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If facebook's metaverse was a revolution yes. If the idea of a metaverse were to happen, no.

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There needs to be significant benefits other than novelty for the metaverse to take hold vs In real life (IRL). I have trouble thinking of any upside, and many downsides including nausea, headaches, discomfort from having a headset on for long periods, lack of privacy inherent in such a coordinated space.

Much prefer a huds display on light weight glasses, with no visual recording ability (recording was the downfall of google glass). Either way big tech’s intrusion into life is becoming dystopian, “do no evil” is not their motto.

I think the metaverse is hamstrung by its association with crypto. Too many metaverse projects are thinly veiled attempts to enable crypto/NFT speculation.

Who cares if you can take your overpriced virtual Nikes from Decentraland to Fortnite? What are the odds that a rifle you purchased in COD is going to be fully supported by other shooters, let alone Rocket League? Do we really want our favorite games to be overrun with "players" from developing countries grinding for loot?

Not to mention the widespread assumption that a metaverse must necessarily involve VR. Roblox, Minecraft and other online gaming communities demonstrate that virtual worlds can be compelling and valuable even if they are accessed via a standard PC or phone, and are not tightly interconnected. The community aspect is more important than the visual stimulus.

A few more environmental disasters like we've seen in the past couple weeks and the metaverse may be your going "outside".

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The concept itself is obviously valuable, not just for computing but for the future of the internet, but the key is in how well it meets the needs and wants of the people.

Facebook's rendition of the concept made it largely distasteful to nearly everyone it was claiming to build it for.

Making a hierarchical series of meta-spaces accessible to all on a platform is quite a common sight in 2D software, it is rather obvious the concept would be useful in 3D as well. And there's nothing inherently wrong with a digital marketplace and replicated shopping environment either. Nor are having social meeting places.

The problem was all that we had ever seen about the Metaverse looked like a single intern had to create a demo in 24 hours based on a crayon drawing made by board members who had spent the whole night drinking. It exercised absolutely no creative vision and looked like a Wii game.

I think seeing some creative vision about digital marketplaces, and visualizing how that could potentially actually improve one's shopping experience, would have been pretty compelling. For example, being able to generate an avatar that looks very similar to you by simply uploading a few pictures of yourself, then being able to try on clothes in a virtual clothing store, would have been so much cooler than showing a cartoon character walking around a nearly featureless park showing characters doing silly things with one another.

I have spent a lot of time dreaming about the potential applications of VR, I really wish I could make my visions reality but VR programming is not exactly the easiest thing to work on. And it really sucks to see companies fail to inspire people by showing them not even half-baked ideas on a technology that already has an above-average barrier to entry.

Got me thinking! Tbh if there was clear value to be had that couldn’t be found anywhere else then those downsides wouldn’t matter. People had nausea and headaches from crt screens but access to a word/excel (or w/e they were named before) was THAT much better than the alternative that it didn’t matter

This far nobody has come up with an actually compelling reason to use it, other than in gaming where already people are spending piles of time navigating fictional universes in 3D. (mostly without VR-headsets that *also* tend to subtract more than they add -- even people who do own VR-headsets usually end up spending more time playing without them than with)

I think it's a solution in search of a problem, really.

No, Amazon would *not* be a better place to shop if it was a "virtual mall".

I wish the metaverse would just die already. Having to wear a headset is a hard pass. It’ll require developing something more akin to a holodeck as depicted in Star Trek for me to have any serious interest.

I want to say, it already has happened and is happening. Meta just isn't where it's at. It's in VRC and a couple other smaller games like it. This small company has vastly proved to be a powerhouse more capable than Meta in getting VR tech off the ground for the dumbest reasons. I mean full body tracking, Haptic feedback suits and even adult items (unofficially) are supported through this game. VRC has done more for the small community of VR adopters and believers than Meta has done for anything VR related with the billions it's thrown at the 'problem'.

Correct. The metaverse is bullshit made up by people desperate for a new grift.

VR worlds won’t be a “thing” until the way you interface with it gets better. Until then it will feel awkward. Hands are getting better all the time but legs and walking and running are still disjointed of you need to use something other than your legs to do the moving.

AR on the other hand has only visuals and hands to deal with as you are interacting with VR things in the “real world”. I can see AR being a big “thing” soon but the device needs to be smaller lighter and more portable and longer lasting on battery. Imagine theaters that no longer need to set up big projectors and speakers and just streams into your AR set and displays a massive IMAX level screen and headphones you supply or the theater supplies.

Real metaverse will happen when you can seamlessly integrate it with your life. When you can line your walls with panels that project perfect 3d images holodeck-style, and I doubt that we are that far off from something that resembles it. You won't get decent market penetration if it requires you to wear something on your face.

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High res contact displays will be a game changer

I thought of that, but I don't use contacts and have no incentive to touch my own eyeball, I doubt I'm alone

That's like people in the late 1890s saying "if cars were gonna catch on it would have happened by now." Give technology time to catch up to vision. Right now even my mid tier PC VR setup is over 3k. The consumer version of VR is 400 ish but woefully underpowered. When the cost and the form factor finally line up we will see the birth of the "metaverse". Who ever wrote this lacks vision, and sure as hell never experienced all the awesome fun I have had in VR.

-Videogames 40 years ago: Pong, Centipede, Mario; a small, niche industry

-Videogames today: 86% of the global population has immediate access to portable gaming, gaming industry is $176 billion/ bigger than Hollywood entertainment industry

​

Patience people. (although Facebook owning a/the de facto VR landscape is a bit laughable)

We have phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, consoles, smart tvs. Market is really saturated, squeezing new device in will be tough task, specially when there is no well defined an easy to understand use case.

It comes down what will be defined as the meta verse?
I’m sure some aspect of it will come to fruition. But it won’t be people wearing headsets all day. But I can see why companies are starting the iteration process now. I’m order to get to a place where it could be projectable. because even the smallest of wearables won’t stay on for very long. But that maybe it will be niche and not necessarily the next cell phone but the next huge market. It might be specific but that doesn’t mean it won’t be big. You can also the separation between enterprise and consumer. They’re is a huge market for this with business and schools.

Too much money.. what do I do syndrome.

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Facebook's metaverse sucks. Too many barriers, not enough advantages. If AR/VR is easy, lightweight, then it'll take off. Zuckerberg is trying to force things before they are ready.

A 3D metaverse has been attempted since the mid-90's before such a word was in use. There were numerous companies all promising we would be flying around a 3D Internet going into virtual malls and virtual stores to buy things, because that's all you can do on the Internet obviously. One company had plans to charge retailers more money to get their virtual stores closer to the spawn points of users.

Here's a much later example. https://youtu.be/d7EjqWbwmsk Note that the video was uploaded 14 years ago. There's more videos on youtube but it's hard to find them as I keep getting videos from malls in the 90's.

>I think it's a solution in search of a problem, really.

That's really well put. An industrial metaverse/collection of virtual worlds could be huge for innovation, iteration, safety training, etc. It's not like those things aren't possible now but if there's an angle worth a damn, it won't be commercializing the experience. The economic benefit should come from whatever happens in the metaverse that gets exported to the real world. The reverse is going to fail. "Come to our metaverse and enjoy our entertainment and blah blah blah." Nobody is paying for that because it is just a novelty. But if you could create something in the metaverse, experiment with it, refine it, meet with others in a 3D space, and then the final product gets exported (whether its a sales thing, a product, a new service), then you can make money, because it does not require anyone to buy VR headsets and look at shitty avatars.

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It’s still a new tech, the issue is that we were still behind on technology when those headsets were released. Displays have been getting better, the optical stack has been improving, developers are learning about user experience (like dizziness).

It’s still new, and we still require better hardware. Unfortunately, this won’t go away so soon. The requirements for VR games are higher than what most people can afford.

I think the next generation of consoles will be when this will explode into popularity.

Not the metaverse itself, I don’t think, but certainly entertainment. I think we will see something similar to the success of the Quest 2 soon enough. Another leap.

I don't know. Nobody has this far made a VR environment that has any benefits for any of that. What benefits would people derive from "meet with others in a 3D space" relative to just having a video-meeting? I've not seen it, neither has anyone else.

I just video-meetings extensively, and yet I see zero point to meeting someone in a 3D space instead.

Hell it's not managed to become popular even for porn, which is often an early adopter of new tech.

40% of people experience nausea while playing vr. That's a huge predefined l percent that can never use the product. Doomed to fail.

Exactly. One can only look at the curve of adoption for ChatGPT and see how a new useful and desired technology is picked up. It spreads like lightning. Zuck bet on the wrong horse.

I can imagine scenarios. Say we're building a new jet engine. Prototyping is expensive so automatically we're iterating with a digital twin. Currently that's done through 2D interfaces, maybe augmented reality at best, and nonstop video conferences. That is ripe for improvement. A jet engine is going to be a large engineering team with global assets, depending on which part of the engine is being developed at any one time. And instead of a bunch of engineers standing over an actual piece of machinery or using computers and talking over the phone, they are in a perfect duplication of a real world lab, except when they make a mistake or drop something or whatever, it doesn't matter, and it also doesn't matter where in the world anyone is.

That's still a little bit ahead of us but not by much. Valid and valuable use case for, idk, next-gen engineering call it. That's one hypothetical where a "metaverse" (which is just a 3d environment with extra sensors) is useful, bringing together AI, VR, advanced computing, haptics, all of it, into a new way of working. That makes sense to me.

What doesn't make sense is asking someone to pay for the experience. Large companies can afford this shit, and if there's breakthrough innovations, I think it will come from the industrial space funded entirely by R&D.

Unlikely to happen. How would you power it?

Obviously it could be much bigger than what is happening now but the interface primarily and then the inputs hold it back. There's a simple and safe way to get rid of the bulky optics and restrictive field of view and that's to use low powered laser projection on the cornea. I've heard companies say people are too scared of the idea of laser projected in the eyes to peruse it. But after a year on the market I'm pretty sure you would start to see mass adoption once people see you're not going to go blind.

< No, Amazon would *not* be a better place to shop if it was a "virtual mall" >

That one video of the virtual grocery store is where I really saw through the BS. I was already iffy up to that point, but that was the moment that really drove home how out of touch and ignorant the people designing and pushing this thing were.

Making something more clunky and unintuitive is the very opposite of innovation.

> if there was clear value to be had

Narrator: There wasn't

Agreed, but keep in mind the early stages of pc/console gaming were also expensive. This is early adopters territory we’re in, we’re underserved in hw, guis and actual use cases. But by exploring and innovating with an engaged user base there’s a chance a killer combination is discovered, one that is enticing enough for an early majority to jump in. Do remember how crappy and expensive early consumer pc’s were

Think building your production line in a digital environment to optimize before you build it.

This is where the industry is looking to.

It would be a win if you can see your bottlenecks and common error scenarios before you actually build the thing on the real world.

We've been doing this for a long time already. 50 years ago complex factories were built as scale-models first in order to detect problems before construction starts on the real factory. Today (and for the last couple decades) we use digital models instead.

But VR and "the metaverse" play essentially zero role in all of this. 99% of it happens on ordinary flat 2D computer-monitors.

Yepp. And the other killer features they tend to brag about are similarly dumb and/or already covered by better options.

Hang out with your long distance friends they say.

But here's the thing: I've already been playing games with long-distance friends in virtual worlds for over 2 decades. There's nothing new in this. World of Warcraft came out 20 years ago, and it's been 45 years since the first MUDs came online.

VR plays no role worth mentioning in this. Advertising and wild claims notwithstanding playing WoW in VR isn't more compelling than playing it on a plain old monitor.

Converse with your friends they say.

But for this my main wishes are things like high-quality video and audio with a minimum of lag, stuttering or other quality-issues. And VR doesn't actually help with that in the slightest. No I don't really care whether I can "walk around" my friend that I'm talking to -- but I do care that the audio-quality is good and that the picture doesn't freeze.

It's possible that some killer use for VR will be found at some point. But this far I've seen nothing compelling.

Glasses then?

Personally, I don't think he's wrong. I just think he's early. Whether or not he's too early depends on how much money he's willing to burn and how long it takes for the tech to get good enough that the average consumer sees it as a must have. I'm moreso referring to the hardware than the current shitty incarnation of "VR worlds".

The biggest problem with the metaverse is that it has to work on standalone headsets which have the processing power of a smartphone. This restricts it to shitty flat cartoon environments instead of something with more life and realism that a powerful PC could push.

Meta does have some amazingly photorealistic avatar generation software and facial tracking features in the pipeline. It's just that their best selling products (Oculus Quest 1 and 2) can't handle it. I think the introduction of the Quest Pro is the first taste of what's to come hardware wise. If they start marketing it towards businesses and build out those use cases we could see a drastically improved iteration of the metaverse compared to what we have now.

I think he's 5-10 years too early, although I'm personally happy that all this money is being used to improve the tech more quickly.

At this point it's just a matter of how much money they're willing to burn until they can hit the gold mine of unobtrusive and high fidelity consumer level devices. There's a good chance they run out of steam before then even if they could sustain this level of spending for over a decade. It's hard to stay motivated if adoption stalls.

Designing for lowest common denominator is a terrible constraint to start with on software. There's no reason they couldn't have a simplified view and a complete view, or a gradient made by various adjustable graphics settings, it just doesn't justify the sacrifices made.

It wasn't creative, and it felt like the lack of visuals made it that much more obvious. If it was designed really well it looking like a Wii game would not have been an issue - obviously Wii games have been quite successful.

I know I'd have a hard time recommending some business software that looks like playing Wii Sports, so they did themselves injustice in that arena too. Should have gone with something more minimalist and professional.

To reiterate, my primary issue and concern is the lack of vision and creativity.

You won't have full peripheral vision, which is what is needed for this to take off.

Fair points and yeah I suppose for a company the size of Meta there's no excuse to not have adjustable graphics. Idk why that thought didn't cross my mind. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of VR but I agree that Meta's implementation of it thus far is super bland. If it wasn't for the stuff they've showed off in the pipeline I really wouldn't have much good to say about the work they're doing. Not sure why they thought the current showcase was a good product to release or market with.

Agreed, but it was an enormously costly mistake on their part. If I was running the company I would have never gone along with that!

Yeah they had one chance to set the narrative and make a good impression and they kind of blew it. It's gonna take some work to reset the public opinion.