Me too, but then given the complexity of this tech, I think it's much closer by order of magnitude to a moon landing worth of engineering than Pat's Sustainable Bamboo Bicycles. Big projects, big scale, big money.

Palmer lucky literally did built the first Occulus in his garage. I don't think it's fair to compare this technology to the moon landing.

You're right that some sort of ready player one metaverse thing is probably on that level, but creating genuinely interesting, fun VR experiences that may in many ways be more interesting and unique does not to me seem beyond the scope of small scale business.

In a sense VR is one of the purest versions of that sort of cyberspace idealism, it's an escape hatch away from curated, corporate products to whatever people want to make. So I'm not pessimistic that creative people find things to built.

Me, too. I think economic pressures like you described generally harm quality of life. We end up with less "real wealth" --all the work-products that would otherwise make net QoL better, for the sake of monetary wealth concentration. As usual this comes down to the incentives and disincentives we've baked into our system not aligning with the best overall outcome. They align with the perceived needs of the biggest fish only.

Being able to buy a VR headset for 400$ is "real wealth".

I have to disagree. This argument comes up in every discussion about wealth inequality. 'The non-wealthy can't complain, because everything is so cheap now.'

Real wealth is, you know... actual wealth. It's being able to start a high 6-figure to 8-figure business (or even smaller if you are satisfied) and not being laughed at as a failure. It's being able to buy rather than rent everything you want to buy. It's having productive assets.

> It's being able to start a high 6-figure to 8-figure business (or even smaller if you are satisfied) and not being laughed at as a failure.

I suspect this is a bit of a SV bubble viewpoint. I don't think that in the general population, if you tell people you are pulling 8-figures in your business, you would be considered a failure.

Yep, sounds like someone who spends way too much time on forums. Do they even have a 6-figure business that's literally getting laughed at? And was that "laughter" more than maybe an internet comment, at most? Starts to sound more like superstition.

>> It's being able to buy rather than rent everything you want to buy. It's having productive assets.

If by "productive assets" you mean income/revenue producing, then I'm not sure we can all have that. Many assets like that require some else to pay rent.

People can now buy a haedset for 400$, rather than 100000$. That creates wealth.

That you personally care more about starting a business than about using a VR headset is not really relevant.

It creates purchasing power only in VR, but that is not the same thing as wealth. I think it's important to keep that distinction. Wealth is more directly connected to financial stability than the price of specific technology products.

I don't think you have a proper concept of "wealth".

I appreciate that. Economy of scale makes it possible for really amazing products, concentrating the efforts of many, to be spread far and wide. That is a great thing, but there are very serious negatives that come along with that incentive to scale when it's not tempered. Hegemonic industries disproportionately empower owners over workers and limit opportunity, competition, and diversity to the point where the "best" products can shove anti-consumer features down people's throats. You get unsteerable inertia.

It's not cut-and-dry bad the way we do things, but there is a lack of balance. There's a lot wrong that could be better if it wasn't someone's perverse bread and butter. Extreme wealth and power inequality, whether for people or companies, don't make for a just, healthy society.

I appreciate your concerns, but I think they are mostly propaganda. Without the industries, there would be no jobs and no workers that could be deprived of their power.

If you want to strengthen workers, create more demand for jobs, so that workers have options. By for example creating a successful VR industry, you create demand for more jobs that haven't previously existed, thereby empowering workers. Somebody who has previously been exploited to manufacture fridges can now give their boss the finger and go manufacture chips for VR headsets instead. One easy way to create more jobs is to hire a cleaning person, by the way. Everybody who is concerned about "living wages" and things like that should start by hiring cleaners and possibly gardeners for their homes.

I personally think the whole concept of "workers" is bunk. Everybody is a free agent entering contracts with other market participants. That's it. "Worker" is a social construct, actually, a socialist construct. More so, being a "worker" does not sound like a very desirable state of affairs, so I think society should work towards getting rid of workers.

Wait a minute, small successes still exist. There are orders of magnitudes more objects available to purchase than two decades ago.

The success of mega projects (iphone, etc.) creates a massive supply chain (mostly in China) of people putting things together in different ways to make random stuff.

E.g.: http://www.arcadeguns.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&p... I was just looking at this to turn our entire wall into a shooting arcade with Aimtrak lightguns to help kill time during the winter pandemic.

This was not possible ten years ago.

There are plenty of places where "small success" still exists, usually in the form of tools that solve a problem for a specific trade/industry/etc. Though you won't see these small successes on HN.

As a society we need a way to determine where we invest resources. Some of those metrics you mentioned, though not perfect, are proxies for evaluating whether or not we should be investing more in certain tech. Otherwise, how would we determine where we should spend our limited resources?

Small successes haven't gone anywhere. However a system that needs billions of dollars in corporate funding worth of research to come into existence cannot be one by definition.

What makes you think VR headsets take billions of dollars to launch? The first Oculus was a Kickstarter project.

I think what Facebook and its vendors are building takes huge investment and lots of the best engineers you can hire. It's not just an lcd panel with lenses glued on, it's a room scale computer vision system, a VR optimised cpu/gpu with a suite of sensors, a VR software platform, controllers packed with sensors, computer vision tracking of controllers and hands, developer tools, a consumer app store, first party apps, a social VR metaverse, a telemetry system, a manufacturing and distribution supply chain, and a marketing push to get it into millions of hands (and it's also highly likely each headset is sold at a loss). I don't know how much money it takes to do all that, but I know you can't raise it on kickstarter.

Some of that might be difficult, but none of it is impossible and all of it is getting easier and easier. Some parts don't need to be invented or kickstarted because it exists already and is ready to go.

It also used to cause motion sickness, had terrible resolution, lots of lag and no games/software that supported it. AR/VR as a whole has come a LONG way since then to make it an actual consumer product.

Um, it is simply very expensive to create a good VR experience. It's not expensive BECAUSE of network effects and economies of scale and corporations. It is only POSSIBLE and AFFORDABLE because of those things.

For another example, to make a modern movie can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It is only possible to make them because there are many people who will possibly watch it and pay for it. Nobody would be able to film the Lord of The Rings trilogy in their own basement just for their own entertainment. Not yet, anyway - tools of the future may make it possible ("GPT-300, make me a good movie based on the LOTR books").