They are going all in on metaverse / have decided that the future of oculus is the primary long term bet, not facebook itself.
And they have the money to make it so.
This is incredibly scary, and probably a good investment.
Gotta remember outside of Oculus, their entire product portfolio exists on top of the platforms of their competitors. This is their play to own the entire thing from the foundation up and the resources they'll be willing to use to accomplish that will be huge and really their only competition is Apple because Google gave up.
Nope. It matters only if the gain wide adoption before anyone else. If they do, they become the de facto owner of that space.
They definitely have the resources to do that.
Metaverses have always been niche. Most people don't like things attached to their head. Remember 3D TVs?
But, perhaps you and they are right. For the first time in my life, I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no part in it.' Please don't take this as like, suicidal or anything, more maybe going off grid or moving to another country.
Every year someone repeats that Facebooks doom is imminent, and every year their revenue and user base gets larger and larger
When does this opinion just become pasé?
I think it is. Not the current crap hardware, but bit further advanced it definitely has a place.
The gamers are basically on board already, streamers would benefit too and porn has a big chunk in VR already.
Sharp headset that can render text clearly would be huge.
Outside of that, I am a big believer in, well I don't know the name for it. But you must experience sadness to feel happy. And bad times to realize good times. Anyone in a virtual world would likely never choose scenarios that cause such things. So there'd be no real true joy in this virtual life. Life is fleeting.
From a health standpoint, I don't believe a human body could exist long in a pure virtual world(thinking of something like, The Matrix). Still people tend to get disease, blood clots, stroke, and more. And bones and muscle too weak to even walk when the grid goes down. Am I thinking about the scenario wrong?
Sorry I don't have all(or any) of the answers to that question, mostly just rambling, but the thought makes me really sad.
Why not? I watch sad and scary movies all the time to experience those emotions.
You can also have virtual struggle and striving to achieve virtual items that are to many people just as rewarding as real world items.
How does your mother die in VR? How does your best friend die in a car crash? How do you learn your Grandpa doesn't recognize you anymore? Or to learn you have a terminal illness? How do you get so nervous to meet a person your face feels like it's on fire, work up nerve, get rejected, and go home wanting to die? Those are real feelings entertainment cannot reproduce.
Nothing virtual is real. No movies are real. Not yet, at least.
I feel like that about ever larger part of the whole tech world. I am torn - I can still muster a lot of techno-optimism when I think for example about possible benefits of advanced AIs for humanity. But than I imagine the world where the most advanced AIs are controlled by corporations like Google and Facebook... I have a bad feeling about this.
I am trying to find some reasonable middle ground between becoming a luddite and just continuing like I do not see all those unforeseen negative impacts produced by the genie that was once called the IT revolution.
You might resonate with the manifesto: https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/
I don’t know that we can outright dismiss anything based on 3D TVs not taking off. I’m certainly no fan of Facebook attempting to own this space, but to outright dismiss the whole concept because of the poor sales for 3D TVs seems naïve IMO.
I'm not sure the general public at large will like VR, either. It's disorienting. And if strip mall Lasik wasn't enough to tell, we don't like wearing things on our face. That will -never- change.
I remember going to a real 3d movie as a kid, but I forget where. Some movie studio park, probably. It was only 10 or so minutes of Hitchcock's 'The Birds', but wow was it amazing. Too amazing. I remember feeling real fear to where I'd take the glasses off for a few seconds, people were screaming, many took off their glasses before it was over.
Not sure if this relates to the metaverse, just sharing an anecdote.
If this VR utopia ever will take hold, it will be with neural implants or something like it. Not with glasses, and not with contacts.
I don't discount that it could be the next big thing, because wtf do I know, but it feels very niche to me, and certainly not something that can get the engagement like a phone can. And in terms of money, Facebook itself is a printing press, I wonder what the business model is for this? Selling games or experiences? Billboards in an AR world?
Addicting people to living in a fake world where anything is seemingly possible, and then exploiting it. Basically the same M.O. as their other products, but on a "next level."
The sentence I was looking for.
Professional headsets will likely become more widespread over the coming years and I fully expect that most desk jobs will replace their displays with a headset... But that's still at least 10 yrs off, likely longer. A prerequisite would be that it's not as stuffy/heavy to wear, but that's already happening at a surprising rate.
It also makes remote contacts (i.e. remote work, family calls etc) very different, as oculus just added face tracking to their newest headsets... So your avatars face mirrors your real face.
The presence you feel in these contexts is hard to explain and has to be experienced imo.
let me repeat what i said earlier: i don't think that the current generation of consumer headsets is ready for prime time, all of the reasons are however solvable. that's why i used the cop-out of "at least 10 years off".
theoretically i can use it indefinitely without getting a headache. It however always feels like a slap in the face if even the smallest hiccup or framedrop happens. Another thing thats hard to stomach is movement done by controller. Its (for me) doable while sitting down, but if i stand up while moving with the controller... lets just say i usually stop within 5 minutes if i'm forced to do that.
the low pixel density on consumer headsets make it hard to consider them for anything but casual gaming usage, even though I think that VR-Headset gaming will always be a pipe-dream. It would be a different story if fantasy-style VR Capsule ever become a thing, letting the player also have touch etc, but the First Person View that current games try use is in my experience just too lacking with a purely visual headset, especially with the poor input quality like we have today.
The potential I see in VR Headsets is really in productivity while sitting in front of a desk using a regular mouse and keyboard. 8k displays would be a minimum for that and once you target that market new designs become viable again, as few people would want to wear such a headset directly on their face. Letting in your surroundings will be less of an issue if it's not aiming for complete isolation/immersion and onboard graphics will likely be less of an issue if the device doesn't have to render a complex video game scene.
I don't know anyone that calls "xfinity" anything but "comcast." I'm pretty sure "xfinity" was them trying to get away from their nickname "comcrap."
Imagine if the world collectively said "no" and kept right on calling them Facebook?
They're going to run around slapping anyone who uses "meta" or "metaverse" with C&D letters figuring nobody will have the money to fight them in court.
I'd chip in to the legal fund for whoever says "see you in court" to Facebook. I bet a lot of people would. Maybe someone like the EFF should set up a "meta defense" warchest.
My guess is they want to address that isolation aspect by making it feel better to interact with others, bringing more people together in the VR space.
But this is me interpreting your "the isolation it brings with it" as people just exploring VR by themselves.
Did you mean something else?
Maybe Second Life and those didn't take off as much because the technology wasn't yet there.
That being said, I still don't want Zuckerberg to be the king of it, but there are plenty of possibilities with high-definition VR/AR tech.
- Facebook Apps
- Facebook Home
- Facebook Workplace
- Facebook Portal
- Facebook Essentials
What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed them.
I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't have a track record of building anything worthwhile outside of their core offering (ie, the Facebook product).
Instagram was growing like crazy, even faster than Facebook in its early days so acquisition was no-brainer. Instagram used Facebook's social graph so acquisition made even more sense.
On the other hand WhatsApp had hundreds millions users at the time of acquisition and Larry Page was very close to acquiring it before Zuck but Facebook offered more money that's why it turned out to be one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of Internet($19bn). WhatsApp's huge userbase and rapid growth could've endangered Facebook Messenger that Zuck was about to separate from main Facebook app and make it standalone instant messaging Facebook app.
So both Instagram and WhatsApp were no-brainer and made perfect sense and Facebook had cash pile to do it so they did it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266618
Unless you're an extremely successful businessman yourself, calling those acquisitions no-brainers is just completely dishonest.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/instagram-...
Unfortunately outside of Tweets, this is the best story I found on it at the moment: https://www.ign.com/articles/oculus-facebook-requirement-end...
To me that points to a 'log in with Meta' option.
Right now, work in the metaverse still looks like 8+ emulated screens floating in a sphere around you. And this is probably not the long term best way to work. The real question is what are the new primitives, is there a new underlying platform, can everyone get equal access to that platform, and who owns that platform.
Just like Apple is making intel chips obsolete with the M1 on Mac, Meta probably is aiming to make laptops obsolete/niche in the long run.
But even if using a VR rig to simulate a bunch of displays would be more efficient, that's not a "metaverse". It's just a VR display. To me a metaverse implies virtual interaction with other people - otherwise what's the point? I find I'm more effective when I have uninterrupted quiet time to work so why would I want to work in a meta-verse where I can be interrupted at any time in a more invasive way than Slack or email can manage? It's like an open-office from hell. Saying it's the future of work is extremely premature.
Edit:
On the topic of this:
> it's too good, and productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle for the mind"
If that's true, Facebook will never crack it. Facebook's products are the opposite of "a bicycle for the mind" - they push experiences and content on you instead of putting you in control. I have serious doubts they could develop something that requires giving the user power over their own experience - the condescending attitude of "we know what's best for you" is too ingrained.
Playing Devil's Advocate here, but I'm already wearing something on my head for ~16 hours per day - my eyeglasses.
The issue here is only that the current generation of devices aren't yet suitable for long-term use.
How exactly? VR is just a display technology, with no new input methods that are even remotely usable for anything like games. How am I going to be better at programming by wearing a VR headset and typing on my keyboard than looking at a screen while typing on my keyboard?
How am I going to be more productive when forecasting prices in Excel on a VR headset than on a screen? When drawing the layout of an integrated circuit? When summarizing news or books?
Sure, it will be easier to visualize a few 3D models, and remote meetings will feel much more natural in VR, but the vast majority of work essentially boils down to either manual work, text manipulation, or fundamentally 2D models.
Unless and until someone comes up with a revolutionary input method with the precision of a mouse and the flexibility of a keyboard (like they did with the touch screen for phones), I don't believe in any claims of a revolution through AR/VR. Only incremental improvements in specialized fields.
I kind of fear a day when i'm just having a casual conversation with someone, and suddenly their voice becomes garbled becauese an AI detected they were telling me some "misinformation".
Anyone know if people there are heavily influenced by his work?
How so? Searching for "metaverse" on LW yields 9 results, most of them are irrelevant.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k3823vuarnmL5Pqin/quantum-no...
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/coherent-extrapolated-volition
The main point being that it has the potential to grow to a point where the life of a user becomes inseparable from a 'Metaverse'. Whether you call this 'virtual' or a 'simulation' seems moot.