Disney Eliminates Its Metaverse Division
wsj.com
wsj.com
Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides. A Mandalorian spin-off series of interactive VR episodes that can be experienced with a group of friends? A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. Nobody's going to buy headsets to make a goofy looking avatar and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg in a Second Life remake. Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
The management of that rideless amusement park is also a little concerning. I'd love to see VR finally go mainstream, but I'd prefer it if pretty much anyone other than Meta were behind the platform that catches on first.
And even if it had rides, they wouldn't be that amusing...
There's no way Disney had not made internal studies, the problem must have been that they can't set up a management and/or production model they like && that works for VR.
Facebook/Meta IMO has poisoned the whole social media space to a degree, where the expectation I have for social media platforms in general has become one of "this is getting worse over time". Instagram now sucks more than it sucked before Facebook bought it. Facebook now sucks more than Facebook 15 years ago. Reddit now... You get the point. They could have done nothing except maintenance and neutral technical upkeep and the result would have been better than what we have today. And the only reason why we don't have that better thing is profits (or the lack thereof in the old platforms).
This tells me that capitalism is really bad at organizing social platforms (not that this surprises me).
I do not really think that is true. There is more than 2 billion active users on WhatsApp which is owned by Meta. Many people reading hackernews distrust them, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the general population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
I pay my taxes, but I don't trust the US government. For that matter, I don't trust my grocery store either but I still need food.
What boggles my mind is why did Facebook just not buy Second Life directly.
[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Secrets_of_the_E...
Porn powers the second life economy.
It is an interesting place, but if FB bought it the moral torchbearers would burn the investment to the ground.
There's a lot of VR content out there, and some of it is excellent, and some of it ties in to popular franchises (PS5 VR has a Star Wars game), and occasionally it's both (Halflife: Alyx for example) . None of it is enough to drive VR to be mainstream entertainment.
If a format exists, then there is porn on it.
* Motion sickness is still a really big problem
* If you're short-sighted and wear glasses, then the picture will be blurry for you. The original PSVR worked around the issue by pushing the lends out so you could comfortably wear glasses and the headset, but none of the modern headsets afaik include this affordance. Wearing contacts isn't an option for a lot of people.
* Way too expensive. I can afford one pretty easily, but most people can't. For roughly the same price as a Quest you can get an iPhone SE which is going to offer significantly more value to the average person
* They're too heavy! People complain about a 240g iPhone being too heavy in the hand. The Quest is 503g on your head, and this headset in particular doesn't distribute weight very well. PSVR is slightly heavier, but is at least slightly more comfortable than the Quest due to its weight distribution.
I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
I really enjoyed using my friend's VR headset to slowly play through Half-Life: Alyx. I could manage about one level at a time before needing to take the headset off and take a break, because of motion sickness + how uncomfortable the whole thing was. I think there's still a lot of R&D to do before headsets are really in a position where regular people start buying them up en masse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environ...
I didn't know about the lens inserts. Those are cool and definitely fix the issue if people can find them.
My larger reading glasses tend to come off when I remove the headset because they touch foam padding but my regular glasses fit in every headset I've tried (other than Magic Leap's stupid "goggles" form factor - the Vive Elite XR however is fine).
It doesn't matter how good the VR output is if I can't recline in my comfy chair with a VR helmet on and then run around a fantasy world fighting monsters and throwing fireballs while lying motionless in the real world.
That's the VR future science fiction has promised.
>I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
Forgive my ignorance, this is a genuine question.
Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse? I see this massive push from the tech industry, a lot of public disinterest, and companies are still insisting that we want this. Do we have public polls that confirm people do crave the metaverse to the extent that tech wants us to? What is making them so confident beyond just hope?
Here's to hoping that these higher interest rates make companies make actually useful and profitable products instead of a bunch of meme products.
To answer that, we first need a good answer to the question: "What the hell is the 'Metaverse' supposed to be?"
Because as long as that isn't answered, the question reads: "Do people, on the whole, even want another corporate buzzword?", and I think we all know the answer to that one.
I don’t have a poll but three observations.
1) People’s tastes vary. But millions of units have sold so people are open to it.
2) My non-techy 60+ year old aunt tried my Quest and kept raving about it and bought one.
3) It has potential to be more immersive. Having messed around with Quest, there are demos of things that are step functions of experience beyond what you get with a TV experience: the eye opener for me was front row seat in a small venue with your favorite band, up close and personal. When the video+3d resolution get better, it will get way more compelling.
Entertainment is all about feelings. An immersive experience provides even more ability for evoking them. People do seem to value more-immersive where possible if you look at the history of TV+movies… if the distractions can be eliminated.
But if the packaging tells you not to let people under 13 years to use it (because their eyesight is still developing?) (and I love the honesty), it’s fair to say the tech isn’t fully there and you aren’t going to capture the next generation of kids with spare time on their hands, among many other factors.
There is also not a lot of free compelling content on Quest unlike the internet; rather they are very geared towards selling you $20 apps in their store. I respect the need to monetize but there is also a fair bit of learning still needed on marketing and business model side for both the platform and apps to drive me to keep opening the wallet. I felt like I explored most of the free content and apps in under 10 hours. Value for money just wasn’t there for me.
I did feel like the tech was “good enough” that this tech would get there eventually. That is a key threshold to cross and imho has been crossed. But I am also reminded of my old (pre-iPhone-eta) WindowsCE mobile phone with stylus and web browser in my pocket. There was value there… but it was also greatly mitigated by being cumbersome in various ways.
Is this an indication that people want the Metaverse, specifically, or are open to VR in general?
I am not much of a gamer, and probably the last person who would ever be interested in a VR headset. But I can see the appeal of VR games. I can't, for the life of me, see the appeal of "the Metaverse."
Ditto business. If you're in VR because you're reviewing architectural renderings or whatever, you'll probably keep the helmet on for a few minutes between meetings and as such, seeing your coworkers come out of other virtual meeting rooms and hang around at a virtual water cooler gives you a bit of that hallway conversation that you're now missing, and provides a continuity of experience.
None of this is where the money is though, at least not now. You're still playing a game, or using business software, and that's what you pay for - not the lobby. That's why, I think, Meta and stuff seems so silly. They seem to expect that you're going to want to use it for its own sake, as opposed to it being equivalent to the Facebook UI - something you use to get the real value, not the value itself.
Unfortunately, today I can't even use VR for more than a few minutes before I'm ready to vomit and my eyes feel like they're being pulled out of my head.
What people (the customers) want is a dashboard that lets them dispatch memes to other people (the users). Meta already sells that. But they want those memes to affect the users' behavior, and Meta is betting that they can turn a stream of user biometrics (collected by the headset) into a way to better tune the meme-delivery-to-desired-behavior pipeline.
Or at least that's what they've convinced the decision makers. It's probably a long way off from working and instead that narrative is just being used to justify building something sci-fi.
My take?
As a general question, no, they don't. And they won't.
However, they may want it for niche applications. Games would be the big one, but also perhaps certain industrial applications and other business functions. Although the business uses are probably better served with just AR instead of a whole "metaverse" (depending on your definition of "metaverse").
Which brings up the definitional problem. We have the metaverse and people love it -- we just call it the internet. So I'm assuming that when people say "metaverse", what they really mean is "VR worlds".
My impression -
Do people want magical alternative worlds they can hang out in? Yeah, video gaming is huge, bigger than movies.
Do people want to interact with those with a VR thing stuck on their head? No, not on the whole - normal screens are fine.
That’s just the default strap being okay but not great, they are designed to be swappable.
Amazon is full of straps that provide way better support for the back of your head. Oculus sells one too: https://www.meta.com/ca/quest/accessories/quest-2-elite-stra...
Also I’ve used the Oculus 2 for many hours and never had issues wearing glasses or getting motion sick. Maybe that was your VR device or a personal thing?
Same thing with the Index. The only issues I had, despite wearing glasses, were:
- Nearly going through a glass door while trying to take cover, and ending up in the hallway.
- The cable. Too short. Easy to tangle. Easy to trip over.
- Wondering why I suddenly had arms and where my awesome gloves had gone whenever I looked at my hands in the half-hour following any long session in Alyx.
Wish it was wireless. And perhaps a bit lighter.
I’d be surprised if it was more than 5-15% of people after long term exposure and across a wide variety of content… which would be a problem yes but hardly a market killer and the tech is always getting better.
Depends on the game.
For MOST people, the motion sickness is caused by your real world motion not matching the motion your eyes see. As a result, games that don't make you use the controller to move around (Beat Saber, Space Pirate Trainer, Pokerstars VR, and more) don't usually make people sick.
But games where you move through the in-game world without moving in the real world (Any racing or flying game, any game where you make your character walk using the controllers) are nearly guaranteed to cause sickness. Many games that require your character to walk around get away with this by using teleportation.
This is why I've always said that putting someone into a racing game or roller coaster simulator or something like that as their first VR experience is doing a major disservice to VR adoption.
I'm choosing the word enjoy because its not something like a car dashboard being touchscreen where people deal with it, this is entertainment and hobbies. If people don't enjoy it, they'll go do something else. VR will have niche use cases for sure and there will be some people that enjoy it but its not going to be mainstream.
More and more just getting outside (in the Big Blue Room) and reconnecting with nature are what I crave.
I agree. I think this is the main issue, actually. As long as that's required, VR will have limited appeal.
This is the refrain of Disney's theme park marketing, but I disagree. It's the fact that people want to say they were there. It's 100% the brand and nothing more. Marketing doesn't have to be, and often isn't, rational.
This is at the absolute core of why theme park experiences sell but VR does not. Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. Until the price of VR comes down to absolute rock bottom prices, there will not be acceptance of "VR experiences" and even so it's still a gamble whether anyone cares enough to buy that to experience on a whim frequently vs plan a vacation around it... I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
Vr is fun but virtual.
A flight sim, regardless of how sophisticated, is still always going to be of a lesser experience than real flying unless you can actually die in the sim.
I'm not suggesting that an ideal flight sim should kill the player if they crash, but rather suggesting that, as an example, a pilot behind the controls of a real plane that has to make a series of instantaneous decisions when a dangerous situation comes up like engine failure will have been "battle tested" in a very real way where his/her life was literally on the line.
Of course not having to risk your life is also a big advantage of virtual as well.
What is you basis for saying that?
> Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home.
By that rationale nobody would play vide games.
I believe it comes down to the experience. The experience of VR is simply not good enough to attract people.
For myself (a sample size of 1) it is all about the magical experiences and memories my child gets from experiencing a fantasy world of fun rides and adventure.
Brands don't care if you buy them ironically. They only care that you give them money.
Mass indifference would be much more deadly to Disney.
And mass indifference is where most of the the public are with VR. It's fun of a kind, but it's a long way short of a compelling irrational magic.
Even compared to other "magic" products like the iPhone.
Meta have failed to make any magic. I don't think Zuck even knows what magic is.
Apple do know what magic is. But gambling they can inject it into their VR proposition is a risky bet.
He got to build a droid and he went outside and used it to entertain and enthrall another smaller child for 45 minutes.
He got to live, for a day, in an immersive and joyous world he never imagined he could see and touch and be a part of.
Its not irony. I bought the magic DESPITE a poisoned brand.
If it were available in VR I'd buy it in VR.
In this case a VR exp would have to feel like going to a park. However, there is something that is missing (or many somethings). You hanging with your friends and family. Now they could also all go get headsets and you hang together. But that seems oddly not the same. Buying that overpriced popcorn and basically 'fair food' is also part of it. Disney would have the best shot at making a park into a game. As most of their rides are 'dark rides'. Basically trains going thru experiences. A fixed park is little more than a carnival but in a fixed location and cleaned up nicely with theming. VR strips out the carnival aspects and is only theming. That strips out part of what you are going for.
I have also been to parks all by myself. That is what wearing a VR headset would feel like. It is not a good experience. You could say 'oh all your friends could get headsets too'. True but at that point you are now looking at similar costs as just going to the parks.
But back to your analogye, it applies particularly well here because Disney are a master of delivering experiences and do exactly that through every possible medium. So if one sees Disney walking away from the Metaverse, that's not something I would interpret lightly - despite the rounds of firing being interpreted as a cost saving measure, it's just 50 staff members and not all of them are leaving the company. Disney aren't short of cash, so if they saw a future in the Metaverse they'd be there for defensive reasons alone.
Rather I think Disney realise that their own VR-initiatives will stand on their own, and their involvement would be propping up 3rd party platforms rather than yielding a benefit from them.
I think Meta are hoping that the Metaverse would emulate the Smartphone/Soft-store model, where developers would do the heavy lifting for the platform, but the crucial difference here is that a Smartphone is useful before even loading a single piece of 3rd party software. Everyone already had a phone when smartphones became a thing - but right now no one is walking around with a VR headset, or anything even vaguely approximating that.
No, this was Mark's personal Quest for the Next Big Thing. No one else in the company is delusional enough to believe it will go anywhere, they're just getting a fat paycheck.
We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time.
Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits.
The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse".
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)
Put that one down in the history books as being way ahead of its time. More honest, too.
Until then, it loses for anything but niche applications, because it's doomed by the popularity of the smartphone. Nobody wants a social network (or whatever) that can't be reached from their smartphone, or that sucks to use on there, which means nobody wants VR as the primary interface to anything, making it rather pointless.
The whole market is spinning its wheels until or unless someone finally manages to get normal people excited about AR glasses, which means some serious hardware advancements. Whatever's the "next big thing" has to be as portable and usable-everywhere as smartphones, or it's doomed. The Web boom among normal folks wasn't because they started sitting at desktop computers way, way more, but because computers got ultra-portable and cellular Internet got cheap enough to actually use. They're not going to clamber to join anything that they can't comfortably and non-dorkily use at a coffee shop or in line at the grocery store or while sitting on the couch watching Netflix or what have you.
Think like if you went to Amazon's website and had to navigate product categories by moving around in an FPS-like interface. This was a thing for a while—it never went big, but there was real excitement around it and some effort was put into it, only to find that (obviously) it sucks for anything but games (duh) and maybe art projects of some kinds.
But probably a lot less than would watch a Mandalorian animated or real life spin-off TV series - and the VR version costs a lot more to create.
A lot of companies (Disney, Magic Leap etc) have spent a fortune trying to make the killer VR content but have failed. Apart from the sports/exercise apps (probably not enough to support the FB metaverse) are there any that would make people purchase a headset for?
Would it need to? It's a video game, right? Once you have the base elements, it could be pretty cheap.
Then if they started to layer gaming on top of that... my kids would be pestering me even more than they already are for a vr set-up.
The biology of humans works against VR in a lot of ways, and most people don't like the idea of taking anti-nausea pill just to experience VR. (I take anti-nausea pills when I do VR, because VR is absolutely mindblowing)
Although it is true some people get sick easily in VR, those people tend to also have trouble with car sickness and sea sickness. I suppose you can say the same about cars and VR for that group.
So even on my very high end setup (Index 120hz,4090 rtx), I still get nausea. It also takes a while for people to get their VR legs, and I don't have time for using VR very day, it's more like once a month.
However I don't think this is specific to the tech any more, just the experience, similar to flying a plane or being on a boat. But It used to be that everyone would get nauseous due to immaturity of the technology as the parent comment was implying, and that's no longer true.
These things are fun to mess around with, but I think very few people will ever want to wear goggles like this for more than an hour or so at a time, which inherently limits their appeal and potential applications. My widescreen monitor has none of these issues and it's plenty "good enough" for most games.
Sounds like a video game to me, something that Disney has weirdly struggled with, having tried on several times to get into video games big time, only to shy away at the huge expense and challenge.
At the moment they've circled back to merely licensing out their IPs to other publishers.
Disney should get more into video games, and VR is great for video games.
VR for "metaverse" whatever it is that is. Not so sure!
"The future is a dead mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse"
It is long but worth a watch. You don't need to stare at the screen the entire time - if you can hear it and look up occasionally, it's fine.
Massive crypto scam by people who are now bound to overhype the whole thing. Regular folks fall for it because they buy into the vision and have to believe otherwise everything falls apart. Companies fall for it because FOMO. Incredibly cultish.
The video is good but I don’t think it is worth the watch unless you have morbid curiosity about that particular project, or you want some crypto related cathartic release. I don’t feel better knowing the gory details of how terrible everyone and everything is in this circle.
Hadn't clicked the link yet but just reading that made me think "Oh I bet it's Folding Ideas!"
Wasn't disappointed. Thanks OP for the link.
It would be not notable at all except, there is a huge amount of money being passed around in it in order to achieve basically nothing.
The dreams about the metaverse discussed at the beginning are also just wild and bizarre. It seems to me that a lot of tech people and investor types are just bored and letting their imaginations run wild. AI taking over the world, living fully inside the metaverse, every object in the world being inside the metaverse to the point where the metaverse is considered more accurate than reality etc. They may as well be talking about time travel or faster than light travel. In reality we have...a worse version of second life
The metaverse is businesses pushing for a platform which brings nothing of value, just for them to extract rent from those using it.
Thinking "what's in it for us" leads you to build a universe that you get to lord over. Putting interesting things that people want in it is someone else's problem.
Thinking "what's in it for them" leads you to build a single interesting thing people want. Then you expand it into a universe from there.
But why would I expect VR to be better than a Zoom call when Zoom calls with family and friends are already so wonky? Do I want to endure the same weird audio/video connectivity crap, only made even more uncanny by being immersed in it? Seems more honest to just keep it on a screen.
It's worse, why would I expect VR to be better than facebook video. I think facebook video is worse than zoom, to the point that internal employees will use zoom for meeting sometimes.
I feel like they should have built the world's best group video/audio product in 2 months, made it free, and used that momentum for metaverse
The potential for workflow efficiency (you can effectively have as many monitors as you want with the profile of a VR headset, remote work is even more portable than a laptop, looking at another desktop can be just as intuitive as another monitor on your own, more immersive and tune-able environment to focus on work) & display of data in 3d that is otherwise too unnavigable in 2D were really promising. Maybe we'll get there in another 10 years when the VR tech cycle completes its orbit again.
Not saying its something that couldn't be improved, id just be interested in hearing from someone that has tried it
I didn't experience any clarity issues personally but yeah the resolutions aren't always as high (which is why abandoning it at this stage is a shame) and refresh rate certainly isn't high enough.
This is an uninformed take based on recollections of what they've released and my understanding of Disney's competencies.
Somebody watching closely will hopefully have more insight.
Mike White, the exec leading the group, reported into Kareem Daniel, who was central to Chapek’s vision of Disney. So it was a significant role. Mind you, Daniel was fired about five seconds after Iger returned.
He had very little concept of what Disney should be doing so just thew out a bunch of ideas with very little budget and expected them to work, whilst also penny pinching beyond belief.
Similarly, in news reporting, every department is a ‘division’.
really? i cannot imagine strapping my late mum into some vr headset.
Glad I'm not the only one. I don't see the appeal at all.
i will admit that if i could ask my glasses "where is the nearest atm?" and it then popped up an arrow pointing at it, i might pay for that. but that means stuffing a lot of hardware into the frames - about the equivalent of a high-end smartphone.
Maybe I'm too old or too anti-social, but using an AR or VR for those things seems kind of sad and depressing to me.
I just want to be left alone when I want to focus and learn things. I love using ChatGPT to explore a subject now, though, because it's pure text and I am driving it, so I can totally see people who are more visual and social learners want something similar "packaged up" in an avatar.
Pretty sure people had the exact reaction when online dating came out thinking you must be some social outcast. Or when some people chose to WFH way before it became remotely normal and were branded antisocial for choosing to not be in the office with the colleagues.
Why be such a hater? I don't get it.
Just because some people are into different things than you or what society deems 'normal' doesn't make them weirdoes.
Mate, have you seen how much money onlyfans girls are raking in from just talking to simps or other lonely and desperate men online? Can be as high as millions USD per month. And they don't even do any explicit nudity for their money, they just send ludes and texts. And the texts are usually written by some people the girl hired since she can't reply to all of them. Those guys are getting taken to the cleaners.
Seems like a niche that could be filled via an AI for cheaper. ChatGPT-3 had some awesome humor before it got lobotomized to be a mundane question answering drone. Could probably replace some standup comedians too.
(I'm surprised that afaik nobody has really cracked the "Tamagotchi" pet care formula on smartphones, which seemed ideally suited to a visually and sonically enhanced version of the same basic ritual)
For that reason, I suspect that to do it with a smartphone, you'd do better with a chatbot talking to users via e.g. Whatsapp or another messenger than a custom app, because people associate messengers with real people rather than a "game".
You put the goggles on and ask for Einstein and a chalk board. Then you have a conversation.
I hope the XR future is more creative.
I'd totally pay for that (I'm serious).
"Man kills wife in fit of rage, throwing knife at virtual Gordan Ramsey"
- Says "he didn't see her behind the Gordan Ramsey avatar"Sounds very different without one. (!)
But that is not what you'd be getting. You can very well listen to Feynman's pre-recorded lectures on YouTube today, and that's the best than can be done. Listening to the same clip being played while some image of him is projected on your glasses to make it look like he's in your living room will not improve the experience.
The closest I've seen is tech that would put his face and voice over the answers that come from chat GPT. Again, with no respect to the late professor, but his appearance is again the least interesting part "talk with Rchiard Feynman" is his appearance and voice. If I could get his help on some of my research, I wouldn't care if he looked like a blob fish and had the voice of Foghorn Leghorn. On the other hand, if I'm just getting ChatGPT answers, then there's no reason not to just make it look like the Crypt Keeper.
That's a feature? You can do that with a real ping pong ball... I'd love to not have to do it...
We got that way back when god invented the book. Or I could prop my phone up against the back of the counter and have a little youtube in my field of view.
Not only that, but VR/AR doesn't solve any incremental immersion blockers. My brain is very good at 'not looking away from the screen,' it's awful at overriding my inner ear balance, temperature sense, smell sense, circadian rhythm, etc.
Is anyone expecting this as a realistic possibility? As AR glasses are today they would need to become much more powerful while also much smaller. (With the current glasses it feels one might snap their neck in a rollerblading tumble very easily just because of the added weight and lever arm on the head.)
VR is absolutely breathtaking at transporting you. Oculus Welcome with its cosy camper van and robot was almost a religious experience for me. But VR doesn't make video games one iota more fun to play. At least not enough to justify the expense and inconvenience. Especially since the price of admission seems to be going up.
I don’t know what it is exactly about that game, but it’s really the only good VR game (and it’s great!)
The biggest test of VR at theme parks in the US came with various Six Flags around the country strapping VR goggles (Samsung IIRC) on some of their coasters and drop towers. They're pretty widely regarded as failures. I got to try two of them and they definitely were not a plus to the ride experience, especially on a drop tower where the view from the top is half the fun.
* https://youtu.be/hSm_vG586II?t=38 (safe for work, as is the whole series)
* https://youtu.be/hSm_vG586II?t=212
The anime series itself is really good. Kind of a science-fiction mystery story.
* https://youtu.be/6vJPJHhs2Xs (also safe for work)
That one has a less fleshed out / "natural" use of AR compared to Dennou Coil, but it's still pretty good.
It's only 6 episodes, and should be available on Netflix in most countries already. Not sure if Dennou Coil is.
That can change.
In other contexts, it's rich white guys dreaming of leaving their puny body and becoming Ubermech with the help of tech...
Epic just shipped the Unreal Engine editor as a plug-in for Fortnite. Most of the things you can do with Unreal Engine as a game developer are now available to Fortnite users. What's created doesn't have to look anything like Fortnite.
Which of course Apple, Google and Meta should not be able to monetise - only them.
They seem to be wanting to build the tools, to build that. They know its a tough road, and being resourced starved (compared to facebook) they're trying to do it a more "open" way with the other game engines participating (He mentions Godot, Unity in his talk), artists etc. Its part of Tim Sweeney's thing to break down walled gardens. Epic being privately held, sort of doesn't have to deal with shareholders...
Not really. Epic has Unreal Editor, is a game development company, and runs the largest MMO. So they know what they're doing in that space. Facebook didn't.
Here's Matthew Ball VC's feature list for a metaverse.
* Be persistent.
Epic has that. That's a basic property of a metaverse.
* Be synchronous and live
Like any MMO, yes.
* Be without any cap to concurrent users
At 3.5 million concurrent users, they're #1 at scaling.
* Be a fully functioning economy – individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others.
They kind of have that, although it's mostly game objects.
* Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms
That's talked about, but not currently delivered.
* Offer unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content, and so on across each of these experiences – your Counter-Strike gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite
Technically, maybe. Operationally, no. They prohibit imports which violate intellectual property law. But you can create a mesh yourself and upload.
* Be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors...
They have that.
What makes it all work is that they can deliver this experience with the visual quality and responsiveness gamers expect. Facebook failed at that. So did Decentraland. Those looked like games from 1990.
The problem is that Facebook and Instagram are "the old thing" and WhatsApp monetization ja hard without pushing users to Signal (or Apple iMessage) while kids spend their time on TikTok instead. Facebook needs to find the next thing after TikTok to pull future generations of users in. And from their view a new world offers tons of ways to monetize.
The wholesale rename of everything is necessary when you're trying to distance yourself from a poisoned past. It's not just about end-users, it's about recruiting and retaining talented employees. The sooner they can make folks disassociate the entire operation from the bad FB name the better. Many engineers aren't interested in telling their friends/family they work for FB, that awful company that enabled the CA scandal etc. Now they'd be able to say they work for Meta, that VR company.
Correct, that's why I still called them Facebook, not Meta, in my post. ;)
People intuitively 'get' the Metaverse, and if it was good, everyone would be doing it.
I remember that crap from like 25 years ago, this is kind of the 3rd try and it failed, but I'm betting the next evolution will hit.
Now it won't be exactly the Metaverse rather just '3D / immersive' but still, it will take over.
I'm worried it's the start of Idiocracy though.
ChatGPT doesn’t require “getting”. It just responds in a freakishly human way by standards that have existed up to now.
But literally nobody “intuitively gets” metaverse. It just looks like a crappy Wii edition of Second Life, but proponents (Facebook staff) always seem to say “no dude it’s not like that it all it’s like dude you gotta listen it’s going to dude like revolutionize dude are you listening it’s uhhhhh” and nobody knows wtf it is
Platforms that aren't products for end users are nerdy, especially ones that don't even exist yet.
You aren't going to find an old person start talking to you about a new functions Microsoft added to the Windows SDK, but you could hear them talk about a new feature in a Windows app they use.
>It just looks like a crappy Wii edition of Second Life
The metaverse doesn't exist yet. Someone could make a product like that for the metaverse, but that is just one product. Not all products will look the same, and not all product will boolean heavy into being like second life.
They'd almost have been better off not bothering to make it.
They will be using Siri, which already exists, it will just be better.
"But literally nobody “intuitively gets” metaverse"
? The first time you put on a 3D headset you are viscerally 'moved' in a way that ChatGPT can never compete with.
The only problem is, it makes you sick, the graphics are not good, the games are not good etc..
When the 'promise' of Virtual/3D is finally fulfilled, everyone will do it.
They most definitely are. Normies find ChatGPT absolutely fascinating for a variety of purposes, whether that's creative or just asking questions. It's basically magic to them.
Meta's "the metaverse" is just any random obscure retro PS1-style game for them.
(Note: /s, not even close to the real definition)
It was quite ridiculous how everybody suddenly kept talking about Metaverse without there even being as much as a vague idea how it would look like. Even Facebook's own presentation on the Metaverse was devoid of vision and just kept repeating stuff that Playstation Home did 10 years ago or that Habitat did over 35(!) years ago. Avatars, customization, multiplayer and that was it. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not a Metaverse, that's just a regular old multiplayer social app of which we had numerous in the last few decades, both inside and outside of VR. There was no vision of how to evolve that beyond that, even the really obvious stuff was nowhere to be seen (online shopping in VR, anybody?).
Some companies tried to mix some crypto bullshit into it to make another Second Life happen, but even that's not new, LindenLabs already had their own VR game that failed with Sansar.
Metaverse was really hype about nothing, just Zuckerberg spending billions on something trying to stay relevant and everybody else wanting their piece of the cake too. Took them a while to realize that there never was any cake to begin with.
Meanwhile people that care about VR just hang around in VRChat or play VR games, without any of that Metaverse nonsense.
Now without that ability, you need to demonstrate you can aggressively grow in newer, exciting markets. What underdeveloped technology markets with social media potential exist outside of this vague idea around VR? Can you name any?
The problem with the metaverse is not that Zuckerberg went in that direction, it's that he executed so poorly and so publicly that he's lost any sort of goodwill from that attempt at a new market. If he wasn't literally un-firable, he'd be have long lost his CEO position.
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find any information about the phrase “the Indians are collecting firewood like crazy”. Could you provide more context or details about where you heard or saw this phrase?
Metaverse make me 'meh.'
Maybe if I hadn't played Everquest in 1999, nor any 3D network game since then, I would have been impressed.
Meta/FB dedicating so many resources to this as-yet-truly-defined thing seems silly to me, I'm not sure how they expect to recoup their losses even if a metaverse is established. Disney, as an entertainment company, is actually well set up to see results pretty quickly.
I'm no metaverse fan. I think the simplest question one can ask any corp type talking up the metaverse that cuts through the BS is "what is the metaverse, and how do you get there?" I'm fully aware of the hardware limitations - someone on HN in the last few months has described the hardware challenge as on par with "build me a completely see-through phone," and while not perfect it's a pretty good comparison. I don't see this as something people will decide to enter and remain in for extended periods of time.
But there are definitely use cases, and Disney, of all companies, is placed to take advantage of those use cases, and they decide to drop it.
Not that I think it will work.
If you don't see/hear your wife/partner arriving (because of the headset), you are as good as dead.
It's not like the ability to build and decorate your office impacts your ability to enjoy porn.
I mean sure, perhaps onlyfans will evolve the ability for a model to have some virtual background in which you can attend the show live, but that will never be "your life online connected to everyone" that the metaverse is supposed to be.
2. "Metaverse" narrative was hijacked by crappy crypto scams
If the metaverse is to make a comeback, it needs a rebrand, and VR tech to be as affordable and low footprint as the average smartphone.
VR technologies and "virtual worlds" mostly attracts creepy people. General public don't want to deal with that kind of people hence they aren't interested in VR, real life is fun enough for them.
The only non creepy people owning VR headsets are those who use it to play racing and flying simulators.
Someone will have to find a way to make VR "sexy".
Tough ask.
Meta Quest 2 has sold over 20 million headsets. That's not bad compared to other gaming devices. What's your definition for "mainstream"?
Then there is traffic and since we already have automated taxis then why not turn them into remote cameras, at least when not occupied delivering rides or food.
Of course this could have huge production costs associated with it and might not be realistic any time soon. But maybe one day ...
I don't think there is anything that matches what OP is looking for perfectly, but games like The Last Express, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask or Invisible Hours get somewhat close. In those the story plays out in real time with all the NPCs playing their roles, the player can observe and interact, but he isn't the central trigger for everything, the story will reach the end even without the player doing anything. Fahrenheit and most of the other stuff Quantic Dream has done also go in that direction, in those games you often switch characters, so you are really playing "the story", not a specific person in that story, however they are much more linear than the other games mentioned and don't leave that much room for exploration.
"The Last Express" for an earlier non-VR example, this one is a bit closer to a regular adventure game, but the events in it still play out in realtime without the other characters waiting around for the player to do something.
When did Windows sell porn in the Windows store? When did Apple sell porn in the app store? When did Google sell porn in the Play store?
Now they'll create an LLM AI division...
But, give it another year and the board will act.
I can't agree. From a hedonism perspective, I've had incredible experiences.
My dad retired and has basically grown into the VRchat community over the last few years. He has met people with different social values than himself and has grown significantly more open minded. Sure you could get that stuff from other places, but he chooses to use VRchat for some reason.
Maybe this is a mix of descending faith that Meta can pull it off with insider info on what that other SV company might be trying to pull off this summer.
They still need Metaverse stuff, of course.