VR isn’t a bad idea.
…Zuckerberg is just an idiot.
That’s really what it comes down to. Facebook has some neat branches and employees, but at the end of the day, its head decision maker is chronically flakey and makes catastrophically bad financial choices, repeatedly.
He’s just so freaking rich it doesn’t even matter.
I still remember the original Metaverse pitch basically being ‘We’re going to copy VRChat but without any of the bits people enjoy’
Having only seen videos of VR Chat, your avatar can be a 6 foot penis or a anime girl or a skeleton with a trumpet. And I think Metaverse was trying to provide that for businesses and the general public?
How can you create a social hub where you can’t be a 6 foot penis?
The original concept was more or less a virtual shopping mall with a character creator. Imagine VR chat but made by EA.
There will be a $12.99 monthly fee for imaging that
So WorldsAway but twenty years later?
I don’t know how to tell you but Worlds Away was 20 years old… a decade ago.
!Released September 1995!<
Delete this
Like it should be, as Neil Stephenson depicted it in Snowcrash, 1992…
Yeah and tied to your fucking meta account so next data breach your colleagues at work can learn that you chatted for hours with a 15 year old with a lewd anime avatar (or as lewd as meta would ever allow something to be) about your fursona.
And, in practice, take forever, don’t really promote it, and make it look like no one at Facebook has ever laid eyes on a video game.
He made WoW but corporate, deanonymized, and lacking anything interesting to do in it.
I can’t imagine why it failed.
He’s so stupid if he really thought companies were willing to buy a VR headset for every employee so they can go to virtual meetings (like actual meetings are not already a chore)
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Including Facebook.
Zuck loves a bandwagon.
Yeah, I don’t like the idea that failed ideas are a waste, because that kind of thinking stifles technological advancement.
I do like thinking that we can have both technological advancement and healthcare.
Meta screwed up health care so badly that now they’ll never get their legs re-attached. /s
What’s really dumb is that VR could actually take off if it was done correctly, but these billionaires can’t think of literally anything besides profit so they base the entire model around that and just expect people to want it. If he had dumped an iota into further development of VR tech, and invested in some actual original VR content, games, etc then people would flock to it. That and actual affordable VR since everything is still overpriced since it’s considered a niche market.
It’d be super cool if it were self-contained and wireless…
That’s the Quest headsets whole thing. The games run on the device, and it has cameras for AR stuff, which is surprisingly intuitive. That being said, what impressed me the most was how solid streaming VR games from my PC (over Wifi 6) is. Pretty much indistinguishable from wired.
Valve’s upcoming new VR headset should be a little better at running games and will probably be great at Streaming, though it won’t do AR.
Well it kinda is? Most of the time I’ve been using VR has either been on the headset itself or wirelessly streaming from a PC. My headset is old so the quality isn’t amazing, but by and large its always worked well.
Imagine if he put that amount towards affordable housing in Cali
Honestly, that’s the government’s job after taxing the shit out of this billionaire.
John Carmack had some choice words when he left Meta.
"We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.
“It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.”
Imagine getting John Carmack on your project and ignoring him. Like, what was the point? Zuck got lucky in the beginning and was cut throat enough to hold on to it, but he has no entrepreneurial talent.
Facebook would make considerably more money if he stayed out of the decision making processes and just let talented people do it. But ego is going to ego I guess.
The dictator. First they get popular (or here rich I guess) but that was luck or network or maybe genious, but now the world moves on and that luck/network/genious doesn’t work for those new problems.
So in a democracy you vote him out, in a company you use up all the money while trying to bribe your way to more money because the dictator in this new setting is dumb as shit.
Zuckerberg was paying for the Carmack name but thought he knew better.
Well obviously!
One of them is a celebrated, accomplished developer. And the other is Zuckerberg.
I do remember a youtube video on C programming language had comments arguing about whether Dennis Ritchie or Mark Zuckerberg is the better programmer.
how embarrassing to compare one of the absolute titans of computer science with some web dev lmao
I remember watching that episode in the Silicon Valley series.
I like to think of the average tech billionaire as Dustin Hoffman from Rain Man specifically in the Casino scene. He’s a savant at counting cards, and Tom Cruise’s character (the investors) see that and help him rack in a shitload of money at blackjack.
Then Hoffman’s character decides he wants to try a roulette-type game, a game for which savant-like card counting skills offer absolutely no advantage, and the investors, unable or unwilling to see how roulette is nothing like blackjack just blindly sign on and Tom Cruise quickly loses $3,000.
Why the fuck do we think the dweeb who made Facebook in college and hasn’t lived as a normal human for two decades would have any particular insight into how people would use VR?
The scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk7eA4gVDno
Zuck wasn’t marketing VR to the average consumer or even the tech enthusiast. He was marketing it to middle managers who wanted to regain control of their WFH peons. During covid, those types lost a lot of control while the workers continued without much change. Now that back to the office is being forced, the target demographic isn’t interested.
The middle managers don’t even matter in this scenario. No executive wants to buy hundreds or thousands of VR headsets just so their employees can meet in a video game instead of Teams. Actually moving any part of the workplace into VR comes with a massive upfront hardware cost and I have yet to hear anyone articulate a real benefit that justifies such an investment.
Facebook bought Oculus in 2014.
Yes and?
Facebook was marketing their virtual office space stuff during covid. In the infinite wisdom of Zuck, that’s the best use of the tech today.
My point is …what was the plan before COVID? What did VR have to do with social networking?
Second life!! /sj
I don’t think he had a plan in the beginning. These people aren’t pioneers. They got lucky once, get labeled as a trend setter and then you have to try and maintain that image. VR was going the next big thing, so Zuck bought a company without a plan. Tech companies do that all the time. They see themselves falling behind on something and just buy some random company to appease the shareholders/press.
The VR office thing was just the limits of Zuck own creativity and saw covid as an opportunity to keep their product relevant.
Zuck bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they weren’t mistakes. His purchase of Oculus is similar.
I suspect the losses on VR will eventually be offset by AR and smart glasses.
He also bought giphy, onavo, parse, ctrl-labs, eyegroove, daytum, and like a dozen other companies, maybe more. Some of these are totally a waste (onavo and parse were shuttered relatively quickly, giphy cost almost a half billion and got basically no roi, etc). It’s more that you’re bound to hit a few zingers if you can just keep trying because you basically have an infinite money glitch.
Also ctrl-labs is neural interfaces. Creepy name for that right? Especially when fucking meta owns it. Yuck.
I suspect only creeps will buy his peep glasses for rapists and pedophiles. They should be banned and if they are not they should at least be like the apple ones, which are basically a gigantic sign that says “this person desperately wants to follow you and your child into the bathroom and videotape it. They want it so bad they spent $3200 and walk around with this stupid asshole shit strapped to their face”
I suspect only creeps will buy his peep glasses for rapists and pedophiles.
I don’t understand this. Even voyeurs benefit more from the optical nature of glasses than the camera part.
Do you not understand the benefit of saving things for later when one has privacy? More nefariously for creating a collection of illegal voyeur content to use for trade on illicit networks of illegal content
Ah. OK. I’m obviously not in the right mindset.
Probably says something good about you tbh
They were at least in the same wheelhouse. Close enough to be seen as a threat to FB. Oculus was just a total shot in a new direction.
Communication would be the underlying theme.
Did zuck personally buy these or did a team of analysts doing research make proposals and he picked some?
Zuck seems quite hands on for big purchases e.g.. I’d lean more to the former than the latter, but I’m sure there’s a team of lawyers and analysts somewhere.
that whole episode was a waste of a perfectly good Carmack
Insert Karma joke here.
Can’t invent one because Carmack seems to be a decent dude.
I don’t know his political tendencies but he’s extremely smart and he does seem decent, so… yea my world would crumble if I learned he’s right leaning
He had it. Once.
After that, he’s just another mogul with tons of money trying to impose his products by abuse of predominant position.
Still wild to me that someone like Carmack was in all this. Like, how did he think this would turn out? I guess the salary must have been enormous.
The company got bought so I guess Carmack thought he could just continue developing the headset, with loads of more cash too.
Most reasonable explanation for this crap I heard:
- facebook is just a website that makes money through tracking and ads
- people need to use a device to access facebook, so they can get tracked and see ads
- apple and google own all your devices and started to block tracking and ads (except their own)
- Zuck saw a risky chance by investing in VR. The vision was to get everyone on their VR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads
cuckedberg bet that VR headsets were going to take over, which even back in 2018 seemed far fetched. He’d have had a better chance to fortify his stranglehold by spending all that money making fb’s own custom android and securing deals with phone manufacturers.
These tech bros call them moonshots.
Which I can see them repurposing all the Metaverse stuff into glasses.
But not that I would touch that and feed the Zuck machine.
Now the vision is to get everyone on their AR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads through your smart glasses.
All this time, effort, and money spent to convince you to buy things you don’t need.
I predicted this crash and burn at the exact moment I saw it for the first time.
All these dickheads steal one good idea, and they think that makes them geniuses.
Anyone remember when the media was sucking Meta’s dick over the metaverse like they’re doing now with AI?
Yeah but this also means they will shit on AI companies in a few years (I hope).
I want this level of self reflection when we look back at headlines like: “Did you know a child-raping terrorist that bankrupted every one of his businesses said he wants to invade Greenland!? See the 24-hour perpetual interview!!11”
I wonder if the Metaverse is still projected to be worth $1trn in 2030
zuckerborg is currently trying to download/assimilate peoples thoughts.
Disagree. The goal is money from advertising.
Manipulating peoples thoughts is much more valuable than assimilation.
Ummm no? I recall many news outlets shitting on the metaverse from day 1.
No, I’m worried now. What did I forget?
We forgot to remember
IT’S NOT A BUBBLE!!!
For context, $77 billion is more than most nations spend on their military.
What we could have bought instead; a list of real problems that money could help significantly with, or fix entirely (generated with AI):
Universal Healthcare (Medicare for All)
- Est. cost: $3–4T per year
- $77B covers ~2–3 weeks of healthcare for the entire US
- Or ~6–7 million people for one year
- ~2% of annual national healthcare spend
High-Speed Rail and Public Transit
- Est. cost: $50–120M per mile
- $77B covers 600–1,200 miles of true HSR
- 3–5 major national corridors plus urban transit upgrades
Homelessness, Veterans, and Mental Health
- Est. cost: $150k–300k per housing unit; ~$25k/person/year care
- $77B covers 250,000–400,000 permanent housing units
- 10+ years of care for all chronically homeless
- 100% of veteran homelessness eliminated
Roads, Bridges, and Infrastructure
- Est. cost: ~$5M per bridge; ~$1M per mile of road
- $77B covers 15,000–20,000 bridge replacements
- ~100,000 miles of roadway rebuilt
- ~15–20% of all structurally deficient bridges
Domestic Semiconductor Manufacturing
- CHIPS Act: $52B total
- $77B covers 150% of CHIPS Act
- 3–5 leading-edge fabs
- Full AI, defense, and automotive supply-chain security
Fusion and Advanced Energy
- ITER reactor: ~$22B
- SPARC program: ~$4B
- $77B covers 3 ITER-class reactors
- 10+ SPARC-class fusion programs
Climate Resilience and Clean Energy
- Est. cost: ~$1B per GW renewable capacity
- $77B covers 60+ GW clean power
- Electrification of ~10 million homes
- Coastal protection and grid modernization across multiple states
Public Sector Scale Comparison
- Equals 3+ years of NASA’s budget
- Equals 10 years of US homelessness funding
- Exceeds annual defense budgets of most countries
The art direction in that screenshot seems to be “make everyone else look so weird Zuckerburg looks normal”
I mean, it was doomed from the beginning. There was no vision, no problem to be solved, no benefit for the user.
Why would the world need this VR space? For meetings or chats? We have virtual meetings and this adds nothing of value. For games? The graphics are bad (to allow more people to use it) and there are better VR games. For companies to advertise? You would need something to get people to go there.
They should have created a benefit for the user first and if that is successful add more.
They could have started with a Sims clone or a WOW clone to get people interested and invested before adding the rest. Selling virtual land only makes sense if it’s worth something.
It is weird that nobody pointed out to him that a meeting in VR is worse than a Zoom call in every practical way. I guess he reached the “surround yourself with Yes-Men” stage too long ago.
It’s also just not an option if someone has a medical condition that makes them predisposed to dizziness, vertigo, etc. Even without a medical condition, users frequently experience motion sickness with VR. And if certain team members can’t use the meeting software, it ceases to have any value as a meeting software.
It always happens with any delusional fool.
They get lucky and so they hire smart people. Then those smart people no longer align with the fool. So they hire more people in hopes of changing the smart people’s minds. But then smart people leave.
And now. All that’s left is the people who were hired who think every time the fool farts, it’s a blessing.
I don’t even like video calls. The only value of it is to see if someone started talking while still muted.
I guess if you count screen-sharing as video calling, but that’s distinct from the camera part.
They did worse than that imo. I was a very early consumer of VR; had the original oculus headset and absolutely loved it. Then zuck bought them out, mandated that all oculus headsets would need a meta account, and effectively dropped support for anything other than the mobile headset. I was legitimately the kind of consumer that would put 5 figures into that hobby over a few years, but I set it down and never looked back after that. Im sure I’m not the only one who fits that description
Same. I was one of the original kickstarter backer. Never touched it again after the meta account got mandatory.
I might get the Steam Frame and see how much has changed in the VR space.
Oh boy, if you haven’t played Half Life Alyx you’re in for a treat.
Should have led with porn
Sure, if they had created for example a ‘second life’ clone with a very lax custom content policy it would have drawn in the pervert community to build their dream harem / larp orgies AND the house builder / interior design community AND the second life larper community.
The question is, if big companies would still have wanted to advertise there. At least the virtual land would have been a bit more interesting.
One thing I would love for the Quest to be able to do would be to create a 3D model of my home’s interior and let me do things like knock down walls or place furniture.
There’s no technical reason it can’t do this except that nobody’s done it because it’s been pitched as a collaboration/NFT selling tool.
I think you can sort of do that with Hyperscape?
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/meta-horizon-hyperscape-capture-beta/8798130056953686
So apparently facebook is funding research into that, still: https://facebookresearch.github.io/ShapeR/
Who knows what they’ll actually do with the tech.
I’m glad they’ve at least thought of it, but I’m amazed they didn’t think this was a killer app for VR. Just the real estate market alone would have been huge.
Kinda ironic that he got the enshittification order right with facebook and instagram, but completely forgot it for VR. You need the people first, then you start banning porn to be “family friendly” and nice with big companies
To play the devil’s advocate: this did happen during the crypto rush, when huge monetary value was assigned to nothings. If you buy into the idea that a JPEG of a monkey created by some algorithm brute-forcing KiSS can be worth a small fortune - it’s not hard to see how VR “real” estate can be valuable.
Digital nothing CAN have value. Like imagine having a central plot on a long running popular Minecraft server, or having a large housing plot in final fantasy XIV, or a sick mount in WoW or any other MMO. The thing is that those are desirable not just because they’re limited, but because the game is a desirable place to begin with. Artificial scarcity with nothing backing it is useless, like monkey jpegs and beanie babies.
So if the metaverse wasn’t dogshit and actually drew in at least tens of thousands of regular users, yeah he could’ve made some money selling digital real estate. Instead, he led with “you can buy real fake land!” with no real reason other than exclusivity.
Note that this was a 10% cut. Meta has a lot of staff. They are also slightly pivoting to AR glasses, as they say Ray-Ban Display sales are much higher than anticipated. I think they see their chance of cornering the VR market as gone (probably because of android xr) (see https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-pauses-third-party-horizon-os-headsets/ ) but think they have a chance to dominate AR glasses / wearables.
$73G to make VR Miis with no legs
Meanwhile, VRChat:
This just proves any VR project without any trans people is doomed to fail
Who else could know what it’s like to walk in another’s skin and see a face you don’t recognize in the mirror?
Every software project should have three groups: furries, trans people, and Linux users. Without all three the software becomes doomed, with too much of one it becomes niche, with a balance of all three it becomes incredible :3
Do they have to be three separate people? Because the Venn diagram of those three groups is a circle
Are furries considered trans or what am I missing? Serious question.
Nah, there’s an in-joke that there’s a lot of overlap for people in all 3 simultaneously (Heavy online presence in communities with an emphasis on allowing people to express themselves how they please).
Linux may just be a coincidence though, similar to the Furry/IT overlap.
It’s best when the van diagram is a circle :3
Facebook is a boomer infested, depressing, idiot shithole. I’m not spending extra money for hardware so I can experience that in VR.
If I wanted to experience that, I can visit my shitty boomer mother for free in reality.
It wasn’t for nothing! I’m sure Meta generated tons of patents they’ll use to stifle anyone else in the industry who tries to innovate.
There’s not a lot they can patent. VR existed before they started this project, inside out tracking existed before they started this project, and there are other products with similar ideas that go far further than anything metaverse ever put out (I feel like it never even released).
