I still can't figure out what the Metaverse is beyond some overly ambitious attempt to recreate VR Chat as something a majority of people would actually spend hours every day in. What I can say is...
I still can't figure out what the Metaverse is beyond some overly ambitious attempt to recreate VR Chat as something a majority of people would actually spend hours every day in.
What I can say is that Facebook is building it, which means it will certainly be a net negative for society as a whole and our best hope should be for it to fail miserably and fade away into the ether.
It's a term that VCs and tech bros have adopted to describe what they think the next big paradigm shift is. Ostensibly including VR/AR/MR (XR). At a high level, there are some very clear trends...
It's a term that VCs and tech bros have adopted to describe what they think the next big paradigm shift is. Ostensibly including VR/AR/MR (XR).
At a high level, there are some very clear trends and shifts going on. Things like the communities around certain games manifesting emergent gameplay (Minecraft, Roblox), as well as companies trying new and innovative ways of creating unique content (live concerts in Fortnite). There is the long-running trend of connecting more systems to other systems such as Xbox/PC/Playstation crossplay, using Google/Facebook as an authentication for 3rd party systems, and a myriad of other examples both good bad and failed.
If you look at these things and take note of the successful standouts it's easy to extrapolate the idea that everything will eventually merge into one or more large meta-systems that people use to get all their information and entertainment. Zuck has decided that he wants to be in charge of that system, by virtue of creating it, instead of waiting for someone else to do it or for it to emerge organically.
I think Zuck is wrong on several levels. The first is that while these trends are notable, they don't necessarily result in the penultimate conclusion (one system controlled by one company) that he seems to think they do. The second is that he or his company is in any way shape or form qualified or capable of either creating or operating such a system. It's like a major company such as IBM declaring in 1965 that they are going to "create the cybersphere" (they didn't, just a random example). In retrospect the hubris behind such a statement would be incredible, and given our historical perspective, it's easy to see how naive that statement would have been.
I do believe that something called "the metaverse" will likely emerge in the next decade or so. I also believe that it will be nothing like what most people (including myself) think it will. There are too many forces at work both hidden and not to try and predict something like that. Some More News (at 44min mark) has a great illustration of my thoughts on this. The Apple iPhone was a paradigm shift and directly resulted in the modern smartphone era. But the first commercials for it didn't advertise the things that the vast majority of users actually use them for now : texting.
VR is a lot of fun, but I still don't think anyone has created whatever the equivalent of the Apple iPhone is. We may not even recognize it for what it is when it shows up. The tech and capability of XR devices continues to evolve rapidly, and there are a lot of people trying a lot of things. Eventually someone will figure out "the thing".
If anything, the fact that Zuckerberg has presumably trademarked/patented the term means whatever the next paradigm of the internet will be, it will not be called the metaverse.
I do believe that something called "the metaverse" will likely emerge in the next decade or so.
If anything, the fact that Zuckerberg has presumably trademarked/patented the term means whatever the next paradigm of the internet will be, it will not be called the metaverse.
AFAIK Zuck only bought the trademark for "Meta" specifically, not for the term "metaverse". And since "metaverse" was first coined in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash 30 years ago it can't be blanket...
AFAIK Zuck only bought the trademark for "Meta" specifically, not for the term "metaverse". And since "metaverse" was first coined in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash 30 years ago it can't be blanket trademarked (again, AFAIK), only trademarked for specific applications, which would give it a much narrower range of protection against infringement.
That makes sense. I was fairly sure Facebook didn't invent the term, but I kind of assumed they wouldn't go all in on it without having a stranglehold on the IP rights for any adjacent...
That makes sense. I was fairly sure Facebook didn't invent the term, but I kind of assumed they wouldn't go all in on it without having a stranglehold on the IP rights for any adjacent application.
Anyway, my broader point is that any competing technology will probably avoid using the same name as Meta, whether that is to avoid legal complications or simply to avoid confusing branding. Which means unless Facebook's metaverse succeeds, then the future of the internet will probably be known by another name.
They have a pretty decent head start and have actual new ideas and something to show for them, especially when it comes to AR. Minecraft Earth was fun as heck while it lasted. While I strongly...
They have a pretty decent head start and have actual new ideas and something to show for them, especially when it comes to AR. Minecraft Earth was fun as heck while it lasted. While I strongly dislike them as a company, credit where it's due, I believe they're the first to have AR anchors shared in real time between separate devices implemented and shipped in a consumer product. I'm not sure if it's been posted here, but there was an article I read a while back basically posing the idea that the metaverse already existed and that it was Minecraft. A huge virtual environment created by its users where you could just interact on a daily level but virtually. I think that idea has merit and combined with everything else MS is sitting on? They'd be my bet as well.
Everything FB is flaunting has been seen before either in MS tech teasers or on Steam. That's honestly kind of sad considering that they own Oculus, which for a short while felt like it was nearly synonymous with VR.
Microsoft has hololens. It's kind of a meme by now (their "gaming" demos were horrible), but the technology, at least conceptually, is sound. Some home video demos of it are floating around and...
Microsoft has hololens. It's kind of a meme by now (their "gaming" demos were horrible), but the technology, at least conceptually, is sound. Some home video demos of it are floating around and while a lot of it is gimmicky, the "boring" parts are convincing. AR in general is. Think an unlimited amount of screens of arbitrary size and shape around you. "Windows" but instead of flat rectangles, it's rectangles that are embedded in physical space. That works for me. It's a space where it takes little imagination to see sensible use cases.
The projection technology isn't good enough yet from what I hear (never tried it) but tech will always solve itself, eventually. What will make it click with consumers is nailing the UX and that will likely not be solved by the "first movers" but a company coming in late, picking up established tech. It's not an exciting proposition but the company best suited for a potential AR breakthrough is... Apple. It's exactly what they've been doing, from the iPod to iPhone.
But Goolge did something pretty concrete for search engines. And the benefit of a search engine also is pretty concrete. What is the benefit of VR and what does Meta add? Like, no buzzwords,...
But Goolge did something pretty concrete for search engines. And the benefit of a search engine also is pretty concrete. What is the benefit of VR and what does Meta add? Like, no buzzwords, concrete scenarios of VR making the world more convenient/efficient/better?
I'm not much of a Facebook fan, and I'm not sure if I expect Facebook's Horizon Worlds / Metaverse plans to be successful in the form it's presented in, but I feel like there's a lot of hot air in...
I'm not much of a Facebook fan, and I'm not sure if I expect Facebook's Horizon Worlds / Metaverse plans to be successful in the form it's presented in, but I feel like there's a lot of hot air in staking a position against it.
"The problem with the metaverse is the way they've advertised it"
"Imagine if the only way to use the internet was through a headset"
"But so far, nothing we've seen we need"
I think this video and most discussions about "metaverse" are just surface discussions about the wording of ad campaigns rather than about products. No one is coming to take the existing internet away from us and force us to only use it through VR. If anyone thought the commercial was threatening to do that then they're pattern-matching way too strongly to YA fantasy dystopia stories. It's a performance trying to communicate "facebook bad" while pretending to engage the subject.
There's also kind of a weird thing where they talk about how obviously terrible metaverse is, and then talk about how it's just like these other previous things that were great. Is the argument there that metaverse is going to be terrible, or that the basic idea is just not as fully Facebook-original as an ad's sound bite might imply?
I'm not trying to entirely disagree with the video's conclusion, but I'm frustrated at how shallow most takes are about Facebook+metaverse+VR. I'm a big VR and VRChat fan, though I'm not so positive on Facebook and think they're making missteps. I believe VR is great for social virtual spaces. I hate how so many discussions of VR involve strawmen about VR having to replace all screens or take over our lives to be useful. (I'm still laughing about how the video brought up that VR is bad because some people have to be on the lookout for intruders. just um what idk why are they so thoroughly scraping the barrel to make sure we have negative affect for VR?)
I think there's issues with Facebook's VR plans, especially along the lines of it not being fashionable enough to attract users and it not prioritizing user-created content enough (which would also help the first issue). I wonder what they plan on doing for moderation of open public areas. I think the way they present commercialization and selling outfits in their ads is done in the most boring way possible, but conceptually the idea of having a marketplace for avatars and accessories is very powerful. (I'm thinking of a marketplace where the items are mostly new custom avatar bases and custom-made designs, not just brand names slapped on a shirt. Will they allow individual creators making fully custom content, or are they just thinking of lazy deals with big brands?) I think there's good questions about how control of such a marketplace could be done.
There's so many interesting angles to dissect but so many of the takes are just "zuckerberg wants us to wear the headsets all day and I'm taking a stand against that".
"I want most of my interactions in the real world, and the idea that most of our interactions will become this virtual space is a little scary"
We're already in the world where many of our social interactions are virtual. It's weird to phrase this as if some oppressive company is thinking about suddenly forcing us to go entirely virtual.
I don’t know this creator but it seems like the things you are complaining about are tangential in nature. The core arguements he presents are generally pretty logical and well represented, but...
I don’t know this creator but it seems like the things you are complaining about are tangential in nature. The core arguements he presents are generally pretty logical and well represented, but there are also a lot of observational comedy mixed in it that are purposefully limited in scope to maximize the impact of the joke.
But like I said, the core arguements are all good:
Zuckerberg and Meta’s claims about what their platform will allow are often misleading, overly optimistic projections, or otherwise impossible. The idea that the metaverse will replace the internet is all 3.
The actual product they are making has not been demonstrated to be novel in any meaningful way.
it is unwise to use this platform because of the long history the company and this CEO in particular have had in abusing their customers privacy and trust.
The selling point of NFT based virtual items does not make extend the usefulness of those virtual items in any meaningful way.
I’m probably missing something; I saw the video last night.
There is one thing that I wish he and everyone else would point out; Facebook/meta is doing a lot of damage to the VR hardware market by flooding the market with deeply subsidized hardware. If you look at all the hardware on the Quest, it seems pretty obvious that they would have to either double or triple the price on it in order to be profitable. I think it would have enhanced a number of these claims.
Double or triple the price to be profitable? I'm quite doubtful about that. The XR2 processor is based on the SD865 iirc and the cameras and sensors aren't that expensive. I'm sure they don't have...
Double or triple the price to be profitable? I'm quite doubtful about that. The XR2 processor is based on the SD865 iirc and the cameras and sensors aren't that expensive. I'm sure they don't have high margins from the hardware itself or might be selling at a slight loss though. The idea that they are highly subsidizing the hardware seems false to me. Look at Lynx R1. Much smaller company, comparable price.
The Quest is $299, and the basic version of the Lynx-R1 is $599, by itself and without controllers - which is already double the price. Not to mention they are primarily targeting enterprise...
The Quest is $299, and the basic version of the Lynx-R1 is $599, by itself and without controllers - which is already double the price. Not to mention they are primarily targeting enterprise customers, to which they charge $1099 for just the headset - without the implied money they'd be making from support and application development.
Most phones based on the SD865 are about $600, and that's with screens that are generally vastly inferior, fewer cameras, simpler manufacturing, and the benefit that most of those parts have massively higher economies of scale.
Vastly inferior screens? Quest 2 has an LCD display, not OLED. Phones with SD865 easily go for sub $400 currently. Quest 2 cameras are also awful compared to those on a smartphone, so very cheap....
Vastly inferior screens? Quest 2 has an LCD display, not OLED. Phones with SD865 easily go for sub $400 currently. Quest 2 cameras are also awful compared to those on a smartphone, so very cheap. Smartphones also pack a lot more features.
Most cell phone screens are HD resolution - 1080x1920, roughly 2 million pixels - and run at a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. The Quest has a display with a resolution of 1832x1920 per eye, which...
Most cell phone screens are HD resolution - 1080x1920, roughly 2 million pixels - and run at a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. The Quest has a display with a resolution of 1832x1920 per eye, which equates to 7 million pixels, and it drives it at 120 Hz. That's what I would consider a vastly superior display. Not only that, but the pixel density is so high that this would count as a specialist display, which means it's especially expensive.
The cameras may not be expensive, but literally everything around them are expensive. Each camera connects to the mainboard via one of four seperate custom-designed FPC cables and require manual installation by a very steady set of human hands. look at how complex it is on the inside and tell me that this looks as easy to put together as a cell phone is.
I'm honestly not sure what 'features' you are talking about. What hardware are we talking about? Everything else that goes into a phone will cost pennies. Unless you're talking about software features, but most of those come for "free" with Android.
I honestly don't see how you can think that this is a fair price for a VR headset given that the cheapest "equivalent" cell phone still costs more.
I concede. You're right, the pixel density is probably triple that of a smartphone. I think you should consider that consoles are generally sold at a slight loss initially, which is what I would...
I concede. You're right, the pixel density is probably triple that of a smartphone.
I think you should consider that consoles are generally sold at a slight loss initially, which is what I would compare a Quest 2 to. Even with the special display, I don't really see what would raise the price to triple. I expect they aren't making money off the hardware but from the store.
Heck, I think this who Metabook/Faceverse thing is silly, and I interact virtually more than I do in fleshspace. If we want to get "meta" about it, every two weeks I do tabletop via Roll20. So I'm...
Heck, I think this who Metabook/Faceverse thing is silly, and I interact virtually more than I do in fleshspace. If we want to get "meta" about it, every two weeks I do tabletop via Roll20. So I'm interacting virtually to create a simulation.
Before FB there were already devs working on the metaverse, i recommend reading Matthew Ball "The Metaverse Premier": https://www.matthewball.vc/the-metaverse-primer
I still can't figure out what the Metaverse is beyond some overly ambitious attempt to recreate VR Chat as something a majority of people would actually spend hours every day in.
What I can say is that Facebook is building it, which means it will certainly be a net negative for society as a whole and our best hope should be for it to fail miserably and fade away into the ether.
It's a term that VCs and tech bros have adopted to describe what they think the next big paradigm shift is. Ostensibly including VR/AR/MR (XR).
At a high level, there are some very clear trends and shifts going on. Things like the communities around certain games manifesting emergent gameplay (Minecraft, Roblox), as well as companies trying new and innovative ways of creating unique content (live concerts in Fortnite). There is the long-running trend of connecting more systems to other systems such as Xbox/PC/Playstation crossplay, using Google/Facebook as an authentication for 3rd party systems, and a myriad of other examples both good bad and failed.
If you look at these things and take note of the successful standouts it's easy to extrapolate the idea that everything will eventually merge into one or more large meta-systems that people use to get all their information and entertainment. Zuck has decided that he wants to be in charge of that system, by virtue of creating it, instead of waiting for someone else to do it or for it to emerge organically.
I think Zuck is wrong on several levels. The first is that while these trends are notable, they don't necessarily result in the penultimate conclusion (one system controlled by one company) that he seems to think they do. The second is that he or his company is in any way shape or form qualified or capable of either creating or operating such a system. It's like a major company such as IBM declaring in 1965 that they are going to "create the cybersphere" (they didn't, just a random example). In retrospect the hubris behind such a statement would be incredible, and given our historical perspective, it's easy to see how naive that statement would have been.
I do believe that something called "the metaverse" will likely emerge in the next decade or so. I also believe that it will be nothing like what most people (including myself) think it will. There are too many forces at work both hidden and not to try and predict something like that. Some More News (at 44min mark) has a great illustration of my thoughts on this. The Apple iPhone was a paradigm shift and directly resulted in the modern smartphone era. But the first commercials for it didn't advertise the things that the vast majority of users actually use them for now : texting.
VR is a lot of fun, but I still don't think anyone has created whatever the equivalent of the Apple iPhone is. We may not even recognize it for what it is when it shows up. The tech and capability of XR devices continues to evolve rapidly, and there are a lot of people trying a lot of things. Eventually someone will figure out "the thing".
If anything, the fact that Zuckerberg has presumably trademarked/patented the term means whatever the next paradigm of the internet will be, it will not be called the metaverse.
AFAIK Zuck only bought the trademark for "Meta" specifically, not for the term "metaverse". And since "metaverse" was first coined in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash 30 years ago it can't be blanket trademarked (again, AFAIK), only trademarked for specific applications, which would give it a much narrower range of protection against infringement.
That makes sense. I was fairly sure Facebook didn't invent the term, but I kind of assumed they wouldn't go all in on it without having a stranglehold on the IP rights for any adjacent application.
Anyway, my broader point is that any competing technology will probably avoid using the same name as Meta, whether that is to avoid legal complications or simply to avoid confusing branding. Which means unless Facebook's metaverse succeeds, then the future of the internet will probably be known by another name.
What Google did for search engines, Facebook wants to do for VR. So they'll be the ones driving the bus, and we all get to go for a ride.
Call me crazy but I think Microsoft has more potential to start the meta verse than zuck boy.
They have a pretty decent head start and have actual new ideas and something to show for them, especially when it comes to AR. Minecraft Earth was fun as heck while it lasted. While I strongly dislike them as a company, credit where it's due, I believe they're the first to have AR anchors shared in real time between separate devices implemented and shipped in a consumer product. I'm not sure if it's been posted here, but there was an article I read a while back basically posing the idea that the metaverse already existed and that it was Minecraft. A huge virtual environment created by its users where you could just interact on a daily level but virtually. I think that idea has merit and combined with everything else MS is sitting on? They'd be my bet as well.
Everything FB is flaunting has been seen before either in MS tech teasers or on Steam. That's honestly kind of sad considering that they own Oculus, which for a short while felt like it was nearly synonymous with VR.
Microsoft has hololens. It's kind of a meme by now (their "gaming" demos were horrible), but the technology, at least conceptually, is sound. Some home video demos of it are floating around and while a lot of it is gimmicky, the "boring" parts are convincing. AR in general is. Think an unlimited amount of screens of arbitrary size and shape around you. "Windows" but instead of flat rectangles, it's rectangles that are embedded in physical space. That works for me. It's a space where it takes little imagination to see sensible use cases.
The projection technology isn't good enough yet from what I hear (never tried it) but tech will always solve itself, eventually. What will make it click with consumers is nailing the UX and that will likely not be solved by the "first movers" but a company coming in late, picking up established tech. It's not an exciting proposition but the company best suited for a potential AR breakthrough is... Apple. It's exactly what they've been doing, from the iPod to iPhone.
Good for them. For the sake of humanity, I hope they fail.
But Goolge did something pretty concrete for search engines. And the benefit of a search engine also is pretty concrete. What is the benefit of VR and what does Meta add? Like, no buzzwords, concrete scenarios of VR making the world more convenient/efficient/better?
Oh, I absolutely did not say they were going to do it, it's what they envision they're going to do.
I'm not much of a Facebook fan, and I'm not sure if I expect Facebook's Horizon Worlds / Metaverse plans to be successful in the form it's presented in, but I feel like there's a lot of hot air in staking a position against it.
I think this video and most discussions about "metaverse" are just surface discussions about the wording of ad campaigns rather than about products. No one is coming to take the existing internet away from us and force us to only use it through VR. If anyone thought the commercial was threatening to do that then they're pattern-matching way too strongly to YA fantasy dystopia stories. It's a performance trying to communicate "facebook bad" while pretending to engage the subject.
There's also kind of a weird thing where they talk about how obviously terrible metaverse is, and then talk about how it's just like these other previous things that were great. Is the argument there that metaverse is going to be terrible, or that the basic idea is just not as fully Facebook-original as an ad's sound bite might imply?
I'm not trying to entirely disagree with the video's conclusion, but I'm frustrated at how shallow most takes are about Facebook+metaverse+VR. I'm a big VR and VRChat fan, though I'm not so positive on Facebook and think they're making missteps. I believe VR is great for social virtual spaces. I hate how so many discussions of VR involve strawmen about VR having to replace all screens or take over our lives to be useful. (I'm still laughing about how the video brought up that VR is bad because some people have to be on the lookout for intruders. just um what idk why are they so thoroughly scraping the barrel to make sure we have negative affect for VR?)
I think there's issues with Facebook's VR plans, especially along the lines of it not being fashionable enough to attract users and it not prioritizing user-created content enough (which would also help the first issue). I wonder what they plan on doing for moderation of open public areas. I think the way they present commercialization and selling outfits in their ads is done in the most boring way possible, but conceptually the idea of having a marketplace for avatars and accessories is very powerful. (I'm thinking of a marketplace where the items are mostly new custom avatar bases and custom-made designs, not just brand names slapped on a shirt. Will they allow individual creators making fully custom content, or are they just thinking of lazy deals with big brands?) I think there's good questions about how control of such a marketplace could be done.
There's so many interesting angles to dissect but so many of the takes are just "zuckerberg wants us to wear the headsets all day and I'm taking a stand against that".
We're already in the world where many of our social interactions are virtual. It's weird to phrase this as if some oppressive company is thinking about suddenly forcing us to go entirely virtual.
I don’t know this creator but it seems like the things you are complaining about are tangential in nature. The core arguements he presents are generally pretty logical and well represented, but there are also a lot of observational comedy mixed in it that are purposefully limited in scope to maximize the impact of the joke.
But like I said, the core arguements are all good:
Zuckerberg and Meta’s claims about what their platform will allow are often misleading, overly optimistic projections, or otherwise impossible. The idea that the metaverse will replace the internet is all 3.
The actual product they are making has not been demonstrated to be novel in any meaningful way.
it is unwise to use this platform because of the long history the company and this CEO in particular have had in abusing their customers privacy and trust.
The selling point of NFT based virtual items does not make extend the usefulness of those virtual items in any meaningful way.
I’m probably missing something; I saw the video last night.
There is one thing that I wish he and everyone else would point out; Facebook/meta is doing a lot of damage to the VR hardware market by flooding the market with deeply subsidized hardware. If you look at all the hardware on the Quest, it seems pretty obvious that they would have to either double or triple the price on it in order to be profitable. I think it would have enhanced a number of these claims.
Double or triple the price to be profitable? I'm quite doubtful about that. The XR2 processor is based on the SD865 iirc and the cameras and sensors aren't that expensive. I'm sure they don't have high margins from the hardware itself or might be selling at a slight loss though. The idea that they are highly subsidizing the hardware seems false to me. Look at Lynx R1. Much smaller company, comparable price.
The Quest is $299, and the basic version of the Lynx-R1 is $599, by itself and without controllers - which is already double the price. Not to mention they are primarily targeting enterprise customers, to which they charge $1099 for just the headset - without the implied money they'd be making from support and application development.
Most phones based on the SD865 are about $600, and that's with screens that are generally vastly inferior, fewer cameras, simpler manufacturing, and the benefit that most of those parts have massively higher economies of scale.
Vastly inferior screens? Quest 2 has an LCD display, not OLED. Phones with SD865 easily go for sub $400 currently. Quest 2 cameras are also awful compared to those on a smartphone, so very cheap. Smartphones also pack a lot more features.
Most cell phone screens are HD resolution - 1080x1920, roughly 2 million pixels - and run at a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. The Quest has a display with a resolution of 1832x1920 per eye, which equates to 7 million pixels, and it drives it at 120 Hz. That's what I would consider a vastly superior display. Not only that, but the pixel density is so high that this would count as a specialist display, which means it's especially expensive.
The cameras may not be expensive, but literally everything around them are expensive. Each camera connects to the mainboard via one of four seperate custom-designed FPC cables and require manual installation by a very steady set of human hands. look at how complex it is on the inside and tell me that this looks as easy to put together as a cell phone is.
I'm honestly not sure what 'features' you are talking about. What hardware are we talking about? Everything else that goes into a phone will cost pennies. Unless you're talking about software features, but most of those come for "free" with Android.
I honestly don't see how you can think that this is a fair price for a VR headset given that the cheapest "equivalent" cell phone still costs more.
I concede. You're right, the pixel density is probably triple that of a smartphone.
I think you should consider that consoles are generally sold at a slight loss initially, which is what I would compare a Quest 2 to. Even with the special display, I don't really see what would raise the price to triple. I expect they aren't making money off the hardware but from the store.
Heck, I think this who Metabook/Faceverse thing is silly, and I interact virtually more than I do in fleshspace. If we want to get "meta" about it, every two weeks I do tabletop via Roll20. So I'm interacting virtually to create a simulation.
Before FB there were already devs working on the metaverse, i recommend reading Matthew Ball "The Metaverse Premier": https://www.matthewball.vc/the-metaverse-primer