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.
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!