Metaverse, and the rise of VR worlds - Whether we want it or not

[Gender: Xenomorph]

For me, I never really cared for VR worlds and meta. The games are mediocre and the whole thing is gimmicky. But there's a huge (and I mean HUGE) push to turn these into the next mobile phones.

I'm a little weary about these. I don't want to be forced to put on these clumsy, nausea inducing headsets by some productivity anxious middle management so he can fill his schedule with pointless VR meetings.

 

[goodbudweiser]

Metaverse sucks, VRChat is better. I'd rather play VRC on a steam version of Switch then join a Metaverse zoom meeting on my Facebook app.​

 

[MrTroll]

Someday KF will exist entirely in the metaverse and instead of boring, unproductive conversations, everyone will spend all their time just drawing penises on everything, including themselves. I just hope I live long enough to experience this glorious future.

 

[Coolio55]

It's only natural to think that Horizon Worlds is a shittier version of a technology that already exists but with half the features sawed off and the remaining half being sold in chunks. It is!
...but remember, the Iphone was just a shittier version of all the other phones on the market with half the features sawed off.
Did it fail? Or did every single company in tech bring out the hacksaws in a manic attempt to emulate it?

 

[Toolbox]

It's only natural to think that Horizon Worlds is a shittier version of a technology that already exists but with half the features sawed off and the remaining half being sold in chunks. It is!
...but remember, the Iphone was just a shittier version of all the other phones on the market with half the features sawed off.
Did it fail? Or did every single company in tech bring out the hacksaws in a manic attempt to emulate it?

The iphone was a more convenient and better marketed version, among other reasons. Facebook has none of the wow factor going for them.

 

[Judge Dredd]

...but remember, the Iphone was just a shittier version of all the other phones on the market with half the features sawed off.
Did it fail? Or did every single company in tech bring out the hacksaws in a manic attempt to emulate it?

iPhones and iPods before them were shitty phones/mp3 players that hipsters bought for fashion reasons, not for function.

A better comparison might be Zoom and even Facebook itself. A shit tier walled garden nobody likes but boomers use it because it's all boomers know.

 

[$80 Nude Haircut]

VR Chat exists so horribly obese men can ERP as anime lolis. Faceberg would never permit such a thing & thus it will never upstage that already-niche hobby.

There's also the fact that Zuck irreversibly tarnished his reputation by associating himself with the very concept of data harvesting. He could bankroll nanomachines that fight cancer cells & people still wouldn't get that shit done because they've decided there's a chance Faceberg is cataloging & selling your genome to China (which would probably end up being true.)

 

[Ultrapenguin]

That is a legitimate point though: if you're someone who gets motion sick easily, VR can be extremely unpleasant to use.

Even if they did try to do something retarded and start having virtual meetings or w/e, it won't work too well when 1/3 of your team is fending off nausea the entire time. Not that reality or basic reason has ever stopped these types of people in the past.

 

[Jewthulhu]

Moon is a hyperdramatic sperg. I'll believe this shit becoming an unstoppable force when I see it.

 

[888Flux]

"Metaverse" was simply a way for Facebook to decouple from "Facebook" and people fell for it. Instead of the rampant abuses of privacy, aggressive data collection and malicious practices towards it's users the connotation Facebook brings people now talk about their gay and retarded VR platform that will never go anywhere because it was never meant to. It was simply a marketing technique and it has worked tremendously well in their favor. A billion dollars isn't a lot of money for a company like Facebook to throw at it's VR subdivision if it means it can distract from what it was and still is - Facebook

 

[Toolbox]

Moon is a hyperdramatic sperg. I'll believe this shit becoming an unstoppable force when I see it.

People like moon make dramatic bait their career. Don't expect what they actually believe with titles and thumbnails like that.

 

[byuu]

That video is garbage.
"Meta isn't dying because a different company, Google, is doing completely unrelated AR stuff."

 

[Toolbox]

That video is garbage.
"Meta isn't dying because a different company, Google, is doing completely unrelated AR stuff."

And google is a constant producer of flop products because they reward making shitty new things rather than keeping existing products in service. Stadia already failed and it was an attempt to do something a bunch of other companies have already done, but with more budget. I guess cloud gaming isn't currently dead either because Amazon is dumb enough to do it too. Even in the ar/vr space Google already had their VR attempt with Google Cardboard and their AR attempt with Google Glass, both didn't last. Admittedly with cardboard they actually helped phone VR last a few more years than it would have already, but the way they went about it had the same holes as everything else they do these days. Phone VR is dead as a concept though because it does not work out.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

I've been following this bullshit, trying to figure out what it even is. I work in tech, and I'm not sure I could tell you what the value proposition is supposed to be. Something, something, immersive NFT's and something?

I watched that YouTube video by some dork predicting that metaverses are inevitable, and he cited a bunch of reasons, none of which really stand up:

Companies are pouring billions into metaverses
Companies poured billions into 3D television, HD-DVD, Google Stadia, Windows Phone, the subprime mortgage crisis... you get the idea. Spending more money doesn't guarantee success, it makes failure (to achieve RoI) more likely.

Metaverses are super popular already!
If you claim that Fortnite is a "metaverse". If Fortnite is a metaverse, so is DOOM (1993).

Imagine how powerful it'll be when they link the metaverses up!
That'll never happen. Apple isn't going to spend lots of money to make it easier for you to take your ass to Google or whatever. The technical challenges involved in porting digital items between different engines without breaking them are huge, expensive, and Big Tech seems to be entering a major slump. Just as likely that investors sour on metabullshit and start demanding this kind of thing gets cut.

VR is going to be so incredibly addictive people will want to stay there!
Idk how sad people's lives are but no, I don't think so. Binging on Netflix or TikTok or whatever is a completely different thing to strapping a dork-helmet onto your head, blocking out your surroundings, and quite probably getting some degree of eye strain and nausea after a while. The dork-helmet is not the new iPhone, it's the new dork-helmet (Google Glass 2.0). Some people will buy it for the home, as a novelty, but they're not going to be taking it on trains, or to work. It's too inherently antisocial for the situations normal humans want to be in, most of the time.

Microsoft is pushing hard to make the metaverse the next Teams!
Who gives a fuck? Employees don't want to spend 8 hours a day with computer screens strapped to their eyeballs. Customers don't want to see an awkwardly rendered Nintendo Mii caricature of you. A regular Teams call, or a good old fashioned phone call, or visit, is fine. There is no demand for this in the enterprise.

 

[Toolbox]

Metaverses are super popular already!
If you claim that Fortnite is a "metaverse". If Fortnite is a metaverse, so is DOOM (1993).

This right here works directly against the success of a wholly new platform by a company that hasn't created a serious product in the field. We already had an era of metaverses in the 90s, Active Worlds, Worlds.com, secondlife, and plenty of mmos. 99% of them are now dead, others are still kept online by owners that probably wish they were. The only name out of the early 3d chat world that still lives on in any serious means is second life, and it's purely because of it's ability to be modded and it also had more features. Horizon worlds can't even say that and it's competing with several non-vr services like Roblox, VRchat which has non-vr compatibility, even second life which fulfills more of the niche market than a pure vr set up.

 

[The Great Milenko]

VR is going to be so incredibly addictive people will want to stay there!
Idk how sad people's lives are but no, I don't think so. Binging on Netflix or TikTok or whatever is a completely different thing to strapping a dork-helmet onto your head, blocking out your surroundings, and quite probably getting some degree of eye strain and nausea after a while. The dork-helmet is not the new iPhone, it's the new dork-helmet (Google Glass 2.0). Some people will buy it for the home, as a novelty, but they're not going to be taking it on trains, or to work. It's too inherently antisocial for the situations normal humans want to be in, most of the time.

It'll be niche for a very long time. Until the processing power can provide photo realistic graphics, And there better be shit to do with a smaller headset with an 8 hour battery life. Even then it will be slightly less niche. Perhaps good for a virtual walk thru of famous sites.

Microsoft is pushing hard to make the metaverse the next Teams!
Who gives a fuck? Employees don't want to spend 8 hours a day with computer screens strapped to their eyeballs. Customers don't want to see an awkwardly rendered Nintendo Mii caricature of you. A regular Teams call, or a good old fashioned phone call, or visit, is fine. There is no demand for this in the enterprise.

"This is a meeting that could have been an email." Fuck, nobody turns on their cameras now. Why? Because I am jerking off to porn listening to this years quarterly results. If you are wearing the headset plus whatever add ones to present a digital representation of one's physical body, you still need to act like you are actually in a physical meeting. Zuckerberg can fuck right on off.

 

[Toolbox]

It'll be niche for a very long time. Until the processing power can provide photo realistic graphics,

The bigger deal is solving the motion sickness issue. Likely the only solution for everyone would be a real full movement system that is reasonably compact. Something that could actually physically move you within a decent range of motion, and also allow you to feel like you're moving with walking/climbing. Pretty much impossible with current technology, the closest we can get is a decent way to simulate driving games or flight sims, and those machines are massive and still have no good way of fooling you into thinking the inertia from the game is applying to you in reality.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

The bigger deal is solving the motion sickness issue. Likely the only solution for everyone would be a real full movement system that is reasonably compact. Something that could actually physically move you within a decent range of motion, and also allow you to feel like you're moving with walking/climbing. Pretty much impossible with current technology, the closest we can get is a decent way to simulate driving games or flight sims, and those machines are massive and still have no good way of fooling you into thinking the inertia from the game is applying to you in reality.

Great point especially with so many people who get queasy so easily and need to get juiced on dramamine else they pass out. I fly FPV and recently switched back to using a monitor instead of goggles because extended flying with goggles ends up causing soreness. We're gonna need either better AR or visual implants for VR to take off.

 

[Mister Uno]

I think some of Moon's videos are informative, but yeah he definitely hams it up especially of late with "This is the Most Evil..." over and over. But him saying the metaverse is going to happen is complete bullshit. Literally nobody cares about it.

The biggest issue I see with something like the metaverse is cost. How the fuck are you going to convince someone to invest hundreds into a VR headset, not even considering the hardware you would need to run these worlds well. Many companies struggle just to keep their hardware up to date outside of the big ones. And secondly, the lack of convince. I do just about everything on my phone and it's portable. You can't say that about the metaverse bullshit. Many people are going to be annoyed they need to move to a certain room to do the very same thing. We could theoretically make it portable, small, and pack some strong hardware but you know it would be some engineer's nightmare to design something like that with little issue.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Metaverses are super popular already!
If you claim that Fortnite is a "metaverse". If Fortnite is a metaverse, so is DOOM (1993).

You forget that this is propped up by business marketeers.

"Oh wow would it be cool if I could buy a cosmetic and carry it on to other games? It'd be like I OWN it!"
"Fortnite has players and cosmetics! It's almost kinda sorta like a metaverse!"
"You already play 4h a day! Imagine if you got paid for it like a real job!"