My kneejerk reaction is this will probably waste a lot of their money without much traction. But I'm also happy about Facebook wasting a bunch of their money...
What about facebook getting into legal trouble here? There is tons of prior art and companies with the trademark. Either facebook buys them all, or find another name
All depends if they can deliver on AR before anyone else.
Gotta remember outside of Oculus, their entire product portfolio exists on top of the platforms of their competitors. This is their play to own the entire thing from the foundation up and the resources they'll be willing to use to accomplish that will be huge and really their only competition is Apple because Google gave up.
Not a chance. I've been wrong about a lot of things tech, probably even most things, but this isn't something I think most people want.
Metaverses have always been niche. Most people don't like things attached to their head. Remember 3D TVs?
But, perhaps you and they are right. For the first time in my life, I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no part in it.' Please don't take this as like, suicidal or anything, more maybe going off grid or moving to another country.
> I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no part in it.'
I feel like that about ever larger part of the whole tech world. I am torn - I can still muster a lot of techno-optimism when I think for example about possible benefits of advanced AIs for humanity. But than I imagine the world where the most advanced AIs are controlled by corporations like Google and Facebook... I have a bad feeling about this.
I am trying to find some reasonable middle ground between becoming a luddite and just continuing like I do not see all those unforeseen negative impacts produced by the genie that was once called the IT revolution.
Have you heard of solarpunk? It's a movement that arose out of a desire to balance techno-optimism with recognition of the dire need for technology that is more Earth- and human-friendly.
They aren't going after the people who have realized over-technicalized life is bad for humans. They're going after the kids who grow up in it and will take until their 30s to realize they've had depersonalization disorders their entire lives.
Did 3D TVs ever get to sub $1k? I think remember my dad bought one almost a decade ago and I’m sure he paid way more than that for a Sony 3D tv.
I don’t know that we can outright dismiss anything based on 3D TVs not taking off. I’m certainly no fan of Facebook attempting to own this space, but to outright dismiss the whole concept because of the poor sales for 3D TVs seems naïve IMO.
Price has never been a limiting factor in TVs. People will throw down thousands each year for the big new 8k. Or projectors. 3D tvs just weren't popular because people didn't like them. It was the first 'major' TV advancement I ever watched fall on its face, and get swept under the rug like it never existed.
I'm not sure the general public at large will like VR, either. It's disorienting. And if strip mall Lasik wasn't enough to tell, we don't like wearing things on our face. That will -never- change.
I remember going to a real 3d movie as a kid, but I forget where. Some movie studio park, probably. It was only 10 or so minutes of Hitchcock's 'The Birds', but wow was it amazing. Too amazing. I remember feeling real fear to where I'd take the glasses off for a few seconds, people were screaming, many took off their glasses before it was over.
Not sure if this relates to the metaverse, just sharing an anecdote.
The reasons 3D TVs failed were the same reasons VR will fail. It's not a question of price, in my opinion, it's a question of friction. People do not want to put things on their head, which requires their full attention and doesn't allow them to look away.
I think you soon won’t need much attached to your head. What about when the tech is a light as a pair of glasses - then contact lenses. Far fetched? In 1995, when mobile phones were for the rich, and internet for the geeks, tell people you will be required to own a mobile phone and an online account in order to be allowed in a shop. That’s what it is in Australia right now.
Nah. As a teen I needed vision correction, and contacts were worse than glasses in the end. Dry eyes, solutions, cases, falling out. Glasses were nice enough, but I touched them so much it was constant cleaning. PRK solved all that.
If this VR utopia ever will take hold, it will be with neural implants or something like it. Not with glasses, and not with contacts.
A common argument for why humanity has never encountered extra-terrestrial life is that any hyper advanced civilization likely moved into a virtual world. Do you believe this is unlikely and humanity is not headed in this direction?
I don't believe humanity or any civilization could survive. It's pure hedonism, really. How does reproduction even occur? And if everyone in the first world is plugged in, what keeps a third world nation from just taking everything? Or killing off the power grid? It would take a massive scale of agreement to even allow that to work.
Outside of that, I am a big believer in, well I don't know the name for it. But you must experience sadness to feel happy. And bad times to realize good times. Anyone in a virtual world would likely never choose scenarios that cause such things. So there'd be no real true joy in this virtual life. Life is fleeting.
From a health standpoint, I don't believe a human body could exist long in a pure virtual world(thinking of something like, The Matrix). Still people tend to get disease, blood clots, stroke, and more. And bones and muscle too weak to even walk when the grid goes down. Am I thinking about the scenario wrong?
Sorry I don't have all(or any) of the answers to that question, mostly just rambling, but the thought makes me really sad.
> Anyone in a virtual world would likely never choose scenarios that cause such things. So there'd be no real true joy in this virtual life. Life is fleeting.
Why not? I watch sad and scary movies all the time to experience those emotions.
You can also have virtual struggle and striving to achieve virtual items that are to many people just as rewarding as real world items.
Those emotions are controlled. You feel sad because something sad happened, but not to you. This is basic empathy. But it's not the same. And the only reason you feel empathy, typically, is because you can relate. But you wouldn't be able to relate if you had no sadness yourself. Because you never allow bad things to happen in your little metaverse.
How does your mother die in VR? How does your best friend die in a car crash? How do you learn your Grandpa doesn't recognize you anymore? Or to learn you have a terminal illness? How do you get so nervous to meet a person your face feels like it's on fire, work up nerve, get rejected, and go home wanting to die? Those are real feelings entertainment cannot reproduce.
Nothing virtual is real. No movies are real. Not yet, at least.
You are right. Pride comes before a fall, and Zuck thinks he is better than Cook, Musk, Bezos, by building the multiverse he will restore his place as the greatest technologist of our time
Maybe I'm too old, but I don't know a single person with Oculus, not even among my younger coworkers.
I don't discount that it could be the next big thing, because wtf do I know, but it feels very niche to me, and certainly not something that can get the engagement like a phone can. And in terms of money, Facebook itself is a printing press, I wonder what the business model is for this? Selling games or experiences? Billboards in an AR world?
Addicting people to living in a fake world where anything is seemingly possible, and then exploiting it. Basically the same M.O. as their other products, but on a "next level."
I got one. My honest opinion is that it's potential is immense, but I wouldn't suggest anyone to get one atm.
Professional headsets will likely become more widespread over the coming years and I fully expect that most desk jobs will replace their displays with a headset... But that's still at least 10 yrs off, likely longer. A prerequisite would be that it's not as stuffy/heavy to wear, but that's already happening at a surprising rate.
It also makes remote contacts (i.e. remote work, family calls etc) very different, as oculus just added face tracking to their newest headsets... So your avatars face mirrors your real face.
The presence you feel in these contexts is hard to explain and has to be experienced imo.
That's hard to answer, because i can only say it depends to both questions.
let me repeat what i said earlier: i don't think that the current generation of consumer headsets is ready for prime time, all of the reasons are however solvable. that's why i used the cop-out of "at least 10 years off".
theoretically i can use it indefinitely without getting a headache. It however always feels like a slap in the face if even the smallest hiccup or framedrop happens.
Another thing thats hard to stomach is movement done by controller. Its (for me) doable while sitting down, but if i stand up while moving with the controller... lets just say i usually stop within 5 minutes if i'm forced to do that.
the low pixel density on consumer headsets make it hard to consider them for anything but casual gaming usage, even though I think that VR-Headset gaming will always be a pipe-dream.
It would be a different story if fantasy-style VR Capsule ever become a thing, letting the player also have touch etc, but the First Person View that current games try use is in my experience just too lacking with a purely visual headset, especially with the poor input quality like we have today.
The potential I see in VR Headsets is really in productivity while sitting in front of a desk using a regular mouse and keyboard. 8k displays would be a minimum for that and once you target that market new designs become viable again, as few people would want to wear such a headset directly on their face. Letting in your surroundings will be less of an issue if it's not aiming for complete isolation/immersion and onboard graphics will likely be less of an issue if the device doesn't have to render a complex video game scene.
That's my experience, too. I know a lot of people who are very into tech, across the entire age range. I don't know a single person who owns one of these. But I think they're mostly used by the hardcore gamer crowd, and I only know a couple of those (and neither have a VR headset).
The only person with Oculus is Mark Zuckerber as he owns Facebook that owns Oculus. Maybe you mean Quest or Rift? I personally don't know anybody who owns an iPad.
We can call them whatever we want to. Fuck them for trying to take over both "meta" and "metaverse." This is them trying to become _the_ VR world just by having _the right name_.
I don't know anyone that calls "xfinity" anything but "comcast." I'm pretty sure "xfinity" was them trying to get away from their nickname "comcrap."
Imagine if the world collectively said "no" and kept right on calling them Facebook?
They're going to run around slapping anyone who uses "meta" or "metaverse" with C&D letters figuring nobody will have the money to fight them in court.
I'd chip in to the legal fund for whoever says "see you in court" to Facebook. I bet a lot of people would. Maybe someone like the EFF should set up a "meta defense" warchest.
I hope they have serious plans for changing how VR works today. VR quickly loses it's appeal after a few hours. The isolation it brings with it is a huge issue. AR holds more promise in terms of mass appeal but I'm not sure we have that one quite figured out yet technically and from a UX perspective.
I know very little about VR so maybe this will be very off.
My guess is they want to address that isolation aspect by making it feel better to interact with others, bringing more people together in the VR space.
But this is me interpreting your "the isolation it brings with it" as people just exploring VR by themselves.
I mean the isolation of basically wearing a helmet for hours. It's exhausting to have your vision and hearing constrained to the digital world in this way for long periods of time. To me, VR is like a roller coaster. It's super fun but only in small doses.
Ah, thank you for clarifying that. While I haven't used VR much, that actually is one of the things I worry about the most: being so disconnected from my physical environment. But I'm also a person who doesn't like walking down the street with earbuds in, preferring to hear what's going on. I wonder how much people will vary in their willingness to dive into VR (and disconnect from their physical surroundings).
Yeah, I'm a VR nerd but I now find that wearing a VR helment for too long creates a kind of existential loneliness that will be hard to solve with better technology.
It really depends on the game. I was playing H3VR, and definatley experienced that dreadful isolation feeling as I was out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fake unliving things. But in multiplayer games like Onward Its provided the opposite feeling for me. My wife and kids left for a week, and I work from home... after a few days, it felt like hanging out with friends.
This discounts a lot of failures and products without real success:
- Facebook Apps
- Facebook Home
- Facebook Workplace
- Facebook Portal
- Facebook Essentials
What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed them.
I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't have a track record of building anything worthwhile outside of their core offering (ie, the Facebook product).
>Don’t like Facebook one bit, but Zuck is almost always spot on with his bets. So yes, incredibly scary as it has a high likelihood of succeeding.
Instagram was growing like crazy, even faster than Facebook in its early days so acquisition was no-brainer. Instagram used Facebook's social graph so acquisition made even more sense.
On the other hand WhatsApp had hundreds millions users at the time of acquisition and Larry Page was very close to acquiring it before Zuck but Facebook offered more money that's why it turned out to be one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of Internet($19bn). WhatsApp's huge userbase and rapid growth could've endangered Facebook Messenger that Zuck was about to separate from main Facebook app and make it standalone instant messaging Facebook app.
So both Instagram and WhatsApp were no-brainer and made perfect sense and Facebook had cash pile to do it so they did it.
In 1.5 years Instagram had 50 million monthly active users[0]. Yea it was no-brainer considering other mobile photo apps existed and Facebook and Twitter were also doing photos.
I think their internal definition of metaverse is probably less literal than people in the media seem to picture - I think they are actually betting on the future of however people communicate, whatever that ends up looking like, be that WhatsApp, social media, VR or something else entirely.
Even their presentation showed that with a solid mix of different ways of communicating and I'm pretty sure that wasn't just accidental. On one level its nice to see a much more expansive definition of metaverse (which IMO already exists) but on another terrifying that FB wants to be part of basically every human interaction.
I don't think this downplays Oculus, but they also announced today that they are going to start scaling back Facebook integration with Oculus and start allowing other login methods besides Facebook.
Honestly, I think this is less scary than having Facebook acting as a "public square". A meta-verse has a higher bar of entry than a website - including specialized hardware - and it's less likely that governments and businesses will distribute information exclusively in some meta-verse vs. it just being another channel for content distribution.
Websites once required "specialized hardware". And if you've got today's top end VR rigs, it's sorta obvious that the world is going to go this way - it's too good, and productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle for the mind". Plus it'll get way cheaper in the future. Note that I'm not talking about entertainment usecases, which are also good - I'm saying metaverse is clearly the future of work, with massive ramifications if Meta is able to invest enough to make it appealing to regular people. And I think Facebook has way more than enough resources to make this a reality.
Right now, work in the metaverse still looks like 8+ emulated screens floating in a sphere around you. And this is probably not the long term best way to work. The real question is what are the new primitives, is there a new underlying platform, can everyone get equal access to that platform, and who owns that platform.
Just like Apple is making intel chips obsolete with the M1 on Mac, Meta probably is aiming to make laptops obsolete/niche in the long run.
I don't know if I agree. Most of my job is typing text into various boxes - web-apps, text-editors, terminals. Fundamentally, long-term productivity in this task is about ergonomics. Wearing something on my head for 8+ hours is like anti-ergonomics, and the benefits are dubious. I could have a bunch of virtual displays in a meta-space, or I could just area bunch of real monitors. And the latter solution is generally simpler.
But even if using a VR rig to simulate a bunch of displays would be more efficient, that's not a "metaverse". It's just a VR display. To me a metaverse implies virtual interaction with other people - otherwise what's the point? I find I'm more effective when I have uninterrupted quiet time to work so why would I want to work in a meta-verse where I can be interrupted at any time in a more invasive way than Slack or email can manage? It's like an open-office from hell. Saying it's the future of work is extremely premature.
Edit:
On the topic of this:
> it's too good, and productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle for the mind"
If that's true, Facebook will never crack it. Facebook's products are the opposite of "a bicycle for the mind" - they push experiences and content on you instead of putting you in control. I have serious doubts they could develop something that requires giving the user power over their own experience - the condescending attitude of "we know what's best for you" is too ingrained.
> And if you've got today's top end VR rigs, it's sorta obvious that the world is going to go this way - it's too good, and productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle for the mind".
How exactly? VR is just a display technology, with no new input methods that are even remotely usable for anything like games. How am I going to be better at programming by wearing a VR headset and typing on my keyboard than looking at a screen while typing on my keyboard?
How am I going to be more productive when forecasting prices in Excel on a VR headset than on a screen? When drawing the layout of an integrated circuit? When summarizing news or books?
Sure, it will be easier to visualize a few 3D models, and remote meetings will feel much more natural in VR, but the vast majority of work essentially boils down to either manual work, text manipulation, or fundamentally 2D models.
Unless and until someone comes up with a revolutionary input method with the precision of a mouse and the flexibility of a keyboard (like they did with the touch screen for phones), I don't believe in any claims of a revolution through AR/VR. Only incremental improvements in specialized fields.
I can't tell you how many times i've had political conversations in VR while playing a game. It's not super common, but it happens.
I kind of fear a day when i'm just having a casual conversation with someone, and suddenly their voice becomes garbled becauese an AI detected they were telling me some "misinformation".
Is this bet on VR making the goggles a hardware requirement? So this new world will only be available to those who can afford gaming hardware and a high speed internet connection?
I'm thinking more about how this seems like a template for people to integrate their personal lives into an actual simulation and give a justification for a 'friendly AI' to determine what's best for us.
If Meta stays true to its history of designing its products to maximize user engagement I find little reason to believe they wouldn't try to design their product to become more and more tightly coupled with the lives of their users. Maybe to the point where they're not able to function in some important way without it.
The main point being that it has the potential to grow to a point where the life of a user becomes inseparable from a 'Metaverse'. Whether you call this 'virtual' or a 'simulation' seems moot.
They are going all in on metaverse / have decided that the future of oculus is the primary long term bet, not facebook itself.
And they have the money to make it so.
This is incredibly scary, and probably a good investment.