Meta’s metaverse hype leads to real-world backlash
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I guess time may prove me wrong, but I really don't see why the world would want a metaverse until you can actually plug into it, like the matrix. Then things may change.
Even Amazon couldn’t push the Amazon phone for example.
The nearest I can think of is Xbox but that came out of the gate strong with halo and had a fandom.
Hydration. Bottled water was only available in specialist stores for putting in things like your car radiator. The only bottled water for drinking on the marketplace was 'Perrier'. It was fizzy and came in distinctive bottles. People bought it as often as they bought spirits and it would stay in the drinks cabinet for months.
Then they started advertising it. After a few false starts the market for 'hydration' was established and paying money for something that came free from the tap was de rigeur.
France and other European countries were ahead of the UK with bottled water, possibly because the tap water was not deemed potable. These brands soon took over the UK market and TV showed the adverts to rake in the consumers.
The original word of 'thirsty' was swapped for the American 'hydration' and instead of asking if someone was thirsty you would ask them if they were properly hydrated.
Clearly there was no government decree or cartel pointing guns at people and insisting that they forget the thirsty idea and public water faucets. Through marketing and the 'hydration word' they got the job done.
So what were they doing in France before bottled water? Just going thirsty?
In Ye Olden Days in the UK some fermented beer was 'drinking water'.
In Ye Olden Days yeast strains were not the ones we have today. The yeast got killed by alcohol at a lower concentration. Drinking wine or beer all the time was fine when it was as weak as shandy.
Waaait a minute!
People used to drink lightly alcoholised drinks made from natural ingredients, recycling their receptacles? And now we pay for bottled water laced with plastics that render mankind infertile?
I am going back to the old ways!
Then why aren't Meta making sure all those youngsters join their platforms? I'm not going to pretend that advertisement doesn't work, but there is also a big difference between getting people to drink a Coke or a Pepsi and getting them to join a social media platform and actually spend time on it.
The initial users then drag their entire sphere into it, often convincing people to ignore their own better judgment.
Or it would, if the technology was actually real. Although, one might argue that Twitter, in a way, could be considered a metaverse already.
I recently lost access to my email and phone 2fa to my instagram. Although my facebook is linked to it and i have changed the email on my facebook, instagram keeps asking me to verify using the 2FA i no longer have. There' no email address you can send requests through, only a wall of FAQ's and automated lines.
There are people i have met abroad i no longer can contact as i used instagram chat as my sole means of communication. I can't even request that my instagram be shut down. Now i have this public profile with thousands of followers and no way of controlling.
I'll admit upfront that I'm biased and develop a VR "metaverse" platform, but where exactly is the appeal of AR for the average person? AR augments reality, so what do you imagine your grandma doing with that?
In general there's just not that much information that is useful that we've not already put somewhere accessible. Streets have names, products have ingredient lists, devices have connectors with particular shapes and colors.
I see AR having a lot of potential, sure, but I'm not quite seeing where is its mainstream appeal exactly.
Look at the indstrial applications of Google Glass.
Seems like once there is hardware + SDK, there will be an absolute explosion in AR.
Space is infinite. Resources are infinite.
You just need an absolute bare minimum of subsistence to keep your physical body alive, keep your electricity on, and connect you up to the Internet.
We just need people to stop caring about the physical realm and only care about the virtual realm.
That is how we achieve practical post-scarcity. That is what the metaverse should be.
OK, right now it's not there, but it'll never get there if we never start.
(But thanks for the recommendation, I will check it out).
The things you lose is the valuable lessons in the physical world like production and decay, health and sickness unless they are also brought over - then why be virtual?
Learning about production and decay in the VR future is no more valuable than learning how to make fire from sticks is valuable today. OK, it's intellectually interesting, but it's just not a practical consideration in daily life any more.
Re health and sickness: muscles would obviously atrophy, but you don't care because you don't need them. I think diseases would spread less because physical human bodies won't be mixing as much.
I'm not sure what happens to human reproduction. Maybe human-inhabited VR is only a brief prelude to the true AI-owned future anyway.
- people make better technology all the time; VR of today is at a quality and immersion level that was unimaginable 200 years ago
- a lot of people in the world live in pretty poor conditions (relative to the lifestyles of rich programmers on HN); at the margin there will be people willing to trade a loss of fidelity for an increase in quality of life, and the amount of people making that trade will only increase as the immersion level improves
You could have a much richer experience of nature in VR than you could ever have today.
That you privilege "real" nature over the infinitely many possible "virtual" natures is a hangover of pre-metaverse thinking. It will only take a couple of generations for this kind of mindset to fade away.
In any case, what's a giant garden in which the sun isn't warm, the flowers don't smell, and the grass doesn't brush against your skin?
With better VR, the sun is warm, the flowers do smell, and the grass does brush against your skin.
Your current experience of "reality" is not as real as you may think it is. Everything you've ever done or experienced has been communicated to your brain through sensory neurons. If we make a VR that can connect up your sensory neurons to the virtual world, your experiences can be just as "real" as "reality" is.
And if VR is where all your friends are, and where your work is, and where your leisure is, who cares about "reality" any more? It's just an alternative plane of existence where resources are finite, you get cold in bad weather, you need to clean when the place gets dirty, you need to wait for things to arrive, etc.
But once there's a company in it that needs to maximize profit, things are going to get sticky. Democracy isn't perfect either and can turn bad.
And what about the potential for technical malfunctions? What about hacking? What about abuse? What about those who can't afford the hardware? What about those who don't want to join?
Building that utopia is going to require rebuilding half (or all) of society first, if we don't we have a near guarantee of getting a dystopia real fast, and even if we manage to avoid that there are too many intrinsic ways for this to turn horrible.
People who realize that Reality is where you can lose Wi-Fi reception, stop receiving nutrient liquid, and otherwise be enslaved and/or killed.
Seriously, your future is a nightmare.
If you want a perfectly clean, warm, automated existence, work on robots and O'Neill colonies, not the Matrix.
You can still do art. You can still create stuff. It's just that it's more like building software than building houses: the tools are free, the materials are free, you don't need any permits, etc.
(Also curious how sex and exercise work…)
I'm not sure about children and reproduction. My best guess is that humans are replaced by AI quite quickly and they solve it for themselves.
Or maybe we just have a state-sponsored reproductive conscription scheme, where the best people are selected to donate sperm and eggs, the children are born from test tubes, and the state keeps the children alive until they're old enough to fend for themselves.
(I grant that this is getting dystopian now).
If they are precise an d that idea fails they have a lot more explaining to do, while now Zuckerberg is a visionary you simply don't understand, yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc
Especially on Hacker News, of all places! This article is the equivalent of celebrity tabloids.
(This comment is probably not written with the best tone, but I am upset. PR mishaps aside, the metaverse is extremely technically interesting. Why HN skips all of that and just does reruns of Zuckerberg's avatar or whatever is beyond me.)
It will never have the fidelity of a simple video stream. To make a virtual reality, you have to shut out the real reality, which necessarily means something covering your face (well, more specifically, your eyes - but we are a long way from being able to do VR with contact lenses).
In shutting out real reality, VR is an absolutist experience, you are either in it, or not, and if you are in it you cannot experience anything else (like drink a coffee, jot on a notepad, answer the phone) unless imported into that VR.
For these reasons, general use VR/AR is DOA.
When I think about the possibilities of AR, I never think "meeting with people". Maybe in VR. But I could care very little less about that.
The possibilities for AR are absolutely immense. And I look forward to a world where the physical space is aided by technology. Much in the same way 30 years ago I looked forward to a digital world. And we see how that tuned out.
As much as I dislike Facebook and Facebook-adjacent companies, the metaverse concept is indeed what the company tried to bring to life, and Meta is indeed a brandig keyword that fits both the concept and the marketing goals.
There are many, many reasons to dislike what Zuckerberg's Facebook et al. does but I'm sure it's branding strategy does not even get into the top 10 reasons.
In many ways his working style reminds me of Bill Gates of mid-90s Microsoft
However, I'm still left wondering if he's known for being willing to accept harsh criticism or not. Has he created a culture where somebody feels safe giving him some uncomfortable truths?
The company MBAs & marketing honchos get a lot of things effed up for them, but the infra & SW engineering teams have nothing but good things to say on matters technical & engineering leadership roles (including MZ)
You need to give your customers something they actually want to do with that headset on.
Forget about gesture recognition, facial tracking, even the joysticks for now.
Perseverance matters, Google is notorious for abandoning efforts if they don't quickly dominate the market. That largely pollutes the lesson you've received IMO.
Heck, Google Cloud is another good example. Google has dumped large amounts of money into it, they've been running it since before AWS was really big, and it's still not really dominating the market.
They aren't innovating because they're working on problems that were solved a decade ago in the game industry> Zuckerberg said the upcoming, yet unnamed headset will offer “the ability to now have eye contact in virtual reality, have your face be tracked so that your avatar is not just this still thing, if you smile, or you frown, or you pout, whatever your expression is, to have that actually in real time translate to your avatar.” His remarks sound a lot like what's already been shown at SIGGRAPH and in other, earlier Meta research demos.
They had a good run as a business, but fundamentally they never had a good product.
AR/VR is going to be an absolute game changer once someone produces an acceptable wearable that achieves mass adoption. Whether or not Meta is the company that succeeds at doing this is another question altogether.
However, the benefits from getting it right, even if it's a long shot, justifies Meta's investment in VR.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23319898/rehearsal-review-finale...
// This is not the worst concept for helping engineers-turned-leaders.
Bill Gates isn't attractive and people give him respect. People camped out for WindowsXP. People love Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. Tim Cook is on the same level of Zuck. He releases stuff that people care about.
Zuck needs to launch something that matters and get respect back. If he can't do that, he needs to step down from Meta.
In another era there’d be pitchforks.
BTW, I would bet $$$ that the reason Horizon Views looks so amateurish is because of a desire to use few resources over bandwidth constrained connections.
Who’s going to want use a blank slate platform from Facebook of all places?
(I think Carmack expressed part of this so credit goes there where appropriate.)
I guess one of the main problems is that Meta so far failed to create a compelling reason to try special-purpose hardware.
"They" do not exist. You completely fabricated an hypothesis where you "wondered" how many people criticized Meta's horizon worlds in spite if never trying them out.
Your "very poor cop out" is the strawman you put together.
They now price match with Amazon. Yes, you heard that right. If Best Buy has the product, you can pick it up right now for exactly the same price as what you can order it for on Amazon.
But if you think about it, Best Buy is actually cheaper for most people --- because you're not paying the "Prime" tax. The down side is there is no way for Best Buy to match the product variety available on Amazon.