People that buy Louis Vuitton are going to shell out for NFT metaverse skins and wear dorky headsets.
That totally tracks.
It's now common for some to use stylized/beautified cartoon 'avatars' in a professional context. People communicate using contrived and performative message board speak with coworkers. Even the 'influencers' spend a large chunk of their life editing and constructing an unrecognisable version of themselves.
If you meet some of these people in real life it's obvious why they do so - reality is too dull, too expensive in time and effort to find a way of standing out from the crowd. Online you can pretend to be whatever you want to be. I see this trend continuing.
A distraction from all the criticism they are currently receiving.
5-10 years after VR starts to really take off, you’ll be able to get a decent standalone VR headset for $200 or less. They’ll probably be cheaper to make than laptops or TVs in the long run because of the smaller displays.
That's not low end VR, it's pain and frustration from knowing you just wasted 105 bucks.
It sounds to me like you never tried a setup like this. Because in reality you mainly spend time adjusting the lenses because focus is so bad you can't even tell which setting is better. The pixel grid is so huge that reading any form of text (like menus) is near impossible. The latency is bad and your view constantly drifts over time because the phone sensors don't cut it, so you better sit on a rotating chair. Oh, and if you've all that covered somehow you'll realize mediocre VR video players and bad rollercoaster demos are pretty much the best phone VR can offer.
Someone was going on and on about how Facebook is showing off a (likely) $50,000 prototype and I was just explaining that 2021's $50,000 prototype is 2031's $100 at Wal-Mart
Have you ever tried that? Smart phones as VR are extremely disorientating and the latency of the gyro makes it unusable.
I've got an Oculus Quest and it's amazing how well it works using the 4 camera vision-system instead of a gyro.
What they were demonstrating in the meta-verse was facial-tracking attached to VR headsets, which is super expensive experimental technology which is not going to be commercially available for quite some time.
[1] https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/facial-tracker/ & https://www.hp.com/us-en/vr/reverb-g2-vr-headset-omnicept-ed...
Avatars would feel like creepy cartoons because your brain knows the voice of the person but your eyes see a cartoon image.
> Being 'inside' a virtual world was never really the important part"
Well, the facebook keynote presents a compelling argument how social interaction with VR can be more meaningful than through a 2D screen in many situations.
However, what IS bullshit, is the display of obviously fake demonstrations with highly experimental and expensive technology.
The reality is, most of the tech, won't be accessible or even productised for a long time, as they didn't even announce any planned dates...