Is Meta having growing pains or in a death spiral?
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It should have been self evident to zuckerberg that wearing a vr headset will never be mainstream.
Metaverse was “Zucks original idea”… a billionaires pipe dream - an average idea backed by untold money.
The Metaverse showed that as they say “once you’re lucky, twice you’re good”.
AR/VR is likely to be the logical progression of physical screens, it's just we're not there yet. And it's not even that the current tech is that bad, it's just too clunky and cumbersome given the limited quality of the experiences at the moment.
I think as the tech becomes less cumbersome and the experiences get better you'll start to see apps that people actually find interesting / useful.
The whole cartoon virtual office stuff Zuck was pushing a couple of years back made it look like a joke. Given where the technology is enterprise productivity apps are clearly not the right product. If they instead invested in interesting AR/VR games and experiences I think they would have had more success. Imo the best stuff on the Oculus is the 3D video experiences and first person video games. But for some reason this isn't where Meta is investing to sell the tech.
But I think digitally enhanced 3D spaces as a non verbal natural language interface for HCI is only a shadow so far of what is possible. 3D just works better than 2D for a wide range of things people do everyday; and better tends to win out in the long run.
Is there utility in ar/vr glasses? Are you enjoying reading and typing from your small screen with your neck turned to the ground? With a friction of getting your phone in and out of your pocket 20 times a day.
How could it not be obvious?
I'd love it if the tech gets there someday, but it's not yet clear how it does.
The utility benefit still has to outweigh the bodily detriment.
I think the most important aspect of this is that such glasses don't introduce a separation between you and the rest of the world.
If people using AR are disconnected from interacting with others in real life (which seems very likely), then there will be a social cost for using it on the regular.
I think this, more than any other single thing, is what will keep AR in the realm of niche applications. The similar problem with smart phones is already one that people complain about a lot. AR would only make it worse.
it's a quick (and mostly accepted) way to tune out, for example, while standing in a line or something. Yes, many people overdo it, but imagine popping on your VR helmet for a second in a social setting.
But for a "weirdly lifelike zoom meeting"... no
I know 100% that this will happen some day, and I hate it.
There will certainly be at least some places who want those people to buy drinks at their establishment.
Heck, just give me a conversation script to follow.
https://aframe.io/examples/showcase/sky/
On desktop, you can pan using the mouse. On a phone, if you grant access to your accelerometer, you can move your phone around as a window onto the panorama. If using VR goggles like my £200 Oculus Go, you can crane your neck around. I have a 360º camera, the Ricoh Theta Z1, and the Oculus devices make a very good viewer to share immersive views of far-off places with friends or family.
Then I considered how people hate to even wear normal glasses. So even if the tech could be as seamless and compact as normal prescription glasses, uptake would be iffy.
Remember the glasshole era ?
(The short-lived project known as Google Glass for those who don't know)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Lou...
Apple's iOS walled garden is a slap to Zuck's face. In VR, Zuck saw a chance to own an emerging platform.
Remember the FB phone? Amazon's Fire phone? Both attempts to own a platform. If your revenue depends on ads, owning the platform is like adding fuel to fire.
I don't think this has been _successful_, but the concern about platform access seems _reasonable_ to me. If you think it's existential, burning billions on a long-shot might even be a good strategy, though one that seems likely to fail.
Plus if you're renaming the firm and making it the focus, maybe do a better job. Give people legs for instance? The whole thing looks ridiculously dated. Maybe spend some of the money finding out what people want.
It is just yet another "second life" (remember that?) software stack, plugged with social networks - the worst of the two worlds.
I've jumped ship with social media stuff about a decade ago, and seeing how nasty it became, I'm just glad I ditched it.
Pro tip: That common excuse "I use it to keep in touch with family blah blah blah" is not an excuse - you can keep in touch with family if you care about them. If you don't, don't waste everybody's time.
(Unlike Meta's efforts.)
I keep finding it strange that this doesn't have to be true?
A repeated question I keep hearing as well as having myself is, "what is it for?" which personally seems bizarre.
There are many possible valid answers to that question, but I as someone who's spent at least a few hours hearing about it really shouldn't have that question.
That personally feels like a much more significant failure than anything else.
Though perhaps I've missed it, maybe there's some clear articulation somewhere of what the goal is of the Metaverse, if so, feel free to enlighten me =)...
That's literally table stakes.
You can't serve ads to nobody.
So even though that may be "what it's for", that can't be the sole reason, those people need a reason to show up.
So for that audience or any audience, what is it for?
A metaverse concert as good as attending a real concert in person, but also your friend who lives 500 miles away is right there next to you. Business meetings as good as meeting in person, but with infinitely luxurious surroundings and no travel time. Office buildings where everyone gets a private office and a dozen huge monitors. And so on.
Obviously, that's not what Facebook are offering at the moment. I would say they are nowhere close.
And of course, though to you and I such a thing controlled by Facebook might seem incredibly dystopian, Zuckerberg probably has a much higher opinion of facebook than normal people!
I personally would be more engaged if they looked a bit further.
For example, this may not be the best idea, but making spaces more accessible to those who have difficulties navigating them could be helpful? That at least is something that doesn't exist, I mean I can go to a real concert to visit a friend hundreds of miles away, but when I was younger I had vertigo. I'm still a bit uncomfortable with heights, going into VR and seeing views from a height with little prep knowing that I'm both safe, but get to experience it on some level was quite liberating.
There are people with much more significant challenges, some of whom I assume would like to be able to have another way to engage with people and spaces that they currently feel are impossible to navigate.
The problem was tiktok. FB missed the short form video social media medium so it can't grow and if it can't grow it's no longer a "tech giant", so I think Zuckerberg desperately looked around and thought, "what comes after short form video?" and came to the conclusion it had to be VR because there isn't anything else that's obvious.
And thus the pivot to the metaverse.
People just like TikTok better.
This was an attempt to get ahead of a potential disruptive innovation that might cause a strategic inflection point (as per "The Innovator's Dilemma"). Some people thought that AR/VR devices might displace smartphones in the social media space the same way that smartphones displaced microcomputers. So far that isn't happening, but I guess it's still a possibility.
There is nothing AR glasses can achieve at an industrial site (their main use currently with HoloLens) that a decent digital twin, being able to quickly zoom in/out across hundreds of yards of wiring/machineries, doesn't obtain easier/faster/better/safer/more comfortable. Just what the doctor ordered for a tired technician, crawl under the machinery to check for the AR gimmick some dude in a $4,000 chair designed, only for the thing to be completely unable to map the AR model to the physical object because there's barely any light under a 25 tonne industrial whatever.
Was reading now the "HoloLens environment considerations" [5], most funny aspect: "Wormholes. If you have two areas or regions that look the same, the tracker may think they're the same. This results in the device tricking itself into thinking it's somewhere else."
[1] October 2022, "Microsoft Hololens causes US army nausea and headaches", https://www.avinteractive.com/markets/government-and-defence...
[2] January 2023, "Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens", https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-...
[3] https://fedscoop.com/darpa-drone-swarms-with-1000-unmanned-a...
[4] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/minefield.pdf
[5] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/hololens-environm...
Thankfully, that is more-or-less unfeasible in reality... hard to imagine such a minefield actually working out. The mines would need to be capable of autonomous movement in difficult terrain, would require at least a month worth of battery capacity and recharging capability, and it would be easy to jam their c&c frequency to completely kill that "self healing" capability.
[1] "White House Asks for $842 Billion in 2024 DOD Funding, 3.2 Percent Above 2023 Budget", https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/3/9/wh...
The US in contrast, who should attack them with tanks or infantry? Canada and Mexico... both completely unrealistic, at least if one assumes that refugees are not supposed to be shredded by anti-personnel mines.
And that completely leaves out the core problem with mines... it is easy enough to clear a path through a minefield using anti-mine weaponry, and Ukraine has gotten a lot of appropriate vehicles, ammunition and training. But the rest of the mines? They take many decades to clear up. When you go into the Croatian hinterland, where they used to fight off Serbians back in the 90s... you'll still see an awful lot of "warning, mine field" signs next to the road.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/21/1106367928/us-landmine-ban-tr...
I just want a good VR experience for playing videogames at home, basically what the Oculus Quest already does. Meta just needs to improve that and only focus on gaming, no Metaverse and no AR.
- put in a lot of money in AR/VR
- develop new things/tech required
- hope to find something new to do with it ( a blue ocean)
Eg. The virtual version of many defense/space projects.
Spot on!
All it took for me to have a Silent Generation (pre WWII birth) divest from about $1M in META was to have her ask her great grand-daughter "do you use Facebook?".
The obvious answer was "NO, that's for OLD people!"
As a late-30's American, I haven't been on FB since the early 2010's... good riddance!
your little question is extremely naive and myopic and probably not the sort of thing you should be using to make investment decisions
It's a good few years away - at least a decade or so. It won't happen until the hardware becomes stylish smart glasses instead of a clunky headset.
And it won't be created by Zuckerberg.
For it to really become the next computing model it has to intuitively understand user-intend which has now become possible with generative AI. AR + generativeAI moves the interaction model from imperative to declarative, users will describe what they want (give me 10 slides with red backgrounds) instead of how to do it. imo generativeAI and LLMs will be primarily seen as a UX revolution (in light of AR)
The odds of hitting the unicorn jackpot are minuscule. The odds of hitting it twice? Relying only on luck? Practically zero. That's why Zuck is flailing.
> ... The odds of hitting the unicorn jackpot are minuscule. The odds of hitting it twice? Relying only on luck? Practically zero. That's why Zuck is flailing.
Mark has been an excellent CEO by all measures. The purchase of Instagram may be the best acquisition in tech history and it was on his watch. Then he did it again with WhatsApp. It's hard to describe making mostly the correct decisions over and over for 20 years luck.
Facebook is a money printer and continues to be one, detour into the metaverse or not.
As an outsider, it hasn’t been clear that whatsapp has generated any meaningful amount of cash flow 9 years after acquisition.
For a price tag of $19 billion, I’m not sure how to see this as a win.
They're monetizing WhatsApp for sure - it's just that they are monetizing it through intermediaries offering transactional and marketing content.
Also, half my friends have migrated over to Signal anyways, advertisements on whatsapp will just speed up that transition I suppose.
Facebook has a pretty terrible reputation with almost all demographic groups, so he hasn't been excellent by all measures.
So would you agree that Mark has done excellent at building products that are good for society’s mental health and well-being?
The space of what to buy, when to buy it, what to build, etc. etc. is all so easy in hindsight. Instagram was making 0 money and cost 1 billion to acquire -- a large amount at the time. It could have blown up in their face, but it didn't. Then he did it again with Whatsapp. Please stop pretending like things are easy from your sofa.
The first problem is finding a good use case for meta. Many very disruptive technologies did not take off immediately from the beginning. Sometimes they didn't take off until their cost was low enough to align with their customer value. Sometimes they didn't take off because customers didn't know what they could do with the product, etc. Think books, TVs, cars, Internet, etc. I strongly believe that once valuable use cases have been identified by customers, the use of VR for metaverse experiences will take off. And it will not just "take off", it will skyrocket to the roofs.
The second problem in my opinion is the brand itself. Facebook was built from infancy on the theft of personal data (remember female profiles and pictures from university sororities websites being scrapped into Facebook to attract testosterone-awkward males). That's Facebook DNA: collecting and processing personal data from people with their legal but informed and/or unwilling consent. The problem with this approach is that until the first problem is solved for mass consumers (i.e., finding a good use case), the only potential customers of VR/AR equipment are tech savy geeks. And this crowd tends to dislike anything that comes out of Facebook/Meta.
Assuming the above is correct, the company has two options: 1. Finding a high-value use case that could attract a large but yet very specific customer segment, like children (parents), women, luxury, factory workers, etc.
2. Cleaning the company from everyone that destroyed its reputation (i.e., all C-level employees, at least) with immediate effect and bringing in someone who is known to treat privacy not as a legal topic but as a universal human right.
As you can probably guess, I speculate that Meta's only way out is solving the first problem before it runs out of cash.
You can't really create the next new big thing and expect the "non-geek" to move there first, they move at the end, and corporations right after, Zucky just inverted the order of the populating the platform
Meta has industry leading AI tech, i mean they research for “embodied AI” and interesting ideas like that, they have expertise in many areas of AI like generative AI… But if there is a CEO king, one must do as the king commands I guess.
So to have them you have to build an inverse kinematics model and try to simulate them... Which also doesn't really work because you don't know the overall body position of the user.
In a practical sense, a VR avatar is a disembodied head and hands - that's all the data you actually have.
The legs thing was kind of a weak criticism. The issue isn't any one thing, it's that Facebook's overall vision is boring, and keeps putting "sell ads" first.
Not much, it's just a multiplayer video game - no different technically than the mmos we've had for decades.
That's why Facebook betting the farm on it made no sense to me - this is something they should have contracted out to a good video game studio, not tried to develop in house when they don't have any experience building these kind of interactive environments. So much money down the drain for what exactly?
And then the next evolution of this model hinges on unproven, still in development, cutting edge technology that has huge upfront monetary costs for anyone who wants to participate in it.
I'm no business expert, but this looks like the perfect way of doing the exact opposite of what the ads business model requires.
I think it's great. When I don't have the time to go to the Gym, I can workout right in my home office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqrFa6pWLA (starts at ~7min mark)
What brain worms do the folks at Meta have?
You're just trying to get this thing off the ground and you decide to start ganking people for clapping? I know micro-transactions are the 'in' thing now, but Jesus Lord, you can't fucking expect people to pay to show appreciation towards others. Wait until you get a billion users first you capitalist vampire squids.