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TechyDad t1_itx8iru wrote

Reply to comment by MaximumEffort433 in Facebook owner Meta sales continue to fall by umberto_pagano

I get ads for the metaverse all the time in a mobile game that I play. It touts how useful the metaverse will eventually be, but I keep noticing that people can do this using existing computers without expensive VR headsets that die after an hour.

For example, the ad said that city planners could study traffic patterns to lessen congestion. They show a bunch of people around a table with a holographic city display showing roads/traffic. Except, you don't need 3D virtual reality to model traffic. You can do this right now using any computer off the shelf.

The metaverse is a very expensive solution in search of a problem.

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Nf1nk t1_itxlbst wrote

I have a Rift and I bought a couple of art programs for it (Medium and Gravity Sketch). They are lovely for doing character work but if I want to do anything with any sort of precision it is very hard to work with it.

The biggest issue for me is that I generally do a hand sketched dimensioned drawing and coming out of VR to refer to it breaks the work stream.

I guess I could scan and import it but that isn't ideal either.

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bittabet t1_ityftql wrote

Their vision is a little more complicated than that. The idea is that these people in a meeting can be spread across the world but still collaborating like they’re in a room together. So if you’re in some smaller city you can still get maybe a great city traffic planner from across the country to come to your meeting and help you work through it.

I also think the pandemic made them tunnel vision in on improving remote work, whether or not people will really still be so heavily working remote in five years is questionable.

I’ve tried the latest Quest headset and honestly you get a glimpse of what they’re aiming for but it’s all very rudimentary and prototypey for now. Like they’ve implemented hand tracking that lets you interact without holding the controllers but right now it can only track the thumb and index finger somewhat acceptably and it was mostly an exercise in frustration compared to just holding a controller. They also have color video passthrough now but because it has to run at a very high framerate to avoid motion sickness the picture quality is mediocre. But with more powerful hardware and sensors from 2-3 years in the future I could see this being a genuinely desirable product. They’re basically trying to use VR headset technology to do the more advanced AR that Microsoft and Magic Leap have attempted but failed due to tiny field of views that destroy immersion.

I think given enough time and money they’ll make a desirable product. The risk here is that someone who already has access to more powerful chips and image processing like Apple enters the market and perfects it before Meta does, in which case all their massive R&D spend to figure this out was just money thrown into a furnace.

Honestly they need a partner who could address a lot of their shortcomings to pull this off sooner and to share costs. They’ve partnered with Qualcomm but I think someone like Nvidia would make more sense for what they need to accomplish.

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BaaBaaTurtle t1_itz9rfs wrote

>So if you’re in some smaller city you can still get maybe a great city traffic planner from across the country to come to your meeting and help you work through it.

Traffic is usually modeled in 2D, not 3D. There's no added benefit to a 3D visualization.

I model complicated fluid flowfields and while we've used the NASA 3D virtual reality visualization, it's usually just confusing. It's much easier for us as human beings to process the information in 2D.

The only area where the 3D really can be helpful is 6DOF modeling but again, we're talking a very specific application.

Jenny in accounting doesn't need a 3D representation of a spreadsheet on an expensive headset with shitty cartoon renderings of her coworkers.

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axonxorz t1_itzgmd1 wrote

> But with more powerful hardware and sensors from 2-3 years in the future I could see this being a genuinely desirable product.

This is where people just don't know. Oculus hardware is already 2-3 years behind on release, they've got 5+ years of R&D to catch up by that metric. The Valve Index was released in 2019 and it's still the best hardware in the game, with rumors of new hardware on the horizon with recent hires.

Inside-Out tracking as on the Quest is great for portability, but unless you are massive enough to curve light around you, tracking fidelity will always be sub-par in comparison.

Not being tethered is nice, but the system is a glorified cell phone mainboard and screen in a case for your face, the necessary battery and performance limitations will be there.

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TheStumbler83 t1_ityoj6w wrote

Wouldn’t someone have to develop all the 3d modelling and traffic flow data to present it in the meta verse. It’s like adding more work for no real benefit. Why not just use existing software that exists for such a specialised use case.

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