The goal of the Metaverse isn't to be wearing something that feels like a VR headset though...
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.
I feel like the person you are replying to will one day be saying "I was right at the time. Those early headsets were a joke. I don't think anybody had a use for them back then". And they would basically be right. As things stand the J curve of hypecycle expectation is up against the wall of unamazing outcomes.
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.
I wonder what would say average people of 19 century when offered to ride a car. Book reading was also not mainstream just as recently. Utility beats everything though.
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.
It is a common trap to think that because an unlikely and successful technology--at the time, now obvious--has become mainstream, all (currently) unlikely technologies will inevitably become mainstream. But it is a way of looking at history that only confirms the biases we may have. Instead, it would be more useful and accurate, both descriptively and prescriptively, to look at life and technology from a statistical perspective.
If VR/AR glasses become no more burdensome than eyeglasses, then you might see more broad adoption. But right now headgear is uncomfortable for work. Even ignoring the weight, if you balance headgear for one position (looking straight ahead) then it is unbalanced for any other tilted position, and it's not like you gain freedom of movement. If anything, you lose some freedom of movement. Plus, taking the gear on and off is (in my experience) more burdensome than getting my phone out of my pocket.
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.
> If VR/AR glasses become no more burdensome than eyeglasses
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.
> friction of getting your phone in and out of your pocket
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.
Average people in developed countries in the 19th century were accustomed to riding in trains and horse carriages. A car wasn't fundamentally much different for passengers.
I'm hanging out for my AR dream: I walk into a room and the gizmo projects the name, organisation and role of every one of my LinkedIn contacts over their head (visible to me only) for any of them in the room. I would put up with considerable physical discomfort for that.
Well, I've noticed an increasing number of people (particularly the younger ones) who have bailed out of dating apps entirely because of the problems that come with them.
There will certainly be at least some places who want those people to buy drinks at their establishment.
To their credit, their headsets support WebXR in their browser so you don't need to use their proprietary frameworks to develop immersive experiences, you can do this using open frameworks like Aframe and Three.js and pure web technologies, and what's more those will also work just fine for desktop and mobile web users, here's an example:
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.
I was going to make a counter point that the tech simply isn't there yet.
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.
The Facebook/Metaverse kerfuffle is more fitted to "first as tragedy (the damage ad-driven social media has done to fabric of society is yet unaccounted for), second as farce (VR was a sad joke from the start—proud owner of the first HTC Vive, used it 10, maybe 12 times in 7? years)". [1]
It's more than that. It comes down to owning a platform.
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.
This. I understood the project as less about the flashy ten-year vision, and more about the same thing that drove Google to build Chrome and Android: not wanting to face lockout from competing platforms.
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.
The reason Meta's VR/AR effort has failed is because they didn't care at the top about making it for current users. The primary focus was for making long-term profitable/business platform too soon. If they had a clue they wouldn't have stalled on the success of the Quest/Quest 2 and made a Quest 3 in time for the next Sept-holiday season. Even late the projected specs for Quest 3 are short of expectations.
My humble opinion is that it's about the AR endgame, and building out the technical capability to get there (via VR mixed reality, wearable devices, etc) AND owning the platform.
I thought it was at best a thing to get a foothold in, not something to rename the company for.
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.
I felt like Zuck thought the rest of the world loved "Ready Player One" as much as he did, and that was about the extent of his market research. Presumably, they thought people would love it so much that the initial offering being visually/functionally sub-standard would not matter so much?
I thought it was Snow Crash. That Facebook coopted the term "metaverse" from that dystopian world told me everything I needed to know about their intentions.
To me this Metaverse thing seems just a nice story to tell people who have no engineering knowledge at all (investors, shareholders et al), and sell them this sci-fi movie idea.
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.
there is no replacement for keeping in touch with friends from far away and yes, remote parts of family, too - fb or insta. I don't go there much anymore because the endless promoted reels drive me insane, but i do miss that aspect of those services.
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 =)...
The ultimate goal of the Metaverse can only be to have something like the Matrix, i.e. have a significant part of the population "jacked in" to the Metaverse most of the time (which would only be the logical continuation of the current state of affairs, with most of us walking around like zombies, constantly looking at our phones). But that would be a bit too dystopian for most people's tastes, so they avoid mentioning it too explicitly...
Carmack has explicitly mentioned that not everyone can have a nice house in a nice place in the real world, but can have one in the metaverse. That’s when I stopped thinking he was so cool. He’s a brilliant engineer, but his political-economy is chilling.
What's ironic is that the Metaverse was originally a utopian ideal within a fictional cyberpunk dystopia, but now we know that centralization of the internet means oppression by governments, surveillance, addiction and corporate mind control, in practice it could only ever be a dystopia within a dystopia, like Zion within the Matrix.
Sure, but if that's the goal then they're failing at the first hurdle, if you want to serve ads, you need space / context that holds people's attention and interest.
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?
The theoretical sci-fi promise of things like the metaverse would be having pretty much everything reality has, but better.
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!
> 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.
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.
That sounds cool - not only for concerts, but also for sports matches etc. But the thing is, why do we need a centralized platform like Facebook, er, Meta, for that? Much better to have an open standard with which everyone can stream a live concert in VR, or offer an application (like Zoom, Teams, ...) for VR meetings? I would say tying VR to Meta is holding it back more than helping to spread the technology...
I'd say you're right in that regard, open standards in this space would be good, but equally having a large player pouring in resources to develop the space can get those efforts off the ground.
To me the whole Metaverse thing felt like Zuck thinking "ok, now I paid two billion for Oculus, I'd better come up with a plan what to do with it to keep the shareholders happy!". And then the plan got out of hand...
2 billion for Facebook isn't particularly a lot of money, I doubt their shareholders would care very much so long as FB continued to be a money printing machine.
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.
Zuckerberg still owns a controlling stake. The only shareholder he has to keep happy is himself.
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.
Magic Leap is a startup also in the "metaverse" space and was supposedly burning $50M / month. And that was actual cashflow, not just the charges and write-downs that comprise much of Meta's number.
A VR headset no, a set of AR glasses yes. What seems to be the issue is that creating usable AR glasses that have the quality of Quest is currently not feasible. Zuckerberg's real gamble was that they could figure out a way to make this happen (maybe they still can).
You also don't want AR glasses. The battery alone is a hassle, add the heating/weight of the device (same issues as VR) and a pinch of motion sickness and the faulty input haptics and you are back to the trusty ol' laptop, if you want to actually get something done, or to the smartphone if you are just consuming content. It's just a bad idea all around, perhaps it's easier to hack the optic nerve and feed images into the brain that way.
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.
AR has its uses though. In the military, for example... imagine a squad of soldiers, with every soldier being digitally linked to a central command station that knows the precise location of each unit. A soldier could then see on their glasses - even at night - where their unit mates are, or get commands and status updates from leadership instead of by (often times barely understandable) radio.
If they can stop themselves from vomiting, maybe [1] [2]. I am more afraid of drone swarms with pytorch object detection obliterating everything in sight [3], or what Geoffrey Hinton said about the self-healing mine field [4].
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."
> what Geoffrey Hinton said about the self-healing mine field
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.
The thing is, do the US have a need for mine grids? You only need mines in a land war scenario as the Ukraine invasion shows at the moment, with Russian mines being the most pressing issue in the expected Ukrainian offensive campaign.
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.
Blue force tracking has been a thing for decades now, so there's nothing new about (relatively) real-time unit tracking and C2 messaging in the field, and there have been multiple stabs at integrating HoloLens into the loop, none successful. (The last effort, Army's IVAS, got shut down by Congress due to reliability and usability problems earlier this year, though DOD hasn't given up on a less-immersive approach.) Where they've seen reasonable success has been in mission planning and simulation, and to a certain degree in technical training; the problems with moving XR systems from controlled spaces into the field have proven essentially intractable to date.
In theory sure. In practice US ground troops are already suffering frequent joint injuries due to the excessive weight of all the electronic equipment and spare batteries they have to carry. An AR headset robust enough for field use won't be light.
I don't want or need AR that the current technological limitations enable, nor do I want a dystopian future where people walking in public with eye-glass cameras filming and scanning everything into some Big-Corp datamining machine without consent.
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.
Just looking at Horizon Worlds makes me wonder if the whole Metaverse thing was just a front to funnel funds into a top secret defense project and if WWIII would be preferable to playing that game.
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!
it sounds like this elderly person is making horrific financial decisions. nearing the end of life and investing in risky equities and changing significant investment allocations after hearing a 12 year old talk
It's pretty clear to me that each successive generation will deliberately pick a different social networks than its parents, and FB is experiencing this generational churn. First it was millennials to Instagram, but Meta also owns IG. Gen Z chose TikTok (and Fortnite), however, neither controlled by Meta, and that's hurting them. The next generation (Gen Alpha) like my daughter will pick something other than TikTok, even if it hasn't been banned by then.
Against most opinions here, I think something like the metaverse can work. The hardware is just not there yet. Once it's a really lightweight device with good enough graphics people will use it.
Your idea of a working metaverse is probably quite different than what the Meta board would call working. Could they fill it with ads and collect even more data about users? Can they build a big moat around it all and control the hardware and software? That’s necessary for them to collect 30% of every transaction.
And the advances in generative AI are a pre-requisite for it.. just imagine people gesturing around in the air trying to create powerpoint presentations using VR/AR glasses - that just doesn't make any sense, no-one will interact with AR that way.
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)
I think this is true too, but the big problem is going to be really, really, really lightweight devices or else projectors that are not wearable at all. Like the weight of probably no more than a baseball cap, or even a pair of ordinary eyeglasses. Heavy, unbalanced, uncomfortable headgear will not be widely adopted no matter how great the metaverse is.
Poor leadership leads to poor results. Everybody knows the emperor (Zuck) has no clothes and it's been known for quite some time. He got lucky, he made a lot of cash. Good for him! Now it's become painfully obvious he has no clue what to do. Why? Because he got lucky.
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.
> Everybody knows the emperor (Zuck) has no clothes and it's been known for quite some time. He got lucky, he made a lot of cash. Good for him! Now it's become painfully obvious he has no clue what to do. Why? Because he got lucky.
> ... 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.
On the flip side, Zuck did see them as a big threat in the messaging area, so buying them was a way to stop making them a threat. I wonder if Zuck saw that WhatsApp could also pivot to social media, apparently people had stopped sharing stuff on FB and started sharing them on private group chats instead. Later on WA did add stories, but that was Zuck's "fuck you" to Snapchat.
I don't think many people on HN forget this. I'm just not willing to let them dodge the cloud that comes with the name "Facebook" by adopting a new name. I do the same with Google and won't refer to them as Alphabet.
Great. Go start your company and buy some competitors and become more successful than Meta.
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.
Its still generating tons of free cashflow, so there's still time and resources to pivot to something else, develop new businesses or just to pay it back to shareholders. Its relatively attractive now, especially with TikTok under intense scrutiny and facing bans in the West.
I think Meta had two problems to deal with. One that could be solved at anytime but we have no idea even that time will come, and another, which I believe can only be resolved through taking consumers hostage.
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.
It is dead, but I think regardless of AR/VR the main issue was to make it a marketing/corporation/consumerism world, facebook has been profitable for advertising, like internet, but the first citizen were not corporation, corporation arrived after, when the first citizen moved for the counterculture, punk, science, porn, memes, etc.
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
Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse? Why were “legs” an “incredible new feature” and not a given? Were/are there engineering or computational constraints limiting the ability to have “legs” / a high quality experience, and what were/are they?
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.
Legs weren't included because there's no way to do leg tracking with a headset.
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.
Thanks for clarifying. I’m not a VR user so I was not aware of that issue with regard to body representation. It seems like camera on the headset to observe the body would help (?).
> Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse?
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?
The business model revolves around ads, and requires 'capturing' as many users as possible on the platform to be able to target effectively.
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.
Meta needs to invest first on hardware (prob. creating smart glasses ala google) and go all in with AR. VR is good but I don't think it'll be "ready-player-one" good and that's the thing. I could see a case being made of using AR all day if you add it to smart glasses.
I've been using my oculus to workout for almost 2 years now. It's pretty much the only purpose for me. I played a few games when I first got it, which were fun, but I lost interest pretty quickly.
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.
Anecdotal, but it seems like the Instagram strategy of cloning TikTok with Reels is bringing some users back to the app. I've got friends who have been sharing Reels links in the past few months who weren't previously.
It's awfully hard to gauge from the outside, but Facebook is showing many of the signs and behaviors that have accompanied powerful companies in the process of dying in the past.
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.
Once these big tech companies get really big and famous like Facebook and Google and stuff, they go awry in their hiring and management and business culture.. they start focusing on ideology, political ideology and censorship and so forth,.....and at that point they have all sorts of excess employees that do nothing but say write papers about political ideology and so forth.. that is when the software starts to go buggy.. Facebook is real buggy now much bugger than it used to be... As an example once Elon musk took over Twitter he fired like 80% of the employees and it works better than ever now
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”.