I'm baffled by the reaction here. I agree that productive VR work is still not ready for prime time, but most of you haven't tried any of this (let alone the new hardware) and you're already dismissing even the possibility of it becoming good in the future. Reminds me of the Dropbox thread. You know which one.
Also what I really don't understand is how anyone can have anything against them spending $$$ on R&D? Worst case scenario: their whole productivity angle doesn't work out, they lose billions upon billions in the coming decade and eventually scrap the whole thing. Then they've still invented a lot of super interesting tech along the way. High resolution displays, low latency rendering pipelines, novel human interface technologies, high fidelity hand tracking, lightweight and sharp lenses, the list goes on and on. There's lots of applications for each of those things and almost nobody else is willing to spend this much cash for such an uncertain roi.
I, for one, am super excited about what the future iterations of this will look like.
I think there’s a lot of hate because Facebook is an immensely hate-able company that needs its next cash cow and it sure hopes this is it.
Look at the history of it’s core product to see where VR will go if it takes off:
Facebook was the cool place for college students to connect with friends. No ID requirements to sign up and no ads for years. Your feed was just your friends post. Things were great. Now there’s ads in your feed and you need to definitively prove your identity. Not to mention the history of scandals and privacy violations.
They’ll do whatever it takes to get those first 100 million users. Once they get them though all bets are off. Privacy will only get worse, they’ll give up on the initial power users because who cares about a couple million hard core gamers?
They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth.
Only nobody cared because that was the time prior to the latest privacy awakening, and apparently we still have a hard time putting it in the right context. If the best thing you can say about a company is that it was not big and nobody cared about their (what are now considered) atrocities back when, then you should probably reconsider your evaluation.
> They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth.
How in the world did you come to that conclusion? Any Meta app you have on your smartphone is doing what they can to collect heuristics in order to identify you and serve you Ads. How is that any different? It's just not as obvious.
> Only nobody cared because that was the time prior to the latest privacy awakening [...]
You make it sound like it's a fad or the user simply didn't care in the 2000s. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If a private company would park a van in front of your door to observe you 24/7 in order to sell mundane details about your daily life to advertisers you'd be up in arms. Yet in the digital space it's no big deal.
> > They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth.
> How in the world did you come to that conclusion? Any Meta app you have on your smartphone is doing what they can to collect heuristics in order to identify you and serve you Ads. How is that any different? It's just not as obvious.
In the early days of Facebook there was a negative article about them in Harvard's student newspaper. Mark Zuckerberg looked for through the logs for login attempts from student journalists at the paper and used the passwords they entered to try to gain access to their email accounts.[0] I'd say that is significantly worse from a privacy perspective than using cookies to show you more relevant ads.
So when Zuckerberg's social world was Harvard he violated the privacy of the school. Now his social world is different and he'd have less reasons to perform those same crimes. Way more power and reason to perform an entirely different set of crimes though!
If you had told my parents in their youth, that their kids would have a high likelihood of happily divulging big chunks of their private life to the world at large, as a matter of routine, they would quite literally not even have understood the concept, no matter in how much detail you would have explained all the steps leading up to that. Why would anyone want any of that?
I am building a small business in the medical field right now. People are real sensitive about their data – right until the point where they happily waive all privacy rights to push you to use WhatsApp for all sensitive communication, because, OF COURSE they'd want to use WhatsApp, what else, it's real convenient after all.
And not many seem to care or remember. Was so far away, to another group of people, won't happen here, what does it matter
Except that to some extent, similar things are happening here -- Putin was, from what I've read, using FB to do psyops, to prepare his 2014 takeover of parts of Ukraine: making up and spreading stories about Russians getting abducted etc, ... Which helped him with the 2014 annexations, and leading up to his invasion and war today. More people dead than in Myanmar.
A bit surprising that the current US gov doesn't seem to look at FB as a psyops threat against itself?
Isn't everyone doing that though? With Apple stepping into the Ads business, it is almost clear that they will eventually wipe out any third party competition, especially facebook from their platform. Facebook has realised that it desperately needs a hardware channel to survive in the cut-throat competitive field the tech industry has become, and VR is that channel.
That doesn't seem a huge stretch to me. Apple has always tried to be on the leading edge in novel human-computer interaction hardware: the mouse, the touch screen, the pocket computer, the wrist computer...
Their current version/vision perhaps is yes. But they're still the market leaders (Although Apples problem with innovation procrastination when market leaders is frustrating).
I guess we have to wait for competition here before we see things move faster(particularly better human interfacing etc). All in all they shoot to the expectations of their users. (And the competition simply plays catch up)
Im waiting for the "total recall" (the new one) style hand/pane/internal projections but that might skip watches and go straight to a neuralink thing.
The wrist computer doesn't make sense to me. Why is every manufacturer so focused on having the same capabilities of a smartphone on a smartwatch? Shouldn't a smartwatch be a complement of the smartphone? Like, take out the cellular, microphone, maybe even WiFi and speaker (just give it a tiny one for beeping), give it a very energy efficient SoC with very limited GPU capabilities, an OLED (or AMOLED) display that is always on with white/gray on black time driven by a low power circuit, and the rest is just sensors and battery. All processing is done in the phone and they're connected via Bluetooth LE, the watch just collects health and movement data, and the battery lasts at least a week.
Why would anyone reply to a text from a watch, when their paired phone is in their pockets? Or listening to music from a watch with a 200mAh battery? Are we stupid?
And I'm not implying the screen only shows time, but it just shows the data in real time and let's you configure things, apps are limited and most things are white on black, again, battery is #1. My wristwatch lasts over a year and shows the time without having to flick or touch it.
You get texts/emails on watch so you can glance at your watch and read it without pulling out your phone.
You don’t listen through your watch but use it as a more convenient interface to change a song/playlist.
The test use case is while you are driving because you can talk to it and it will type out what you’re saying well. Rather than pulling out your phone and trying to text back.
It also monitors vitals and steps. It is also handy when I forget my phone in the car and I need to text or make a quick call.
I clearly haven't, can you elaborate? I thought the steam deck was near universally lauded for it's open and hackable software, repairable hardware and competitive pricepoint.
Is there some privacy news or other scandal I've missed?
Full disclosure, I say this having spent days playing my Steam Deck now.
It's a hardware channel to deliver you an ad platform selling you video games. Steam has better vertical integration (they are selling the games they are advertising), but it's the same idea. I haven't seen Steam OS telemetry reports, but I would expect they're basically the same as every other tech player. The platform _is_ open and hackable, but the OS is immutable and it's still an ad device.
I also have a Steam Deck, and I should make it clear the "ads" are the usual Steam Store stuff - entirely voluntary (you don't see ads for games unless you visit the Store page) and non-intrusive.
I think there's a world of difference between showing people ads for games when they visit a store page voluntarily, and showing people ads in their social media feed when what they want is to see their friends' updates.
I find it very weird as well. So a store shouldn't show products it sell? Only allow them to be searched?
I understand being anti-add, but we are talking about store here selling and distributing products. Which makes reasonable attempt to serve relevant suggestions to user. Of new games or games that are somewhat based on what users have already played or followed.
Now if Steam store was showing third-party advertisements I would be on barricades.
And no one actually forces you to use the Steam on Steam Deck it is linux box with root access in place...
I am absolutely astonished. Up until now I was absolutely sure that Valve was purely a charity. /s
Seriously though. Can we have some nuance in the debate about advertising? Surely the bit we object to is the invasive, privacy and democracy-eroding tracking - not the concept of advertising itself?
True, and it isn't just hate for the sake of hate. I would like to have a device like that (not for meetings, god forbid, but I'd like to read without having to hold a book in by hands, or to watch a 360° 3D movie, you know), but I'm just not gonna buy it from Facebook. To clarify, I'm not gonna buy it from any company that will require me to sign-up and log-in somewhere to use the device I bought.
Maybe they didn’t require ID, but for the first year(s) they did require a valid college, and then business domain in your email at sign up so it was really anon as you’re making it out to be.
I’m glad you pointed this out, it seems to have been a lost fact. When I got my fb account it was when fb was still adding schools a chunk at a time, mine happened to be one of them. My friends who went to schools not yet “in” or didn’t go to school at all we’re quite jealous. This span of time lasted less than a year but part of the initial draw of fb was the exclusive nature of it.
I never understood the hate for Facebook. Everytime someone points out their reasons, usually it has major flaws in 1) Inconsistency 2) Hypocrisy 3) Ideological bias 4) Bandwagoning.
So if someone wants to hate Facebook, if they have principled position, I respect that. But that's hardly ever the case in my experience online and offline.
I am not a fan of most social media companies, but I love the tech scene, and the progress Meta is making in this field. Should be universally applauded even by the harshest critics of Facebook.
I don’t think “progressing in a field” is worthy of applause if you’re just going to use that progress to hurt people. Technology doesn’t just magically make peoples lives better, sorry but the cats out of the bag on that one.
Well maybe you never had the need for privacy. Fine with you, not fine by most people. Or you are oblivious how previously quite good tool for integration with remote friends and family got progressively worse to the point where its utter ad-infested and bug-infested piece of crap (to be fair FB was having tons of bugs since beginning, they just didn't improve on that front, I can easily hit 3-5 of them within a minute of casual use - latest firefox with ublock origin).
No company sliding down so much has received much love. Not sure what is there to not understand. Oh yes and owner is clearly an amoral person with strong sociopathic traits hellbent on making humanity worse off long term, not unique but the same applies and compounds.
No amount of self-serving VR progression or some open source libs can anyhow annulate that. Morals is something a lot of people value, and lack of it gets appropriate reactions.
The word "dystopia" (according to Google Trends at least) had a large spike worldwide in November 2016 and has been consistently trending higher than pre-November 2016 ever since. Trump (or probably just general events around then) did something to the Anglosphere net that definitely made it more negative and cynical.
It’s all just pure facebook hate. I remember some of same people who today trash vr and anything coming out of meta-RL were literally drooling at totally absurd incomplete and awful VR demos at GDC 7 or 8 years ago at a time when I really thought VR was totally unusable and unplayable.
Now that the tech is actually nice enough that it is usable and sometimes even actually better for certain things folks are just jumping on the hate fb bandwagon.
You’re absolutely right that most people here haven’t even tried some of this stuff. Personally I never gave VR a thought myself but my brother wanted a quest so I bought one, now I have my own and am looking forward to trying what’s next.
Most people on HN aren’t trying VR because HN’s users are aging like Slashdot’s user base years back. A lot of HN comments on VR are simply variants of “get off my lawn”. You’d think people would actually try something for a decent amount of time before panning it with a novella length comment. If I were to guess, most HN users have only tried Google Cardboard and not modern VR
On that note, I understand why people dislike meta even if they’re making really cool stuff, but people have to realize that Meta isn’t the only VR company. I have a feeling that only Apple can change the popular perception of VR
I have tried it and it is a pretty cool experience. But I understand the rants, not a matter of age btw. Facebook is for old people for that matter and developing against any META hardware would have to take that into consideration.
But the closed environments are just majorly repellant. I had an older headset (rift s) and suddenly needed to create a facebook account. Should have bought the more expensive Steam version. But I don't see how VR can really reach the masses. You need the extra funds and a decent system and 2D monitor is the more sensible investment.
I will never buy an Occulus device again of course. There were management decisions anyone who really likes technology and wants to dabble with it will very likely and understandably hate with a burning passion. A passion sourced in the love for technology and the ability to share it. And they knew that people would dislike it, just hoped they would comply in switching to their Facebook platform.
This is 100% on Facebook and to 0% on grumpy users. Not being grumpy is pretty naive in my opinion.
> But I don't see how VR can really reach the masses.
The same exact way every technology gets adopted by the masses: it gets cheaper, faster, and better. I really don’t understand why people are suddenly forgetting this tenet of technology. Oh and btw Meta isn’t the only VR company. Despite the name, meta cannot fully own the metaverse since it’s essentially VR over the internet. I still don’t understand how so many technical people can fall for the marketing
> I still don’t understand how so many technical people can fall for the marketing.
Because if you're predisposed to hating new technology or generally thinking technology causes more harm than good, then you'll look for the weakest interpretation of a new development and use that to get angry.
For all the angry ranters in this thread it's the idea that Meta will be the only company to do VR hardware and software ("I mean it's their name for god's sake!"). In reality Horizon Worlds is definitely the runner-up with stalwarts like VRChat and Second Life that actually have mindshare across multiple platforms and headsets. Immersed is the better app for productivity right now, Workrooms is pretty new. Horizon is playing catch-up. Companies like HP and Apple are making headsets. The market is just getting started. But the idea of a healthy, competitive, VR market with lots of choice doesn't fit the narrative around evil technology so nobody wants to make that point.
Cheaper faster and better is insufficient: it needs compelling use cases. And we keep tuning into Mark waiting for him to demonstrate compelling uses cases and... crickets.
And bluntly, instead of talking about compelling, awesome use cases you appear to have nothing to say about that because you assert that HN users haven't tried VR headsets. In my case (and I believe for many readers), that is untrue.
There are compelling use cases like being able to play ping pong with your sibling who lives thousands of miles away. The same applies to watching movies and playing board games. It’s next gen zoom at the very least due to the presence it provides. You’d know that if you just tried it instead of dismissing it and coming up with bad assumptions due to a lack of data. Meta isn’t the only VR company and it won’t be the last. Everyone is too fixated on not seeing the forest for the trees immediately in front of you
I would argue a lot of the HN crowd is exactly the type to be first adopters of tech, VR in particular since it really is different from anything else and the technical know-how is super helpful in getting things to run (HN users would probably not be intimidated).
But a lot of HN users are old enough to remember Meta's (Facebook) catastrophic privacy issues and know better than to let Meta into a huge portion of our life such as work infrastructure.
It is pretty amazing that Apple gets to pull the "we're the good guys" while their market is affluent people able to spend 1k+ on hardware. They call their ad-tech "user tailored experience" and label FB's as "tracking".
Meanwhile FB provides free services to two billion people and get to be the scapegoat for NYT and Apple. Yes, they sell adds--just like the entire media landscape going back hundreds of years.
FB doesn't just "sell ads". They do their best to snoop on users (and non-users) in every context they can to better target advertising. And there's no easy way to say "stop tracking me". I think it's perfectly reasonable to be a little miffed about that.
20 years ago we called software designed to do this kind of thing "spyware". How did it get normalized to the point that people defend it?
And regarding the comparison to traditional media: if the NYT had a PI following me around every day, I wouldn't trust them either.
Most companies selling ads have to do tracking in order to insure their customers are actually getting what they paid for with their marketing campaigns instead of having fake bot views. I’m not entirely sure how Apple can avoid that and still appease its ad customers
You’re not wrong, and I’m definitely an Apple fan at the moment. I just don’t see how they can’t start tracking us if they want their new ads division to succeed. As a customer, I’m a little worried about this new division.
Is there public demographic data on HN users? My expectation, based on comments, would be that HN is skewing younger over time. Certainly it's gotten more popular over time, so a static, aging demographic seems unlikely to me.
Given the larger trends in the demographics of every developed country, I highly doubt it. Nearly every population is now skewed towards the older generations as becoming a larger and larger demographic due to longer lifespans and much lower birthrates. I do not feel that HN is safe from this trend
For what it's worth, you're at least right about me; I truly hate fb, and their simple involvement in a product is sufficient reason not to purchase it unless it's been thoroughly broken by the modding community.
I'm right with you there. Hating and boycotting FB and all their products is the clear ethical choice.
I sincerely hope the company goes out of business.
Same here, I don't get the whataboutism some folks here try to spin off, like we are some luddites shaming VR concept itself.
No, its purely FB, clearly long-term amoral company, that gets all the (well deserved) hate. I stand behind the statement that humankind is worse-off long-term with FB existing and trying to get into all aspects of our existence to sell more ads.
I wouldn't care about it at all if US had good regulators re privacy and other aspects of these sneaky corporations. But it clearly doesn't, cash flow is the king, hence one should be reasonably warry of such behavior, with company wielding so much power.
The above more or less applies also to ie Google and Apple, but based on behavior FB is in its own category.
I don't think so. I've tried it. It's definitely the next big "thing" I wanna spend on. But this isn't it. And as a gamer I strongly feel Meta isn't the company that's gonna give me "it".
I'd rather back another horse for $1500. And as a consumer base, none of us are obliged to be fangirls for Meta given their track record.
More than a decade I was a young teen dreaming of immersive experiences offered by the wii. I can even say with some specificity that I thought RED STEEL 2 was going to be the most amazing game ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Steel_2
It's a pretty good title! It's a better VR game than most actual VR games. The control scheme has some interesting motion sword and gunplay. Plus you can turn and dash without getting motion sick because its on a tv. Look at the fighting gameplay. See how much better it is than Half Life Alyx and Boneworks?
But, the immersive quality of red steel 2 fades pretty quickly. As does Alyx and boneworks. Because... it sucks. VR asks you to believe you're in a world, like in ready player one. But you're not. None of the little things are there. It's just a camera on your face with better wii wands.
Having understood this, it's pretty clear that the best possible resolution headset will not fundamentally change the VR experience. Maybe text will be easily readable. That would be nice. But the experience Meta wants you to believe you'll have won't be coming any time soon.
VR 7-8 years ago wasn't gated behind a store and large EULA, and the people in charge hadn't announced their intent to not just monopolize and monetize social VR spaces, but also workspaces.
There was still reason to be excited and hopeful about the future of VR.
I'll wait to get excited if the Index is updated. And until then I'll keep using my low res low FOV first gen Vive. Exclusively to hit boxes.
You make it sound like it is all gated behind an app store now somehow. Which is not the case at all.
On my quest 2 headset, I can play games from oculus store, I can also play any steamvr/pcvr games on quest 2 (connected to the desktop PC by a cable or in wireless mode), as well as any user-built application .apk files dowloaded to my headset directly (either from the headset's web browser or transferred from PC). All on the official firmware, no jailbreaking or any special steps needed to make this work.
Not sure how this is even remotely representative of some app store gating.
I’ve read of people getting their Facebook accounts banned and losing their oculus store purchases. But now they use a meta account so that issue shouldn’t happen as often. Because the bans were happening because the attached Facebook account was inactive.
But you could always make a new account and play your steam games
I still prefer a product that works independent of needing to sign in (and share a bunch of data, some of it biometric), but I'm glad they fixed the google-like ban blast radius at least.
I had access to Oculus dev kits back in the day and am now a Valve Index owner, which means that
1. I've been closely following VR for almost 10 years now
2. I've invested some money for the best VR hardware available (at the time).
My take on Facebook and why I am fully on board with the skepticism here:
- VR hardware, at least on the higher end, is pretty good. It has been "there" for many possible applications at least in terms of fidelity since ~2019. VR being so uninteresting is mostly a software problem in my opinion, not a hardware problem, even if the hardware development is important to make adoption more realistic without the need to invest a ton of money.
- The novelty of VR wears off rather quickly. I barely use my VR hardware nowadays, and right now I can't imagine a scenario in which VR makes anything in my everyday life easier and more efficient, quite the opposite. While I don't doubt that it will happen, I very much doubt that Facebook will be involved in the next important step forward. They are just too out of touch with reality (outside of the investor/silicon valley/zuckerberg bubble) for that.
- The software is just lacking, and everything Facebook is presenting when it comes to software is in many ways a step back compared to VR products from as early as 2014 (e.g. VR Chat)...Acting as if Facebook is pushing anything forward here is just naive following of buzzwords at best, dishonest parroting of marketing talk at worst.
- Anything a company like Facebook might plan with VR is just uninteresting, because it will ultimately have dark patterns, manipulation and monetization baked into its very core, be it directly or indirectly.
Rather than developing VR as a "next step" in personal computing, Facebook is just racing to build an ad infested dystopian walled garden as fast as they can, why would I get excited about that in the slightest?
I'm still generally very interested in VR, but the only thing I'll get excited about is VR device from a manufacturer that doesn't have backstabbing me as his ultimate goal and will base all his decisions on being Facebook.
And yes, I still remember "Oculus won't require a Facebook Sign-In", and while that has been reverted for now, I won't believe for a second that the people working at Facebook aren't eager to get something equivalent back as soon as enough users are on board.
I believe the visceral pushback is happening because this is a perfect example of a technology and platform that should not be. And most people instinctively sense that.
We need more humanity, care for ourselves and others, more love and connection to humans and everything surrounding us, to experience what it means to be alive and being a part of the universe. This tech aims to isolate us even more than we already are, through its fundamental design. When you put human values above the maniacal quest of a boy billionaire for relevance and power, you come to the conclusion that this is the entirely wrong path.
The overall goal is the exact opposite of what you're saying here. Just about every single person I've ever talked to in this industry wants to build devices to bring human beings together across space + time. Allowing folks to see each other eye to eye and form real human connections where otherwise it would be impossible. XR is probably the least isolating technology in history if you consider what it can do in terms of breaking down boundaries of time, distance, ability, and appearance. It is the most humanistic of any technology I've ever used in my life, in the way that it's explicitly designed to bridge human, emotional connections where none could exist before. Just one of many perspectives...
> Just about every single person I've ever talked to in this industry wants to build devices to bring human beings together across space + time.
This is admirable, but unless they also have some ideas about how to keep such a service running the funding model is going to default to advertising. And advertising has a corrosive impact on free-expression (can't allow anything untoward to happen next to an ad) and community (is this person being genuine or are they selling something?).
With internet revenue models being what they are, I don't see VR social experiences going in a good direction at the moment. Maybe if we had a good p2p technology for hosting/joining VR worlds so these things could be community-run there would be hope. But every popular VR application I know of is hopelessly centralized and subject to the same market forces that made social media such a mess.
If recent history is taken into account, the goal of anything in this space is, or will ultimately turn out to be, engagement. “Social” platforms today are unhealthy places as is. Do you really think another layer of abstraction away from a common reality will turn out to “bridge human, emotional connections where none could before”? I’m curious: what exactly are you referring to?
I do see potential applications in fields like 3D-enhanced medical imaging, as highly specialized tools for professionals. But not as a general tool or device.
Long-term, I find it more likely that people who can escape into a convincing, curated reality, will do so with increasing frequency and in turn stop caring about their surroundings. Because we’re human primates and not responsible enough to deal with complex change like this yet.
Not sure if any technology can make something real or less isolating.
You can mimic with with audio, video conferencing and now XR but it's till fake bits which can be manipulated by you know who or make you pay or watch ads which is what it will be. Should have named it Adverse.
Yeah, and Facebook was always about connecting ppl.
You are working Ina capitalistic system, the only motive for your company is profit for shareholders.
When you are small and inconsequential, other motives might rule. But the trajectory is clear.
If you succeed, your company turn into a paper clip machine for which humans are just meat for the grinder.
This is how it always plays out.
As opposed to what? A communist system where it's run by spotless, selfless bureaucrats? Do you have an alternative to our capitalistic system that results in lower corruption?
You're really leaning your entire arm on the scale here.
People have a visceral reaction to the implication that donning a computer on your head and interacting via Corporate Memphis styled cartoon avatars is any sort of future that we should seek. It's that simple.
That video of a woman sitting lifelessly at her table while her avatar engages in hearty expressive conversation puts a lump of discomfort in my throat. It's a repulsively dystopian outcome for social interaction, but Meta wants to sell it as a future we're missing out on.
People do not like that. I've followed VR since it's infancy, owned most of the major headsets, used it in an office environment, and I will say while VR is cool, the promise of the metaverse is deeply offensive to the senses of most people, myself included.
The worst moment for me was after working by myself in VR logging in to a shared workspace and having a dude, muted, sat on the couch next to me. It loaded me in unmuted by default and I was talking to myself about what was happening.
It wasn’t at all clear that he was muted and I was unmuted and his hands were moving disconcertingly near where his body should have been. I started describing him to someone irl and his weird avatar head turns slowly toward me, hands still pulsating.
I said something like “uh shit I think he can hear me…?” and his floating weird head glitchily nodded, fingers creeping across his torso the whole time.
I logged out. That was it. So many things wrong I’m not sure I could find any reason why I’d try that again.
So you had one bad experience in the immature stage of early development of a technology.
I don't understand how you extrapolate that to the entirety of every possibility it will ever have to offer. Yes Zuckerberg's metaverse vision is weird and creepy. But the underlying tech that is being developed to enable it to exist is transformational. The use cases will develop from what suceeds and people actually like. You could just as easily have painted a dystopian picture of people staring blankly at their iPhones walking down the street instead of talking to the person next to them.
Some people seem to be defending VR itself vs my comment on the metaverse. I use VR a fair bit. I’m not excited specifically about the co-working/social use cases.
Presentations can be really cool.
I won’t get into whether the current state of smartphone use is or isn’t dystopian, at least not on HN.
The previous comment reminds me of how older people used to describe the internet when it was slowly gaining traction. It’s obvious that there were a lot of rough edges, but it would be really short sighted not to see the future potential. The same thing happened to the first smart phones.
The www did things better than anything that already existed. Many things it offered were both massively useful and simply not exist before.
What exactly does "Metaverse" improve? What does it offer to the business world that cannot already be done?
And are these improvements worth a 1799$ Price-Point per employee, plus all the work & expenses imposed by integrating this into existing structures, and making sure its compliant to regulations and company rules?
And are these improvements worth enough to the employees themselves so they will be willing to wear a headset for 8h a day (Especially in labour markets that already face a supply problem)?
One of the many benefits that the metaverse introduces is immersion into virtual presences. You’d realize this if you ever tried anything more than Google cardboard. That’s not to say that VR doesn’t have many temporary downsides that will be addressed with tech improvements, but to not see its potential is the same way the internet was treated by older folks in the last century
> The www did things better than anything that already existed.
Older folks didn’t realize this since they waited a long time to actually try it, similar to how older folks treat VR today
Still, your statement on the internet was not true especially when it came to low res videos and many other flaws which we have since addressed over time. Back then surfing the internet also tied up a household’s main form of communication.
You seem to me to be conflating the metaverse, which is what I was talking about, with VR, which is how I got into it.
I didn’t come late to any of these parties. There are some cool experiences in VR, including what you mentioned.
The internet was immediately transformative, though. There was no video, never mind the resolution. There was no audio. You waited minutes if not an hour for an image-heavy page to load. I loved it immediately.
Syncing up with a headset on in a shared coffee shop with hands and fingers is not a technology problem. It is down to not understanding the medium. My reaction was to this shortcoming in the makers of the product (in this case Immersed) and by extension Facebook’s vision of social.
We have no shortage of ways to simultaneously edit things. The idea that collaborative work in VR, which is currently already hard to work in, is the driving use case of VR adoption, especially in a “social” way, does not seem likely to me.
What’s the term for needlessly carrying over phenomenological cruft from a previous technology experience? Like analog dials on a digital touchscreen. VR (and whatever the metaverse will be) are stuck in it. They can come into their own only when something truly better (and probably unique to the medium) appears.
Right now the most interesting thing from VR for me is the use of its immersivity in psychological research.
> You’d realize this if you ever tried anything more than Google cardboard.
I have a quest2, and I think its a fantastic piece of hardware. I am having tons of fun with it and use it every day.
For gaming.
Because in gaming, immersion into the world is something I cherish and want, and am willing to spend money on.
I am not looking for immersion into a spreadsheet, or my source code.
There, I look for information density, ease of navigation, searchability, tooling, interoperability, the ability to share and collaborate quickly and efficiently, and to make my intentions available for processing by machines.
My question is: Which of these priorities does VR enhance, in what way, over the existing technology?
I am not looking for "social immersion" when drawing a diagram. I am looking for getting information into and out of systems quickly and efficiently.
And I already have "infinite canvases" in drawing apps, at least until my systems 64GB of RAM are full. What I don't have, and also don't want (because I cannot see how this would increase my productivity), is the necessity to walk around my room or perform gestures with controllers to navigate said canvas (or desktop), when I can do the same with a quick and precise flick of my mouse or a keyboard-shortcut.
> am not looking for "social immersion" when drawing a diagram.
"social immersion" was quick wording to say “working on a viseo diagram with someone else in a shared semi-physical space”. This is better than a flat zoom session.
> And I already have "infinite canvases" in drawing apps
No, because it’s not the same. You can’t see as much of it as you can in VR. There’s a difference in having that workspace visible all around you vs having it trapped inside a small 28” monitor
It’s really hard to believe that you’ve even used VR for even gaming just based on your comments. You don’t seem to have experienced breaking out of a flat 2d screen. You really have to try it before making a lot of poor assumptions
Why? What specifically makes it better as in more efficient, faster, easier to use? I am not using Viseo specifically for making diagrams, but the applications we use allow for collaborative editing. If my colleague wants to show me something he just draws it on his screen and I see the edits in real time. I also see a location indicator of his mouse.
How does seeing his avatar in a virtual space improve upon this? Does it offer me more information density? Is the information easier to digest? Is it easier to edit the diagram?
> You can’t see as much of it as you can in VR.
I can see my entire workspace if I want, I just have to zoom out. Sure, I can't see details then. The same is true for seeing something in some distance in a virtual space. So what difference does it make in that regard?
It’s called “presence”. There are just some things where being in a shared space is better for than pancake Zoom calls. You would know this if you actually tried VR.
> I can see my entire workspace if I want, I just have to zoom out. Sure, I can't see details then
“Why do I want to use VOIP when I can make a telephone call?”
“What makes a word processor way better than a typewriter?”
“Why do I need a car when I can ride my horse?”
Yes but it’s not in six degrees of space, it’s flat unlike in VR, and it’s trapped inside a small rectangular flat screen
You claim that you have used VR extensively, but I highly doubt it based on your comments. I shouldn’t have to repeatedly explain concepts like presence or 3D space that should be basic knowledge for someone already familiar with VR.
This is a pointless conversation when you refuse to try modern VR. What really puzzles me is why you seem to need to lie about using VR.
> and it’s trapped inside a small rectangular flat screen
Why is that a problem when we are talking about flat diagrams, spreadsheets or text?
> You claim that you have used VR extensively, but I highly doubt it based on your comments.
It's precisely because I have used it extensively that I make these comments. Presence and the ability to project content into a virtual 3D space that is experienced by direct interaction is a great technology if it is presenting content that benefits from this representation.
Interactive movies benefit from this. Virtual Walks through great landscapes or museums do. Virtual Art exhibits do.
Games do, perhaps more than any other area. I have literally spent hours in "Tales from the galaxys edge" just walking around the Cantina playing repulsor-dart or sitting with friends around a fire in "A Townships Tale", exactly because this is an immersive experience where the presentation through this technology has tangible benefits over experiencing it, as you say, on "a small rectangular flat screen".
And I can absolutely see this technology have a great impact in non-entertainment areas; Controlling robots in dangerous work environments. Helping maintenance personal with difficult tasks through AR devices. Training of personnel. Architecture comes to mind, designing complex machinery, 3D design in general.
But spreadsheets? Flow diagrams? Source code editing? Wearing a headset to sit through meetings? How do these applications benefit from this mode of representation?
That sanitized corporate dystopia wants to have the same restrictions, scarcity and limitations as real life.
The theory: you could let you explore limitless worlds only bound by your imagination and current compute power.
Current meta vision: Horrible outdated corporate cartoon graphics so you can go to a bland sanitized online store to buy an NFT picture of some shoes, and look at a horrible cartoon representation of the Eiffel tower.
Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable though. It could be the same as starting zoom.
Like, at this price point, and with these features that isn’t it, but I can see it in a non-dystopian way.
It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me.
> "It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me."
This is the key part. VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat. It's not just hardware that is interchangeable and multi-use with pluggable things and apps. I think a lot of the people weary of Facebook's VR headset would be put at ease to a large degree if this was an 100% open ecosystem where just one of Facebook's entities is providing the hardware.
> VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat
Thats not what happened. One of the biggest walled gardens spent a tiny portion of their massive wealth to move into another market by purchasing the market leader.
Its this behaviour that needs to stop. Corps should be restricted to a single trade category.
I dont need to come up with one - they already exist in the form of trademark (WIPO NCL) classification.
I suppose the hardware would be class 28, the app store would be class 35, there are other classes that would be applicable too given they also provide services, etc.
Preferably they would be even more granular than that - I believe the chinese system is a bit more detailed in that area.
> Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable
... are a minority vastly overrepresented by the website we're on.
The company I worked at during the bulk of the pandemic let us all expense headsets to have meetings.
Getting into VR the first time is not a seamless experience in the slightest, so trying to get serious work done in meetings took weeks because of the mix of experience levels.
Then there was the fact that at the end of the day we live in a flat 2D world of software. Trying to hit touch targets meant for a mouse with a magic wand is maddening.
Then there's just the entire uncanniness of avatars that we're nowhere near solving. VR avatars are consistently forced to take on cartoonish proportions because we can't render convincing customizable human avatars on these headsets and won't be near that any time soon. Same goes with the backdrops, which end up being "infected" with the cartoonishness to avoid clashing.
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But you know what the death knell was for our VR use? At the end of the day, even at its best, it was the same as starting Zoom.
For non-enthusiasts it needs to be stomping Zoom.
They don't want to strap a screen to their face just to do the stuff that they were doing by sitting in front of a laptop. At the end of the day, it was "ok enough", and that was precisely why it fizzled out. General apathy at the fact that, this was not an improvement of exactly what we had been doing for months before, was enough to get people suggesting zoom the moment an issue cropped up, and eventually we all just dropped the headsets.
Re: usage for work. I wonder how using VR googles can actually work in any sort of public space (like an office). Since your vision is absolutely obscured, it basically requires absolute trust of the people around you. Other people can not only steal your wallet from your bag (that could still happen in a regular office, people leave private stuff unattended), but can for example come close to you and touch your hair or do other kinds of pervy things. I can't imagine women not being worried about this.
A solution would be to give each employee a tiny office with a door and a lock, which wouldn't be a bad outcome of VR to be honest...
The headsets have cameras on the outside your vision can "pass through" and you can see the world around you - just with virtual objects in it. This gives you a mixed reality experience rather than a virtual world. So for example you see the cafe around you but with you laptop screen hovering above the table and your australian friend bob sat on the other side.
One of the big feature improvements on this unit is that those cameras area lot better.
Another feature is that the headset uses some kind of lidar to map out the space around you, so that even if you are in an immersive experience objects and people coming into the real world area you marked out will get overlayed into your virtual world, so you can see bob sneaking up behind you.
These headsets are pretty cool and the consumer one is pretty cheap. Well worth getting one even if you are intending to sell it on after experimenting.
I am a connoisseur of VR from back when you could count the polygons on 3D models. I am definitely an enthusiast, and even got lucky enough to develop some VR applications (mostly for HTC Vive). So I'm definitely all in on VR!
But I'm all out when it comes to Meta and Facebook, who have repeatedly proven they are simply a bad actor. The gross privacy negligence, the disgusting mistreatment of their users and advertisers alike, and being a major factor in today's terrible social issues, Meta is a huge net negative for humanity.
They can hand those out for free, and I will still not take it. I am done feeding them data. I want no part of their ecosystem, even by proxy. It doesn't even matter what the product does - I will not take it from Meta.
I realize some people here work for Meta and it's not personal. But you must encounter this opinion from time to time. I have friends who work at Meta and it's incredible to see how they brace for impact every time they tell someone where they work. I feel bad for them, but Meta earned this notorious reputation with noticeable effort.
HN generally had good SNR. However when it comes to certain things remotely involving a controversial party, it can inspire lots of off topic/uninteresting/uninformative commenting. Just have to tune it out. Anywho, I totally agree that whatever happens with the metaverse doesn’t make their R&D any less valuable—-motion handling, their work into optics, neuronal signal decoding and a bunch of other multidisciplinary areas of research they’re reaching into. It’s really cool to see some of the things out of Meta AI/Reality Labs, and I hope they continue keeping things open.
> I'm baffled by the reaction here. I agree that productive VR work is still not ready for prime time, but most of you haven't tried any of this (let alone the new hardware) and you're already dismissing even the possibility of it becoming good in the future. Reminds me of the Dropbox thread. You know which one.
This is Hacker News' reaction to almost every new thing that isn't already several years past the early adopter end of the curve (crypto, VR, a lot of bio). The community has become a bit stiff and conservative, for a tech community.
I’d argue that naive tech-positivity has run its course and more initial believers are sobering up to the reality of what kind of monsters this debonair optimism helped create.
Yes I hate Meta but that’s not the reason for my opposition towards this. Even Microsoft announced an integration and I don’t hate that company.
In aggregate, company's are pouring billions of dollars and who know how many person hours into VR meetings. Engineers are a limited resource. Investment is a limited resource. This could be going towards trying to solve many more useful problems.
I see people talking about the immersiveness being the biggest selling point. That's so true for video games but do people really think immersion is what's missing with remote work? I've been a fully remote employee for many years. It's the real time chat, drastically improved document collaboration, and video conferencing that has made the biggest impact. I've never yearned to be taken out of the coffee shop I'm working in or my home office and transported to a virtual conference room where I have to physically move my arms and head just like the real world.
Just because some tech works for one use case doesn't mean it does for another. Our touch screens are great on a phone. Terrible in a car where you need to be able to control things without focusing your eyes on it.
People look at this new tech and are flying to it because it's the new shiny thing. If you're in this group, think about what a marvel a screen, keyboard, and mouse are. You only twitch your eyes and barely move your hands and fingers at all. Yet, you can rapidly type, switch between totally different applications, scroll huge canvases of interfaces, etc all while barely expending any energy at all. That's that I call efficiency.
> Also what I really don't understand is how anyone can have anything against them spending $$$ on R&D? Worst case scenario: their whole productivity angle doesn't work out, they lose billions upon billions in the coming decade and eventually scrap the whole thing.
Err well people who own Meta, which is likely a lot of people here through shares, investment funds, pensions, probably don’t want that do they?
I think the metaverse is something very cool and for it to be associated with Facebook which comes across as a toxic company causes resentment. Something cool and futuristic that I've read and dreamed about has been tainted before coming to fruition because of who is making it.
I hear great things about the headsets but I just dont trust the company that makes them.
I a not dismissing the possibility of it becoming "good" (as in "works well technically"). Throw enough money and talent at almost any technical problem, and the solution can become "good".
I doubt a wide adoption in the market. Just because something new has been created doesn't mean the market will adopt it. It has to have a tangible advantage. If it is meant to replace something, like existing workflows and methods it needs to have an advantage so massive, that it isn't just better than what exists already, but is worth the cost of any transitions as well.
And I just don't see that.
Why would I wear a device, that is still big even in its newest incarnation, on my head when I have 3 ultra-high-definition monitors? Why would I use controllers when I have a mouse, keyboard and a touch-sensitive screen? I already have video chat, speech recognition, chat, mail etc. at my disposal. I already have all these forms of communication on a device that fits in my pocket for when I'm out of office. I already have all these things, and they work, they are configured, they are integrated in my employers existing infrastructure, workflows, methods, they are compliant with whatever regulations apply, they are tried, tested and budgeted for.
I mean, how would I even make the case for this to my employer? "Hey, Mr. CEO sir, my team needs devices that we have never used before in this company, to do exactly what we do now, except you would be able to watch our avatars sitting in front of virtuals screens while we do it, that is, if you wear one as well. Btw. the thing costs 1799 $ per employee."
There are more important problems than low latency rendering pipelines in the world that they could be solving instead.
What Meta is doing, is creating themselves a platform where they can sell ads, because they've been hurt by recent privacy changes by Apple and fear the market share of Google Chrome.
> Reminds me of the Dropbox thread. You know which one.
I didn't see the thread until later but back then I thought the Dropbox was a sucker that I was taking advantage of because I could get extra 50 MB or whatever by just walking up to someone in my dorm and referring them to use Dropbox, even if they had no intention to continue using Dropbox...
I want to be less naive now. Facebook (it doesn't deserve the Meta name) will NEVER, EVER do anything for "good". I believe it simply is not capable of doing any "good". We cannot let Facebook be the gatekeepers of a pay toilet, much less the (purported) future of our communications.
Back to the topic though, I thought xbox kinect was trying to solve all of these problems a long time ago with just a couple of cameras. what happened?
You earned my upvote with the PKD 3SOPA reference.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Luckey: an evil alt-right-wing extremist pulling the wool over people’s eyes with his robotic right hand, artificial eyes, and steel teeth, who returned from an expedition to the Prox system in possession of a new alien hallucinogen Chew-Z to compete with Can-D, to perpetrate an uncanny creepy plot about adults on drugs playing together with physical miniaturized doll houses in order to escape their dystopian existence by retreating into to a mega-corporation controlled virtual reality.
Don't forget the promise Palmer Luc-- I mean Eldritch makes Mayerson: that Chew-Z offers incredible opportunity to allow formative experiences customized to the user, yet Lucke-- I mean Eldritch is so controlling of the shared hallucination that Mayerson surmises death is the correct course of action.
At least Palmer Eldritch's sister never married a "gaslighting creep" like Matt Gaetz, and he never threw a fundraiser for Dr. Oz where the quack Doctor gave a speech in front of Adolph Hitler's car.
> Then they've still invented a lot of super interesting tech along the way.
Google has also developed a lot of interesting tech along the way. Most of it is junk you can buy for $5 at the Salvation Army now.
The problem with "Meta" is that it's pushing something without any buy-in from an audience that cares about it.
The actual audience for VR is almost completely at the early adopter, 1974 Altair stage. We're at the stage where the enthusiasts are figuring out what works and what doesn't. That's mostly what social interactions will work at first, and what hardware mods are most important to expand those.
As much crap as people give Ready Player One, there's an analogy in there. Facebook is the mega corp trying to take over. They're the "Innovative Online Industries (IOI)" from the novel, a "multinational corporation bent on a well-funded effort to find the Easter egg in order to take control of the OASIS and monetize it." (Direct quote from Wikipedia.)
As a counter example, let me tell you about an early experience I had in Second Life circa 2005 or so.
I got involved with SL for a few years back then. There was one singular critical moment I experienced that convinced me there was something very special happening back then which I really haven't experienced again yet.
In SL your avatar can fly around. Here I am on my low level 2005 pc and low res 2005 monitor with 2005 headphones. I'm cruising around a bit I fly over this hill into one of the weirdest things I had ever seen at that point in my life of 25 years.
I fly over the crest of this hill and run into an amphitheater with a stage. Same thing we've all seen dozens of times in real life. There are dozens of other avatars all in the crowd sitting in different areas of the amphitheater. Most of the audience was oddly wearing furry costumes.
On the stage is a band of other characters, all doing different animations of playing fake instruments.
So the way I'm describing this seems pretty normal these days and nothing impressive. But this was 2005.
What hit me really hard is that these are all real people experiencing the same event AT THE SAME TIME. That was the aha moment.
The band wasn't just npc characters. There was an actual band of 5 or so people together in the real world streaming their show into SL for a bunch of other people from all over the world to watch in real time. Sure, it's like 50 people dressed as sexy foxes and stuff, but they were all witnessing this musical performance in real time through this weird 3rd party virtual interface that very accurately replicated a real world experience in terms of spatial placement and audio (to some extent).
For me, it was this super weird magical moment that gave me a glimpse of what the future actually could be. Everything was built by the people from their avatars to the band people to the person that designed and built the stage and amphitheater. And it was in a shared virtual/physical space where I was able to randomly encounter it just by flying around and crossing a certain hill.
To this day I've probably had a similar AHA moment a handful of times.
Today you can watch bathtub fun time on Twitch, or people begging for subs on YouTube, or people spamming TikTok to promote their SoundCloud accounts.
But none of that comes close to the experience of discovery in 2005 of finding an impromptu rock show in Second Life with furry foxes watching in real-time.
In modern times, I haven't bought a VR headset yet. I've played with it when available, and I've seen a taste of VRChat and some other awesomely weird modern experiences.
I'm firmly convinced that whatever actually ends up becoming "the metaverse" isn't coming from an out of touch older millennial billionaire who took the wrong message from a particular book/movie or it's actual spiritual predecessor Snowcrash.
There's a last sentence here that I tried to write a few times and failed. Weirdos is wrong, so is "alternate thinkers". Young people? That's wrong too because since 2005 Second Life's population of users has been mostly flat but consistent, and they tend to be older tech savvy folks that have used these platforms for decades before they got "popular".
I don't have a label, and that's probably the point. There eventually may be lots of people who dive into "the metaverse", but those people are so diverse that IOI/Meta isn't going to be able to dictate whatever it becomes.
I would be really surprised if they were "inventing" high-dpi displays or new lenses. The likely scenario to me seems that they would just buy what is already available or perhaps pay another shop to customize something for them, not invent a new technology.
What it really seems like they are doing is having a serious case of NIH syndrome and re-writing a bunch of stuff that already exists elsewhere.
People hate it because Facebook has not proven itself to be a good steward of technology, and I think people are more broadly questioning whether we should elevate these companies to stewards of our lives in the first place.
Having tried and used current VR hardware for many hours, often long sessions, I can absolutely see the potential. But the hardware and sofware has a long long way to go. Looking just at Meta and the Meta Quest 2, the top 10-20 apps are the same today as they were a year ago. There are some cool fitness type apps, but for the time being its a novelty and I don't see doing meetings in VR as something I have any need or desire to do once the novelty wears off.
Isn’t it tech policing itself? Meta is structured in a way no one can say no to Zuckerberg. That pretty much leaves only general pushback and outright legislation to counter his judgements. All of them individually and collectively.
So yes a tech forum is alight with negativity. We’re also one of the canaries in the mine that should be listened to in this.
He’s eroded freedoms (misinformation, rampant gaslighting, bullying, etc), invaded peoples privacy, and there’s no remedy but defection.
Meta makes the world a worse place. It always has. The flagship product, FB, was built to creep on women. The sooner Meta dies, the better for our planet.
If the tech is so interesting then why is the "tech specs" tab filled with no substance? I can barely begin to speculate what would make this hardware stand out over the competition, let alone make confident conclusions. The hardware having the potential to be cool isn't a strong point to make because the people selling the hardware aren't even making it.
The last thing people want is more monitoring of their work. VR work, compared to video calls, is more monitoring. You could have checked your phone during video calls which you couldn't do it with VR.
And neither video calls nor VR is proven to be more productive than emails.
There's some truth in that. People are uncomfortable with the thought of becoming (even more?) Mark's serfs and want to dispel that by magically willing the tech into being garbage.
The fact is that in 2022 many parts of bigtech-skeptic narrative are being planted in the mainstream culture and politics: the mature thing would be to lean into that, as a responsible technologist, and not rely on nerdy rituals of thrashing 'ware on forums. As much as it is fun, it serves a different purpose. I mean, if it is dangerous for us as human beings and citizens, just say it aloud, we won't be saved by the tech being buggy.
Myself, I have enough stuff to do in the big screen and audio system world and don't crave VR immersion, though it was fun when I tried. But I can see the potential and know that people are already using it in gaming and virtual workspaces. You can potentially buy one simple thing for your computer, not waste that much space and have the immersive experience. One thing I want is that it is open (software and hardware wise) and not connected to any surveillance machine, like we should be able to expect from a freaking appliance.
I'm a user of Immersed (an VR for productivity app) and I use to code frequently.
I wanted QPro to be a success. I expected at least a reasonable bump in resolution. What was released is just disappointing and I can not justify paying that price point. I would go for Pico4 before of QPro.
Zuck, has wanted to build VR social world for years. How do you see that relating to his other visions /ambitions ? What do you think people will really find meaningful in this VR product 10 years in future?
Cute. Whenever someone wants to defend their dear little niche/dead end product they always make that reference on HN. Similarly on slashdot with the ipod comment. Yet there is a subtlety that every person who makes this broken analogy are missing (apart from the fact, that, well, if someone made a book that kept a record of all instances this analogy was made on HN, it would be hard to miss the fact that.. no, X pet product defended Y times on hn didn't become the next dropbox)
The criticisms against dropbox and the first ipod were nerds who thought there was already, -within the same product category- good enough things, underestimating the importance of things like UI, accessibility, portability (in the case of the ipod when people compared it to the gigantic creative jukeboxes and mp3 CD-R players).
They were criticism targeted at a single product, not an entire category, because no one sane would think there's no use for tools that remotely sync documents, or gives you the ability to listen to your entire music collection on the go. Dropbox and the ipod were great, refined products, but products that stood on the shoulders of giants and markets that were already plentiful by the time they came out. Keeping backups of documents is a need a great amount of people have. People were already listening to portable music when the ipod came out. They were product that did important things better than anyone else on the market, but products that entered markets that were already quite mature. Meanwhile VR as a whole is still a niche.
VR enthusiasts are more like the nerds of old who made fun of dropbox. They have very little understanding of the wants of the general public. Shut yourself in a closed uncanny valley virtual world wearing an uncomfortable headset for hours? This is more like the people who thought rolling your own was better than dropbox.
Zuckerberg is not the next Steve Jobs. If anything, he's the carbon copy of the typical slashdot reader. His mindset is thoroughly alien to the human mind.
>In the Recode interview, Zuckerberg falls back on the term “use case” to describe people using Facebook Live to stream their own suicides in real time. He repeats this characterization, going on to call suicide-streaming a “use” of Facebook Live: “There were a small number of uses of this, but people were using it to…show themselves self-harm or there were even a few cases of suicide.”
This is the sort of people who think the future of humanity is to enclose yourself harder in your little virtual bubble. The everyday man finds this sort repellent.
I love it when people call VR niche. The quest 2 is estimates to have sold a similar number of units to the Xbox X and S combined, and about 3/4 the number of units as the PS5 [1]. It is now a mainstream console.
a mainstream console is used everyday. how many VR headsets are sitting unused on shelves? the volume of sales is far from being the most relevant metric.
It’s great to be excited for the future. Agreed. It’s also good to be cautious about a future where Facebook owns all the Patents to the tech. That sounds like a dystopia to me.
vr is not taking off. the market for VR is growing but still way less than initially expected. and the whole VR for work seems antithetic to companies asking people to go back to the office.
I’m really excited, too, but there are serious issues in Meta’s execution: They really need to get their UX, customer service, and hardware/firmware release processes solid.
It’s foolhardy and expensive to test hardware in prod, especially in a down economy with logistics/resourcing issues, and it’s absolutely nuts to disregard passionate, on-the-hour-Oculus-is-so-great (Boomer) users who’ve thrown thousands into the platform, telling them to delete their Facebook accounts (Facebook accounts they now are now dependent upon) to resolve unverified firmware borkage.
(Also, a more lightweight headset would help get the rest of us there. ;) Where’d ya go, Google Glass?)
Looking at past historical patterns, though, I truly believe a smaller company will emerge from the recession in the next year or two that gets us closer than Meta or any other large company ever has or will.
Also what I really don't understand is how anyone can have anything against them spending $$$ on R&D? Worst case scenario: their whole productivity angle doesn't work out, they lose billions upon billions in the coming decade and eventually scrap the whole thing. Then they've still invented a lot of super interesting tech along the way. High resolution displays, low latency rendering pipelines, novel human interface technologies, high fidelity hand tracking, lightweight and sharp lenses, the list goes on and on. There's lots of applications for each of those things and almost nobody else is willing to spend this much cash for such an uncertain roi. I, for one, am super excited about what the future iterations of this will look like.