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Comment by marc__1 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting commentary on the 'metaverse'

>Starting with our results for the fourth quarter of 2021, we plan to break out Facebook Reality Labs, or FRL, as a separate reporting segment. As we have discussed, we are dedicating significant resources toward our augmented and virtual reality products and services

>We expect our investment in Facebook Reality Labs to reduce our overall operating profit in 2021 by approximately $10 billion. We are committed to bringing this long-term vision to life and we expect to increase our investments for the next several years.

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Whilst I despise Facebook, I thought Zuckerberg was extremely savvy in picking up WhatsApp and Instagram (which I didn’t see coming), and also pursuing VR (which I absolutely did). But there’s a big difference between acquiring near-winners and building something entirely new. Perhaps I’m just being hopeful, but it seems unlikely to me that Facebook is an organisation that could construct something entirely new and execute it well. They’ll have lots of competition and buying it out will probably not be an option, given the intense scrutiny they’ve attracted. So I wouldn’t bet on Facebook to own the next generation of social platforms.

Market agrees. You get better returns just buying the S&P500 over FB shares. Hence their 50 billion stock buyback to slow down the falling share price.

I feel like "network effects" in the metaverse will be compounded cubic: the nodes, the edges, then the third mysterious component emerging from the shared hallucination itself ;)

I suspect the upcoming HW need of XR metaverse is in the foveal rendering required for low latency retina resolution immersive HMD. For cost/weight/power that probably means eye-tracking, which is gold standard for ad tracking and marketing attention metrics.

Give away the hardware to high status college students and sell their attention metrics to advertisers. Very FB! Of course you need content too, but users can provide that, right?

Right. Today, video game streamers prefer to disguise their identity behind 2D anime style virtual avatars ("v-tubers"). Same reach, but their irl persona gets shielded from trolls ;)

Pimax's Next-Generation Reality 12K QLED VR https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pimaxs-next-generation-rea...

Note that it is dual HDR LCD with miniLED backlights not OLED as described, but it is retina and foveated rendering with eye-tracking from Tobi.

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