Anyway, I use it once or twice a month to play a zombie shooting game with my brother, who lives overseas. We shoot zombies for an hour and chat. It feels kind of similar to golfing, bowling or somesuch. We can't do those in person, so we do it in VR.
So for me, VR is kind of a comms tool. A place to catch up. Alternative to video calls. Calling is great, but doing something together it just a normal way of bonding.
As always, the tech is a canvas. You can paint any pictures on it. That said, yeah... This kind of tech & gaming has shown a real proclivity for isolating us from reality and each other.
OOH, I think social VR has a lot of immediate potential, with current and next generation tech. It'll take a while before the user base, hardware, etc. will support blockbuster gaming, films and such. Social stuff can be more lightweight and simple. In that sense, fb is a sensible home for VR.
OTOH, fb's approach to software if goddam awful. Their whole paradigm is making software that makes people do things, not software that people do stuff with. That's likely to tip the balance in the antipattern favour.
We definitely don't need fb. VR though, is another mode. We don't necessarily need it, but having it does give us something new.
For hanging out with a younger sibling, zoom doesn't work too well. Video (or audio only) calling enables only a certain kind of interaction. In the physical world,we play tennis, have dinner, cook together, etc. We don't just sit in front of each other and talk intensely all the time.
VR opens this up a little.
>“There’s this piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it’s a terrible looking place,” Carmack told Rogan. “And people say, ‘This is the world you’re trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.’”
>“Is his life really better if he takes them off and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning. People don’t generally go, ‘Oh, you’re not experiencing the world around you because of air-conditioning’ … That is what human beings do, we bend the world to our will.”
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I will say this: I had to isolate myself for months during covid, because of chronic issues that increase the risk of getting ICU'd. And while I missed social contact and leisurely walking under the sun, I can't say that I ever felt imprisoned. If anything, in times like these I would love to have even the emulation of the experience that is walking through a forest without having to worry about my allergies, my joints, snakes or getting lost.
What this all means is that, you're not "better" or "worse" than me for wanting to go in the countryside. You're only different. The whole notion of "you have no life if you work in front of a computer most of the time" was absurd to begin with. How is doing something that I enjoy doing "no life"? The solution to that is simple: Instead of applying societal pressure by pointing out that someone refuses to have a life by focusing too much into games, programming, anime or whatnot to inspect the reasons why they're not attracted to what you claim to be as "having a life".
What I'm saying is, getting out once or twice a week to get my sun exposure for some vitamin D works just fine for me, and I hope people will stop pointing out that "I don't have a life because I prefer X over Y". It's wrong, it's borderline "no true Scotchman" and pivots over the real issue that is respecting people's preferences without feeling that you have "more life" than others.
And we see that it clearly has a very negative impact overall so idk what kind of argument is that.
"everything sucked so we destroyed our environment and enslaved ourselves to machines to make it bearable"
You're talking about AC? Surely the climate dialogue hasn't devolved to the point of "uses energy == bad". We can reflect on its role in shaping society/living spaces and its costs and benefits without being so reductionist.
Humans are just really good at externalizing costs on the environment and on each other.
And enough humans are driven by motivated reasoning so that entire organizations are devoted to disrupting any attempts at fixing things.
Those are human problems. Facebooks social problems are not caused by the evils of digital scrapbooking with reliable write/read coherence over shards. They are the evils of humans redirecting information based on perverse incentives, taking profits from others pain.
AC has had an extremely positive impact. Simple uses energy == bad reasoning hasn't.
I have access to many many acres of forest, and am quite familiar with it. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I am unlikely to see many interesting places in person around the world... Pictures are nice, but will never do them justice. I wouldn't mind being able to take a 3d VR tour of them one bit.
Edit: That said, living in VR and never going for a walk through a forest would be utterly dystopian and nightmarish for me. The only thing keeping me from daily walks in the woods right now is hunting season.
I don't think any of these things are substitutes for each other. A book about the arctic is not an alternative to a visit. It's a substitute for another book, maybe.
The main way VFR competes with other stuff is competition for time, in the sense that TV, social media and such are.
A good chunk of them live online, having parasocial relationships with Twitch streamers and Youtubers, or buying skins to put on their characters in Fortnite. I have almost no idea what Roblox and Minecraft are besides world building, but kids get addicted to that too.
Lots of money to be made.
I regret the amount of my teens that I spent playing video games in general, but I don’t regret Minecraft. It’s such a genuinely positive and constructive experience in its openness. It’s like life - there’s no endgame or goal. No single way to play. You can decide you want to build a megabase connected by rail, you can decide you want to terraform a mountain, you can build crazy automatic machines to grow food or kill enemies for you. But it’s your choice, the game doesn’t push you in any direction outside of the very early game.
It also served as my introduction to computing - the in game wiring system is Turing complete. I learned about logic gates from Minecraft.
In comparison, any computerized activity will require tons of resources (and related industrial pollution) and slave labor to produce the hardware you're using, and more energy/resources to power the device. I'm not against video games, but do we need more hardware? Our hardware is extremely powerful already (though games are rarely optimized in any way) and as much as i can see human progress via Internet connectivity, i don't see any "usefulness" for VR technology: it seems to me that apart from requiring more hardware and potentially fueling gaming addictions and social isolation, there is little to no value proposition compared to Second Life and other software we've had for decades.
IMO Facebook wants you to experience life entirely though their platform, because once you take a step back you realize that Facebook is this weird alternate world where everyone is angry all the time, truth has no meaning and there are no social norms.
Meanwhile, when you DO step back into real life, you realize many of the people who probably want to murder you online are perfectly nice in person. Or that most of the people you talk to on Facebook are people you used to be friends with but would never make time to see in real life because you’re not that close anymore. And that Facebook might not be reflective of reality, which threatens their engagement metrics. So they want to shape your reality to be less threatening to them. I couldn’t think of a more dystopian concept — fortunately the value proposition is not appealing to most.
But: As evidenced by the Gaming industry and the Entertainment industry ($150b+ combined rev), folks do want to escape from their usual environment.
If you're Facebook, and your mission's to connect the world, then metaverse sounds like one plausible solution to make that happen.
My friend has had a vive for years, he has an entire room dedicated to it so you can actually walk around. Its being driven by a several thousand dollar computer and makes the room unusable for anything else as you have to keep the floor vacant so you can actually walk around. If I had a room to spare, and 5-6k dollars to drop, I'd have it but when you're taking home about $500 a week and don't have an empty room...
The cheaper options, where you're just sitting on your couch, aren't nearly as engaging or interesting (at least to me). Another thing to consider is how many people wear glasses, and how poorly these things work while wearing glasses because they mask them into your face and/or fog. If I want to get custom lens inserts, I'm looking at another $300-500 cost every 12-18 months (that's assuming any can actually accommodate my astigmatism and the prism requirements I need).
- you are working
- you have a family
- you have access to a forest
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Whether or not more and more people will be unemployed or not due to advances in technology and shifts in society is probably up to debate. I personally think that we'll see more unemployment with uneducated folks. And even if they work it will be paid badly, unstable due to being easily replaceable and rather stressful and dull.
Same for having a family. Finding a spouse will be difficult for the disposable and getting children risky. So, also not an option for many.
And access to a forest - as in a place with nature where you can walk for half an hour without meeting anyone. Good luck with that living in the middle of some ghetto without public or individual transportation options.
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Those products will be the new Opium for the People. The new couch with chips in front of the TV. A sedation and escapism.
Nation States and corporations have rendered the western world so meaningless and painful that most of us will do anything to get out of it for a while... whether it's via drugs or VR or whatever means at our disposal.
These will be the same software developers that will end up building Progressive Web Apps for smart glasses made by a big tech company.
Probably it will have both AR and VR capabilities built in and the use case will be to use AR for outdoors (and indoors) and VR for indoors only.
Like it or not, it is going to happen and they will be building it anyway.