it as #1, but it could have been a thing if zuck actually made it not look like shit and didn’t try to commodity the hell out of it.
Don’t forget that it took, what, 1 week after release for someone to “grope” a journalist avatar and have meta desperately try to patch out shitty human behavior, removing avatars’ hips and legs and forcing them to stay 1.5m away from each other at all times
I feel like Rec Room solved this issue ages ago.
Vrchat exists because of porn, mostly. If metaverse added big tiddy avatars it probably wouldn’t have failed as hard.
Vrchat exists because of porn
That’s a weird take. I’ve played VRchat for around 100 hours, of which most was spent just bullshitting around and randomly inserting yourself in conversation that can go on for hours. Never noticed any porn rooms or whatever you meant by that, but I guess we have different goals in games
Note that this was a 10% cut. Meta has a lot of staff. They are also slightly pivoting to AR glasses, as they say Ray-Ban Display sales are much higher than anticipated. I think they see their chance of cornering the VR market as gone (probably because of android xr) (see https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-pauses-third-party-horizon-os-headsets/ ) but think they have a chance to dominate AR glasses / wearables.
For context, $77 billion is more than most nations spend on their military.
What we could have bought instead; a list of real problems that money could help significantly with, or fix entirely (generated with AI):
Universal Healthcare (Medicare for All)
- Est. cost: $3–4T per year
- $77B covers ~2–3 weeks of healthcare for the entire US
- Or ~6–7 million people for one year
- ~2% of annual national healthcare spend
High-Speed Rail and Public Transit
- Est. cost: $50–120M per mile
- $77B covers 600–1,200 miles of true HSR
- 3–5 major national corridors plus urban transit upgrades
Homelessness, Veterans, and Mental Health
- Est. cost: $150k–300k per housing unit; ~$25k/person/year care
- $77B covers 250,000–400,000 permanent housing units
- 10+ years of care for all chronically homeless
- 100% of veteran homelessness eliminated
Roads, Bridges, and Infrastructure
- Est. cost: ~$5M per bridge; ~$1M per mile of road
- $77B covers 15,000–20,000 bridge replacements
- ~100,000 miles of roadway rebuilt
- ~15–20% of all structurally deficient bridges
Domestic Semiconductor Manufacturing
- CHIPS Act: $52B total
- $77B covers 150% of CHIPS Act
- 3–5 leading-edge fabs
- Full AI, defense, and automotive supply-chain security
Fusion and Advanced Energy
- ITER reactor: ~$22B
- SPARC program: ~$4B
- $77B covers 3 ITER-class reactors
- 10+ SPARC-class fusion programs
Climate Resilience and Clean Energy
- Est. cost: ~$1B per GW renewable capacity
- $77B covers 60+ GW clean power
- Electrification of ~10 million homes
- Coastal protection and grid modernization across multiple states
Public Sector Scale Comparison
- Equals 3+ years of NASA’s budget
- Equals 10 years of US homelessness funding
- Exceeds annual defense budgets of most countries
The art direction in that screenshot seems to be “make everyone else look so weird Zuckerburg looks normal”
I predicted this crash and burn at the exact moment I saw it for the first time.
All these dickheads steal one good idea, and they think that makes them geniuses.
Imagine if he put that amount towards affordable housing in Cali
Honestly, that’s the government’s job after taxing the shit out of this billionaire.
Facebook is a boomer infested, depressing, idiot shithole. I’m not spending extra money for hardware so I can experience that in VR.
If I wanted to experience that, I can visit my shitty boomer mother for free in reality.
They could have created a whole grand theft auto level city and filled it with real people for cheaper wtf
You know how difficult it is to create 3D legs?!
Oh not difficult at all? Yeah well it cost them a bazillion dollars!
Oh you think that’s funny?!
You know how difficult it is to create 3D legs?!
Without tracking actual legs? Reverse kinematics is pretty tricky (but obviously not impossible)
I mean he just pumped that money into the US and Chinese economy. It’s not like he lit a pile of money on fire like the Joker. Most of that money went into salaries of the people doing R&D and manufacturing of the headsets in China. Lets hope the Zuck has a dozen more of these failures.
Absolutely it didn’t just get lit on fire.
But that amount of money is enough to end world hunger for a decade. (According to the WHO, ~$7-8 billion a year.)
Instead of being the next Carnegie but with food instead of libraries, and worldwide, Zuckerberg went for a moon shot pet project that an undergrad MBA student would’ve been laughed out of the room for presenting. Diverting time, money, and resources from anything actually productive.
While paying basically no taxes.
