Maybe the metaverse is a viable concept or maybe it isn't. But Meta doesn't care about the metaverse or the potential users of it -- they simply want their own platform similar to how Google has Android, and Apple has iOS, and Microsoft has Windows. Apple, in particular, is a thorn in their side.
Not caring about what the user's want is the first problem. The second is that they wanted this done yesterday. So rather than evolving the technology and seeing where the market was going, they tried to build the whole thing at once immediately.
They didn't know what they were building, how to build it, and they threw it together as quickly as possible. The result was, unsurprisingly, pretty lame.
Then to justify the expenditure, they then forced it into every aspect of their Quest devices trying to force adoption. Unsurprisingly again, this failed and also pissed off all their Quest customers and damaged the viability of that platform.
Meta thought they could simply spend their billions and that would be enough to succeed.
No one wants to wear a PC on their faces. The few who did wanted that for games but Zuck wanted a social VR platform, not a third-rate gaming console. Games couldn't even bring in the numbers needed to pivot anyone to social so they're giving up.
This has yet to be determined! Because no VR headset so far has actually been a proper PC. You can't develop on them. You can't just install whatever TF you want. You have to use their app store and getting developer mode enabled doesn't even give you root on the device.
A more accurate statement would be, "No one wants to wear a locked-down, extremely limited-use phone on their faces."
When the Steam Frame comes out, then we'll see how much of a difference having full control over your VR hardware can make. It runs SteamOS and you can install whatever you want. It's a complete Linux distro! An actual PC on your face.
Putting Linux on a headset will do nothing to change that the average person wants no part of one on their face. You can develop for the Vision Pro inside the Vision Pro today, and few people care.
Maybe a game library as large as Steam's will make it a little more appealing, but unlikely. The Quest has a good sized library and seems to have saturated the market.
Godot on the Quest allows you to develop on the device which is at least cool even if it makes little sense. You’d see the virtual world around you adapt to the changes in the editor. That was one on the reasons I bought it, even if I never used it in the end
If you're interested, Folding Ideas did a video essay covering the metaverse and why it never really took off, that's really well done. However the main bullet points:
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
You also have to be "all in", so to speak, in order to participate. I can window or minimize a screen on a PC. I can pause a game on a console. I'm immediately aware of my surroundings in both cases. With a VR headset, I have to physically remove the headset before I see where I am within physical space.
It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.
I think it was both the horrible technical implementation and the full and total control they demanded over it. It's like what I would imagine the Oasis to look like ten years after the bad guys won in Ready Player One.
The internet only succeeded because it was so free and open at the beginning, decentralized, open protocols, everything free, no borders, no censorship, no surveillance just hackers that layed the foundation with no restrictions placed upon them (except the severe technical limitations of the time for them to overcome). Of course that's almost all gone now with capitalism taking over turning everything to shit, but that came only after it already was successful.
Meta's vision and implementation of the metaverse was exactly the opposite end of the spectrum in every way from the start: centralized, commercial, proprietary, censored, surveilled, restricted, closed, walls everywhere, safe, advertiser friendly, it was uncool, not fun and no style. Like they paid people to create shitty "worlds" and force their employees to use it, otherwise nobody touched that shitshow willingly, except (concerningly) for some random toddlers for some reason.
Neither. The VR space simply isn't it. Sounds cool in science fiction but nobody wants to spend their life with a giant headset strapped to their face. Their Orion glasses were the first time I could see the space actually going mainstream, but I'm not sure if they will ever be able to take it past the prototype stage.
Was the product. It's fundamentally unsound, but beyond that, why would you be in that thing? The Metaverse had barely any content worth using, there was no reason to buy it beyond disposable income and novelty.
"Metaverse" will never happen because we don't fit in the wires and can't eat electricity.
You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.
If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.
In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.
Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.
Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.
I think Meta's position as a large company under (rightfully) a lot of media scrutiny fundamentally prevents it from creating a successful "metaverse". It'll be pushed towards being overly corporate/sanitized and centrally controlled to meet expectations of managing misinformation, player safety, etc. opposed to the less restricted conditions that resulted in the web. Smaller companies (like VRChat) or individual hobbyists can get away with more, and generally have less cynical motivations.
Microsoft was in the middle of the biggest antitrust case in history (both in the US and the EU) and successfully launched the Xbox in that time. They had Halo and local multiplayer up to 8 players across 2 connected consoles requiring no internet. Meta didn't have anything besides a naked desire to pursue the end (monetize the user) before the means (a product people wanted).
I'm really glad they did no do that! That would be the end of VRChat & big damage for the community, basically requiring a migration to to inevitable replacement.
Just see what Facebook did to BeatSabre and other VR games and Game studios they acquired.
Sure, they could have cloned it, but better with more money - that would be less questionable, especially if it actually worked out.
Well, at least they helped to provide affordable headsets for VRChat players at the right time. :)
Maybe the metaverse is a viable concept or maybe it isn't. But Meta doesn't care about the metaverse or the potential users of it -- they simply want their own platform similar to how Google has Android, and Apple has iOS, and Microsoft has Windows. Apple, in particular, is a thorn in their side.
Not caring about what the user's want is the first problem. The second is that they wanted this done yesterday. So rather than evolving the technology and seeing where the market was going, they tried to build the whole thing at once immediately.
They didn't know what they were building, how to build it, and they threw it together as quickly as possible. The result was, unsurprisingly, pretty lame.
Then to justify the expenditure, they then forced it into every aspect of their Quest devices trying to force adoption. Unsurprisingly again, this failed and also pissed off all their Quest customers and damaged the viability of that platform.
Meta thought they could simply spend their billions and that would be enough to succeed.
No one wants to wear a PC on their faces. The few who did wanted that for games but Zuck wanted a social VR platform, not a third-rate gaming console. Games couldn't even bring in the numbers needed to pivot anyone to social so they're giving up.
> No one wants to wear a PC on their faces.
This has yet to be determined! Because no VR headset so far has actually been a proper PC. You can't develop on them. You can't just install whatever TF you want. You have to use their app store and getting developer mode enabled doesn't even give you root on the device.
A more accurate statement would be, "No one wants to wear a locked-down, extremely limited-use phone on their faces."
When the Steam Frame comes out, then we'll see how much of a difference having full control over your VR hardware can make. It runs SteamOS and you can install whatever you want. It's a complete Linux distro! An actual PC on your face.
Putting Linux on a headset will do nothing to change that the average person wants no part of one on their face. You can develop for the Vision Pro inside the Vision Pro today, and few people care.
Maybe a game library as large as Steam's will make it a little more appealing, but unlikely. The Quest has a good sized library and seems to have saturated the market.
Godot on the Quest allows you to develop on the device which is at least cool even if it makes little sense. You’d see the virtual world around you adapt to the changes in the editor. That was one on the reasons I bought it, even if I never used it in the end
I tried out an actual IBM PC, wearable version in about 2000. It was kind of neat and ran DOS. Never really took off though. This thing https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-pc-goes-readytowear
If you're interested, Folding Ideas did a video essay covering the metaverse and why it never really took off, that's really well done. However the main bullet points:
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
You also have to be "all in", so to speak, in order to participate. I can window or minimize a screen on a PC. I can pause a game on a console. I'm immediately aware of my surroundings in both cases. With a VR headset, I have to physically remove the headset before I see where I am within physical space.
It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.
I think it was both the horrible technical implementation and the full and total control they demanded over it. It's like what I would imagine the Oasis to look like ten years after the bad guys won in Ready Player One.
The internet only succeeded because it was so free and open at the beginning, decentralized, open protocols, everything free, no borders, no censorship, no surveillance just hackers that layed the foundation with no restrictions placed upon them (except the severe technical limitations of the time for them to overcome). Of course that's almost all gone now with capitalism taking over turning everything to shit, but that came only after it already was successful.
Meta's vision and implementation of the metaverse was exactly the opposite end of the spectrum in every way from the start: centralized, commercial, proprietary, censored, surveilled, restricted, closed, walls everywhere, safe, advertiser friendly, it was uncool, not fun and no style. Like they paid people to create shitty "worlds" and force their employees to use it, otherwise nobody touched that shitshow willingly, except (concerningly) for some random toddlers for some reason.
Neither. The VR space simply isn't it. Sounds cool in science fiction but nobody wants to spend their life with a giant headset strapped to their face. Their Orion glasses were the first time I could see the space actually going mainstream, but I'm not sure if they will ever be able to take it past the prototype stage.
Was the product. It's fundamentally unsound, but beyond that, why would you be in that thing? The Metaverse had barely any content worth using, there was no reason to buy it beyond disposable income and novelty.
"Metaverse" will never happen because we don't fit in the wires and can't eat electricity.
You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.
If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.
In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.
Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.
Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.
I think Meta's position as a large company under (rightfully) a lot of media scrutiny fundamentally prevents it from creating a successful "metaverse". It'll be pushed towards being overly corporate/sanitized and centrally controlled to meet expectations of managing misinformation, player safety, etc. opposed to the less restricted conditions that resulted in the web. Smaller companies (like VRChat) or individual hobbyists can get away with more, and generally have less cynical motivations.
Microsoft was in the middle of the biggest antitrust case in history (both in the US and the EU) and successfully launched the Xbox in that time. They had Halo and local multiplayer up to 8 players across 2 connected consoles requiring no internet. Meta didn't have anything besides a naked desire to pursue the end (monetize the user) before the means (a product people wanted).
Both and also AI became the sexy thing before they really got anywhere with metaverse shit
So broadly, they should have acquired VRChat and just slapped their name on it before its own developers enshittified it, but nooooooo...
I'm really glad they did no do that! That would be the end of VRChat & big damage for the community, basically requiring a migration to to inevitable replacement.
Just see what Facebook did to BeatSabre and other VR games and Game studios they acquired.
Sure, they could have cloned it, but better with more money - that would be less questionable, especially if it actually worked out.
Well, at least they helped to provide affordable headsets for VRChat players at the right time. :)
Fair enough, it is really striking how VRChat got so much right about the medium.