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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Second Life required you were at least 18 at one point. It was meant more for social gatherings and meeting spots and I think (though I'm not 100%) that they shifted toward "virtual" office spaces with a focus on community building and digital trade using real-life currency.

The metaverse, as I understand it, is just Facebook Games but in VR, for kids and bored adults.

I think the outcome will be the same, though. I can't imagine how anyone at Facebook thought this idea would work.

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I'm shocked people are taking "Meta" at face value.

To me it's a way to signal to outsiders that Facebook is still cool and hip. That's it.

Now when recruiting they can play the Meta-not-Facebook angle.

Now if they can pad earnings calls with the amazing success the metaverse is seeing (so what if it's losing us money, that's the future!)

It's like an inverse Alphabet. Where Alphabet silently serves as an umbrella for moonshots, Meta is a moonshot that's an umbrella for boring old Facebook

> Meta-not-Facebook

I am going to start using this term to satisfy people that argue its not called Facebook anymore.

"The artist formerly known as Facebook"

s/artist/criminals/

Meta-pk-Facebook = Meta-previously-known-Facebook

would be better, because in case of the Meta-not-Facebook, 'not' might be strong enough to remember that way.

Nailed it.

They are spending insanely on r and d on this compared to companies their size. 10b a year.

Their market cap has risen over 70B since the announcement, so I think they'll be ok

(Yes I know market cap != war chest, but expenditure on Meta is nothing compared to the "soft power" it provides FB)

honestly I am not sure how actually are they spending that kind of money.

I dont see a ton of fb recruiters hiring for VR skills, I dont see a lot of training/certifications /open source libraries /platform Sdks for other devs etc that feels like $10B a year kind of budgets are behind VR/AR.

That's a lot of money, Hard space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin which have big hardware expenses spend only 1-2 billon/year and have thousands or tens of thousands of staff working and their progress is visible .

Does FB have 20,000 + engineers working on metaverse? even if so, doing what exactly ?

you're looking in the wrong place. i have reality labs recruiters calling me frequently and my linked in feed is a never ending cascade of sponsored posts about how working ar FB^H^HMMVRS is so much fun.

> FB^H^HMMVRS No sure what this meant

I am sure FB is recruiting, my point is not that reality labs is fake , I am sure it is real and they do recruit, it just that I don't see recruitment that would signal that large a number of investment.

I wasn't saying from a personal engineer anecdotal experience, but as some one working in recruitment tech, I keep an eye on industry patterns.

I could be wrong in my impression but I think they are just doing bit of creative accounting on existing expenses to show high spends on their flagship project.

> Does FB have 20,000 + engineers working on metaverse?

At least 10k as of March

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...

You used the lowercase metaverse. THAT metaverse is a broad concept definitely not specific to Facebook. It encompasses things like Second Life and Meta's attempts, but the more pure connotation is something like the world wide web but with virtual spaces and avatars. Not controlled by any particular company.

The strange thing to me is that web browsers do support VR, and they used to even support navigating seamlessly between VR pages without exiting VR mode. But for some reason the seamless navigation was removed. And browsers are almost never even mentioned in these discussions of the Metaverse, even by people who seem concerned that some proprietary platform will take over.

This type of utter failure to understand or recognize the significance of various technologies even by groups like HN, makes me seriously support the idea of AI taking over control of the planet.

> The metaverse, as I understand it, is just Facebook Games but in VR, for kids and bored adults.

I don't think that's true. Search for "Horizon Workrooms" to see an (IMHO) significant product they have in the collaboration tool space.

That’s the most dystopian thing about this - the best, most aspiration use for VR they can show case is… meetings, but in VR.

What's wrong with that? That meetings are necessary in modern working life is a fact. So might as well have products and services that make them better on some axes. And it doesn't necessarily have to be just office meetings either. University lectures or tutorials this way also sound pretty cool to me. You could have a student from Taiwan, the US, Germany and Sweden sit in the same classroom and interact, without having to travel thousands of miles. I think that's very cool.

The point is not that meetings are not a good application, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of useful productivity stuff beyond that.[1]

Also in person meetings are useful over a video call largely because there is lot of information from body language you can pick up being up close to someone. There is a lot of information on how someone breathes, moves or posture etc.

AFAIK there is no good VR solution that is able to solve that today. Even if there was enough cameras on you to pick up that level of detail , the bandwidth on transist across continents today or in next 15 years is not going to be available even for it make sense for businesses let alone regular users. VR as a replacement for zoom sure is interesting gimmick , but as replacement or equivalent to sitting next to each other we are atleast 2 decades away .

[1] real estate is only successful business application I have seen in the VR space

I keep reading about this multi billion army contract , I am sure the money is real, but whether it is actually effective remains to be proven.

> Also in person meetings are useful over a video call largely because there is lot of information from body language you can pick up being up close to someone. There is a lot of information on how someone breathes, moves or posture etc.

I keep hearing this but don't feel I've lost anything working fully remote for the last five years. Are there experiments proving that a call with high quality audio is so much worse in business than a physical meeting?

Perhaps I'm just not perceptive enough to pick up on all the nonverbal cues. Though even if so I think calls are more equitable and accessible.

The last in-person meeting I attended, I drew on a whiteboard, made exaggerated gestures with my hands to point to different parts of it, and established spatial metaphors by establishing one side of the room as the backend, and the other as the front-end.

When people asked me questions, they walked up to the whiteboard and pointed directly, and then scribbled on it to clarify. I felt a lot more connected when I was able to make direct eye contact and get backchannelling. Perhaps it was my perception, but I felt like it was a lot better for communication as a whole.

I'm sure you can replicate all of this stuff in Zoom or VR, but it sure is a lot more clunky and annoying.

"get backchannelling"

Curious what this refers to?

It depends on the kind of work you do. Some roles doesn't require that much collaboration or discussions.

A senior developer/IC in a well run shop maybe requires to attend 1-2 meetings a day and can function efficiently for years without distractions of a work place.

However roles that require a lot of whiteboarding and brain storming simply don't work well remote on zoom. it is hard to share a meaningful simple white board, it is impossible to walk around and ideate .

Teaching a class of 20 in remote is hard. Teaching for me depends on my ability to see their eyes clearly to know see the light of understanding so to speak then changing my examples speed or approach to make sure most get the points. Many business meetings are also not that different. It is impossible for me to look at 10 boxes on a screen to do the same.

I have heard from sales professionals that without being near the customer it hard to judge what their interest levels are, what kind of discounts / packages to offer etc . Video chat simply doesn't give you the same inputs.

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When you share a public space with few others , by design the reduction in privacy also helps everyone learn and collaborate better, some just turn around for help and gets it in a minute, I look over a shoulder and see they are stuck and could use help .

Small ,informal and unstructured discussions is where lot of nuance is learnt. Slack doesn't replace this very well at all.

"...roles that require a lot of whiteboarding and brain storming simply don't work well remote on zoom"

Agreed. And the point about eye contact really extends to any remote exchange... though I believe it is particularly important in education (where we've supplanted a human-rich interaction with staring at files or tiny heads).

If I may be so bold, our team is working on a solution to both of these issues. By digitizing contents from physical/analog surfaces in real time, we're trying to encourage folks to keep the whiteboard (or blackboard or paper...). If you have the energy, would love some feedback: https://sharetheboard.com

Not sure what axis Horizons makes meetings better on though.

So, voicechat?

> That meetings are necessary in modern working life is a fact.

No, the fact is that they happen. Whether or not they are necessary is a matter of opinion.

Isn't this just the natural progression of technology? I don't understand how having a more effective way of communicating with remote coworkers is "dystopian".

fwiw, SL launched the "teen grid" in 2005. later they merged it in with the main grid and disallowed youngsters from entering "adult themed regions"

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