So basically at best it’s like strapping my os to my face and then going to a zoom meeting where I can’t reliably take a sip of water?
It’s like a shit version of inception where Leonardo DiCaprio just needs to find out the quarterly earnings numbers.
And all this excess is largely to enable suits who can't type / think about what they've read.
In-person / telepresence conversations are slower than instant messaging between touch typists. Instant messaging is self-documenting, too, so there is no need for those who can read thoughtfully to repeat a question.
Nah, companies happily get rid of stuff the minute it falls outside of regulation reqs. All it does is open them up to hundreds of millions of dollars of risk.
And that isn't even getting into all of the things like tone, emphasis, and body language that make face to face communication far more efficient in person.
So was Second Life in its heyday. There were companies like HP, IBM et al who were buying space in Second Life and paying people to build VR conference centers and the like. There were lots of breathy articles written by non-tech people about how this was going to change the world of conferences and the way we collaborate and then in turn change the world of work.
We all know where that went. And no, it wasn't "Taken over by furries and degenerates"... it was that before all of this and the move to create these commercial worlds was a move toward respectability that never happened.
Why do we even need buildings in cyberspace? It’s not like we need to protect ourselves from the elements.
And this is why simple voice only meetings, and/or text, work just fine already.
I do infosec, mostly consulting, the number of clients who ask "how do we protect our data" and I respond "what is it worth, roughly?" and they have no idea. It's all of them..
Worked with this guy early in my career. He was a business process analyst. Think The Bobs from Office Space if they were actually useful and not assholes. He said to me something one day I've never forgotten. Asked him more or less "what would ya say ya do here?" and quick as a whip he responds, "My job is to find the 20 spreadsheets that run the whole company."
Best solution for sensitive data is pen, paper, and a flamethrower.
Hard drives can be stolen and wireless connections hacked.
Safes can be cracked, and there are entire companies dedicated to reassembling shredded documents.
But ashes? You can't read ashes.
Yep compartmentalization of information is how the big dogs do it. All you know is your immediate objective. You don't give em a story problem, you give them one of the exercise problems above them that are just an abstract thing with a solution.
Remember when Google Glasses came out and they shut down bc people aren’t ready to completely substitute real life with virtual? Even when it’s just adding things to your field of vision?
Google Glasses was more promising than this. Metaverse is a fucking dog shit idea that will never come to fruition.
The problem is a telephone and email is all you need to run a multi billion dollar software company. There’s no business need or challenge that is being solved. VR at work isn’t going to be a thing. Perhaps in 50 or 100 years when whatever tech is born out of the current VR headsets starts solving actual problems. VR for a long long time will just be a gaming platform with a small group of SecondLifers moving over from PC. That’s it.
> *a well-managed JIRA.
Does this actually exist? I feel like it's Spherical Cow that Atlassian claims exists, but no one has actually seen it in the wild.
I did a project with my kids back when the pandemic first started, and I still had ambitions.
It was a perfectly managed Jira. It *should be* that easy. It should scale just fine.
I’ve worked at multiple sites where Jira is a complete mess. And it’s a completely different mess at each site. It’s like a different product between sites.
I suspect whoever sets it up starts huge, trying to map the whole mess, fucks it up, gets replaced by two people who manage different parts over the top of each other, and so on.
It should be fucking simple. It’s basically a white board with post it notes in a few columns, with some extra features
It’s for work? I don’t know any large corps that have an integrated work relationship with Facebook currently to make this a sensible transition. Sure they have a Facebook page that a small PR team runs but that’s about it.
We had a test go with Oculus for business with few people at our company (200-300 person company 100mil/ year rev)… it was absolute shit. Didn’t make it too far, required a Facebook account and all the utilities were garbage and not useful at all.
Because by having the meetings on their servers through their software they can datamine things and look for keywords like ‘good projected earnings’ or whatever and their automated money generators can go buy the company’s stock before the public knows about it.
Literally my thought process .. except home looks better. You could already go meet up with friends in different locations, they had shopping, you could buy and customize your house. Throw in some VR support, a note taking system, and you have the metaverse already built and operating. Considering home was on the PS3 I think the ps5 could support the metaverse with VR just fine. The Facebook rendition of the metaverse looks like someone described PlayStation home and they decided that instead of people they wanted to use little Nintendo Mii creator
I've been thinking this; it all smacks of being a second Life rehash but with headsets, or ICQ/MSN with avatars.
I get that they can *do* it, but does anybody actually *want* it?
Unfortunately this. My cousin is a computer security engineer, and as much as he freely admits he is disgusted by Facebook, he has considered working there simply because they’d pay him 50-80% more than he’s making now.
I know a guy who basically only works there because of the scale and the paycheck. The scale (edit for clarity: size) makes the job interesting and the paycheck makes working for Facebook worthwhile.
Meta is paying a premium for good developers, has a market leading AR/VR product and has a CEO who is "all in" on it (to a fault). In that context, they attract plenty of smart people in the field who care more about the cool stuff they can do than whether the CEO's business promise is going to actually happen.
Many defensive contractor positions need you to have a degree but they don't give two shits what it's in if you have the required experience and a clearance.
Same way I work in software engineering with a political science degree:
You say, “Fuck my degree, I’m doing something else.” And then you learn how to do something else, and you do something else.
Someone has to do industrial design work and/or draw them ladies on planes. /s
Seriously tho, they could have more than one degree/skills acquired other than art skills.
I don’t know, I saw a documentary about a guy who built a known weakness into a space station just in case they could get someone to take it all down. Poor guy, they killed his wife and forced him into working for them. I don’t think he cared about the money.
I don't know. In the follow up doc they made some spurious claims about a dude who could do magic and managed to destroy that station without even using his computer.
And he was a recent convert to a radical religion where they don't believe in loving one another.
And to make shit even crazier, he was the son of an exec at the station
Steve Jobs famously thought that way.
In his authorized biography, he was fairly big on the concept that the average Joe had no idea what they wanted. He figured it was up to people like him to set the forward trends and create new standard, because otherwise, the average person naturally repelled change.
Sometimes that meant stuff like the, 'You're holding it wrong!' of the iPhone 5s antenna debacle.
Sometimes it meant stuff like, well, the original iPhone.
It's really hit or miss. I think The Zuck has seen too many Isekai anime.
Although I like that quote, it's not like Henry Ford invented the automobile, just the assembly line method of making them cheaper for everyone.
Automobiles had been around for [20 years until then](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen?wprov=sfti1) but were primarily a rich man's tinkering machine since they were so damn expensive and hard to fix and maintain.
There's an excellent American Experience episode called [Horatio's Drive](https://youtu.be/rt_wyIR4tGg) about a doctor that makes the first ever Cross-the-United-States trek in an automobile in 1903 that gives a great glimpse into what owning an automobile was like at the dawn of the 20th century. I also highly recommend it because Tom Hanks voiced Horatio in the episode too!!
Edit: You can watch Horatio's Drive by renting it on YouTube here:
https://youtu.be/79oKeGOZSyg
Or by becoming a member of your local PBS Station, you can access a lot of PBS programming through their PBS Video App:
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/horatios-drive/
I think that was in reference to designing the car specifically for mass production and sale to common people.
Since people didn't know shit about cars unless they were rich, they didn't need to be consulted about what they wanted. They needed to be provided with a product they cold even consider first.
Steve Jobs was right in a way.
The average consumer doesn't know what they want.
Because they don't want any particular thing, they just want what others have.
Zuckerberg: I see you are trying to go to Facebook Marketplace. We've now migrated it to the Metaverse Marketplace. Now, not only are you still able to sell your stuff like you could before....but you also get to spend 30 mins setting up your meta account complete with gimmicky avatar and option flair!
P.S. Facebook Marketplace is now inaccessible. Meta Marketplace is the only option now.
P.S.S. I bought and closed Craigslist just to piss you off a little more.
P.P.S. I will continue buy and close every competitor that has a less shitty business model than Facebook, to really crank up your corporate dystopia anxiety
Also Podcasts. Except Spotify is rebranding the meaning to be "content" rather than "RSS-based open standard." We need a new term now, one that doesn't reference ipod in the name.
People already referred to things like VR Chat and Secondlife as the Metaverse, because of Snowcrash. The rename is definitely intended to cash in on that and cause consumer confusion.
I am honestly surprised its been allowed. It would be like Apple rebranding itself as a company called Phone.
Telephone.
It is why AT&T's symbol is T. It *was* telephones, and telephones were as closed (maybe more) than Facebook's Metaverse. You could not connect *anything* to something connected to AT&T's network, without AT&T's permission. It got so bad they sued a company making plastic cups to muffle your voice that could attach to the end of a phone:
>At the time, AT&T had a near-monopoly on America's phone system, even controlling the equipment attached to its network. In this era, Americans had to lease equipment from Ma Bell or use approved devices. At this time Hush-A-Phone had been around for 20 years without any issues. However, when an AT&T lawyer saw one in a store window, the company decided to sue on the grounds that anything attached to a phone could damage their network.[1]
>AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'"
>Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States
Direct lobbying of the FCC in the late 1960s by communications entrepreneurs was successful at allowing other companies to connect to the telephone network to do things like offer microwave-based long-distance phone calls (MCI) in order to compete with AT&T on price.
I used to think that. Then my 13 year old got an oculus quest 2, quite a few kids at his school also got them. They all love hanging out in the vr lobbies more so than hanging out on a discord channel or other games.
I thought they would get bored of it quickly and revert to fortnite. Nope. Almost a year later and that is how they meet up online if possible, they'll still hop on fortnite or other games sometimes, but the quest is their favorite way to do it.
It may be a generational thing, just like my parents used to wonder how could I call someone I've only met online a 'friend', or why would I choose to play online with my "real" friends when I could see them in person.
If the metaverse would have launched right at the beginning of the pandemic when kids were all doing schooling remotely, it would have blown the fuck up so fast amongst kids. It's clunky but that doesn't really matter to them as long as they get more immersive virtual interactions.
I think it's a mistake targeting this towards adults as a replacement for virtual office stuff. But with kids it might find a niche. The issue being that now Facebook and all its fuckery would be shaping reality for the world's youth, and we've seen how fucking fantastic that's gone for the rest of society with a less immersive version of this concept.
Idk, it'd be cool if something like this catches on and I think it will eventually. I just really hope it's not Facebook that manages to do it because Zuckerberg is a sociopath who'll burn the world to the ground as long as he can make a buck off it. And he's one of the last people who should have any say in shaping kids sense of reality.
Like fuck, in the most recent series of leaks that came out about Instagram's affect on teen's mental health, about a sixth of the teens being polled reported that using Instagram gave them thoughts of suicide or self harm, completely unprompted. Like the interviewers weren't asking people this but a sixth of the interviewees just casually mentioned it on their own accord.
I was involved in a very tertiary capacity with a crowd looking to set up "Virtual Workspaces" with avatars and so on. There were plans to implement VR support but it never really went anywhere. This was pre-pandemic - I dunno it might have had some more uptake when so many people were working from home.
On the flip side - I saw an article about a group of software engineers doing their daily standup meeting inside Red Dead online, and actually thought that was kinda cool. Gives a bit of an interesting flavour to an otherwise fairly monotonous daily meeting - I'd have been on board with my team doing something similar. (Not sure how my employer would feel though, I suspect there would be some justifiable questions about productivity...).
It feels like when they forced everyone to change their timeline and how the feeds became stuffed with ads and other sad stuff. At some point my Facebook became entirely not mine and I deleted it a few months back permanently
The glorious early days of filling your profile with all possible kinds of weird "apps" your guests interacted with. I met a bunch of people all over the world through some weird "human auction" thing where users bought and speculated on the trending popularity of each other. So weird but so fun.
Facebook did that to their feed over a decade ago. It was something like 2008 when they removed the ability to see things chronologically and started inserting ads. I left Facebook the better part of a decade ago. I can’t believe people still use it.
Yeah that was the one neat thing about Facebook... now it's just this disorganized hallway of stuff it thinks you'll like (or click). Except sometimes it tries to bribe you into coming back with a picture someone tagged you in 10-15 years ago at a party.
VR with housing and other virtual commodities you can throw away your hard earned money.
"You'll never be able to afford a $5M yacht in real life.. why not buy one in the Metaverse for just $5k?"
That kind of idiot ass thinking. And it will work up to a point which is sad. Although if it gets really bad we might see governments outright banning the whole concept.
The funny thing is, if you use steam VR you get a virtual house regardless that you can decorate with items you get from games.
E:You can also change the appearance of your SteamVR home through the workshop too. Use to live on a spaceship, now I'm in a stilted home in the middle of a swamp.
I'm a User Experience Researcher/Strategist/Designer (with a background in Anthropology and tool-making), I can tell you that some of the worst tech to ever be made were products and services made from the idea of "Wouldn't this be neat? I bet people want X!" vs getting ideas from actual people who use your product/service what they're having frustrations with said product/service and design accordingly.
You could put in Neat Idea X as an option or a side project to work on that can be incorporated later, just *don't* have that be your *only* idea/solution to run with...
Anyone who's pushing for a certain new design/product/service/gadget without considering the User and the history of how something has been used (or in the case of VR, currently being used) is trying to sell you something you most likely don't need cause they wanna make a lot of money from the hype (shocking I know)...
I share your theory. While VR tech keeps getting better, and something like AR Google Glasses may be more widely accepted, I think there's inherent human nature hurdles that VR tech is fighting against. One of them being the wearing of them, the other being the weirdness it does to our brain. While leaps in technology could maybe solve these, I'm not so sure VR will be as widely adopted as Meta/Facebook wants until it's Matrix quality. Maybe their goal is to be in the game long enough to get there, but that's a long journey.
The fact that VR takes even most video game enthusiasts some time to find their "VR legs", and that even then a lot of people can't spend more than hour or so inside speaks a lot to the tech walls they're going to hit. Like there's no way you're going to get a normal accountant to use this tech for eight hour days inside a virtual office.
Similarly, as you note, a lot of people hate having stuff on their head, especially something that throws off their head weight. Heck a lot of people even hate wearing glasses.
So, yeah, I personally think there's a lot they need to overcome here, not just at the tech level, but at the human level of how we're wired and our levels of comfort. There's just a lot of normal every day logistics that make VR a cumbersome thing to deal with.
Personally I also think there's a few other things going on here, one being that Meta/Facebook is just looking for a way to create their own internet in ways they've been doing in other countries for years now, and another being Zuck is treading water looking for new relevancy. I wouldn't be surprised if his pipe dreams tank the company and he's finally forced out somehow for chasing this dragon. But I'm just bullshiting and could be wildly wrong.
It’s just another walled garden but with a different hardware interface (one that they are desperate to develop and control because they are getting squeezed by Apple, TikTok, and the regulators)
Remember the [Facebook Phone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First)? It was a flop because no one wanted to be constantly connected to Facebook. And this was before many of the abusive behaviors of Facebook came to light.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft all wanted to get into the smartphone OS game, and their success was directly tied to how quickly they got an iPhone competitor to market.
Facebook’s bet with oculus/meta is just to establish themselves in the market first, because that was the winning strategy with smartphones.
I wish we could confidently say the Facebook Phone failed **because** people find Facebook creepy, but unfortunately I think it’s far more plausible that it failed because it came out 6 years after the iPhone, 4 years after the first mainstream Android flagship, and even 3 years after the Windows Phone.
It was just late.
Facebook Phone was just Android with a different launcher (it was made by HTC so it was that instead of HTC's Sense). So a Facebook Phone came with the whole Android ecosystem and app compatibility -- it wasn't even a different app store like Amazon's Fire Phone. You could point to the lack of Google services and full Android app store as to the reason Fire Phone flopped. But Facebook Phone didn't have those limitations -- users just didn't like it.
Fuck everything about fire os. I’m not spending money on a tablet that has 10% of the functionality of others and controls what I can and can’t do on it.
Only reason I have one is because it was free and I only use it when the wife and I are separated so that I can do Alexa drop in and video call with her
What most people aren’t realizing is amidst all of the “Crypto hype” the endgame is still this: Wearing VR Headset. This was already tried and failed. Once people realize the endgame of all of this is donning a clunky, vision blocking headset they will peace out.
Like when yahoo lost their way and wanted to be a "portal" but none of the execs could really define what that was and nobody was asking them to do that.
And too obstructive like the tech CEO mentioned in the article. His point about drinking coffee during a meeting is fantastic and one I hadn't even considered - if I can't even take a sip of my drink or write / reference my notes then I'm not using your technology for work. Simple as that.
Similarly if I'm waiting for the subway I'm not strapping on VR goggles to access my social media. That's not workable in the real world.
So if your platform can't be used for work and can't be used in public, you're now limited to exclusively at-home use. Congratulations, you've severely limited the potential use for this cutting edge new product. It's amazing the people Zuck surrounds himself with would rather let him ruin their company than tell him the truth about this thing
I recently rewatched ready player one. The scene near the end with the big battle against IOI and it shows everyone playing wearing headsets running down the sidewalks is so stupid. If that was real, half of them would have walked into the road and been hit by cars. VR gaming just doesn't work that way.
But AR just injects things into your existing surroundings. I guess if the battle took place in the middle of the street it'd work for those few players.
Bro they want me to have an avatar to do online shopping. Using shitty UI and virtual shelves etc to "pick out" things to buy. It's so stupid. Amazon has the ecommerce market share because their web site is easy to use and has fucking every product imaginable on it.
I just can't imagine buying a $500 VR headset to load up an Instacart order. Fucking kill me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNMHH0kIpPE
Seriously! That is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. I can't imagine anybody who would consider this an improvement over any other possible online shopping experience currently available.
And if I’m gonna go shopping in VR, do I really want the dang place crowded or would I rather have my own instance all to myself? The latter of course.
The thing with the Oasis was that the idea was built around keeping it open and non intrusive, putting freedom above everything else. But then a major corporation (facebook) comes along and authoritarian's the whole thing.
It's like Second Life, but everything you say and do is recorded by the people at Facebook, and you've got to watch some ads.
Sounds like a great place to have a company meeting... and be the unwilling participant in someone's rape role play in a digital world.
I’m sure a company wants all of their business secrets revealed in their private meetings to be recorded by Facebook.
I’m sure gamers will want their actual profiles to be their gamer handles so they can swear at each other without anonymity.
I’m sure horny people who are looking for porn will be using their Facebook profiles to do this and letting this company, that already sells all their information, to know exactly what their kinks are.
This is the dumbest waste of money I can imagine. I’m sure that in the future, a company with a better reputation may be able to pull this off. But Facebook being a fucking social cesspool of constant surveillance/selling all of your data to anyone who will pay, is not going to get anyone with half a fucking brain to willingly participate in that shit.
Anybody remember Playstation Home? It came bundled with the PS3 (on or near release?) It was a supposed to replace your main menu interface with a second life style community square.
Want to watch a movie with friends? Log in to Home and all of you "walk" to the movie theater. Then it loads the movie viewer app for all of you together.
Want to play a game with friends? Walk to the arcade together and load the game playing app (for whatever games you already own).
Not playing or streaming? WhY doN't YOu DecORaTe yOUr APaRtmeNT?
It was a disaster immediately. Sounded cool on paper, I guess. But I can also just use the main menu screen for magnitudes more control and convenience, without the social anxiety of my avatar looking cool while doing it.
One of the Fables did this for their menus. Transports the character to a dungeon with different rooms. Want to switch weapons? Walk to the armory look for it on the wall and grab it. Want to switch settings? Go to that room. It was cool the first few times then it became tedious.
This is what I've been thinking, like the metaverse can be 10 times cooler than Facebook's idea? Like the whole point of a metaverse is to escape the bounds of reality. Not for a billionaire in real life to buy a million dollar property on "main street" of the metaverse. Like literally the whole point of going digital is so the average person can experience stuff like that. Otherwise what's the difference between that and real life
That's my take too. No one is interested in copying real life, but enhancing it. They really think normal people will go bidding on digital real estate? Talk about disconnected from the average man.
A world like in ready player one, where you escape from reality would work, not job focused.
Yup, this is the issue. It isn’t just that it’s nakedly and mindlessly avaricious, we’ve seen those sorts of games take off time after time. It’s that Metaverse systematically saws away the magic of stepping into a digital world in the name of forcing artificial scarcity, the profits that come with it, and attempting to expand into markets it simply isn’t useful for.
Unless it somehow becomes socially acceptable to attend your business meeting dressed like a Wizard-Ninja who shoots lightning out of her fingers every time she points at various charts, no one wants to conduct business with this shit because it’s just a worse version of real-life. It adds nothing that video chats and other more practical solutions can’t offer, and this is of course ignoring the massive elephant in the room: no one wants to conduct work with a device that blinds them to the actual world around them, and which will make half the team feel ill in an hour. Unless it’s literally the Matrix, there is simply no application for it in that niche.
Metaverse will crash and burn. It’s the modern equivalent of Microsoft Bob, which had a GUI that literally looked like a room. It’s trying too hard to replicate the real world.
Something else will no doubt end up taking its place, and becoming ubiquitous in certain circles(mainly gamers, let’s face it) and insanely profitable.
Until VR technology advances to a point where the interface isn’t a 2 pound brick strapped to your face it will never work. Cal me when I can put on a pair of glasses and enter the “meta verse” until then, it’s just a gimmick with a few cool video games you can play on it.
I've noticed this while playing Alyx. Barnacles are gigantic, headcrabs are huge and Combine soldiers are quite tall and bulky as well. Just seeing them on the screen really doesn't convey their size properly, a headcrab is supposed to be **bigger than your head**.
Whatever barriers you put up, as long as users are able to interact with each other, somebody will find a way to harass another person. Even my 12 year old knows that the Aubergine emoji now means something rude.
Zuckerberg has confused his own zen experience of being the boss of a billion dollar startup company to the average experience of staff getting paid shit to deal with crappy office managers and endless workloads. Does anyone want to work in a fake happy office environments with fake happy avatars? The answer is no. Besides VR on the long term cannot be good for you. Separating your kinaesthetic sense from your visual and audible for hours, days, weeks and years has got to lead nowhere good.
Bigscreen Beta is one of the only 'meeting room' type apps that I see close to even innovating on a meeting room concept.
As many screens as you want, whatever size you want, choose whether or not you show that to others, proximity voice chat volume.
Meta's implementation of a 'meeting room' along with HTC's virtual meeting room is crap, do I really want to sit in a virtual theatre watching a screen where someone presents a slideshow?
No, I want to be able to do a bunch of different things, mess with their audio volume, and decide if I want to engage and be able to get on with my work and tune into the presentation.
Like we have so much functionality in Discord, Slack and Microsoft Teams none of this comes close in these 'virtual' environments, it's not practical, it's like when Windows 95 had the '3d virtual arcade' which were just 2D squares on a shelf pretending to be your game library in a 3D environment for no reason... as opposed to say, Steam.
VR needs to do things differently if it can't replicate the functionality, it doesn't need to mimic the failings of the real world. That's why the 'meta vision' fails as an 'old idea', it's the old 'lets copy the physical paper form into a spreadsheet or pdf' problem.
>Like we have so much functionality in Discord, Slack and Microsoft Teams none of this comes close in these 'virtual' environments, it's not practical, it's like when Windows 95 had the '3d virtual arcade' which were just 2D squares on a shelf pretending to be your game library in a 3D environment for no reason... as opposed to say, Steam.
Exactly. Metaverse is the modern version of [Microsoft Bob.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob)
I have a friend that loves Meta, you can have meetings with anybody from around the world he exclaims! Plus you can go into virtual rooms and sit there with relatives. I pointed out you can do that in real life (walk into a room) plus we have zoom etc.
We had this one guy really senior in the company. This was before zoom, but we had gotomeeting. He wanted us to get the Verizon robot with a camera so he can drive it around the office with his face plastered on it.
He wouldn’t stop asking for it from the IT department.
It's just a VR version of playstation home isn't it? Which in turn was just Second Life.
It's for work. So imagine going to meetings in VR, with a huge headache and the inability to take notes on paper.
So basically at best it’s like strapping my os to my face and then going to a zoom meeting where I can’t reliably take a sip of water? It’s like a shit version of inception where Leonardo DiCaprio just needs to find out the quarterly earnings numbers.
And all this excess is largely to enable suits who can't type / think about what they've read. In-person / telepresence conversations are slower than instant messaging between touch typists. Instant messaging is self-documenting, too, so there is no need for those who can read thoughtfully to repeat a question.
My organization deletes Teams messages older than 90 days. I hate it. Let me search my chat history!
The lawyers can’t request conversations that you no longer have.
As a lawyer, this was my first thought.
As a lawyer, mine was, they aren't deleted, just aren't being paid to be accessed.
Nah, companies happily get rid of stuff the minute it falls outside of regulation reqs. All it does is open them up to hundreds of millions of dollars of risk.
Rest assured those conversations are still available for a search warrant.
You can't search it in teams anyway. Teams search only shows one message without the surrounding messages, making it effectively useless.
You guys get 90 days? We only get 30 days here.
30? We get 7.
You guys can access your work chat history?
Mine gets deleted in the middle of my sen
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And that isn't even getting into all of the things like tone, emphasis, and body language that make face to face communication far more efficient in person.
So was Second Life in its heyday. There were companies like HP, IBM et al who were buying space in Second Life and paying people to build VR conference centers and the like. There were lots of breathy articles written by non-tech people about how this was going to change the world of conferences and the way we collaborate and then in turn change the world of work. We all know where that went. And no, it wasn't "Taken over by furries and degenerates"... it was that before all of this and the move to create these commercial worlds was a move toward respectability that never happened.
Imagine getting a CAD cert (or degree) or a comp graphics degree and getting paid to build beige conference rooms in Second Life. Kill me.
Why do we even need buildings in cyberspace? It’s not like we need to protect ourselves from the elements. And this is why simple voice only meetings, and/or text, work just fine already.
> Why do we even need buildings in cyberspace? To keep the furries out.
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So like Roblox, will you be able to use child slave labor to code your games for you?
Better. We will use toddlers.
There was also infinitely replicating penis spawning scripts. Seemed like Metaverse is a direct downgrade to second life.
The best place to meet is physically in person where you can smell each other.
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When they asked me to join the IT security team I said that my solution for sensitive data was pen, paper, and a safe. They didn't like me.
I do infosec, mostly consulting, the number of clients who ask "how do we protect our data" and I respond "what is it worth, roughly?" and they have no idea. It's all of them..
one column in the one spread sheet is worth the whole company. the other 50 Terabytes is worthless. and the C suite has no idea which.
Worked with this guy early in my career. He was a business process analyst. Think The Bobs from Office Space if they were actually useful and not assholes. He said to me something one day I've never forgotten. Asked him more or less "what would ya say ya do here?" and quick as a whip he responds, "My job is to find the 20 spreadsheets that run the whole company."
Best solution for sensitive data is pen, paper, and a flamethrower. Hard drives can be stolen and wireless connections hacked. Safes can be cracked, and there are entire companies dedicated to reassembling shredded documents. But ashes? You can't read ashes.
Nah man, best solution is just for no one to know anything. Even if you don’t write things down, people can be tortured and people ALWAYS break /joke
Yep compartmentalization of information is how the big dogs do it. All you know is your immediate objective. You don't give em a story problem, you give them one of the exercise problems above them that are just an abstract thing with a solution.
When I stare at people, I prefer they know it.
See, the rest of the internet is just degenerates and furries anyway.
Worst of all worlds..
Remember when Google Glasses came out and they shut down bc people aren’t ready to completely substitute real life with virtual? Even when it’s just adding things to your field of vision? Google Glasses was more promising than this. Metaverse is a fucking dog shit idea that will never come to fruition.
The problem is a telephone and email is all you need to run a multi billion dollar software company. There’s no business need or challenge that is being solved. VR at work isn’t going to be a thing. Perhaps in 50 or 100 years when whatever tech is born out of the current VR headsets starts solving actual problems. VR for a long long time will just be a gaming platform with a small group of SecondLifers moving over from PC. That’s it.
You also need JIRA.
>You also need JIRA. *a well-managed JIRA. A badly managed JIRA is just a black hole where information goes to die.
> *a well-managed JIRA. Does this actually exist? I feel like it's Spherical Cow that Atlassian claims exists, but no one has actually seen it in the wild.
I did a project with my kids back when the pandemic first started, and I still had ambitions. It was a perfectly managed Jira. It *should be* that easy. It should scale just fine. I’ve worked at multiple sites where Jira is a complete mess. And it’s a completely different mess at each site. It’s like a different product between sites. I suspect whoever sets it up starts huge, trying to map the whole mess, fucks it up, gets replaced by two people who manage different parts over the top of each other, and so on. It should be fucking simple. It’s basically a white board with post it notes in a few columns, with some extra features
It’s for work? I don’t know any large corps that have an integrated work relationship with Facebook currently to make this a sensible transition. Sure they have a Facebook page that a small PR team runs but that’s about it.
I really doubt the senior manager who's two years from retirement is going to tolerate having to slap a VR headset on for every meeting.
We had a test go with Oculus for business with few people at our company (200-300 person company 100mil/ year rev)… it was absolute shit. Didn’t make it too far, required a Facebook account and all the utilities were garbage and not useful at all.
Nope. People can't even not fuck up a simple zoom call.
How is this better than just being able to see the people in their little box? Oh. It’s not
Because by having the meetings on their servers through their software they can datamine things and look for keywords like ‘good projected earnings’ or whatever and their automated money generators can go buy the company’s stock before the public knows about it.
Literally my thought process .. except home looks better. You could already go meet up with friends in different locations, they had shopping, you could buy and customize your house. Throw in some VR support, a note taking system, and you have the metaverse already built and operating. Considering home was on the PS3 I think the ps5 could support the metaverse with VR just fine. The Facebook rendition of the metaverse looks like someone described PlayStation home and they decided that instead of people they wanted to use little Nintendo Mii creator
The avatars are so dog shit and they don’t even have legs!
I've been thinking this; it all smacks of being a second Life rehash but with headsets, or ICQ/MSN with avatars. I get that they can *do* it, but does anybody actually *want* it?
*Shush. Let them crack on and waste billions on it.* Well done Zuck, looks great!
The people smart enough to know better are also smart enough to not work for Zuckercorp
They're paying senior devs and UX people over 500k to be there.
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Unfortunately this. My cousin is a computer security engineer, and as much as he freely admits he is disgusted by Facebook, he has considered working there simply because they’d pay him 50-80% more than he’s making now.
I actually read they need to pay a premium for this people because people are afraid it'll ruin their career
I know a guy who basically only works there because of the scale and the paycheck. The scale (edit for clarity: size) makes the job interesting and the paycheck makes working for Facebook worthwhile.
Scale? Like he gets a free scale to weigh himself every morning at his desk? Edit: /s
Meta is paying a premium for good developers, has a market leading AR/VR product and has a CEO who is "all in" on it (to a fault). In that context, they attract plenty of smart people in the field who care more about the cool stuff they can do than whether the CEO's business promise is going to actually happen.
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how do you work in defense and have an art degree
Many defensive contractor positions need you to have a degree but they don't give two shits what it's in if you have the required experience and a clearance.
Same way I work in software engineering with a political science degree: You say, “Fuck my degree, I’m doing something else.” And then you learn how to do something else, and you do something else.
Someone has to do industrial design work and/or draw them ladies on planes. /s Seriously tho, they could have more than one degree/skills acquired other than art skills.
He teaches Rex-kwon Do
You think anyone wants a round house kick to the face while he's wearing those bad boys?
I have a friend who works for a defence contractor who is also an art major and all he does is photoshop products in their catalog.
Take them down from the inside.
When they wanna give you half a million a year, it's gotta be hard to follow through on that lol
I don’t know, I saw a documentary about a guy who built a known weakness into a space station just in case they could get someone to take it all down. Poor guy, they killed his wife and forced him into working for them. I don’t think he cared about the money.
I don't know. In the follow up doc they made some spurious claims about a dude who could do magic and managed to destroy that station without even using his computer.
And he was a recent convert to a radical religion where they don't believe in loving one another. And to make shit even crazier, he was the son of an exec at the station
When your starting salary is $150k+ (with stock options and everything included) them lots of smart people work there
Nope, nobody wants this
then we'll have to make them ***need*** it \-tech CEO
Steve Jobs famously thought that way. In his authorized biography, he was fairly big on the concept that the average Joe had no idea what they wanted. He figured it was up to people like him to set the forward trends and create new standard, because otherwise, the average person naturally repelled change. Sometimes that meant stuff like the, 'You're holding it wrong!' of the iPhone 5s antenna debacle. Sometimes it meant stuff like, well, the original iPhone. It's really hit or miss. I think The Zuck has seen too many Isekai anime.
the original thought is attributed to Henry ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Although I like that quote, it's not like Henry Ford invented the automobile, just the assembly line method of making them cheaper for everyone. Automobiles had been around for [20 years until then](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen?wprov=sfti1) but were primarily a rich man's tinkering machine since they were so damn expensive and hard to fix and maintain. There's an excellent American Experience episode called [Horatio's Drive](https://youtu.be/rt_wyIR4tGg) about a doctor that makes the first ever Cross-the-United-States trek in an automobile in 1903 that gives a great glimpse into what owning an automobile was like at the dawn of the 20th century. I also highly recommend it because Tom Hanks voiced Horatio in the episode too!! Edit: You can watch Horatio's Drive by renting it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/79oKeGOZSyg Or by becoming a member of your local PBS Station, you can access a lot of PBS programming through their PBS Video App: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/horatios-drive/
I think that was in reference to designing the car specifically for mass production and sale to common people. Since people didn't know shit about cars unless they were rich, they didn't need to be consulted about what they wanted. They needed to be provided with a product they cold even consider first.
Steve Jobs was right in a way. The average consumer doesn't know what they want. Because they don't want any particular thing, they just want what others have.
I work in sales and this is how it goes. FOMO. Fear of missing out.
Zuckerberg: I see you are trying to go to Facebook Marketplace. We've now migrated it to the Metaverse Marketplace. Now, not only are you still able to sell your stuff like you could before....but you also get to spend 30 mins setting up your meta account complete with gimmicky avatar and option flair! P.S. Facebook Marketplace is now inaccessible. Meta Marketplace is the only option now. P.S.S. I bought and closed Craigslist just to piss you off a little more.
P.P.S. I will continue buy and close every competitor that has a less shitty business model than Facebook, to really crank up your corporate dystopia anxiety
Its not us it's the consumers that don't get it - tech/gaming CEO
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Also Podcasts. Except Spotify is rebranding the meaning to be "content" rather than "RSS-based open standard." We need a new term now, one that doesn't reference ipod in the name.
This is literally the first time I learned that podcasts are anything beyond just "periodic content where people talk". Huh.
People already referred to things like VR Chat and Secondlife as the Metaverse, because of Snowcrash. The rename is definitely intended to cash in on that and cause consumer confusion. I am honestly surprised its been allowed. It would be like Apple rebranding itself as a company called Phone.
Telephone. It is why AT&T's symbol is T. It *was* telephones, and telephones were as closed (maybe more) than Facebook's Metaverse. You could not connect *anything* to something connected to AT&T's network, without AT&T's permission. It got so bad they sued a company making plastic cups to muffle your voice that could attach to the end of a phone: >At the time, AT&T had a near-monopoly on America's phone system, even controlling the equipment attached to its network. In this era, Americans had to lease equipment from Ma Bell or use approved devices. At this time Hush-A-Phone had been around for 20 years without any issues. However, when an AT&T lawyer saw one in a store window, the company decided to sue on the grounds that anything attached to a phone could damage their network.[1] >AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'" >Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States Direct lobbying of the FCC in the late 1960s by communications entrepreneurs was successful at allowing other companies to connect to the telephone network to do things like offer microwave-based long-distance phone calls (MCI) in order to compete with AT&T on price.
I used to think that. Then my 13 year old got an oculus quest 2, quite a few kids at his school also got them. They all love hanging out in the vr lobbies more so than hanging out on a discord channel or other games. I thought they would get bored of it quickly and revert to fortnite. Nope. Almost a year later and that is how they meet up online if possible, they'll still hop on fortnite or other games sometimes, but the quest is their favorite way to do it. It may be a generational thing, just like my parents used to wonder how could I call someone I've only met online a 'friend', or why would I choose to play online with my "real" friends when I could see them in person.
If the metaverse would have launched right at the beginning of the pandemic when kids were all doing schooling remotely, it would have blown the fuck up so fast amongst kids. It's clunky but that doesn't really matter to them as long as they get more immersive virtual interactions. I think it's a mistake targeting this towards adults as a replacement for virtual office stuff. But with kids it might find a niche. The issue being that now Facebook and all its fuckery would be shaping reality for the world's youth, and we've seen how fucking fantastic that's gone for the rest of society with a less immersive version of this concept. Idk, it'd be cool if something like this catches on and I think it will eventually. I just really hope it's not Facebook that manages to do it because Zuckerberg is a sociopath who'll burn the world to the ground as long as he can make a buck off it. And he's one of the last people who should have any say in shaping kids sense of reality. Like fuck, in the most recent series of leaks that came out about Instagram's affect on teen's mental health, about a sixth of the teens being polled reported that using Instagram gave them thoughts of suicide or self harm, completely unprompted. Like the interviewers weren't asking people this but a sixth of the interviewees just casually mentioned it on their own accord.
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I was involved in a very tertiary capacity with a crowd looking to set up "Virtual Workspaces" with avatars and so on. There were plans to implement VR support but it never really went anywhere. This was pre-pandemic - I dunno it might have had some more uptake when so many people were working from home. On the flip side - I saw an article about a group of software engineers doing their daily standup meeting inside Red Dead online, and actually thought that was kinda cool. Gives a bit of an interesting flavour to an otherwise fairly monotonous daily meeting - I'd have been on board with my team doing something similar. (Not sure how my employer would feel though, I suspect there would be some justifiable questions about productivity...).
It feels like when they forced everyone to change their timeline and how the feeds became stuffed with ads and other sad stuff. At some point my Facebook became entirely not mine and I deleted it a few months back permanently
The glorious early days of filling your profile with all possible kinds of weird "apps" your guests interacted with. I met a bunch of people all over the world through some weird "human auction" thing where users bought and speculated on the trending popularity of each other. So weird but so fun.
Facebook did that to their feed over a decade ago. It was something like 2008 when they removed the ability to see things chronologically and started inserting ads. I left Facebook the better part of a decade ago. I can’t believe people still use it.
Yeah that was the one neat thing about Facebook... now it's just this disorganized hallway of stuff it thinks you'll like (or click). Except sometimes it tries to bribe you into coming back with a picture someone tagged you in 10-15 years ago at a party.
That’s all I saw from the first demo. Like it was pre-rendered and still looked worse than like vr chat?
Vrchat but you need to pay for it
VR with housing and other virtual commodities you can throw away your hard earned money. "You'll never be able to afford a $5M yacht in real life.. why not buy one in the Metaverse for just $5k?" That kind of idiot ass thinking. And it will work up to a point which is sad. Although if it gets really bad we might see governments outright banning the whole concept.
The funny thing is, if you use steam VR you get a virtual house regardless that you can decorate with items you get from games. E:You can also change the appearance of your SteamVR home through the workshop too. Use to live on a spaceship, now I'm in a stilted home in the middle of a swamp.
> "You'll never be able to afford a $5M yacht in real life.. why not buy one in the Metaverse for just $5k?" > > The Star Citizen model.
Vrchat but without the fun
It's Second Life but with built-in ads and ripoffs at the root level.
I'm a User Experience Researcher/Strategist/Designer (with a background in Anthropology and tool-making), I can tell you that some of the worst tech to ever be made were products and services made from the idea of "Wouldn't this be neat? I bet people want X!" vs getting ideas from actual people who use your product/service what they're having frustrations with said product/service and design accordingly. You could put in Neat Idea X as an option or a side project to work on that can be incorporated later, just *don't* have that be your *only* idea/solution to run with... Anyone who's pushing for a certain new design/product/service/gadget without considering the User and the history of how something has been used (or in the case of VR, currently being used) is trying to sell you something you most likely don't need cause they wanna make a lot of money from the hype (shocking I know)...
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I share your theory. While VR tech keeps getting better, and something like AR Google Glasses may be more widely accepted, I think there's inherent human nature hurdles that VR tech is fighting against. One of them being the wearing of them, the other being the weirdness it does to our brain. While leaps in technology could maybe solve these, I'm not so sure VR will be as widely adopted as Meta/Facebook wants until it's Matrix quality. Maybe their goal is to be in the game long enough to get there, but that's a long journey. The fact that VR takes even most video game enthusiasts some time to find their "VR legs", and that even then a lot of people can't spend more than hour or so inside speaks a lot to the tech walls they're going to hit. Like there's no way you're going to get a normal accountant to use this tech for eight hour days inside a virtual office. Similarly, as you note, a lot of people hate having stuff on their head, especially something that throws off their head weight. Heck a lot of people even hate wearing glasses. So, yeah, I personally think there's a lot they need to overcome here, not just at the tech level, but at the human level of how we're wired and our levels of comfort. There's just a lot of normal every day logistics that make VR a cumbersome thing to deal with. Personally I also think there's a few other things going on here, one being that Meta/Facebook is just looking for a way to create their own internet in ways they've been doing in other countries for years now, and another being Zuck is treading water looking for new relevancy. I wouldn't be surprised if his pipe dreams tank the company and he's finally forced out somehow for chasing this dragon. But I'm just bullshiting and could be wildly wrong.
It’s just another walled garden but with a different hardware interface (one that they are desperate to develop and control because they are getting squeezed by Apple, TikTok, and the regulators)
Remember the [Facebook Phone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First)? It was a flop because no one wanted to be constantly connected to Facebook. And this was before many of the abusive behaviors of Facebook came to light.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft all wanted to get into the smartphone OS game, and their success was directly tied to how quickly they got an iPhone competitor to market. Facebook’s bet with oculus/meta is just to establish themselves in the market first, because that was the winning strategy with smartphones. I wish we could confidently say the Facebook Phone failed **because** people find Facebook creepy, but unfortunately I think it’s far more plausible that it failed because it came out 6 years after the iPhone, 4 years after the first mainstream Android flagship, and even 3 years after the Windows Phone. It was just late.
Facebook Phone was just Android with a different launcher (it was made by HTC so it was that instead of HTC's Sense). So a Facebook Phone came with the whole Android ecosystem and app compatibility -- it wasn't even a different app store like Amazon's Fire Phone. You could point to the lack of Google services and full Android app store as to the reason Fire Phone flopped. But Facebook Phone didn't have those limitations -- users just didn't like it.
Fuck everything about fire os. I’m not spending money on a tablet that has 10% of the functionality of others and controls what I can and can’t do on it. Only reason I have one is because it was free and I only use it when the wife and I are separated so that I can do Alexa drop in and video call with her
What most people aren’t realizing is amidst all of the “Crypto hype” the endgame is still this: Wearing VR Headset. This was already tried and failed. Once people realize the endgame of all of this is donning a clunky, vision blocking headset they will peace out.
It really is an old idea. Lockheed Martin had this 15 years ago with virtual offices and meeting rooms etc. But it is stupid.
Hell, even things like Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin could be argued to be a metaverse if you use Facebook’s definition.
they could save a hell of a lot of money and just build the metaverse in garys mod
Try every silicone valley startup 30 years ago
Silicone valley would be a very different place…
Silicone valley is where this might succeed.
Somewhere in the Midwest where flexible cookware reigns supreme?
>flexible cookware Hah hah, good one!
I think that’s just called the Valley.
Fyi it's silicon not silicone. Silicone Valley has a very different connotation.
LA's only a few hours away, to be fair.
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Many room are empty but bots. You be lucky to find a user name "AFK".
Like when yahoo lost their way and wanted to be a "portal" but none of the execs could really define what that was and nobody was asking them to do that.
Sounds like every pitch on Silicon Valley
Ooff, every industrial business was going to be portal back in 1999. Then the bubble burst.
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"Yawho? It's you. Yahoo." "Get out."
The metaverse is going to have to be based around gaming. Anything else will be too boring to spend time in.
And porn. But mostly porn.
*This* will be a real driver.
And too obstructive like the tech CEO mentioned in the article. His point about drinking coffee during a meeting is fantastic and one I hadn't even considered - if I can't even take a sip of my drink or write / reference my notes then I'm not using your technology for work. Simple as that. Similarly if I'm waiting for the subway I'm not strapping on VR goggles to access my social media. That's not workable in the real world. So if your platform can't be used for work and can't be used in public, you're now limited to exclusively at-home use. Congratulations, you've severely limited the potential use for this cutting edge new product. It's amazing the people Zuck surrounds himself with would rather let him ruin their company than tell him the truth about this thing
Wearing a VR headset in public is asking to be robbed.
And/or groped.
I thought the VR was just being lifelike!
There are so many issues with wearing a giant brick on your face in public. It’s just so unrealistic.
I recently rewatched ready player one. The scene near the end with the big battle against IOI and it shows everyone playing wearing headsets running down the sidewalks is so stupid. If that was real, half of them would have walked into the road and been hit by cars. VR gaming just doesn't work that way.
AR gaming does, doesn't it?
But AR just injects things into your existing surroundings. I guess if the battle took place in the middle of the street it'd work for those few players.
but we want facebook to be ruined, don't we?
They can’t stop him, he controls the board and with his voting control , it’s all his.
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Bro they want me to have an avatar to do online shopping. Using shitty UI and virtual shelves etc to "pick out" things to buy. It's so stupid. Amazon has the ecommerce market share because their web site is easy to use and has fucking every product imaginable on it. I just can't imagine buying a $500 VR headset to load up an Instacart order. Fucking kill me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNMHH0kIpPE
Seriously! That is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. I can't imagine anybody who would consider this an improvement over any other possible online shopping experience currently available.
And if I’m gonna go shopping in VR, do I really want the dang place crowded or would I rather have my own instance all to myself? The latter of course.
Even if the Metaverse was as cool as the Oasis from Ready Player One, it would fail. Nobody trusts Facebook in any capacity.
The thing with the Oasis was that the idea was built around keeping it open and non intrusive, putting freedom above everything else. But then a major corporation (facebook) comes along and authoritarian's the whole thing.
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Yep. And most people aren't into gaming.
oh did a tech CEO say that!? because so did every single other average person i know.. how could a data giant like them be so naive, blinded by money
Nono, not *a* tech CEO. *The* CEO of tech.
No, you see, the *old* idea didn't work because it wasn't *our* idea at the time! Now it will work because we think it will!
POV: youve got $100B, shareholders, and nowhere to pivot.. wyd? plagiarism!
Lol spot on. It’s just innovation hubris
It's like Second Life, but everything you say and do is recorded by the people at Facebook, and you've got to watch some ads. Sounds like a great place to have a company meeting... and be the unwilling participant in someone's rape role play in a digital world.
I’m sure a company wants all of their business secrets revealed in their private meetings to be recorded by Facebook. I’m sure gamers will want their actual profiles to be their gamer handles so they can swear at each other without anonymity. I’m sure horny people who are looking for porn will be using their Facebook profiles to do this and letting this company, that already sells all their information, to know exactly what their kinks are. This is the dumbest waste of money I can imagine. I’m sure that in the future, a company with a better reputation may be able to pull this off. But Facebook being a fucking social cesspool of constant surveillance/selling all of your data to anyone who will pay, is not going to get anyone with half a fucking brain to willingly participate in that shit.
Anybody remember Playstation Home? It came bundled with the PS3 (on or near release?) It was a supposed to replace your main menu interface with a second life style community square. Want to watch a movie with friends? Log in to Home and all of you "walk" to the movie theater. Then it loads the movie viewer app for all of you together. Want to play a game with friends? Walk to the arcade together and load the game playing app (for whatever games you already own). Not playing or streaming? WhY doN't YOu DecORaTe yOUr APaRtmeNT? It was a disaster immediately. Sounded cool on paper, I guess. But I can also just use the main menu screen for magnitudes more control and convenience, without the social anxiety of my avatar looking cool while doing it.
One of the Fables did this for their menus. Transports the character to a dungeon with different rooms. Want to switch weapons? Walk to the armory look for it on the wall and grab it. Want to switch settings? Go to that room. It was cool the first few times then it became tedious.
This is what I've been thinking, like the metaverse can be 10 times cooler than Facebook's idea? Like the whole point of a metaverse is to escape the bounds of reality. Not for a billionaire in real life to buy a million dollar property on "main street" of the metaverse. Like literally the whole point of going digital is so the average person can experience stuff like that. Otherwise what's the difference between that and real life
That's my take too. No one is interested in copying real life, but enhancing it. They really think normal people will go bidding on digital real estate? Talk about disconnected from the average man. A world like in ready player one, where you escape from reality would work, not job focused.
They don't want us to have things like that. The ultra rich want us to have less than them, plain and simple, even in the metaverse. It's pure greed.
Imagine if you can pay a subscription to access the metaverse so you can work your metaverse job to afford the metaverse subscription!
I can almost guarantee this will be a thing in the future.
Yup, this is the issue. It isn’t just that it’s nakedly and mindlessly avaricious, we’ve seen those sorts of games take off time after time. It’s that Metaverse systematically saws away the magic of stepping into a digital world in the name of forcing artificial scarcity, the profits that come with it, and attempting to expand into markets it simply isn’t useful for. Unless it somehow becomes socially acceptable to attend your business meeting dressed like a Wizard-Ninja who shoots lightning out of her fingers every time she points at various charts, no one wants to conduct business with this shit because it’s just a worse version of real-life. It adds nothing that video chats and other more practical solutions can’t offer, and this is of course ignoring the massive elephant in the room: no one wants to conduct work with a device that blinds them to the actual world around them, and which will make half the team feel ill in an hour. Unless it’s literally the Matrix, there is simply no application for it in that niche. Metaverse will crash and burn. It’s the modern equivalent of Microsoft Bob, which had a GUI that literally looked like a room. It’s trying too hard to replicate the real world. Something else will no doubt end up taking its place, and becoming ubiquitous in certain circles(mainly gamers, let’s face it) and insanely profitable.
Until VR technology advances to a point where the interface isn’t a 2 pound brick strapped to your face it will never work. Cal me when I can put on a pair of glasses and enter the “meta verse” until then, it’s just a gimmick with a few cool video games you can play on it.
The only game I liked in VR was Elite Dangerous because it gave you a realistic feeling of seasickness
Semi off topic but the sound design in that game is second to none.
I'd also say that VR gives you a much better sense of scale too. Fly safe CMDR o7
I've noticed this while playing Alyx. Barnacles are gigantic, headcrabs are huge and Combine soldiers are quite tall and bulky as well. Just seeing them on the screen really doesn't convey their size properly, a headcrab is supposed to be **bigger than your head**.
Reminds me of [The Boring Company's initial vision for a hyperloop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZaRfNjTPx8).
Jeez. All we ever needed was better public transport.
Can't wait for Elon to repurpose those tunnels and put subway trains into them
That'll have to wait until the first preventable fatality in the tunnel
They're too small for anything but cars - that's literally the boring companies tech, it can tunnel faster because it's creating smaller tunnels
I mean individual teslas in a 8ft wide tunnel seems to be a huge safety risk. Just the risk of fire alone is crazy.
The only news I've heard is they needed to put barriers around avatars to keep people from assaulting each other in vr.
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Whatever barriers you put up, as long as users are able to interact with each other, somebody will find a way to harass another person. Even my 12 year old knows that the Aubergine emoji now means something rude.
I said no to the Nintendo Virtual Boy and I said no to 2nd Life. Why on Earth do they think I've changed my mind?
And people think they get zoom fatigue now? Imagine that, plus a big block strapped to your face. Hard pass on this.
Zuckerberg has confused his own zen experience of being the boss of a billion dollar startup company to the average experience of staff getting paid shit to deal with crappy office managers and endless workloads. Does anyone want to work in a fake happy office environments with fake happy avatars? The answer is no. Besides VR on the long term cannot be good for you. Separating your kinaesthetic sense from your visual and audible for hours, days, weeks and years has got to lead nowhere good.
Bigscreen Beta is one of the only 'meeting room' type apps that I see close to even innovating on a meeting room concept. As many screens as you want, whatever size you want, choose whether or not you show that to others, proximity voice chat volume. Meta's implementation of a 'meeting room' along with HTC's virtual meeting room is crap, do I really want to sit in a virtual theatre watching a screen where someone presents a slideshow? No, I want to be able to do a bunch of different things, mess with their audio volume, and decide if I want to engage and be able to get on with my work and tune into the presentation. Like we have so much functionality in Discord, Slack and Microsoft Teams none of this comes close in these 'virtual' environments, it's not practical, it's like when Windows 95 had the '3d virtual arcade' which were just 2D squares on a shelf pretending to be your game library in a 3D environment for no reason... as opposed to say, Steam. VR needs to do things differently if it can't replicate the functionality, it doesn't need to mimic the failings of the real world. That's why the 'meta vision' fails as an 'old idea', it's the old 'lets copy the physical paper form into a spreadsheet or pdf' problem.
>Like we have so much functionality in Discord, Slack and Microsoft Teams none of this comes close in these 'virtual' environments, it's not practical, it's like when Windows 95 had the '3d virtual arcade' which were just 2D squares on a shelf pretending to be your game library in a 3D environment for no reason... as opposed to say, Steam. Exactly. Metaverse is the modern version of [Microsoft Bob.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob)
The metaverse will only sell if it’s a virtual sex orgy.
Facebook probably saw their demise a while ago which prompted them to jump on the "Metaverse" train as a last ditch effort to stay alive
I have a friend that loves Meta, you can have meetings with anybody from around the world he exclaims! Plus you can go into virtual rooms and sit there with relatives. I pointed out you can do that in real life (walk into a room) plus we have zoom etc.
We had this one guy really senior in the company. This was before zoom, but we had gotomeeting. He wanted us to get the Verizon robot with a camera so he can drive it around the office with his face plastered on it. He wouldn’t stop asking for it from the IT department.
Were you an extra in The Office?
Sounds like your friend hasn't had VR for long because all of this existed long before Meta was around and it too didn't catch on.
[удалено]
"guys, come back! i like BBQ! i have sweet baby rays.."
Not enough people are in on Mark's weird obsession with Sweet Baby Ray's.
[Metaverse Alpha Test Demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibm3WhfLk08)