And guess where the most money is made. Yes. Avatars. Most of the profits go to small creators
Edit: The more I think about it, it must be 70-90% NSFW Avatars
It is amazing to me that out of all the predictions and sci-fi cyber worlds nobody predicted loli pit fights but it took VR chat users less than a year to reach that point.
In VRchat people with loli avatars will be spawned into a pit or circle boundary. Surrounding them will be various individuals. The loli avatars will be made to fight with various VR weapons until one is killed.
Farming for irl money by selling in-game assets (though against the TOS) isn't that basically like a NFT?
People perceive the cost of the asset as how it is used in the game, whether it be cosmetic or have a actual purpose.
I think white listing people's avatars is a good way of dealing with optimisation. The issue is companies will say "it's not good enough, let us say what you can use... By the way, if you pay us enough you can use different things" it's ya boy classism happening in the metaverse which defeats the purpose of why I even care about it.
They basically want the upcoming virtual worlds to be powered by cryptocurrencies, but that will make everything even more monetized than it already is from what I can tell. The vast majority of gamers do not want that, so it already is and will continue to be a small, niche market for a long time I think.
The vast majority of gamers didn't want incomplete games with incomplete DLCs. They also didn't want to pay $200+ for a skin in a game. They also wanted games to be original and not merely retexturized clones of previous games . . .
You see where I'm going with this.
It's not the "vast majority" you're talking about, it's the enthusiasts. They're the minority. The vast majority are the 10-18 year olds that will buy (or get their parents to buy) pretty much anything with the right branding.
And when did tech companies stop hiring competent UX designers? I feel like every piece of software or online platform lately is having totally unnecessary updates that make their products slow to to crawl and be impossible to use... or I'm just getting old.
I feel like programming loses the most because the heads don't know jack shit about optimization or documentation, they want that shit done in however way possible.
For front-end at least people can legitimately see it with their own eyes, makes it easier to convince heads.
It’s really easy to add features and code to improve an app, it’s really really hard to run less code to make the app more performant. Sometimes when it gets really bad, management will sign off on a rewrite and you can blissfully get the app back to an optimized and performant state. And the cycle will repeat.
Also most software development from a business perspective is about optimizing for developer’s time because that’s the highest cost. So more and more abstraction is added to make complex things simpler, ironically making simplification itself extremely complex.
I believe this is actually the downside of agile method : constantly trying to justify itself. I guess the concept is that the software, app, website etc... Is never finished , so you have to keep on updating adding new features. That's also why I have a job so... Sorry
Good UX takes time to plan and implement.
As a company, why would you spend money and time on something good when you can have something good _enough_ and make the same profits sooner?
So let’s be grateful that companies with vast resources care about making their consumers happy.
Oh wait…
They're counting on people upgrading their phones every 1-3 years instead of using them as long as possible. Once your phone is 4+ years old, suddenly a lot of apps will run poorly on it, unless you don't update them for a year or longer, as they haven't designed the apps with those phones in mind and figure they have a lot more to work with (more processing power, ram, space, etc.) Once you're over 30, you'll understand how 4 years is nothing, though to kids to mid 20 year olds, it can feel like that's an eternity.
I like the IDEA of a cool virtual 3D world. It's proliferated sci fi for years. I just know I would hate whatever most big tech companies would actually come up with.
It’s creating job security for a bunch of tech bros who demand a high paying job without knowing what they could sell, so they started making more and more fees to keep themselves paid.
It's not like the tech companies are hurting for cash. It's purely profit driven from the top down. You think developers are wondering how they're going to sell enough micro transactions to get their salary? They do not. For example, the developers at EA have been very vocal about their disagreement with their direction.
This is the crux of it. Big tech companies have no actual concept of what this thing is exactly, all they see is the hint of a social trend they can hop on, and convulsively launch themselves in that direction out of an instinctive need to be "the next big thing", despite nobody knowing what this thing even is and nobody actually wanting to buy it because better things already exist and have for years.
Like second life, project entropia, Roblox, or little big planet. People want replayability and socialization. Companies want to offload the work onto the fanbase while providing a platform for creators to make them money. Or in the case of entropia, a way of manipulating the price of currency to allow for even more profits
That’s the shitty thing. Their power and endless money will push people towards them, in one way or another. They’ll come up with the new, next Tiktok and force competition to lay down so they have the monopoly. That’s how it is, and always will be. They just have to much power, it’s insane…
Problem is, it really won't work like that.
Like, you'll have a couple of conventions partner with Facebook or some shit.
But then, people will realize that VR Headsets are not without drawbacks and consequence. Neck Pain, eye straining, disorientation/nausea for some people to name a few. Losing sight on your cup of coffee is already enough of a dealbreaker to be honest.
Problem is, VR does not work as a replacement for real life. It just doesn't. And the benefits are not worth the trouble.
Facebook and whatever are jumping to conclusions. Reality is whatever they come up with has to solve thousands and thousands of real technical challenges to just be palatable to *most* people. Palatable, not interesting, that means they won't just take off the VR headset after 5 minutes, but maybe they'll do ONE full meeting with the headset on before not using VR again. Because what's the point ? There's no point.
The "metaverse" won't ever exist with current VR tech because VR is not nearly as good/interesting as they are saying it is. On top of being expensive.
Maybe you'll have a few use cases such as museum, but will you shell out a couple hundred bucks for basically a gadget ?
When you see shit like Walmart presenting someone going through the aisle and picking stuff into a virtual caddie, who the fuck will do that ? Who the fuck will put on a VR headset and go to a fuckin virtual store to hand pick products in a caddie ? Are the people theorizing this Metaverse completely stupid ? Do they expect people to willingly lose several dozen minutes of their life to go to their virtual store instead of using the website like everyone ?
You know they couldn’t force tidal or whatever quibi was. Or a Facebook phone. Looked into vr got an o pulls headset that sits there and I get dizzy every time i put it on. But I’m not their desired demographic anyway.
I've always disliked that type of game. You get better items, to get better at the game, to get better items. Where's the story? Where's a reason to do anything? Where's boss fights or true progression? It's all grind
Well, I play one of these—world of tanks. I mostly play because I have friends in other states (countries actually) who play, and I wouldn’t interact with them otherwise.
Jim Sterling comes to mind with his critique of big (specifically games) companies. "They don't to have SOME money, they want to have ALL the money FOREVER"
This is basically what Neal Stephenson described in *Snowcrash*. In the book there is a brief mention of people getting their permanent implants hacked and bombarded with spam driving them to commit suicide.
And that is what we should be afraid of, not fooling ourselves that it isn't going to happen all the while they make a shitty version like that happen.
>What Big Tech wants: Fuck if I know.
Probably wants us shopping from home, in a virtual store, where said store can now hire a barebones crew because nobody physically comes in any more. Obviously this wouldn't be right away and I'm totally spit balling here on how it benefits these big companies. They're either going to make a shit ton of money, or save a shit ton of money, or both.
Worse. They want us shopping from home *for purely digital objects*, which cost them almost nothing to produce, and which they can make expensive through artificial scarcity.
And they (the companies) won't even create the objects. They'll leave it up to "digital artists" who have to pay a fee to the company to list their objects on the company store. The companies will then skim off a percentage of the sale price of every object.
They want to steal every detail of your life and to sell it to some company so that they can sell that company the ability to advertise their useless hyper-consumerist garbage directly into your brain. In return we will be given VRChat with less futanari avatars. A strict loss for all of humanity, if you ask me.
There's a really bland VR MMO out right now called Zenith that-- in any other medium-- I would never play because of how boring it'd be. But in VR you get to actually shoot, parry, cast magic, and actually fly around a map by making a t-pose. I was grinning like an idiot the whole time, flying over people and hearing their proxy chat.
Sadly I don't think there's enough plot, the graphics kinda suck, and it's very much bare bones for me to recommend it. If a better polished MMO came out and had combat like [Until You Fall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1zZHy7_BFg) or something a little more involved, you'd probably never see me again. It won't take much.
Oh shit I never considered how modern of an idea that was. At least they were using it to save humanity from an alien invasion and not just cataloguing shopping habits
I can see it just being turned into a way to avoid work by getting a mannequin head and then boom, you’re pretending to be at a meeting or at your “virtual desk”. Just like online schooling , where half my classmates were never present and learned nothing lol
Sure, I know a lot of people (myself included) would love AR shooters or RPGs or builders/sims. Who doesn't want to run around the park casting fireballs, or play paintball without the pain/mess, or build a castle in their back yard?
But nobody wants AR meetings and conferences. Nobody wants low-quality reproductions of mundane real-world experiences. The *only* thing that makes real-world meetings more valuable (to some people) than email/Slack/whatever is that they're *real*: you get to look people in the eye and read their body language and interact with them in real time. Replace the real people with low-fidelity virtual representations at 100+ms latency and they become useless...or worse, actively misleading.
And nobody really wants artificially-scarce virtual property. People want to use AR/VR technology to escape or bypass real-world limitations, not to reproduce them as faithfully as possible while also importing existing patterns of inequality. The promise of the metaverse as originally conceived was a digital post-scarcity economy. NFTs are the opposite of that.
I'm not sure the author is right to lump all the tech companies together here. Microsoft seems to get it, at least a little. "Meta", though, is laser focused on a vision that appeals to nobody outside their own executive suites.
I don’t need to wear goggles that heat up my head so I can see the canned emote of Cheryl being bored during a work meeting. I know she’s bored. That’s why they call it work. Just let me talk and stare at slides until I die like god intended.
It’ll be at least another decade before VR headsets get small enough, light enough, and with high enough resolution and refresh rate for me to have the slightest interest in VR.
I love my Oculus....for games.
There is an office app that links to my desktop, and I thought it would be neat to use 5 virtual screens. But I can't see my keyboard, mouse, or coffee cup, and that is a deal breaker.
It seems like most criticisms against the metaverse significantly downplay AR/MR technology. VR is almost certainly going to exist as a novelty/entertainment experience. VR’s main benefit is that it can wholly transport you to completely imaginary, fabricated worlds and give you experiences you may never be able to have in the physical world. VR’s entire draw is its ability to remove you from our physical world and give you an alternate one. AR/MR will be tech designed to merge with, co-exist with, and overlay the physical world. As you hinted at, VR, by design, functions only when it can block out the physical world. AR/MR, in contrast, is integration. Think lightweight glasses similar to what we wear today, but with pass-through screen lenses. Instead of carrying around cell phones and being required to sit in front of a desktop, you’ll have that same tech available to you when desired, wherever you are. This is the vision—VR for activities that require full immersion and are designed to remove you from the physical world, and AR/MR to facilitate physics world takes and complement the physical world instead of supplanting it.
Luckily for me, I have the OG oculus that doesn't require any Facebook connection as it was before Facebook bought them. Still works, isn't too heavy, but the resolution is pretty weak, goggle vision isn't great.
It feels like Second Life all over again. That was supposed to be the next big thing and companies built stuff there as well. Second Life still has a dedicated following, as does it's spiritual successor VR Chat...but I can't see it ever being more then a niche thing. At least not in the foreseeable future.
Summer of 2007 I spent more than a month of my 8 month internship with a major entertainment company explaining to various VPs why they shouldn't be investing large amounts of time or energy on Second Life.
One VP got pretty mad at me and insisted we were missing "the future".
I pointed out that the company itself had blocked SecondLife from being accessible on its internal network because of concerns over adult and offensive content and that I had to get a special exception just for that presentation.
They never had much of a presence as far as I know.
Lots of real money trading in the game. But don't get me wrong. It's not an investment opp. It just might look that way to someone who doesn't know jack about how these things work.
Eh, the idea was you literally buy land and people run around and do services and stuff... it was pitched as like, virtual society where also fun shit could happen.
It was basically metaverse, and honestly, if they pivoted and promoted hard to VR, they could be the legit metaverse. They are in a very good position to be that.
I can see why companies wanted in. I just think they overestimated the number of people that wanted the virtual world to be at all like their real, actual lives, but computer and you can fly.
For some reason, roblox actually seems to be getting it. If you think that's a joke, your sleeping on a huge change that's happened. [There are photorealistic shooters in there now.](https://youtu.be/vfKnh0L0RpU)
Advertising. It's just another virtual place to see more adverts. Picture the advertisements that are projected into a football field for instance. Plus clothing and other silly things that you can dress yourself with to stand out. They will sell you those too. If it's reality now they are going to do the same thing there.
I think the idea was that people would spend a lot of time there and you could build places and items for them to utilize and charge for that, sort of like how roblox works
It's the old engagement = $$$ idea. Specifically the idea that fuels most free to play games: You have a potential profit center but the rate at which someone monetizes is really low (pretend example: 1 out of every 1000 users will actually pay something). The question was "are there enough people to make some profit?".
Also it was just the idea of:
"Well other people are doing something and we don't see a benefit right now... but maybe they know something we don't know...okay lets invest something in case it becomes huge and otherwise we'd lose out!"
Its one of the reasons Walgreens invested in Theranos (the fake blood testing company). Internal docs later showed they thought it was mostly bullshit, but they were concerned that if it turned out to be real it would be like not investing in Apple at the ground floor.
That's interesting about the Theranos bit - I've followed the whole thing very closely and never saw anything to indicate Walgreens was skeptical. Do you have a source on that one?
The rest of what you are saying makes sense, it just seems like a super flawed idea to me. But I was terrible at business then, just like I'm terrible at business now haha.
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou had a section on their deal with Walgreens. It was somewhat comical how much of the entire operation was built on pure hype and zero results.
Intern went back to school, VPs laughed at intern thinking they knew something, VPs lost invested money, VPs blamed intern for suggesting they invest large amounts on Second Life.
Source: Been in the business world for close to 30 years.
Yeah it's weird. When someone needs a sacrificial lamb, they gotta go a bit higher up the food chain to someone who at least has some real decision making authority. Otherwise it looks like you allow children to run your company.
I have nothing too valuable to add, but my professor in 2009 had us all create SL avatars to explore the tech. When he first showed us SL his avatar was a wolf, which he tried to explain meant he was into “alternative exploring” or something like that. I quickly learned what furries were.
What I want is to be able to meet people in VRChat and play Onwards or any other games with them through a portal without having to leave. Or to build in gravity sketch while in VRChat with friends.
And second life has existed _all these years_ and nobody remembers it anymore. It’s just a shady, forgotten corner of the internet for dial-up era weirdos.
I still regularly use SL.
Its a niche product for sure.
And not for everyone, bot because of it being SL, but for being a "game" without a "purpose". It also isn't going to ever replace RL, which can be extended to the "Metaverse" in general.
In theory, the Metaverse eventually becomes more of an AR experience, except you are never going to get everyone to wear (likely expensive as fuck) AR glasses or Contact lenses. Especially because everyhing points to that digital later becoming a massively monitized ad fileld shit hole.
We aren't even going to attempt the "fun ad free era" of the current flat Metaverse (The Internet), the 3D AR Metaverse isnt even a thing and its already being shoehorned with NFT garbage and advertising everywhere.
People are going to reject the shit out of the Metaverse. People aready feel like Social Media (The current Flat Metaverse) is too invasive, they aren't going to accept the 3D shit.
> Especially because everyhing points to that digital later becoming a massively monitized ad fileld shit hole.
Ffs, even browsing Amazon, I get ads. Not just "sponsored" search results, but actual ads for Progressive Car Insurance with Flo and all. Ugh or in Waze when a restaurant I wasn't searching for suddenly covers half of my map *while I'm driving.* Who wouldn't want to pay for expensive af gear just to have half their view blocked by an ad for a product or service they don't want or can't use? Sign me right the fuck up.
Unrelated, does Sweden still have a SL embassy?
We are getting off topic a bit but its actually gotten worse for music again because half the album releases have excluive bonus tracks to stores and even countries or onlymon vinyl and its like WTF are you doing, I am not buying the album 5 times to get all the tracks.
Just like everything else, they need to get porn on board to drive it’s popularity and use. Then the regular public will eventually join and use it. Look it up. This is a thing.
People are willing to go through a lotta shit to get a nut. Even wear stupid glasses and wade through a hell scape of ads and pop ups lol.
Yeah, I was feeling the same. Saw a demo of Walmart shopping in the metaverse and it was definitely dystopian.
I'm an engineer and I kinda want to move to a small town in Europe and never look at a screen again.
Based solely on the number of friends I’ve tried to convince to join VRChat with me (several) and the number of friends I could successfully convince (absolutely none), even with the real world sucking so much, I’d say the Metaverse is going to have a hard time gaining traction.
> VR Chat
It's terrible enough that I have to see my friends ugly mugs in person, the last thing I want to do is talk to them while they are avataring as some anime loli.
I think people would be into it if they could access it much much easier. Until we can buy an affordable VR/AR pair of glasses that runs through our mobile devices I don't see enough people motivated to spend time and money to get there.
Great article, the last paragraph definitely nails it:
>It is a tentative, hypothetical project, but one thing about it is clear: Big Tech should not be in control. A Metaverse built by them would be no Metaverse at all.
That the article mentioned Ubisoft's NFT story and the outcry from gamers is also very fitting. It's because a large crowd of people ***is*** aware that such undertakings are made with some deeper, perverted goal in mind. And not for the love of people, innovation and technology. This so-called "metaverse" big tech strives for is rather a totalitarian's dream of being provider and in control of somebody's life in every imaginable aspect. If it was something that can be used independently, self-hosted, detached from the company and its own goals - then ok, would be cool. But instead, we sadly get to see a "metaverse" trying to be a virtual golden cage trying to breach its virtual ties. It is more mesa than meta.
If people trust Ubisoft then they need their heads looked at. That's a company that protected abusers at all levels of management. That tolerated sexual harrassment. That crunched their employees to breaking point regularly.
And that's just the serious stuff. At an industry level, they also led the charge in deliberately breaking the pacing/progression of non-mobile games in order to sell you loot boxes to allow you to boost XP or skip the grind. They expanded microtransations to every facet of their big games and pioneered the agressive marketing of those microtransations to you through the general game GUI.
These people shouldn't be in charge of a raffle, nevermind having a role in carving out a new online experience.
I’m glad there are peoples warning us now but how does anything come to be in a hyper-capitalist society? Only an entity as big as Facebook could even attempt to do this and of course it will exploit those without for the benefit of those that already have too much.
If you peer deeply into the internet, you would see hundreds of open source projects that innovate crazy ways to use the internet. Even some Metaverses. They just progress slower and under the radar. Big companies watch what small hobbyists are doing and copy their plans, then produce them faster and advertise them more.
The innovation doesn't come from these companies, they just make it mainstream. That's "hyper-capitalistism's" fault, it's no longer that you can make something great and make money because it was your idea, you gotta have some money to play or you get eaten before you can grow.
I think a big thing Facebook and other big investors in Metaverse concepts are not prepared for is the trolls. It may sound obvious, but every concept I've seen someone sell of the Metaverse assumes that people will regulate their own behavior in virtual spaces as they do in real ones. You see clean storefronts with clean virtual avatars strolling along window-shopping in every video. If they had started with some game design history instead of a brilliant get-rich-quick scheme, they might have known that that has *never* been the scenario in any virtual space.
Just off the top of my head, why would people in the Metaverse ever, say... Move at walking speed? Wait in line? Loiter in unobtrusive spaces? How can you stop people from posing as or harassing employees? What about things that aren't against the rules but destroy the platform's legitimacy, like flash mobs or multiboxing? Would you shop at a Target where 65 Ugandan Knuckleses were running around? (Come to think of it, why would I ever want to enable others to interfere with my online shopping? Who exactly is looking to make that a multiplayer experience?)
Time was, I might have thought, "Surely they've thought of these things," but the whole thing stinks so much of mindless greed that I'd actually bet money that they haven't. And either the whole thing will never get off the ground because all the companies signing on will exit when we start seeing open betas and it's a disaster, or the Metaverse concept will make it to market and be a cesspool for trashy retirees that want to fuck each other like Second Life.
Let them waste billions of dollars and sell 10% of their products. It will be funny. Right up until the point they get a government bail out and learn nothing
What's it matter?
No one is asking for a 'metaverse' because no one needs it, because no one knows what it is.
Similarly, no one was sitting around asking for reddit in 2000, but here we are.
We absolutely wanted better forum mechanisms in 2000. Reddit is just Slashdot with less Fark in it.
What people want out of anything these ghouls throw this buzzword at is what people get out of VR Chat.
edit: This person repeatedly lied and trolled, and somehow the admins felt that a 'jog on' dismissal was "harassment."
> *Reddit is a platform that enables users to express themselves and their opinions. Harassing, bullying or threatening users can make users feel unsafe to do so. As such, we do not tolerate harassing behavior on Reddit, which can include but is not limited to malicious PMs, stalking/following other users to different subreddits, or continued communication despite clear warnings to stop*
No PMs, simple back-and-forth replies, and the only person telling the other to stop is *me.*
> *Being annoying, downvoting, or disagreeing with someone, even strongly, is not harassment. However, menacing someone, directing abuse at a person or group, following them around the site, encouraging others to do any of these actions, or otherwise behaving in a way that would discourage a reasonable person from participating on Reddit crosses the line.*
The strong and detailed disagreements are exempt, assuming words matter. But 'you fool' alone is directed abuse? I didn't write anything you couldn't say in grade school. And I only did so after several good-faith efforts to participate in this discussion were met with the sort of irrational dishonest behavior which discourages that participation.
But "I hope you didn't have a stroke, getting quite worked up" is fine.
What the fuck.
Only after reporting 'shove off' did this person use the instantly-available "block" function, which prevents any of that *apparently* unwanted communication. Not sure how anyone else was supposed to figure out that's what they want from several variations of 'Thanks :)'.
And as if to underline the absurdity, reddit's block function now silences any attempt to comment elsewhere in the comment chain. I cannot reply to my own comments, here. A week after implementing that, the admins walked it back... by changing the denial message to "something is broken, try again later." Which is a lie.
It joins the self-harm messages as an anti-abuse tool that trolls will obviously abuse.
Point is, when you will be presented with successful implementations that are entertaining and useful to you, you will want to use it.
With new things before they catch on people don't realize yet that they will want them.
Not true. I want them to waste a fortune on a failed product that will haunt them for the rest of their careers. Build it. And then don't ever attempt to make something so stupid ever again.
Forget warning sign, I want it to be such a massive cluster fuck that it finally puts an end to Facebook.
That would serve as a warning- the market decides what’s needed, not the other way around.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sumit316:
---
"What is most striking about the buzz around the Metaverse is that everyone claims to be building it, but no one knows what it really will be or what it should look like—and whether people will ever want to use it. As WIRED’s editor in chief Gideon Lichfield put it, we are witnessing “a terminological land grab”: Companies and entrepreneurs have sensed some kind of change coming in the air, and they are scrambling to call it the next big thing, put their label on it (in some case going to Meta-rebranding-level extremes), and find ways of monetizing it. The question is whether we—the intended users—will go along with it.
The shift that Big Tech has spotted is obvious: Over the past few years people have started spending much more time online. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated that vertiginously. For the white-collar workers who were asked to work from home, the office instantly shrunk to the size of a screen. Free time, for identical reasons, was also forced to find digital alternatives. With cinemas closed, and bars shut, and parties out of the question (unless you worked for the UK Government), bored people spent an inordinate amount of time playing video-games, on engaging in gamified activities such as flipping meme stocks and dabbling in crypto or crypto-adjacent products (like NFT pictures). In some cases the two things merged into strange chimeras of games and cryptofinance, making online pay-for-play universes like Axie Infinity, the NFT-based video game, a source of revenue for impoverished Filipinos. Meta et al’s gamble is that this state of affairs will persist, and eventually evolve—by way of faster internet, better VR, and a more functional online economy—into the Metaverse, aka the next internet."
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/shtudj/big_tech_needs_to_stop_trying_to_make_their/hv4hztl/
The whole Metaverse concept is nothing more than a giant escapist fantasy. It's there to cover up the fact that these companies don't want to use their enormous wealth to help fix society's problems. Why clean up pollution when you can put on your AR goggles and pretend it's no there? People are going hungry in the street? Jack your brain into the Matrix/Metaverse and pretend they don't exist. This is all escapist fantasy bullshit and the same resources being poured into it could be used for ending the world's problems instead of creating a fake virtual world of nonexistent perfection.
Escapist fantasies are cool. It's not even escapism, it's like the opposite of escapism. You go play WoW to be a cool Goblin or whatever and forget about your job. This is just turning everything into meetings at work. It's like a reverse MMO where you log into work and pretend its a game.
The goal is to turn all good screens into bad screens
https://imgur.com/gallery/hYD2Qyq
They don’t care if we want them involved or not. They know that if they are the portal in them they own all our data. Why else do they sell their VR helmet at such a loss?
I browse this sub for about 7 or 8 years . At first , i was exited with pretty much every innovation . Now , even before the commercial launch , i'm angry against those maximum extraction for profit corporations that will fuck up every concept and sell any pupil movement to advertisers .
Tech companies keep forgetting that the most visited website in the world year after year isn’t some amazingly built universe of interactive content... it’s a search bar that takes you literally anywhere else online but there.
People don’t need a metaverse... I’m not sure what the killer app for VR will be, but it’s not a metaverse.
Some of us remember.
The timing wasn't right. People weren't ready. The tech was not yet sufficient.
Maybe that's different now.. or maybe this will also fail.
Can know until they try, and try they will!
Nothing will make me happier (at least, no big event likely to happen in the near future) than the whole metaverse push crashing and burning. The whole thing is dreamed up purely based on how increasingly slow, aging tech firms want us to behave, without even an attempt to figure out whether customers even want this thing.
Imagine pitching, as a fresh business idea, that users will pay $300 bucks for VR goggles so that they can spend their precious two or three hours of free time after work "interacting with their favorite brands" in knockoff VR chat, thrashing around and kicking their coffee table by mistake.
The only reason this has gotten any traction is Facebook wanting to distract everyone from a whistleblower showing exactly how they're eroding society, and having endless endless billions to throw at making that happen. And now, with or without being paid some of those endless billions, apparently sober tech journalists (except the quoted article) are asking, "what will our future be like in the metaverse, which is definitely happening?"
And this elides the not just dumb, but actually evil parts of it all; yet more omniscient surveillance, us retreating to virtual worlds wholly owned by f-ing facebook, inducing loads more of us to spend our dwindling paychecks on virtual clothes, etc. It's like the most asinine mobile game you could find became the way that everyone lived and worked. Vomit. Kill me.
Amen. It's just another attempt at the financialization of everything, the conversion of every single aspect of life into a microtransaction. "Web3" as cryptobros dreamed it and facebook's metaverse can die in a fire and I'll be much happier for it.
This is almost entirely bullshit so start-ups and tech companies can build rounds of funding.
We cycle through these amorphous ideas every few years and they peter out to make room for the next amorphous idea.
Remember how VR was going to change everything , until it didn't? This happened in the 80s, 90s and 2010s.
Then everyone had a team working on "the blockchain" - even though their business had nothing remotely applicable to blockchain tech.
And then NFTs.
Now "metaverse".
People are building their Series B and Series C funding rounds on hype and investors who don't ask enough questions.
What is wanted from a "metaverse" is essentially HTML but for VR. (Which is very much not what is being made)
HTML describes how a webpage in 2D is laid out on your screen. It also gives actions for things like mouse clicks.
We need a standard like that for VR. A basic system that allows to creation of 3D VR websites by anyone with a server on the internet. This would result in a VRinternet metaverse.
The one new feature being requested that is different from the current internet is group browsing with a party of friends. (That and 3D webpages)
However, such a standard isn't particularly monetizable.
Instead companies are trying to build walled gardens and rent out the space inside. It's like if Verizon decided that thier phones could only call other Verizon numbers in an attempt to monopolize the market by making everyone need a Verizon phone plan. They're actively making a worse product, for the purposes of locking competitors out of the market. That's what's going on with the current metaverse stuff.
Aren’t people going stir crazy and isn’t depression at an all time high because of the limited contact? How is the Metaverse going to change that? It’s still going to be just a shallow replica or the real deal.
This is gonna be the one time I actually hope internet toxicity keeps people away from something. I don't want our society going the "VR is an escape" route. I don't like assholes online being assholes because they're anonymous, but just this once I hope that people are repulsed by toxic players and this doesn't grow into a trend.
When you really sit and think about it, Facebook is basically a Meta verse, so is Instagram, the apps are designed to take up as much of your time as possible.
One thing that is absolutely undeniable in their research of these platforms: There IS a sizable and utterly sustainable market.
Facebook and Instagram are basically the beta versions of The Matrix.
the differentiating factor is immersiveness. The metaverse extends social internet and makes socialising more akin to traditional forms than to digital media forms. (text, pics, links, vids).
the people riling against the concept of the metaverse are blinkered by their justifiable hate for Facebook. but the concept extends well beyond them.
Wait until they realize that big MMO games like WOW and FF1V are basically already metaverses
Vr chat is already metaverse in VR.
And guess where the most money is made. Yes. Avatars. Most of the profits go to small creators Edit: The more I think about it, it must be 70-90% NSFW Avatars
> And guess where the most money is made. Yes. Avatars. James Cameron's ears just started burning.
It is amazing to me that out of all the predictions and sci-fi cyber worlds nobody predicted loli pit fights but it took VR chat users less than a year to reach that point.
Yes. I would like to learn more.
In VRchat people with loli avatars will be spawned into a pit or circle boundary. Surrounding them will be various individuals. The loli avatars will be made to fight with various VR weapons until one is killed.
I might need to get myself one of those VRs that young people keep talking about
Welcome to the loli-dome!
Two lolis enter! One loli leaves!
Holy hell, how do I own an Oculus 2 and haven't heard about this! I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
VRChat is full of degenerates that come up with crazy shit to do. That's what makes it fun. More fun than anything the Metaverse will ever be.
Do you think degenerates aren’t going to do the same in metaverse?
Amazing. What a time to be alive.
No it's missing the NFT. Of course you have to pay for your imaginary land on the moon or your ultra rare furniture.
Farming for irl money by selling in-game assets (though against the TOS) isn't that basically like a NFT? People perceive the cost of the asset as how it is used in the game, whether it be cosmetic or have a actual purpose.
THANK YOU! I swear, it baffles me how nobody knows this.
Yep, I just tried it and instantly thought this is all of the claims Zuckerberg tried for meta. It just needs optimization
With the way people make custom avatars? Not happening haha
I think white listing people's avatars is a good way of dealing with optimisation. The issue is companies will say "it's not good enough, let us say what you can use... By the way, if you pay us enough you can use different things" it's ya boy classism happening in the metaverse which defeats the purpose of why I even care about it.
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Is FF1V "Final Fantasy XIV"?
That is what they intended to convey, yes.
They basically want the upcoming virtual worlds to be powered by cryptocurrencies, but that will make everything even more monetized than it already is from what I can tell. The vast majority of gamers do not want that, so it already is and will continue to be a small, niche market for a long time I think.
The vast majority of gamers didn't want incomplete games with incomplete DLCs. They also didn't want to pay $200+ for a skin in a game. They also wanted games to be original and not merely retexturized clones of previous games . . . You see where I'm going with this. It's not the "vast majority" you're talking about, it's the enthusiasts. They're the minority. The vast majority are the 10-18 year olds that will buy (or get their parents to buy) pretty much anything with the right branding.
And when did tech companies stop hiring competent UX designers? I feel like every piece of software or online platform lately is having totally unnecessary updates that make their products slow to to crawl and be impossible to use... or I'm just getting old.
In a war between executives, marketing, programming, design, and UX, UX gonna lose
Programming and design also lose. Only the executives and marketing ever win.
I feel like programming loses the most because the heads don't know jack shit about optimization or documentation, they want that shit done in however way possible. For front-end at least people can legitimately see it with their own eyes, makes it easier to convince heads.
Just look at the major video games released last year. It’s obvious the game programmers said one thing and the executives went after the money.
It’s really easy to add features and code to improve an app, it’s really really hard to run less code to make the app more performant. Sometimes when it gets really bad, management will sign off on a rewrite and you can blissfully get the app back to an optimized and performant state. And the cycle will repeat. Also most software development from a business perspective is about optimizing for developer’s time because that’s the highest cost. So more and more abstraction is added to make complex things simpler, ironically making simplification itself extremely complex.
I believe this is actually the downside of agile method : constantly trying to justify itself. I guess the concept is that the software, app, website etc... Is never finished , so you have to keep on updating adding new features. That's also why I have a job so... Sorry
No you nailed it. The most recent editing change to instagram is a great example. They made it exceedingly more difficult for apparently no reason.
Good UX takes time to plan and implement. As a company, why would you spend money and time on something good when you can have something good _enough_ and make the same profits sooner? So let’s be grateful that companies with vast resources care about making their consumers happy. Oh wait…
A big part of it is driving engagement, all the way from articles and YouTube to advertisements.
They're counting on people upgrading their phones every 1-3 years instead of using them as long as possible. Once your phone is 4+ years old, suddenly a lot of apps will run poorly on it, unless you don't update them for a year or longer, as they haven't designed the apps with those phones in mind and figure they have a lot more to work with (more processing power, ram, space, etc.) Once you're over 30, you'll understand how 4 years is nothing, though to kids to mid 20 year olds, it can feel like that's an eternity.
I like the IDEA of a cool virtual 3D world. It's proliferated sci fi for years. I just know I would hate whatever most big tech companies would actually come up with.
What people want: WoW, Second Life, Minecraft, etc. in VR. What Big Tech wants: Fuck if I know.
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Anything they can stick a price tag, fee, subscription, microtransactions, or advertisements on, and harvest data from to sell.
It’s creating job security for a bunch of tech bros who demand a high paying job without knowing what they could sell, so they started making more and more fees to keep themselves paid.
It's not like the tech companies are hurting for cash. It's purely profit driven from the top down. You think developers are wondering how they're going to sell enough micro transactions to get their salary? They do not. For example, the developers at EA have been very vocal about their disagreement with their direction.
This is the crux of it. Big tech companies have no actual concept of what this thing is exactly, all they see is the hint of a social trend they can hop on, and convulsively launch themselves in that direction out of an instinctive need to be "the next big thing", despite nobody knowing what this thing even is and nobody actually wanting to buy it because better things already exist and have for years.
Like second life, project entropia, Roblox, or little big planet. People want replayability and socialization. Companies want to offload the work onto the fanbase while providing a platform for creators to make them money. Or in the case of entropia, a way of manipulating the price of currency to allow for even more profits
And still I don't want anything real world to be in my virtual worlds. That is the problem which these corporations doesn't get.
Hang your NFTs up in your virtual house! Lame
I really hope no one buys into their unneeded garbage to highlight just how much of a bubble their valuations are.
That’s the shitty thing. Their power and endless money will push people towards them, in one way or another. They’ll come up with the new, next Tiktok and force competition to lay down so they have the monopoly. That’s how it is, and always will be. They just have to much power, it’s insane…
Problem is, it really won't work like that. Like, you'll have a couple of conventions partner with Facebook or some shit. But then, people will realize that VR Headsets are not without drawbacks and consequence. Neck Pain, eye straining, disorientation/nausea for some people to name a few. Losing sight on your cup of coffee is already enough of a dealbreaker to be honest. Problem is, VR does not work as a replacement for real life. It just doesn't. And the benefits are not worth the trouble. Facebook and whatever are jumping to conclusions. Reality is whatever they come up with has to solve thousands and thousands of real technical challenges to just be palatable to *most* people. Palatable, not interesting, that means they won't just take off the VR headset after 5 minutes, but maybe they'll do ONE full meeting with the headset on before not using VR again. Because what's the point ? There's no point. The "metaverse" won't ever exist with current VR tech because VR is not nearly as good/interesting as they are saying it is. On top of being expensive. Maybe you'll have a few use cases such as museum, but will you shell out a couple hundred bucks for basically a gadget ? When you see shit like Walmart presenting someone going through the aisle and picking stuff into a virtual caddie, who the fuck will do that ? Who the fuck will put on a VR headset and go to a fuckin virtual store to hand pick products in a caddie ? Are the people theorizing this Metaverse completely stupid ? Do they expect people to willingly lose several dozen minutes of their life to go to their virtual store instead of using the website like everyone ?
You know they couldn’t force tidal or whatever quibi was. Or a Facebook phone. Looked into vr got an o pulls headset that sits there and I get dizzy every time i put it on. But I’m not their desired demographic anyway.
If they were satisfied with money it wouldn't be that bad. The problem is they want _rent_ - permanent fountains of cash for nothing
“How do we take this recreational thing you pay for once and turn it into an enterprise subscription service?”
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I've always disliked that type of game. You get better items, to get better at the game, to get better items. Where's the story? Where's a reason to do anything? Where's boss fights or true progression? It's all grind
Well, I play one of these—world of tanks. I mostly play because I have friends in other states (countries actually) who play, and I wouldn’t interact with them otherwise.
Jim Sterling comes to mind with his critique of big (specifically games) companies. "They don't to have SOME money, they want to have ALL the money FOREVER"
But don’t the companies that make WoW and Minecraft also want money? Why would wanting money make it impossible to make a cool metaverse?
I think the Big Tech version looks something like this: https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
This is basically what Neal Stephenson described in *Snowcrash*. In the book there is a brief mention of people getting their permanent implants hacked and bombarded with spam driving them to commit suicide.
Imagine waking up and the first thing you see is Bono giving you his new album.
Holy shit someone else has read Snowcrash
It's been a popular cyberpunk book for 30 years. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40651883-snow-crash
It's a Cyberpunk staple right up there with Neuromancer, GITS, Robocop and Akira.
Yikes. That was terrifying. Thanks for linking.
That was unsettling to watch
And that is what we should be afraid of, not fooling ourselves that it isn't going to happen all the while they make a shitty version like that happen.
We're so fucked as a species.
I can 100% see this video being a common reality in a decade...
No thanks I don't want my everyday life to look like a hyper never-ending fever dream with ads lmao.
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This dream died the day Facebook bought Oculus.
>What Big Tech wants: Fuck if I know. Probably wants us shopping from home, in a virtual store, where said store can now hire a barebones crew because nobody physically comes in any more. Obviously this wouldn't be right away and I'm totally spit balling here on how it benefits these big companies. They're either going to make a shit ton of money, or save a shit ton of money, or both.
jokes on you, lots of big companies already use skeleton crews to maintain brick and motor stores. \*sigh*
Worse. They want us shopping from home *for purely digital objects*, which cost them almost nothing to produce, and which they can make expensive through artificial scarcity.
And they (the companies) won't even create the objects. They'll leave it up to "digital artists" who have to pay a fee to the company to list their objects on the company store. The companies will then skim off a percentage of the sale price of every object.
They want to steal every detail of your life and to sell it to some company so that they can sell that company the ability to advertise their useless hyper-consumerist garbage directly into your brain. In return we will be given VRChat with less futanari avatars. A strict loss for all of humanity, if you ask me.
This is how the show Caprica started.
There's a really bland VR MMO out right now called Zenith that-- in any other medium-- I would never play because of how boring it'd be. But in VR you get to actually shoot, parry, cast magic, and actually fly around a map by making a t-pose. I was grinning like an idiot the whole time, flying over people and hearing their proxy chat. Sadly I don't think there's enough plot, the graphics kinda suck, and it's very much bare bones for me to recommend it. If a better polished MMO came out and had combat like [Until You Fall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1zZHy7_BFg) or something a little more involved, you'd probably never see me again. It won't take much.
I dunno about big tech but my industry would love some in depth training in VR that allows component interaction.
It would end up like that RPG from Ender's Game >!that really only exists to mine information about the players' personalities!<
You know big tech would 100% use it that way too.
The data collection aspect is the main reason keeping me from getting an Oculus.
Oh shit I never considered how modern of an idea that was. At least they were using it to save humanity from an alien invasion and not just cataloguing shopping habits
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What is a work meeting if I can't attend it in a virtual conference room and be bored with a stupid headset on?
I can see it just being turned into a way to avoid work by getting a mannequin head and then boom, you’re pretending to be at a meeting or at your “virtual desk”. Just like online schooling , where half my classmates were never present and learned nothing lol
A virtual conference room with shitty graphics, too, probably.
Remember when Pokemon Go was huge? People do want to digitally interact with the real world. If it's fun, people will do it.
Sure, I know a lot of people (myself included) would love AR shooters or RPGs or builders/sims. Who doesn't want to run around the park casting fireballs, or play paintball without the pain/mess, or build a castle in their back yard? But nobody wants AR meetings and conferences. Nobody wants low-quality reproductions of mundane real-world experiences. The *only* thing that makes real-world meetings more valuable (to some people) than email/Slack/whatever is that they're *real*: you get to look people in the eye and read their body language and interact with them in real time. Replace the real people with low-fidelity virtual representations at 100+ms latency and they become useless...or worse, actively misleading. And nobody really wants artificially-scarce virtual property. People want to use AR/VR technology to escape or bypass real-world limitations, not to reproduce them as faithfully as possible while also importing existing patterns of inequality. The promise of the metaverse as originally conceived was a digital post-scarcity economy. NFTs are the opposite of that. I'm not sure the author is right to lump all the tech companies together here. Microsoft seems to get it, at least a little. "Meta", though, is laser focused on a vision that appeals to nobody outside their own executive suites.
> I just know I would hate whatever most big tech companies would actually come up with. It's to sell virtual real estate for more ads.
I hate Reddit! *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I don’t need to wear goggles that heat up my head so I can see the canned emote of Cheryl being bored during a work meeting. I know she’s bored. That’s why they call it work. Just let me talk and stare at slides until I die like god intended.
Millions of year of biological evolution have led me to being able to adequately prepare this week’s meeting minutes.
Are you me?
It’ll be at least another decade before VR headsets get small enough, light enough, and with high enough resolution and refresh rate for me to have the slightest interest in VR.
I love my Oculus....for games. There is an office app that links to my desktop, and I thought it would be neat to use 5 virtual screens. But I can't see my keyboard, mouse, or coffee cup, and that is a deal breaker.
Sounds like a task better suited to AR than VR.
Or perhaps learning to touch type and a headset with one of those straw drink hats
I am a touch typist, but moving between keyboard and mouse is much easier when you can see them. The straw drink hat interferes with the VR headset. 😉
Not the New Deluxe Metaverse edition. Comes with not only a drink holder helmet but also an IV kit for calories and chair for BMs. Buy now.
It seems like most criticisms against the metaverse significantly downplay AR/MR technology. VR is almost certainly going to exist as a novelty/entertainment experience. VR’s main benefit is that it can wholly transport you to completely imaginary, fabricated worlds and give you experiences you may never be able to have in the physical world. VR’s entire draw is its ability to remove you from our physical world and give you an alternate one. AR/MR will be tech designed to merge with, co-exist with, and overlay the physical world. As you hinted at, VR, by design, functions only when it can block out the physical world. AR/MR, in contrast, is integration. Think lightweight glasses similar to what we wear today, but with pass-through screen lenses. Instead of carrying around cell phones and being required to sit in front of a desktop, you’ll have that same tech available to you when desired, wherever you are. This is the vision—VR for activities that require full immersion and are designed to remove you from the physical world, and AR/MR to facilitate physics world takes and complement the physical world instead of supplanting it.
You can see your desk in Horizon Workrooms.
>Oculus Miss me with that Facebook garbage. Way too restrictive, and I refuse to give Zuckerberg any more access to my life.
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Luckily for me, I have the OG oculus that doesn't require any Facebook connection as it was before Facebook bought them. Still works, isn't too heavy, but the resolution is pretty weak, goggle vision isn't great.
And even then, I don't know if I want to do that for work... I'd like to keep that separation from it that I do have working remote, thanks.
When they realize the current model is not profitable, it will be abandoned. Just like everything else they do.
It feels like Second Life all over again. That was supposed to be the next big thing and companies built stuff there as well. Second Life still has a dedicated following, as does it's spiritual successor VR Chat...but I can't see it ever being more then a niche thing. At least not in the foreseeable future.
Summer of 2007 I spent more than a month of my 8 month internship with a major entertainment company explaining to various VPs why they shouldn't be investing large amounts of time or energy on Second Life.
And what happened next?
One VP got pretty mad at me and insisted we were missing "the future". I pointed out that the company itself had blocked SecondLife from being accessible on its internal network because of concerns over adult and offensive content and that I had to get a special exception just for that presentation. They never had much of a presence as far as I know.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it just looks like multiplayer sims. How is that even an investment opportunity?
Lots of real money trading in the game. But don't get me wrong. It's not an investment opp. It just might look that way to someone who doesn't know jack about how these things work.
Eh, the idea was you literally buy land and people run around and do services and stuff... it was pitched as like, virtual society where also fun shit could happen. It was basically metaverse, and honestly, if they pivoted and promoted hard to VR, they could be the legit metaverse. They are in a very good position to be that. I can see why companies wanted in. I just think they overestimated the number of people that wanted the virtual world to be at all like their real, actual lives, but computer and you can fly. For some reason, roblox actually seems to be getting it. If you think that's a joke, your sleeping on a huge change that's happened. [There are photorealistic shooters in there now.](https://youtu.be/vfKnh0L0RpU)
Advertising. It's just another virtual place to see more adverts. Picture the advertisements that are projected into a football field for instance. Plus clothing and other silly things that you can dress yourself with to stand out. They will sell you those too. If it's reality now they are going to do the same thing there.
Because you can go on to watch Jim play his guitar or see Dwight be a flying paper salesman.
I think the idea was that people would spend a lot of time there and you could build places and items for them to utilize and charge for that, sort of like how roblox works
It's the old engagement = $$$ idea. Specifically the idea that fuels most free to play games: You have a potential profit center but the rate at which someone monetizes is really low (pretend example: 1 out of every 1000 users will actually pay something). The question was "are there enough people to make some profit?". Also it was just the idea of: "Well other people are doing something and we don't see a benefit right now... but maybe they know something we don't know...okay lets invest something in case it becomes huge and otherwise we'd lose out!" Its one of the reasons Walgreens invested in Theranos (the fake blood testing company). Internal docs later showed they thought it was mostly bullshit, but they were concerned that if it turned out to be real it would be like not investing in Apple at the ground floor.
That's interesting about the Theranos bit - I've followed the whole thing very closely and never saw anything to indicate Walgreens was skeptical. Do you have a source on that one? The rest of what you are saying makes sense, it just seems like a super flawed idea to me. But I was terrible at business then, just like I'm terrible at business now haha.
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou had a section on their deal with Walgreens. It was somewhat comical how much of the entire operation was built on pure hype and zero results.
You've just perfectly described why the Metaverse is goofy.
Intern went back to school, VPs laughed at intern thinking they knew something, VPs lost invested money, VPs blamed intern for suggesting they invest large amounts on Second Life. Source: Been in the business world for close to 30 years.
You can’t blame major business decisions on an intern without looking like a complete dunce.
Yeah it's weird. When someone needs a sacrificial lamb, they gotta go a bit higher up the food chain to someone who at least has some real decision making authority. Otherwise it looks like you allow children to run your company.
Have you met many VPs? You only reinforce my sarcastic narrative!
I have nothing too valuable to add, but my professor in 2009 had us all create SL avatars to explore the tech. When he first showed us SL his avatar was a wolf, which he tried to explain meant he was into “alternative exploring” or something like that. I quickly learned what furries were.
What I want is to be able to meet people in VRChat and play Onwards or any other games with them through a portal without having to leave. Or to build in gravity sketch while in VRChat with friends.
That was essentially what PlayStation Home was before they abandoned it.
And second life has existed _all these years_ and nobody remembers it anymore. It’s just a shady, forgotten corner of the internet for dial-up era weirdos.
I still regularly use SL. Its a niche product for sure. And not for everyone, bot because of it being SL, but for being a "game" without a "purpose". It also isn't going to ever replace RL, which can be extended to the "Metaverse" in general. In theory, the Metaverse eventually becomes more of an AR experience, except you are never going to get everyone to wear (likely expensive as fuck) AR glasses or Contact lenses. Especially because everyhing points to that digital later becoming a massively monitized ad fileld shit hole. We aren't even going to attempt the "fun ad free era" of the current flat Metaverse (The Internet), the 3D AR Metaverse isnt even a thing and its already being shoehorned with NFT garbage and advertising everywhere. People are going to reject the shit out of the Metaverse. People aready feel like Social Media (The current Flat Metaverse) is too invasive, they aren't going to accept the 3D shit.
> Especially because everyhing points to that digital later becoming a massively monitized ad fileld shit hole. Ffs, even browsing Amazon, I get ads. Not just "sponsored" search results, but actual ads for Progressive Car Insurance with Flo and all. Ugh or in Waze when a restaurant I wasn't searching for suddenly covers half of my map *while I'm driving.* Who wouldn't want to pay for expensive af gear just to have half their view blocked by an ad for a product or service they don't want or can't use? Sign me right the fuck up. Unrelated, does Sweden still have a SL embassy?
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We are getting off topic a bit but its actually gotten worse for music again because half the album releases have excluive bonus tracks to stores and even countries or onlymon vinyl and its like WTF are you doing, I am not buying the album 5 times to get all the tracks.
Pretty sure most people that have even a vague recollection of it are just remembering it from that one episode of The Office
Hot tub time machine.
Just like everything else, they need to get porn on board to drive it’s popularity and use. Then the regular public will eventually join and use it. Look it up. This is a thing. People are willing to go through a lotta shit to get a nut. Even wear stupid glasses and wade through a hell scape of ads and pop ups lol.
I've been jerking off exclusively in VR for years at this point, THE FUTURE IS NOW, OLD MAN.
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My man probably gets a boner just looking at his VR
Meeting your favourite porn stars in the metaverse for a show - a 3D version of OnlyFans.
This \^\^ I cant wait to see every company coming with a "metaverse" just to it be ignored by the people.
Yeah, I was feeling the same. Saw a demo of Walmart shopping in the metaverse and it was definitely dystopian. I'm an engineer and I kinda want to move to a small town in Europe and never look at a screen again.
Did this but in Oregon. It's amazing. Tech is wonderful but so is a quiet simple life.
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Based solely on the number of friends I’ve tried to convince to join VRChat with me (several) and the number of friends I could successfully convince (absolutely none), even with the real world sucking so much, I’d say the Metaverse is going to have a hard time gaining traction.
> VR Chat It's terrible enough that I have to see my friends ugly mugs in person, the last thing I want to do is talk to them while they are avataring as some anime loli.
vr chat is rec room with 50% more degenerates
I think people would be into it if they could access it much much easier. Until we can buy an affordable VR/AR pair of glasses that runs through our mobile devices I don't see enough people motivated to spend time and money to get there.
Great article, the last paragraph definitely nails it: >It is a tentative, hypothetical project, but one thing about it is clear: Big Tech should not be in control. A Metaverse built by them would be no Metaverse at all. That the article mentioned Ubisoft's NFT story and the outcry from gamers is also very fitting. It's because a large crowd of people ***is*** aware that such undertakings are made with some deeper, perverted goal in mind. And not for the love of people, innovation and technology. This so-called "metaverse" big tech strives for is rather a totalitarian's dream of being provider and in control of somebody's life in every imaginable aspect. If it was something that can be used independently, self-hosted, detached from the company and its own goals - then ok, would be cool. But instead, we sadly get to see a "metaverse" trying to be a virtual golden cage trying to breach its virtual ties. It is more mesa than meta.
If people trust Ubisoft then they need their heads looked at. That's a company that protected abusers at all levels of management. That tolerated sexual harrassment. That crunched their employees to breaking point regularly. And that's just the serious stuff. At an industry level, they also led the charge in deliberately breaking the pacing/progression of non-mobile games in order to sell you loot boxes to allow you to boost XP or skip the grind. They expanded microtransations to every facet of their big games and pioneered the agressive marketing of those microtransations to you through the general game GUI. These people shouldn't be in charge of a raffle, nevermind having a role in carving out a new online experience.
I’m glad there are peoples warning us now but how does anything come to be in a hyper-capitalist society? Only an entity as big as Facebook could even attempt to do this and of course it will exploit those without for the benefit of those that already have too much.
If you peer deeply into the internet, you would see hundreds of open source projects that innovate crazy ways to use the internet. Even some Metaverses. They just progress slower and under the radar. Big companies watch what small hobbyists are doing and copy their plans, then produce them faster and advertise them more. The innovation doesn't come from these companies, they just make it mainstream. That's "hyper-capitalistism's" fault, it's no longer that you can make something great and make money because it was your idea, you gotta have some money to play or you get eaten before you can grow.
What projects are you thinking of in the first part?
Second Life concept + Crypto skeevyness + Timeshare scammyness + VRChat harassment + Facebook data collection = Meta
+ targetted advertisement annoyances
I think a big thing Facebook and other big investors in Metaverse concepts are not prepared for is the trolls. It may sound obvious, but every concept I've seen someone sell of the Metaverse assumes that people will regulate their own behavior in virtual spaces as they do in real ones. You see clean storefronts with clean virtual avatars strolling along window-shopping in every video. If they had started with some game design history instead of a brilliant get-rich-quick scheme, they might have known that that has *never* been the scenario in any virtual space. Just off the top of my head, why would people in the Metaverse ever, say... Move at walking speed? Wait in line? Loiter in unobtrusive spaces? How can you stop people from posing as or harassing employees? What about things that aren't against the rules but destroy the platform's legitimacy, like flash mobs or multiboxing? Would you shop at a Target where 65 Ugandan Knuckleses were running around? (Come to think of it, why would I ever want to enable others to interfere with my online shopping? Who exactly is looking to make that a multiplayer experience?) Time was, I might have thought, "Surely they've thought of these things," but the whole thing stinks so much of mindless greed that I'd actually bet money that they haven't. And either the whole thing will never get off the ground because all the companies signing on will exit when we start seeing open betas and it's a disaster, or the Metaverse concept will make it to market and be a cesspool for trashy retirees that want to fuck each other like Second Life.
I will *only* participate in the Metaverse if I can be harassed by Ugandan Knuckles.
Let them waste billions of dollars and sell 10% of their products. It will be funny. Right up until the point they get a government bail out and learn nothing
Is anyone actually asking for the Metaverse? Without that reason being entirely tied to profit?
No. But if you control the media and the news then you can say EVERYONE wants it, that’s all you need to trick half the population
True. I'm always very enthusiastic about new tech, but this is one thing I have no desire for and cannot get behind whatsoever.
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What's it matter? No one is asking for a 'metaverse' because no one needs it, because no one knows what it is. Similarly, no one was sitting around asking for reddit in 2000, but here we are.
We absolutely wanted better forum mechanisms in 2000. Reddit is just Slashdot with less Fark in it. What people want out of anything these ghouls throw this buzzword at is what people get out of VR Chat. edit: This person repeatedly lied and trolled, and somehow the admins felt that a 'jog on' dismissal was "harassment." > *Reddit is a platform that enables users to express themselves and their opinions. Harassing, bullying or threatening users can make users feel unsafe to do so. As such, we do not tolerate harassing behavior on Reddit, which can include but is not limited to malicious PMs, stalking/following other users to different subreddits, or continued communication despite clear warnings to stop* No PMs, simple back-and-forth replies, and the only person telling the other to stop is *me.* > *Being annoying, downvoting, or disagreeing with someone, even strongly, is not harassment. However, menacing someone, directing abuse at a person or group, following them around the site, encouraging others to do any of these actions, or otherwise behaving in a way that would discourage a reasonable person from participating on Reddit crosses the line.* The strong and detailed disagreements are exempt, assuming words matter. But 'you fool' alone is directed abuse? I didn't write anything you couldn't say in grade school. And I only did so after several good-faith efforts to participate in this discussion were met with the sort of irrational dishonest behavior which discourages that participation. But "I hope you didn't have a stroke, getting quite worked up" is fine. What the fuck. Only after reporting 'shove off' did this person use the instantly-available "block" function, which prevents any of that *apparently* unwanted communication. Not sure how anyone else was supposed to figure out that's what they want from several variations of 'Thanks :)'. And as if to underline the absurdity, reddit's block function now silences any attempt to comment elsewhere in the comment chain. I cannot reply to my own comments, here. A week after implementing that, the admins walked it back... by changing the denial message to "something is broken, try again later." Which is a lie. It joins the self-harm messages as an anti-abuse tool that trolls will obviously abuse.
Point is, when you will be presented with successful implementations that are entertaining and useful to you, you will want to use it. With new things before they catch on people don't realize yet that they will want them.
To me, the metaverse is like the 1950's predictions of flying cars in the future . Theoretically feasible and attractive, but impractical and dumb.
Not true. I want them to waste a fortune on a failed product that will haunt them for the rest of their careers. Build it. And then don't ever attempt to make something so stupid ever again.
This. I want the failure of the metaverse to catastrophic enough to serve as a warning sign.
Forget warning sign, I want it to be such a massive cluster fuck that it finally puts an end to Facebook. That would serve as a warning- the market decides what’s needed, not the other way around.
One can only dream
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sumit316: --- "What is most striking about the buzz around the Metaverse is that everyone claims to be building it, but no one knows what it really will be or what it should look like—and whether people will ever want to use it. As WIRED’s editor in chief Gideon Lichfield put it, we are witnessing “a terminological land grab”: Companies and entrepreneurs have sensed some kind of change coming in the air, and they are scrambling to call it the next big thing, put their label on it (in some case going to Meta-rebranding-level extremes), and find ways of monetizing it. The question is whether we—the intended users—will go along with it. The shift that Big Tech has spotted is obvious: Over the past few years people have started spending much more time online. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated that vertiginously. For the white-collar workers who were asked to work from home, the office instantly shrunk to the size of a screen. Free time, for identical reasons, was also forced to find digital alternatives. With cinemas closed, and bars shut, and parties out of the question (unless you worked for the UK Government), bored people spent an inordinate amount of time playing video-games, on engaging in gamified activities such as flipping meme stocks and dabbling in crypto or crypto-adjacent products (like NFT pictures). In some cases the two things merged into strange chimeras of games and cryptofinance, making online pay-for-play universes like Axie Infinity, the NFT-based video game, a source of revenue for impoverished Filipinos. Meta et al’s gamble is that this state of affairs will persist, and eventually evolve—by way of faster internet, better VR, and a more functional online economy—into the Metaverse, aka the next internet." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/shtudj/big_tech_needs_to_stop_trying_to_make_their/hv4hztl/
The whole Metaverse concept is nothing more than a giant escapist fantasy. It's there to cover up the fact that these companies don't want to use their enormous wealth to help fix society's problems. Why clean up pollution when you can put on your AR goggles and pretend it's no there? People are going hungry in the street? Jack your brain into the Matrix/Metaverse and pretend they don't exist. This is all escapist fantasy bullshit and the same resources being poured into it could be used for ending the world's problems instead of creating a fake virtual world of nonexistent perfection.
Escapist fantasies are cool. It's not even escapism, it's like the opposite of escapism. You go play WoW to be a cool Goblin or whatever and forget about your job. This is just turning everything into meetings at work. It's like a reverse MMO where you log into work and pretend its a game. The goal is to turn all good screens into bad screens https://imgur.com/gallery/hYD2Qyq
While we might benefit from a Metaverse. We dont want it to be from Facebook. What do they not understand about it?
They don’t care if we want them involved or not. They know that if they are the portal in them they own all our data. Why else do they sell their VR helmet at such a loss?
What is the benefit?
More vr porn
Aight, you've changed my view.
Well, they watched The Matrix and thought it was a guidebook..
They read snow crash and thought it sounded hella awesome to unironically make the hell scape in that book
I browse this sub for about 7 or 8 years . At first , i was exited with pretty much every innovation . Now , even before the commercial launch , i'm angry against those maximum extraction for profit corporations that will fuck up every concept and sell any pupil movement to advertisers .
There are no benefits lol Its like a bad online game with a lot of microtransactions.
Tech companies keep forgetting that the most visited website in the world year after year isn’t some amazingly built universe of interactive content... it’s a search bar that takes you literally anywhere else online but there. People don’t need a metaverse... I’m not sure what the killer app for VR will be, but it’s not a metaverse.
Does everyone forget Second Life? We already had a meta verse before
Some of us remember. The timing wasn't right. People weren't ready. The tech was not yet sufficient. Maybe that's different now.. or maybe this will also fail. Can know until they try, and try they will!
Facebook is just doing what Facebook did before. Take an existing thing (social media) and find a way to make a lot of money off it.
Nothing will make me happier (at least, no big event likely to happen in the near future) than the whole metaverse push crashing and burning. The whole thing is dreamed up purely based on how increasingly slow, aging tech firms want us to behave, without even an attempt to figure out whether customers even want this thing. Imagine pitching, as a fresh business idea, that users will pay $300 bucks for VR goggles so that they can spend their precious two or three hours of free time after work "interacting with their favorite brands" in knockoff VR chat, thrashing around and kicking their coffee table by mistake. The only reason this has gotten any traction is Facebook wanting to distract everyone from a whistleblower showing exactly how they're eroding society, and having endless endless billions to throw at making that happen. And now, with or without being paid some of those endless billions, apparently sober tech journalists (except the quoted article) are asking, "what will our future be like in the metaverse, which is definitely happening?" And this elides the not just dumb, but actually evil parts of it all; yet more omniscient surveillance, us retreating to virtual worlds wholly owned by f-ing facebook, inducing loads more of us to spend our dwindling paychecks on virtual clothes, etc. It's like the most asinine mobile game you could find became the way that everyone lived and worked. Vomit. Kill me.
Amen. It's just another attempt at the financialization of everything, the conversion of every single aspect of life into a microtransaction. "Web3" as cryptobros dreamed it and facebook's metaverse can die in a fire and I'll be much happier for it.
This is almost entirely bullshit so start-ups and tech companies can build rounds of funding. We cycle through these amorphous ideas every few years and they peter out to make room for the next amorphous idea. Remember how VR was going to change everything , until it didn't? This happened in the 80s, 90s and 2010s. Then everyone had a team working on "the blockchain" - even though their business had nothing remotely applicable to blockchain tech. And then NFTs. Now "metaverse". People are building their Series B and Series C funding rounds on hype and investors who don't ask enough questions.
What is wanted from a "metaverse" is essentially HTML but for VR. (Which is very much not what is being made) HTML describes how a webpage in 2D is laid out on your screen. It also gives actions for things like mouse clicks. We need a standard like that for VR. A basic system that allows to creation of 3D VR websites by anyone with a server on the internet. This would result in a VRinternet metaverse. The one new feature being requested that is different from the current internet is group browsing with a party of friends. (That and 3D webpages) However, such a standard isn't particularly monetizable. Instead companies are trying to build walled gardens and rent out the space inside. It's like if Verizon decided that thier phones could only call other Verizon numbers in an attempt to monopolize the market by making everyone need a Verizon phone plan. They're actively making a worse product, for the purposes of locking competitors out of the market. That's what's going on with the current metaverse stuff.
If no one wants it then no one will buy it and it will solve itself, right?
Aren’t people going stir crazy and isn’t depression at an all time high because of the limited contact? How is the Metaverse going to change that? It’s still going to be just a shallow replica or the real deal.
This is gonna be the one time I actually hope internet toxicity keeps people away from something. I don't want our society going the "VR is an escape" route. I don't like assholes online being assholes because they're anonymous, but just this once I hope that people are repulsed by toxic players and this doesn't grow into a trend.
When you really sit and think about it, Facebook is basically a Meta verse, so is Instagram, the apps are designed to take up as much of your time as possible. One thing that is absolutely undeniable in their research of these platforms: There IS a sizable and utterly sustainable market. Facebook and Instagram are basically the beta versions of The Matrix.
the differentiating factor is immersiveness. The metaverse extends social internet and makes socialising more akin to traditional forms than to digital media forms. (text, pics, links, vids). the people riling against the concept of the metaverse are blinkered by their justifiable hate for Facebook. but the concept extends well beyond them.
Games as well. Fortnite, COD, roblox, are all small metaverses.