At this point I've got three guesses as to what the deal with the Metaverse is:
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They've actually spent very few resources on this thing and are only pretending that they're putting effort into it as a means to distract from the terrible reputation Facebook was getting
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They are dumping a lot of money into this turd, but the overwhelming majority is going into the pockets of executives at the expense of overly credulous investors
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They're entirely serious about making the Metaverse a thing and Silicon Valley is populated by talentless hacks
Right now I'm leaning towards the second option.
The Metaverse is actually the confluence of three things 1 - the same old tech dream of an ever exploitable augmented reality. you see this with chatrooms, second life, vr chat. 2 - facebook's decline and its history of just repackaging what someone else has recently created and marketing themselves into a dominant position. Meta is to, again, VR chat like instagram reels and so on 3 - the consolidation of media into far ranging IP oligarchies and the need to create a medium for cross pollination of everything under the sun. so you can be in a irtual coco chanel chatroom watching rick and morty, you bring up an in built shopping app to order a digital stranger things nike branded t shirt that you can wear to overwatch 3 later that night
Ugh. I hope they never realize their idea to make cosmetics portable between games and different social programs. VRChat neatly solved this by the simple expedient of completely ignoring IP laws, but an official corporate project would make it nightmarish in ways I can scarcely imagine.
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where he looks human
he's given it like 3 tries now and failed each time so im not sure this plan is gonna work out
how do you have Facebook money and can't make your stupid meta shit like 1:1 realistic and instead it looks like thefucking Sims
Severe hardware limitations. To make VR work you need to render two relatively high resolution images at the same time at very high framerates otherwise most people will puke and fall over and then continue puking.
The HTC Vive, Index, and various other VR headset solutions do this by offloading all the heavy processing to a very powerful (for a consumer PC) computer and just having the headset consist of the displays, lenses, audio outputs, and sensors.
The "Meta" Quest, however, is an "inside out" system. All the graphics processing hardware is packed in to the headset. This puts both space and weight at a huge premium, and greatly limits the available processing power. Facebook's solution to this problem is greatly limiting the graphical fidelity of the games and programs so the headset's hardware can run them at a good framerate.
As a result the Quest hardware can't run things at nearly as high of a resolution or complexity as a headset with a powerful computer doing all the graphics processing, so they're stuck with avatars that look like that.
This is what they're propping up as the future. As definitive proof the American system works and has grand aspirations beyond killing everybody for profit. So exciting.
we upgraded from sub MII channel avatar to around the sims 3 avatar really impressive stuff
when you're a non-euclidean being you just want to escape reality a litle bit and pretend to be a bland human online
Fucking tech-bro minimalism. Drop the bullshit. No one believes you buy your shirts in six packs at target. I want to see you push the limits of what materials science can do in collaboration with high street fashion. Fucking Naomi Wu has cooler clothes than any of these geeks and I'm pretty sure she works out of a makerspace after getting done with her real job.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - our oligarchical overlords are so fucking boring. If I was the kind of psychopath who had that much money, I'd be visibly insane and proud of it. I'd commission a house made of pure marble shaped like an open palm supporting a Roman villa. I'd have so many birds of paradise inhabiting the pools and baths that the whole place would be declared a wildlife preserve. I'd be carried around on a palanquin by four huge, bald dudes while wearing a toga. I'd have servants following me around feeding me peeled grapes. With that kind of money I wouldn't be a lunatic, I'd be eccentric.
Fuck, these people are boring. All the money in the world and all they can think to do is turtleneck, LA mansion, eat caviar, and tweet.
i swear something about the metaverse just screams corporate and soulless to me
It literally is the beige corporate hell version of Second Life and VR chat with everything interesting or novel or imaginative about those spaces carefully removed.
More human expression in that avatar than in his real world face, so that's something.
my guess as to why it looks like garbage is that they are banking on mass adoption, which means hardware on the level of a quest 2. As to where all the money is going though, I have no fucking clue.
Last I heard they had like 4/5 advanced headset prototypes, each one with it's own quirk (like high FOV and other stuff), but that can't be all of it, it just can't, it's an ungodly amount of money :ohnoes:
for it to be mass adopted people would have to want it. This is google glass all over again there is simply no demand and people in practice find the idea confusing and annoying
What? I thought everyone wanted to hear their uncle's political opinions come from a John Wick avatar as an insidious migraine develops.
it's worse than that their uncle doesn't even want to use this platform to share his political opinions
What people want to use VR for is weird furry sex in surreal environments. But for a wide variety of reasons Corporate American cannot or will not provide weird furry sex in surreal environments. And so we're stuck at this impasse where they know that VR has world changing potential (Everyone comes together in virtual realm to pretend to have weird furry sex), but for cultural and ideological reasons they are blind to the exact nature of that potential.
Life if Facebook wanted to make their "Metaverse" work they'd hire Disney animators to make furry porn avatars and then charge people a shitload of money for them.
I don't think a large enough demographic want furry porn for that to be a viable business strategy justifying several billion dollars of investment
You don't start with the furry porn, you start with stylized avatars that allow greater expression instead of aiming for realism. The furry porn comes naturally.
They're constrained to N64-era graphics due to hardware, and look back at what looked good in that era and what looks like garbage.
look what I don't understand is how providing a service people use to make furry porn will result in a profit of tens of billions of dollars.
that seems like a niche market
The point is to integrate the service into people's lives that you can monetize later, instead of starting with a service that even the devs find uninteresting.
FB is pushing for it's use for office meetings, but nobody is going to spend time at home adjusting some uncanny Mii version of themselves in a super-sterile world, whereas if it had the vibrancy of VRChat, people would feel compelled to just out of social pressure, and then it's just an issue of getting them to use free content to keep them engaged.
New marketing strategy: Gift 1000 units to various library maker spaces in large cities. Sponsor experimental art exhibits and STEAM camps which all feature the headsets. Basically, let 1000 flowers bloom. See what people with an interest in the technology actually do with it. See what people react best to. What parts of the tech are flashy and interesting? Because clearly, they have no clue.
They keep their best engineers with the coolest ideas in R&D making world-changing prototypes and then lock those prototypes away under NDAs and copyright bullshit. And this is still all we get.
This shit is such a waste. Of money. Of creativity. Of humanity. You enslave children in the global south to mine the rare earth minerals for all these servers and workstations and cell phones and websites and extract billions of dollars’ worth of value that could have gone to healthcare or infrastructure or education and this is what you do with it? It’s fucking evil. It’s so fucking evil.
New marketing strategy: Gift 1000 units to various library maker spaces in large cities.
This is literally the only reason people use Macs. Back in like the late 80s early 90s Apple gave schools very favorable deals on like Apple IIe computers, so schools fitted out their computer labs with Apples and kids grew up in the Mac environment. It paid off because now people will pay huge premiums for inferior hardware and software packaged as a lifestyle brand.
the Mac environment is just UNIX though it's available easily and for free
I think it's not google glass because unlike google they made the mistake of hard commiting, right? They even changed the company name. This shit has the potential to sink the entire ship
yeah but they are still not going to succeed in getting this going
Hold on, SF6 has a character creator?
That might get me back into that series after not playing since 3.
I think it is unclear how big a deal it will end up being but the feature looks quite robust so far
Emoji auto-complete doesn't work in post bodies -- it gets erased as soon as you submit. It works if you type the whole emoji code out, though.
Zucc originally proposed “meatverse”, a virtual carnicería, but the underpaid intern misspelled it and now he’s just making shit up as he goes
It is like what if they made VR chat but instead of having furry sex there, what if you bought office furniture and got yelled at by your boss?
The metaverse is like four different things:
1 - An open standard where VR shared spaces like VR Chat can interoperate (which doesn't actually exist)
2 - A good reason to use NFTs (which doesn't actually exist)
3 - Facebook's private version of sexless VR Chat with office furniture
4 - A marketing ploy by Facebook trying to convince you that #3 will give you #1 and #2, but only #3 exists and they only plan on making #3.
It’s that city that the alliance hangs out in when they aren’t questing, except there will be business meetings
The more impressive technology: being able to reflect your inner feelings and soul
It looks like he just made a joke he really worked hard on and is waiting for someone to laugh.
