We can answer this by looking at how many facebook users are okay (implicitly) with using facebook in exchange for access to their data and exclusive rights to place ads right in front of them. The answer is 100%

There's a world of difference between sharing cat/dinner/vacation photos with friends and family and living in some kind of fantasy animated cartoon world.

The social dynamics are completely different. Second Life showed that very clearly.

The three biggest things in Second Life were fantasy consumerism, fantasy entrepreneurship, and fantasy sex.

Unless FB is getting into those markets it's going to find the metaverse a tough sell.

Not least because the whole point of fantasy is that it's not really you. So that immediately conflicts with FB's only-real-identities dogma.

FB is already in those markets. FB and Instagram are every bit as much fantasy land as Second Life. I agree with you that the social dynamics are different.

I would highly doubt 100% of Facebook users would want to use virtual reality. Out of those who would tho, it would be pretty high, I doubt many Facebook users would buy HP Reverbs after that. Not worth the absurd cost tho

The trouble I have is that the cost for using the system is the same as if you try to buy your own Facebook-free headset. The advertisers still demand all your info and demand to be able to sell to you.

I feel like we’re all hoping that there will be a VR version of the early web, free and open, and mostly just neat things to connect with or about. I worry there is increasingly no chance of that.

Isn’t that what the state of VR has been for the past decade? I used an Oculus for the first time in 2013 and it was exactly that feeling of exploration and joy

Counterpoint: the HTC First (aka the Facebook Phone) was >$1 USD less than a month after it debuted, and still was a gigantic flop. Facebook Portal has sold ~1 million units. Oculus has sold ~8 million units or so (all numbers based on quick googling, might be wrong). So people reject Facebook hardware all the time, and they don't actually have that much in the way of hits in the HW space.

The phone is a bad example. It was a shitty phone. There was absolutely no advantage to using it.

On the other hand, oculus is state of the art in virtual reality. I don't know if any other hardware or ecosystem as well developed as theirs is.

It was $1 on a two-year contract. It was also a bad phone. That really doesn’t say much

It says that they’re lacking in the hardware department.

No, that question is wrong, because that answer rounds up to 100%.

Maybe a vocal minority like us HN-folk, but I don't think that by ourselves we really matter in terms of numbers.

Exactly. You could assume that it's likely that something like 2.75B (out of the est 2.89B) FB users would happily wear (free) physical spyware in this scenario.

My wife put on an Oculus Quest and threw up within 5 minutes from simulator sickness. In this case, I think the average HN-Folk is _more_ likely to be interested in VR than the average person

My late step-mother put on an Oculus Go and played basically every rollercoaster simulator available on the device back-to-back.

It was like the Matrix scene where Neo was learning, then leaves the simulation and says "I know Kung Fu".

She used computers for social media and looking up recipes, so not very savvy at all. I don't think there's a correlation between interest in VR and technicality. Maybe between _vocal_ interest in VR and technicality.