• ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Metaverse is what people thought the Internet was going to be in the 80s. It's just like flying cars, in that the idea only makes sense in sci fi because people aren't going to strap on VR goggles to browse facebook.

    • effervescent [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It’s actually really funny to watch these companies pen-test the human psyche by constantly upping “immersion”. Remember when 3D TV’s were The Newest Hot Commodity and everyone was making them and then the consumers collectively went “those are kind of shitty please stop”. The same hogs that have an 8K 70” OLED flatscreen in their living room and pay for the biggest Dish package were like, “nah I’m not into the 3D thing I’ll pass on this trend”

      • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, it also defeats the purpose of a computer anyway. Why would I walk around the internet? No one is gonna put on their be headset to look something up or doomscroll while watching a movie.

        • FidelCashflow [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The AR tech is almost there to let you wear a headset like big sunglasses and doomscroll in bed in 3D with iron man sitting next to your or somethibg.

          • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            But you can't look up from your sunglasses on occasion. No one wants the internet to take their full attention. People dick around on their phones while doing other stuff. This makes your phone and maybe holo Iron Man take your full attention which no one wants to do.

            If they do make them it's our moral obligation to hack them so they're real life They Live sunglasses.

            • FidelCashflow [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Not so. Imagine if people could be using their phone with zero hands. A floating window with eye tracking commands for example would allow you to doomscroll 100% of the time while doing luandry.

    • FidelCashflow [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      We are almost there. I think they are betting this push can get them there and let them corner thr market. Virtual sex games are a quite a profitable part of the industry now from what I can see. In that way it is doing a good job of following the mobile market for chunky games and such.

  • YouKnowIt [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    It'd be pretty funny if they only got their current user base on this thing, looking like a nursing home from the universe where the Nazis won

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Tech companies have now realized that the only way they can provide the infinite growth demanded by capitalism is if they expand into a digital world where all the limitations are imaginary.

    And since the investors really do need infinite growth to keep functioning, I think they have to actually go along with this BS.

    • cawsby [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      Why eat when you can you buy an NFT of a singing bowl of ramen?

      • Owl [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I'm actually optimistic about all this. If half the capitalist class fucks off into a digital ancap fantasy land, that's fewer of them we have to fight to control things that actually matter.

        • Snackuleata [any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Wasn’t this Nick Land’s idea before he went full reactionary: that if we accelerate capitalism it will fly off somewhere so we can live in peace?

        • bigboopballs [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          If half the capitalist class fucks off into a digital ancap fantasy land, that’s fewer of them we have to fight to control things that actually matter.

          The capitalist class aren't going to be the ones fucking off into fantasy land, I'm afraid

        • SoyViking [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          There's no fun in being a rich asshole if you don't have anyone to push around. They're going to drag you with them into digital ancap land, whether you want to or not.

          That meeting at work you have to go to? It will be held in Metaverse. College classes? Go to the ones in the Metaverse, physical presence on campus is a premium experience you can't afford. The only job you're able to get afterwards will be as a NPC in the Metaverse. You want to go to a concert? How will you afford to go in real life, peasant? You will be able to afford it in the Metaverse though.

    • KermitTheFraud [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      As far as I can tell, the current problem with VR worlds is that the traditional adoption path for giant platforms like this includes making them accessible to poor kids in the imperial core, who near universally do not have VR headsets. Google Glass is still around, but is catered to industrial use cases, which tells you a lot about the price point for a headset that’s comfortable for extended periods of time.

      • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]
        ·
        3 years ago

        FB's current VR headset costs what a used phone costs, and everyone has phones.

        All they have to do at this point is start forcing people into it.

        • Awoo [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          That's the thing though. People don't want it. Closing yourself off inside headphones and a headset as well as however other many peripherals you need to make it better is not what people want. It's fun for full immersion single player games (in the sense that you have nobody else in the room with you) and absolutely nothing else.

          The very concept of the technology ignores the fact that people live in family households with other people. That 2 parents and some kids are supposed to all have one of these and all close themselves off from one another in VR.

          It ignores the material reality of what most people's home lives are actually like.

          They've taken their ideological individualism and gone so far into it they've become divorced from reality and do not realise this shit will never ever work with current households.

    • KermitTheFraud [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Near future: the same debate about whether or not employers should accommodate remote employees, except it’s about working from within the Third Life platform

  • gaycomputeruser [she/her]M
    ·
    3 years ago

    Real dying company shit if its not just a ploy to be "job creators" so the eu will give them stuff

      • CoconutOctopus [it/its]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Cyberpunk as a genre in general. Snow Crash took all the tropes that were beginning to be played out by then and dialed them all up to 11.

        • ClathrateG [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          I disagree, is the corporatocracy in snow crash really more extreme than that in neuromancer for example? compare the gargoyles and the head antenna in snow crash to the body mod/cybernetics in most cyberpunk, it just doesn't read as a parody to me

          yes it's aware of cyberpunk tropes and deconstructs some of them, but that puts it firmly into the category of post-cyberpunk imo

  • FidelCashflow [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I an a huge VR nerd. We aren't there yet. 10k programmers working for polish wages might get us there though. VR for sure is the next thing like videigames were the next thing. We are just three generations of tech out from it really being viable. It is disheartening to see a giant monopoly decide to try to corner the market before competition can get established. It will eventually be good for it. Especially when people can pirate their work, untill then though it is rough.

    • spectre [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      What's the endgame that we should be staking our hopes on? I've had fun tinkering around with friends' VR gear in the past, but what's the killer app or game that's going to make VR ubiquitous?

      • FidelCashflow [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The consumer end one is just a pair of glasses that probably blue thoth to your phone that lets you do AR. So you can sit on the couch, and it projects an image of your distant friends and family reasonably well onto the couch opposite you so you can watch immersive disney brand content together.

        Then there will be mid grade gammer stuff with gloves that let you feel stuff. Those alread exist and work well, the price just needs to drop. A VR treadmill so you can actually walk around your tiny appartment and interact with people. The current one is like 2k, but I can see the whole bundle of VR. Haptics, and treadmill fittinf on the PC game budget soon.

        Then there will be high end, where you go to diesneyland and the rides are half VR. Schools have VR training demos for like, auto repair. And they can have VR scans of your living room to show you products advertized naturally

          • FidelCashflow [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            In ways we can't imagine. It will track your facial responce, heart rate, body movments.

            It will do AB testing on you to see which picture of an anime girl makes your pupils dilate to sell you potatoe chips better.

            Shit, we even have the tech to scan your brian and see what image you are focousing on. Imagine YUM brands tm. Using that to make commercials.

    • KermitTheFraud [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      It’s very real. Lots of buzz around the metaverse being the next big thing (now that I guess the Internet of Things has lost some of its buzzword shine). The big idea is that stuff like Second Life and IMVU is going to go mainstream soon with some sort of new VR/AR variation. It’ll be a similar shift to when corporations realized that kids were spending a lot of time on Youtube and Reddit and suddenly all the boomers knew vaguely what a meme was and started recognizing the names of influencers. Facebook is already commodifying our ability to interact with reality and in some areas it is the Internet, so this is actually a pretty natural progression.

    • Barabas [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This is what Grimes was thinking of when she said she wasn't a socialist, but believed in a UBI based on crypto and gaming.

      Tech ghouls are very serious about this.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This shit has happened multiple times and multiple times it has failed.

    The Palace was first, a chat app where you use avatars to navigate buildings and interact with others.

    Second Life, similar but in THREE DIMENSIONS woaw! Every company poured millions into it and completely wasted their money.

    Now this shit. Same will happen again. They will push it incredibly hard and it will just become some incredibly niche thing. The massive amount of investment that goes into it will create digital corporate wastelands full of digital corporate crap nobody wants or needs.

    • Three_Magpies [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I think this happens because VR only appeals to an extremely small slice of the population, but this group is extremely over represented in the tech dev space.