Honest question: what is Facebook trying to accomplish? What exactly is the "Metaverse?" Their Superbowl ad was just straight-up weird & confusing. I'm honestly not sure what their product team's vision is.
Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG?
I have an Oculus and other than Beatsaber and Alyx and a few other titles/apps, it's just not that exciting. The Nintendo Switch is at least an order of magnitude more fun.
I think it really boils down to, they need a near future myth for investors to speculate their stock price up. That myth is, ubiquitous, always-on AR is just around the corner, and they're going to be the platform it runs on.
Reminiscent of the Uber play - once it was widely noticed they couldn't drive costs down enough to achieve profitability, there needed to be another narrative to maintain optimism in the company.
And so the narrative changed, from:
"through the magic of {pixie dust technology} we can make providing chauffeur services so cheap it would be hugely profitable"
to
"we will replace all the human drivers with robots, any day now"
Of course, that future was much, much further away than purported, but it certainly was useful for pumping up optimism in a company where the present-day situation isn't necessarily favorable.
FB's money-printing products seem to be facing major headwinds. They're scandal-wracked, user growth is plateauing heavily especially in the most profitable markets, and a fast-moving competitor is rapidly eating into their most coveted growth areas and they seem unable to convincingly fight the trend. A narrative shift is certainly needed for them.
I would add this is as much about recruiting as the stock price. The scandals are crushing morale. Top engineers can go work at Apple and build the actual devices that enable FB, TikTok, etc. Or they can go work to transition the planet to sustainable energy at Tesla. Or go work on making life interplanetary at SpaceX. Or they can go build spyware, aimed at convincing people to buy shoes, at Facebook.
They needed a more exciting vision to continue to attract top talent, which is generally a prerequisite for a high stock price anyway.
Problem is, if Uber recent news are anything to go by, in the current environment investors aren't interested in promises, they want to see results and they want to see them now.
Uber literally just forecasted positive cash flow by the end of this year, and the stock tanked. FB banking on a far future R&D move is not likely to fly well with investors. Most certainly not in the near future.
Oh I fully agree, investors won't be nearly as credulous with FB as they were with past companies with wildly optimistic visions (and not nearly such rosy results in reality) like WeWork or Uber.
I think it's both a function of investors having been burned in the recent past with unicorns failing to deliver on their lofty promises, but also the reality that FB has suffered significant (read: catastrophic) reputation damage from the endless stream of scandals. FB employees seem to have an inexhaustible belief that they can weather any storm without permanent harm, but I suspect that isn't actually true.
More than that, the narrative shift isn't convincing. At least with Uber they had fancy robot cars to show off, even if they didn't work. What does FB have to convince us of the metaverse future? A lot of expensive CGI-rendered "concept reels" and very little actual product that is actually here (or imminent). The recent Superbowl ad did not contain a single frame of actual product footage - nor did the "fake" product in any way resemble anything FB has announced!
And the little that does exist (Horizon Worlds) is... really... really... painfully bad. The fact that FB has even let the public at these experimental products (rather than iterate internally) is baffling.
As someone who's been in the consumer tech space for a really long time the strategy here is just mind-boggling. The company continues to pitch no actual product - it has remained frustratingly vague about what the metaverse even is - but also insist at the same time that the entire company is reorienting around it. What little is released is shockingly poor - to the point where one wonders if these half-baked products will poison the well against a better thought-out and genuinely useful product further down the line. It reeks not of visionary thought and more dragging whatever you can out of the experimental arm of the company to try to cement the narrative shift.
This seems like the most plausible explanation to me. But Zuckerberg does also seem weird and unsocialized enough to actually believe there's potential in the metaverse.
A future myth? They've been printing money for over a decade now. Their first positive net income was 2009. Apart from last quarter, they're still gaining users every year, sometime double digit percentages. They were able to squeeze multiple times the revenue out of their user base than other social networks.
If they execute on VR half as well as they did their core product than the hype is real
Yes, exactly. This is just like Uber and self-driving cars…only instead of “this will lower our costs and finally make us profitable!” it’s “this is another platform where we can have infinite growth!” It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the days of wild growth for their existing platform are over.
Playing devil's advocate, I think they're betting on the long game.
Eventually, when XR headsets become the size and have the practicality of sunglasses, they will become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today. It would be naive to think that the current smartphone design is the end-all-be-all of personal computing devices. We're already seeing small drops in smartphone sales worldwide, some of which are undoubtedly related to the global crisis, but let's be real: the design has hardly improved from the glass slab of the iPhone. We've lost bezels and the tech has seen iterative upgrades and small innovations, but in general it's a stagnated market with no clear path forward.
Current generations of XR headsets are still far away from mass adoption, but once the tech is drastically easier to adopt, possibly within the next decade, companies will flock to fulfill the demand, and Meta will already have an established platform.
That's their bet anyway, and while I dislike everything they stand for, I can't say they're wrong in this case. Facebook might be dying, but they're seeing the writing on the wall and trying to pivot to an—as of yet—nonexistent market.
Cars can't get any smaller because they are constrained by a much more fundamental size limit than computers: the size to fit the driver and the passenger(s) and still have an engine. Formula 1 cars are as small as it gets.
They didn't get any faster than 1960s-1970s limits because of efficiency and safety considerations, as well as the fact that a faster car means absolutely nothing on a jammed road, and traffic jams happen for reasons entirely unrelated to the speed of the cars involved. They didn't fly because of a complex mix of challenging engineering, tricky economics and the naivety of cultural expectation.
Computers are different. They are mainly limited by the size of the UI and other IO, the actual "computer" is inconceivably, inhumanly, unimaginably small. Most of our devices is just places for your fingers to touch and your eyes to see. We can keep shrinking until we get to the point where computers are things we put inside our brains cells and inject in our bloodstream, and perhaps even more.
They can absolutely get faster and more efficient than they are today. The brain that made them makes do with 100W and makes a mockery of GPT3 and CNNs. Yes it's a specialized architecture, that's the whole point. The easy money of moore's law and Dennard scaling blinded us to a whole landscape of possible computer architecture and programming paradigms, we haven't made a dent in that mine yet.
No, Formula 1 cars are massive. They are light but very large to maximize downforce. There are a rules that define the maximum width and no current F1 car is smaller than that. I'm fact, this year's rules also define a maximum length and some manufacturers needed to shorten their cars.
What? A 2021 Formula 1 car is around 2 meters wide and between 5-6 meters long, those dimensions are larger than many cars, only being beaten by pickup trucks.
Isn't this a straw man argument? Nobody in their right mind promised flying cars, it is just not feasible energy-wise.
On the other hand, VR headset is just a mobile phone strapped to user's face, with it's screen always on. So the tech is already here, and if you check out Quest and Quest 2 - it is basically just that, even powered by the same Android OS.
I feel like this is a strawman argument without the nuance of the specifics of each field, or how the ideas were portrayed.
Were you promised flying cars or was it concept art of a future without the limits of physics? That's very different than ideation from companies actively working on a product and having a deep understanding of the limitations involved.
By the same logic they should bet the house on nuclear fusion. It’s a sure winner and I’m sure they can connect billing to your Facebook Pay account or something.
I have a really hard time seeing everyone would want to walk around with even sunglasses to augment their reality, though it could make sense for specific situations such as travelling to foreign countries.
But its really hard to be optimistic about some Metaverse or Second Life clone by Facebook (sorry Meta), where the difference is the use of XR.
So far every venture that's tried this has failed due to the lack of smarts. If their smart speakers are even remotely as smart as their XR, this is dead in the water.
Also there are dozens of ginormous game companies producing what the FB metaverse needs in order to survive: CONTENT. FB won’t be able to create anything like the quantity or quality of content these game companies can. If they decide to play in a different arena than FB’s metaverse, it’ll meet the same fate as Stadia and for the same reasons.
> Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG?
The straightforward answer is that FB leadership sincerely believes that yes, that will happen.
Conspiracy theories about alternative motivations may be fun, but this is precisely why they purchased Oculus in the first place and they’ve been pretty clear and consistent about this.
I think you're touching on why corporate America doesn't understand what r&d is supposed to be. Expecting certain returns in specific places is not the point. You fund a lot of stuff and you don't know which is going to pay off.
This isn’t R&D at this point. They’re pointing the entire direction of the company at it, publicly committing to it, renaming the company after it, and spending many billions.
VR and AR solves every problem advertisers have with browsers. Browsers are: sandboxed away from the OS, are easy for users to manipulate with addons, lacking in new data streams to monetize.
Meanwhile in VR land: Root/super user/driver level access to the system (worst of drm and anticheat software), tons of new data streams (full camera, and microphone access to the room. Some day to have eye tracking, mouth tracking , and anything you fit on health tracking watches), and of course the user can only use the device through the advertisers own software (no skipping of engagement features, no more noscript, and a nice little walled garden App Store).
>Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG?
I do, although it's very possible current attempts are too early for tech reasons and will remain relatively niche for years.
Fundamentally the appeal of vr isn't games, it's to have communication and control ability on the level of a real life activity (or even better) but online. I'm not sure if that can be achieved without brain implants (not for vision - that's likely to remain external for a long time - but for everything else, especially motor control, sense of touch).
If brain implants are needed Facebook's attempts are at least a decade too early.
Regardless of Facebook's/Meta's current attempts, in the future majority of work and social activity will happen in vr, but the timeline is unclear. Well - at least in the timeline in which technical civilization doesn't collapse.
> Pretending like they have something for the future, which they don't.
I've been following some of their research with their VR/AR hardware, and it appears to me they definitely have something for the future. They're investing massive amounts of money, and they seem to be miles ahead of everyone else (well, it doesn't seem like there is anyone else). To me, they clearly do have something for the future, with what seems like a very natural progression of technology and interacting with computers, with something like the Metaverse being an eventual end goal, maxing out that technology.
Maybe Metaverse isn't what people want, but there's so much between the computers we use now and the Metaverse that they can dip their toes in, along the way.
I'll say it with naive confidence: AR/VR is the future of display technology/use.
Something being the future isn’t very interesting if it’s always in the future. After playing the VR game Dactyl Nightmare in 1992 I figured VR was the future of video games. Thirty years later it’s still the future of gaming. By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error.
Hah! I had that game in my college town computer store. With my head full of Mondo2000 and Gibson, I was sure that VR was just around the corner. Little did I know it was our flying car.
>By the numbers, a lot more people play VR games today, but by percentage of gamers, it’s still a rounding error.
I think the big thing VR has going against it is just how antisocial it is. It's hard to have shared experiences around the technology unless enough people are already bought in.
I would say it's also hard to get buy in because you can't really describe/comprehend "presence" without experiencing it, and 2d videos or VR play don't do any favors at all.
The amount of times I've heard "I can't imagine the eyestrain from having a street that close to your face" convinced me that many people are very confused about all of this.
>They're investing massive amounts of money, and they seem to be miles ahead of everyone else (well, it doesn't seem like there is anyone else).
Who are they ahead of? They have a standalone headset which has fairly limited performance, and FB Horizons which looks like something you could make in Unity in a few days. With things like VRChat, Neos, Cluster, and others available, they definitely aren't ahead and are lagging very far behind in my opinion. Their increasingly poor reputation will even limit what they can do in a VR/AR space.
> They have a standalone headset which has fairly limited performance, and FB Horizons which looks like something you could make in Unity in a few days.
I think judging their long term plan by looking at the limitations with the current hardware (and therefore software), is extremely (and literally) short sighted. Horizons has been "out" for three whole months, and needs to run on that limited hardware. I'm assuming there's real value /learnings for getting the architecture figured out, regardless of the clients GFLOPS.
For some positives, besides having the only viable standalone headset right now, their camera based tracking (position, hands, controller) is far better than anyone else's. There's nothing remotely comparable for their hand tracking. I think it would be hard to argue that camera/lidar based inside out tracking is not necessarily the future for small form factor devices.
Hybrid standalone/PCVR, wireless and beaconless, with superior resolution and enough performance, for only $300. That does put them ahead of everyone else.
It doesn't need to be anything. It's the FB equivalent of ActiveX or self-driving cars or "the network is the computer". A thing that spinmeisters can use to generate spin.
Playing with VRchat, or some multiplayer video game on a VR headset (I'd recommend you try Population One), social interaction with other humans feels really natural, I've met countless strangers around the world, and started talking about random stuff as we've tried to hunt down enemy players. VR just breaks down some barrier that makes social interaction feel lot more natural than a text-based interface ever could.
When people get paid to do it. Younger me would rather be trading my data for training their ai, doing whatever quests they set up, hanging out in that environment if it can pay close to a minimum wage job. (Note this is easier to do in poor parts of the world, and they are just as human, with similar ai teaching potentials to those in the wealthiest nations.)
Then when all my friends are there, "working" I'll have plenty social incentive to get me to strap on the Oculus and be part of the group even if I wasn't getting paid/or didn't live the game. I remember wasting soooo many hours of my young life watching my friends play boring games of fifa, just because I wanted to part of the group.
I really don't love meta, they are insidious. but I'd rather my kid work the metaverse for extra cash than work as a "essential" worker.
I was under the impression (from other HN threads) that the simplest explanation for their erratic seeming rebranding / behavior was related to some kind of red herring optics narrative manipulation for stockholders or something. Like I know what that even means.
No, but, I see great trends in threat reduction in using stuff like Oculus in military and space applications -- let's build some crazy robots, get some low-latency links between the front line and an operating base, and let the COD trained kids go ape-shit on whatever enemy might be out there. They use Oculus' (or similar VR technology) to stay on base where they can be well protected, vs the (hardened) robots that are on the front line.
I've completely written off FB and IG -- deleted my FB account about 7 years ago, I still have a 'legacy' IG account that I might log into once a year with a name that nobody would be interested in...and that's my extent of the Meta I have in my life. I have zero desire to get into VR (until they come out with something that will work for the guys like me that have poor vision), but, who knows what the world might bring in the next 40 years.
Facebook’s CTO said in reference to Metamates (after saying “I love it!”):
> Also the saying is a reference to a Naval phrase which Instagram has used for a while "Ship, Shipmates, Self"
The fact that he thinks this in anyway justifies the ridiculousness of this is telling. It’s a primary reason why people are astonished by it, aside from how silly it sounds. First, it’s somewhat insulting to the Navy. Second, the context is not even remotely close. And lastly, the direct implication is that the company is above everyone else.
This person probably makes upwards of a million a year (probably much more?). These people are truly disconnected from society and reality.
When I was in the Navy, "shipmate" was a negative term because you only heard it when someone, most likely a khaki (senior enlisted or officer), didn't know your name and wanted to chew you out. "Hey shipmate! Your haircut is unsat!"
Yep shipmate is only used against people too new to know you’re actually insulting them (in boot camp and earlier schools it’s more of a cute jest), and when someone is so fucked up that they’re not worth reading the name on their uniform.
Yeah, you pay me that sort of salary I'm out after 6 months and building whatever side projects I feel like hacking away on for the rest of my life.
(Unless I really enjoy the job I guess).
Or I'll stick around for a couple of years and then open a restaurant that I don't have to care about profitability with. My current dream is a little hole in the wall place that sells greasy burgers, sandwiches and breakfast stuff.
Maybe I'll combine the two and open an uprofitable breakfast sandwich shack with the most overengineered point of sale system ever built.
You do realise these "naval terms" aren't exclusive to the military? I'm deliberately throwing quotes around that phrase for good reason; Zuckerberg, and/or his marketing clowns clearly haven't read any of Patrick O'Brian's books, or any nautical references.
As someone else has pointed out, this is all sounding a bit L.Ron H.
Yea, I saw that too. And I agree, in that I wager too that Hofstadter is either having some fun or was unaware of the context or intended use or all of the above.
I saw a Meta employee post a “my company rocks” post on LinkedIn this week.
Almost all of the replies were from Meta employees, and almost all of them were hyper enthusiastic. It was almost like cult members reaffirming each other that they’re still in a high functioning group.
Now of course LinkedIn is gonna LinkedIn, but this post was cranked up to an 11.
A lot of the time this stuff is just coordinated by HR for marketing/recruiting. It’s not just a SV thing (plenty of companies have these awkward forced “Yay I love it here!” posts) and not even just a tech or corporate thing (even fast food restaurants will do stuff like this), but I guess it is an American thing.
I was really apprehensive about this kind of "cultiness" when I moved out to SF in 2014 for my first engineering job. Luckily it really dropped off after company onboarding and I hardly ever heard this kind of talk from my normal colleagues.
That is, perhaps unfortunately, not a thing limited to tech companies.
My personal theory is that a lot of executives seem sold on this idea that they'll somehow hire a staff of people enthused to work there, for whom it's their dream job. People who act like that's true get ahead in those companies.
Yep, but when they're doing a talk they're playing a role. It's like when you're interviewing, you probably turn on the BS a bit. Most people don't do talks of any kind for their company so that group is already not representative of what it's like to work in company X on a day-to-day basis. That said, some things are true. E.g. Googlers are pretty self-congratulatory although there are plenty of internal cynics as well.
Have you ever seen interesting, clever, sensible, empathetic and lovely people being silent on linkedin? Ignoring hype posts from their colleagues on linkedin?
Socks? Okay, cute. Socks for the rest of your family, and they already know enough about the ages of your children to send those sizes as well? Holy shit.
Like the people who, legend has it, clap for minutes during Stalin's (or Saddam's) speeches, because they don't want to be the first to be seen to stop clapping...
It sounds like something straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley. It's a big problem with their 'Metaverse' idea in general. I saw some footage of the Horizon Worlds VR platform and it looks incredibly corporate and sterile.
If you look at how creative people are in VRchat or Minecraft or other user-centric ecosystems I wonder how Facebook is supposed to be attractive to users.
> Zuckerberg has encouraged his employees to call themselves “Metamates” instead of “colleagues” or “co-workers” or “Steve.” It’s nautical! We’re going on a swashbuckling adventure! Ahoy, Metamaties!
> But nautical adventures don’t always end well. Indigenous Hawaiians killed Captain James Cook. Even successful explorers spread disease, enslavement and general human misery through the world.
The more I have seen of Zucks interactions over the years, the more I am convinced he is seriously mentally unwell. He has a fantastic brain, but fantastic things can go fantastically wrong. Particulary when surrounded by sycophants.
As a neurodiverse person, that neurodiverse person creeps the hell out of me. I don't have much respect for his mental acuity either: his initial projects were the kind of thing "unpopular 13 year old me" would have come up with to get popular.
That, in general, assholes rise to the top? There have been studies upon studies upon studies upon even more studies of how socio-/psychopaths have what it takes. That's not to say that Zuck is a sociopath or psychopath, but I'm pretty sure there's something going on, for which we don't have a word/diagnosis, that is a sibling of the former two.
Scraping the college yearbook website to populate a website for voting on the attractiveness of female students (which is what Facebook started as) isn't all that impressive. A marginally gifted 12 year old could not only code that up in a week, but would also have the requisite lack of emotional maturity required to plaster women on a website for voting.
He identified the very worst, and most vulnerable, of what we are: how we count likes, dislikes, and friends (when "friends" become nothing more than a token economy). Instead of desperately trying to connect with humanity (like the rest of us neurodiverse individuals), he chose to disconnect humanity as a whole.
> You can't seriously believe this.
And the inability to seriously consider what your fellow human is warning you about is just the tip of that iceberg.
It was pretty smart to buy out the then-emerging competition from Instagram. The price seemed absurd at the time, but in retrospect, it was cheap and prescient.
That move doesn't work anymore, though. The cat's out of the bag with TikTok, Snapchat, etc.
Usually the lower an employee is on the company totem pole, the more they are treated like infants. More "company values" to replace any values you might hold, more dumb names. Maybe they will make fun new uniforms for the metamates soon. That way the adults can quickly pick out when children are in the room and adjust accordingly.
It's going to be funny seeing employees laugh it off and use the name ironically, and watch in horror as the irony is gradually lost in translation to newcomers.
My company has also been pushing "company values" very hard, and I've always hated it. It feels cult like and condescending. Especially when they capitalize them. We have to show that we all believe in the value of Ownership here!
Yes, be an Owner in every way except the one in the ways that matter - decision making and a piece of the profits. I just ignore dumb propaganda like this. You have no obligation to accept the responsibilities of ownership if they don’t come with a proportional piece of the rights & rewards. Although if you are given options worth a fair amount of % ownership, this may be a reasonable request.
>an Owner in every way except the one in the ways that matter - decision making and a piece of the profits.
Ouch - that stings me with my past history of nearly 2 decades as a megacorp product manager. Of course I took ownership because that's how I am wired - not because of some corporate culture initiative.
It's interesting that Bezos basically left Amazon to have his mid-life crisis. He handed over the reigns for all the important stuff and went off to work on other stuff whilst he partied on yachts.
Facebook is so tied to Zuckerberg as a person that Zuckerberg's mid-life crisis is facebook's mid-life crisis. Facebook as a product has basically reached maturity, and it makes perfect sense that the company uses the cash they're throwing off to pursue other bets. But strategically refocusing the entire company on AR/VR is just bizarre. It damages the existing business which is still hugely valuable, it ties the new business to an existing reputation which is abysmal, and it makes the chances of success tiny - because you don't need to make something new that works, you need to make something new that justifies a trillion dollar market cap.
Didn't at one point Marissa Meyer read to the whole company a children's book, out loud? That was the best moment to quit imaginable, right in that meeting, just by interrupting "I quit!".
Might as well hear a pilot tell you the itinerary for the flight you're on was changed to the side of the tallest mountain in the range the plane had fuel for--and there was no need for the parachutes tucked behind the bathroom in the very back. You could call it "the Kool-Aid moment."
> last value, and I am not making this up: "Meta, metamates, me"
I can't get the "Is this good for the company?" scene out of my head[↓]. Maybe Zuckerberg is trying to set up the perfect environment for Office Space 2?
It’s actually a riff on a Navy saying, according to folks at Meta.
And what is the difference between a rip-off and an homage? I think your underlying feelings leaked through what would have been an otherwise reasonable comment.
Could be. The others are each building their favourite vision of dystopia for profit. Netflix are selling entertainment shows. Hard to see them as the same class of dangerous but equally doesn't seem to have the same scope for revenue.
These days, it's more like a list of the companies that ruined tech and the internet. Microsoft certainly belongs on that list. Netflix made it better for a while at least.
The whole point of the Metaverse in Snowcrash was that most people's lives were so incredibly bad and depressing, that people wanted to escape into the Metaverse where things may be better for you.
Facebook is betting on people's lives getting worse, partly because their original product has done such a great job of making that a reality for the last decade.
Is there no one there at all who would tell him this was a terrible idea? That it's an absolute parody of working in a corporate hell? If I had any kind of stake in FB, that would be the most worrisome part of this.
Sure, I don't think he actually came up with it himself. I'm saying it didn't happen without Zuck's sign off. If no one told him it was awful, that's worrisome. If they told him and he ignored it, that's even worse.
A guy who gives out business cards at the start saying "I'm CEO Bitch" and then takes over the world is probably surrounded by complete "yes people" at this point.
Everything about the Metaverse pivot smells to me like a team that thinks their best interest is to just agree with the Emperor.
How embarrassing. I couldn’t even begin someone asking me to refer to them as a metamate. I don’t think I am capable of taking that scenario seriously.
Employee names are always cringy at first. You have to get over the irony hump and then Googler, Xoogler, Softies, Twits, Yahoos, and Amazonian become normal after a bit.
You know CEX the train company — they’re CEX workers.
this is how authoritarian regimes and cults work; they make you do and say ridiculous things as a shibboleth. this serves multiple purposes:
- alienates you from outsiders
- costly signal of in-group membership
- breaks down your sense of self-worth
- creates a false group consensus
evergreen dalrymple quote:
>the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
this isn't just limited to communism, it's a pathological feature of many groups. your embarrassment is a feature not a bug.
That legitimately surprises me. When I worked there a few years ago, the big thing was removing gendered language (such as “ninja” and “pirate” and “Jedi”).
I have empathy for people in all kinds of horrible situations. I have empathy for every metamatie who gave up their soul for money, who might only now be starting to see the problem.
"At Facebook, we have finally created the perfect high-tech workforce: genetically engineered apes that we call 'Metamates'. Tireless. Genius intellect. Loyal to the death. And...completely non-unionized!"
It will likely track a similar use arc. A versatile word of neutral connotation was attached to a new, derogatory meaning, which displaced all the others: today its only meaning is "prisoner".
"Inmate" used to encompass things like "hotel guest" and "hospital patient".
Is Meta doing anything cool with hardware? I can't see their vision succeeding unless there are substantial hardware innovations. Specifically, they need to solve the walking problem, they need to get some sort of haptic feedback down, and they need to make the headset as small and simple as a pair of sunglasses. Without these, the Meta-verse will never reach the mainstream.
"Anything cool"? They've made a standalone, wireless, battery powered VR headset with built-in inside-out tracking, and are selling it for about the price of a Nintendo Wii. It's an astonishing technical feat. Facebook have done more to bring VR to the masses than anyone else so far.
It is definitely neat, don't get me wrong, but there's really not that much of a difference between these new headsets and the Gen 1 HTC Vive. There's a lot more distance to cover before Meta reaches the "ready player one" vision.
It’s completely wireless and requires no additional hardware (neither extra sensors nor a $1500 PC). That’s leaps and bounds beyond the first-gen Vive.
I'm not saying that there hasn't been substantial innovation. Indeed, these things are major upgrades. But it's still "evolution", not "revolution" - these upgrades don't enable any fundamentally new experiences, it's still 2016 VR style experiences in a more sleek package. The cynic in me thinks that this style of VR is fundamentally flawed, and more major innovations are required in comfort, display, locomotion, and haptics to get VR to the point where we are ACTUALLY all spending most of our time in the Metaverse.
Ready Player One didn't have ready player one tech. The movie was wildly inconsistent with how it worked, because there are numerous fundamental design problems with getting really good vr. Like hard technical interface problems that just didn't make sense.
Yeah, it was honestly a terrible book and movie (for someone who didn't grow up in the 1980s). The VR tech was the only part that I thought was cool, but as you said, there are many parts that are inconsistent. Like every scene where he is flying around in VR, or fighting. But I do think the walking problem needs to be solved for better VR, and an omni-treadmill could have some potential as a solution.
Nah. Treadmill is good if you want to play old school doom, but terrible if you want to move around in other ways. More importantly, a big problem with vr is that people just aren't very good. Even with complete brain transfer into the game world, people aren't competent enough to do the cool shit you see in ready player one.
I mean in terms of the experiences the hardware allows, no. Maybe this will allow them to keep future hardware costs down as well, which would be nice. But the lower price point alone isn't really a huge change in VR. The experiences are still the same ones you can play on the old headsets, and people still don't want to mess up their hair by strapping a headset to their face for hours.
I am just of the opinion that the current VR paradigm is fundamentally limited, and outside of a few niche applications, isn't going anywhere. It's telling that 6 years after the first headsets, there still isn't really a "killer app" for this tech. And I'm saying this as someone who has wanted true VR since my childhood. Admittedly I am pretty cynical and would love to be proven wrong.
What it allows is to have the experience at all, and that is a huge change. Before the Quest, VR was out of reach unless you had 4 figures to burn on a top of the range gaming PC and an entire room to dedicate to VR, not to mention the huge hassle of installing drivers, setting up sensors, etc. It was solidly in "enthusiast" territory because the experience, while novel, just wasn't worth the effort.
Now, though? You buy a cheap piece of hardware. You charge it. You put it on. Boom, you're teleported to another world. Saying that's no different from wading through making an HTC Vive work is like saying Dropbox is no different than rsync, except rsync also costs a thousand bucks.
The Ford Model T wasn't revolutionary tech either. The Quest (series) is the Model T of VR headsets. It's the one that everyone's gonna buy, just for fun, because it's finally worth it.
I'm with you, and I was right about the apple watch. This(vr in general) feels like a one-off of the next big thing, like the pda was to the smartphone.
We can all laugh at how stupid these moves sounds, but Facebook is an incredibly profitable company not in the habit of burning through cash on doomed projects. It really sounds like they’re buying hard into the meta-verse and the most terrifying thought to me is. What if this pays off?
Facebook has had a good streak of successful ideas, but basically operates at the whims of Zuckerberg, and nobody has exclusively good ideas.
There will probably be something like meta-verse that eventually gets popular, but I suspect that success is not going to be something achieved by throwing money at the problem.
“metamate” is a straight up embarrassing thing to be called. If I worked there I don’t think I could get that out of my mouth without gagging or heavy sarcasm.
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
As funny as that video is, it really made me feel bad for Zuck.
He really has no idea what acting natural is, his whole life really is just tied up in "They just give it to me, the dumb f----". Regardless of how much power/money he has, that feels sad.
> He really has no idea what acting natural is, his whole life really is just tied up in "They just give it to me, the dumb f----". Regardless of how much power/money he has, that feels sad.
I've never really thought about about it in quite that way before, but there is a weird way in which Zuckerberg comes off as genuinely tragic character. Which is really odd, him being a wildly successful billionaire and all.
Yep. It's really sad that he ended in a position where he'd been able to inflict the most damage he possibly could. In a better world he'd be workaholic middle manager annoying 20 or so reports instead of billions.
It's not clear how much this is going to stick. When Google became Alphabet the leadership came up with the idea that employees would refer to each other as "characters", but I can count on one hand the number of times I saw that in 4 years at Google. Also, Microsoft's demonym is "Microsoftie" which is no better and didn't seem to be too popular among folks I knew there.
> Microsoft's demonym is "Microsoftie" which is no better and didn't seem to be too popular among folks I knew there.
It is certainly popular enough in the Seattle area at places that are not Microsoft. There are enough ex-MSFT people floating around (really, a lot of them) that you hear it often.
Will 'meta' increase their employees comp to compensate for the tanking stock? If you were making 400-500k 6 months ago, you're only making 300-400 now.
These cultish identities are always fake.
Nobody authentically believes in them and usually they only pretend to in order to signal dedication.
I`ve only seen this work at Musk`s companies with new hires.
I wonder if there is a compendium of what different companies call their own workers internally. Do all companies do this? Also kinda interesting how it doesn't seem Googlers ever became Alphabeters or whatever
They're doing all this to distract from regulation for their bread and butter businesses. That and they see not owning the platform their apps run on (iOS and Android) an existential threat.
Got me thinking: hmm, making new Facebook just gone easy :) But still some mega scale infrastructure building is needed. So plan could be: 1. gather some funds (for straight few years of burning them); 2. place 2 page ad somewhere visible saying: "Hey FB emplees we redoing it, come to us ! This month we need: nix admins and network specialists, next: frontend developers for state of artetcetc"; 3. release early; 4. ...
Please read Dan Lyons’ book Disrupted about what life is like working for a cult-y startup and seeing the insanity while having to wait for your options to vest.
The chapter on the bozos is worth the cost of the book alone.
"Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-bannered window with a Facebook logo. Which, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do."
That seems like a reinterpretation of the classic C. S. Lewis quote:
"Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”"
Does anyone actually see the majority of the planet strapping Oculuses to their face and spending even a fraction of the amount of time there that people are currently spending on FB and IG?
I have an Oculus and other than Beatsaber and Alyx and a few other titles/apps, it's just not that exciting. The Nintendo Switch is at least an order of magnitude more fun.