When I was a child I was in an "Odyssey of the Mind" group and in one competition we had to solve some problem and the plan my team came up with had a few steps, one of which was "Build a robot". We were all children and none of us had even the slightest idea of how to build a robot or any relevant technical experience or ability. But somehow, we never realized this deficit and came up with our plan and tried to execute it.

It wasn't until we had destructively disassembled a power tool that one of us had access to, on the theory that we could use whatever motor was inside of that tool to drive our robot, that we realized we had no idea what we were doing nor any conception of how to build a robot. I had a feeling of amazement that sticks with me today that we were able to articulate our plan to solve the problem, which depended on our robot helping us with some sub-task, but were completely unaware of the fact that the robot was far beyond our ability to construct. Our plan was like something that might have worked in a cartoon but not in reality.

That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.

Another way of thinking about it is taking the hardest part of the problem and hand waving it away to solve the easier parts and then forgetting that there is a big blank spot in your plan. It's easy and fun to think about all the stuff you can do in a compelling virtual reality metaverse, but you don't have one and aren't likely to get one any time too soon.

I am pretty sure that Zuckerberg has already attended such a concert or similar in high-quality VR and knows that it is possible. It is expensive now, but that price will come down.

I have tried out some VR, and apart from the thick cable coming out of my gear, I was blown away by how cool it is. Not that cool that I would really want to use it currently, but hey, that will certainly improve.

It reminds me a bit of my sister. She was swearing that she will never need another phone than her Nokia more than a decade ago when I showed her my iPhone 3G. Yeah, right :-)

I bought a Vive when they first came out. I have a Quest 2. My first VR experience I was blown away - but that only lasted a few minutes for me before I got bored.

I hardly ever use the VR headsets even after trying a number of different games. The problem is that it's not so much virtual reality as it is strapping a screen to your face. You run into the limits of the system pretty fast.

One example, you can play poker in a VR casino. But, it doesn't feel at all like playing poker in a casino in reality. It feels like watching goofy cartoon characters play poker while you try to clumsily control one without proprioception. I enjoy playing in my browser much more than in VR.

Another example, I like VR boxing. It's probably my favorite VR game - but even in the best such game I've found (Thrill of the Fight) the limitations are obvious. The game can't really tell where your hands are, what they're doing, if you block or dodge, etc. I can flick my wrist, the way you might playing Wii Sports Tennis and smash the other guy in the face with an uppercut. Or, I can try to throw a real punch the game will decide it missed for some reason though my own sense of reality has me putting my elbow through the opponent's body.

On top of input and accuracy limitations there is the fundamental limitation that you cannot feel what's happening. Getting hit doesn't feel like anything. Sometimes you can't even tell if you are blocking or dodging a shot or getting hit by it - very different from real boxing. You likewise can't tell if you're hitting the opponent.

These things are called virtual reality but aren't there yet. I agree they're making progress and they are okay toys. I'll keep buying new versions because I want to help support the effort and I like such toys, but they aren't like reality. They're missing a part of it.

Missing physical feedback is a problem, of course. For example, you see a bench in VR space, but you cannot just go there and sit on it. So there certainly is a limit to what you can do. But just improving all other aspects will change the game already.

I think we are actually much closer to being able to "build the robot" than you seem to think.

The "Metaverse" is not necessarily anything more magical than HTTP serving 3d models rendered on the screens strapped to our faces (rather than 2d documents rendered on the screens strapped to our desk)

I think the bigger questions is, will people driving this shift try to keep it a part of the decentralized Internet or will they try to put up walls around their gardens?

> The "Metaverse" is not necessarily anything more magical than HTTP serving 3d models rendered on the screens strapped to our faces (rather than 2d documents rendered on the screens strapped to our desk)

But that's just it, isn't it? GP said:

> > That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.

Why would most people want "HTTP serving 3d models to a screen strapped on their face" to take the place of "attending concerts with one another"?

Without significant, ground-breaking advancements in freedom of movement/input and feedback/presence beyond the screen & headphones strapped to their face and maybe some shitty rumble from a playstation controller, this isn't "attending a concert with one another" in any meaningful sense, this is just "watch a concert from your couch while talking to your friend over discord", except with a more expensive screen fewer people own or seem inclined to buy, and clumsier input.

I feel like a lot of people who bring up “the concert use case” really need to think about it for more than two seconds.

Imagine jumping up and down headbanging to your favorite 2000’s pop-punk song, blasted off tequila and red bull, except you’re in your living room and wearing an expensive but loosely-fitting headset that obstructs your vision. This idea is gonna need a second draft.

I already use thick cardboard protectors over my pc screens when I play VR. The danger is there but it can be mitigated.

Eventually I guess people will have more movable furniture.

I'm saying that we don't need "significant, ground breaking advancements".

Obviously for something like a concert or dance club (where half the point is to literally feel the music and the crowd) we aren't there yet.

But for something like a stage play or a comedy show the significant barrier is a low-friction way to connect the audience response back to the performer(s). That comes down to implementation and infrastructure rather than the underlying technology.

The technology is at a point where the next increment could be the one that makes a mass adoption feasible for something like "360 Facetime", "Street view but it's live/real-time", or "Portal but it's the entire room", It's not going to take a "significant ground breaking [technological] advancement".

I think that's why Facebook wants to own it so hard they made it the parent brand and are trying to steal what the word "metaverse" even means so that people expect to always mean Facebook's ideal of a walled garden they control.

> That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.

I don't really agree.. We have amazing 3D and VR games. We have amazing highend headsets. We have great 2D collaboration software. Gesture recognition is improving rapidly, one year ago we didn't even have handtracking yet on the standard quests.

All the individual pieces are available. It's just a matter now of bringing them together and driving the prices down with scale.

Thank you for embodying the straw man we are trying to argue against.

I guess the issue is "we" here. Sure "humanity" as a "we" has all the tools. But humanity has all the tools to solve world hunger and perhaps reach net Zero green house gas emissions.

The metaverse is being sold as some sort of universal VR app, but it's being pursued through a capitalist system.

It won't work. "It" referring to whatever Facebook pumps out and calls the metaverse. It'll just be another game. In order to "work" or to realize its massive ambiguous vision it has to reach critical mass of adoption such that any competitor simply must build onto the Facebook controlled platform. I think we are years away from seeing that, and I don't think the people pursuing the metaverse right now are capable of building it.

The only company I see actually open sourcing the tech is Nvidia.

Nvidia is closer to building the metaverse than Facebook is, mark my words on that.

But either way, the metaverse is a bit of a joke. It's kinda like saying "VR chat, but like _really good_".

I think eventually maybe we get there, but it could be literal lifetimes away. I think the haters are afraid that the companies pursuing metaverse are just wasting human and financial capital that needs to be allocated towards potential existential crises, or barring that, just towards more important or more immediately useful things.

These capitalist companies want to be the platform owner of the metaverse, ala apple to the App Store. It's not a vision of the future that is powering them, it's a faint mirage of $ and power. It's envy of the app store. That's what I think powers the resentment of the metaverse that so many people feel.

It's not just Facebook though. Satya Nadella's keynote from Ignite was also talking a lot about Metaverse.

I agree it will take longer. And it'll probably be a capitalist invention, yes. I would also really love to see a truly open and decentralised approach but with the amount of money these companies are pumping into it, they are bound to want to own some of the IP in return.

But I'm not presenting a strawman, I just thought you were speaking mainly about technological readiness. I agree we have bigger problems to solve as humanity though I think in the long term this can contribute. I've done some trials at work with VR meeting software (Spatial, Arthur, Immersed) and they really create a sense of 'togetherness' that Teams/Zoom don't. Of course meeting in person is better, but this is not very feasible now because of Corona and probably in the future because of emissions. So I think even a "really good" VRChat would help there a bit. Even tough these companies are not doing it to solve the world's problems obviously.

PS: Is Nvidia really that open? I haven't really been following it (my only PC that has a Nvidia card I use exclusively with Windows for gaming), but I heard they are not opening enough sourcecode to make Wayland work well, even. And that's only 2D stuff.

> In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!

I completely agree that this sort of marketing of metaverse entirely misses the reality of tech we have and expectations. I think its also a great analogy, and i had a similar experience when i myself did Odyssey of the mind :)

Based on the article, however, it seems clear that we could be around the corner from real use-cases for this tech that are actually an improved experience. I think VR tech could def improve "mise en place" tech use, where a user is focused on accomplishing one goal at a set time and place using tech. This could even be as vague as "do my remote job".

>VR headsets are expensive

Quest2 is $299, so actually on the scale of a very cheap phone.

Maybe some things are more tedious but some things are better. Ever more ubiquitous computing and contextual/spatial computing of AR is really interesting.

You don't get it but others find AR/VR compelling and Microsoft and FB smell money. It's worth talking about why these large companies are spending the effort.

> You don't get it but others find AR/VR compelling

One thing I rarely see mentioned or discussed is the "longevity" of VR interest amongst users. As a (former? I'm not sure yet) VR enthusiast and adopter on the high end of things I noticed that the novelty wore off really quickly, after ~1 year of owning my Index my usage went from somewhat regularly to barely anymore and for most titles with VR support I prefer playing them the regular way and the VR-first titles can't get me to set it up, or were "onetime" experiences (like HL Alyx, which is one of maybe ~3 VR games that really felt enriched and improved by the VR experience, in hindsight).

From friends and colleagues of mine I hear similar things, VR headsets collecting dust already.

Carmack said basically the same thing in his Connect 2021 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo

"There are no lapsed mobile users, essentially... but there are, right now, a whole lot of people that are lapsed VR users...."

This is actually one of the main points of the article. He doesn't believe gaming is going to be the killer app for the reasons you cite - it actually isn't that compelling, not nearly so much as people would think. But what has changed his mind is that other applications are compelling, in particular the potential for workspaces.

So we have a weird situation atm where huge numbers of people have generically written off VR because it didn't cut it for high end gaming with them, without ever even considering the alternatives. In my mind, these are fitness and professional use.

The fact is that I can go into VR to work today and its intolerable after a short period, but only because of factors I think will be solved within the space of a few years - the resolution is too low, the battery doesn't last long enough, it's too heavy and gets uncomfortable. These will all get solved. Once that happens, VR will be unambigously a better place to work for quite a wide cross section of activities. This is the "skating to where the puck will be" that tech companies need to focus on.

That's been the story of VR since the 90's.

If you view VR as a spectrum between ViewMaster 3-D and a holodeck, we're very much still on the ViewMaster 3-D end of things.

We're really just a couple steps past the Virtual Boy, and that was 25 years ago.

While the Quest 2 headset is subsidized by Facebook it is still a mind blowing device for $299. For that price it is the most revolutionary gaming/vr experience in the last 50 years let alone 25.

I would name Gameboy for that

Not sure if you haven't tried a Quest or haven't tried a virtual boy in 25 years but it's nowhere close.

You're not in a sensory goo tank or anything but for starters you can't even lift up a virtual boy.

> Quest2 is $299, so actually on the scale of a very cheap phone.

$299 is not a "very cheap" phone.

It's a matter of perspective. Surprisingly poor people will get on cell plans with $1500 iphones.

Not any I know, and I am one myself.

EDIT: while you're implying they have $1500 to put down on a phone what is much more likely is that

a)They're gifted said phone

b)They're buying a used one off of ebay, facebook marketplace or similar for much much less money

c)They're using a "lifeline" phone that they've bought at a discount from their "lifeline" provider.

In none of these cases -particularly if they're getting a government subsidy ("lifeline") is it likely that they're paying >$250/mo

I agree. A phone is also quite a staple for a long time now. Smartphones were so successful because they are basically better phones.

A VR headset is something normal people are just not used to. I guess that will be that way for quite a bit time.

Yeah, a $10 phone is 'very cheap'. A $300 phone is at least lower midrange.

Under $300 is the "budget" category of new phones.

What companies arbitrarily categorize as "budget" doesn't really represent or communicate anything.

My results if I Google "budget phones"

* Toms: Under $400

* Verge Under $500

* TechRadar: Under $500 with the lowest category Under $200

* CNET: Under $500

* AndroidAuthority: Under $500

* Wired: Under $500

Like you can personally decide that a budget phone should be under $200 or something but real life people looking to buy "cheap" phones are looking to pay ~<$500 for it.

I mentioned that companies shouldn't decide what is budget for people, and your response is to list a lot more companies and what those companies consider budget?

>real life people looking to buy "cheap" phones are looking to pay ~<$500 for it.

A good portion of the world must not be "real life people" to you. I will hazard a guess and say that you must have lived a life without much financial difficulty.

True but you're looking at the US. Here in Spain a ton of people use Xiaomi phones between 100 and 200 euro.

It always surprises me how much of those I see in the metro. I don't see many flagships at all here, many people on the street also use wired headphones.

In the Netherlands it's a totally different picture. Lots of iPhones, S-class Samsung, airpods...

It really depends on the country and their average wages.

That is one month salary for plenty of people in Portugal, hardly budget.

Quest 2 is 299, plus the unknowable cost of supporting Facebooks Orwellian distopia.

It might be sold for $299, but how much do they cost to manufacture? Nothing else in the space with the same specs sells for anythimg near that. And that makes me suspicious about how sustainable that price is.

Nobody else has the software and store that takes % of sales. Also Quest 2 is heavily simplified(cheapened) compared to even Quest 1.

> Quest2 is $299, so actually on the scale of a very cheap phone.

The Quest2 is $299, but how much is a GPU good enough to deliver a better than a regular desktop/laptop/smartphone user experience these days?

> deliver a better than a regular desktop/laptop/smartphone user experience these days

the quest delivers an experience you can't really get with those devices, and it does it with just that hardware. The GPU inside it does what it needs to do (mostly).

Also, i bet an apple vr headset with apple silicon GPU would kick ass

> Also, i bet an apple vr headset with apple silicon GPU would kick ass

Oh it will. But it will cost almost 10x the price of a Quest 2. Apple doesn't get into something until they can do it really well and they make the most of the early adopter premium, only bringing prices down after a few generations.

Quest2 is standalone and supports things like RecRoom and such. No PC required.

It's not super great but I connected my Quest to my Macbook Pro 2015 and I can use it for work - multiple virtual monitors floating in space where I can edit code etc. The limiting factor is the resolution of the headset, not the GPU of the laptop.

In 1994 there were people playing Doom with VR headsets on Lisbon Expo (IT related).

Many of us don't get it, because we have seen the sales pitch come back every couple of years.

The metaverse concept might make sense with perfect AR.

Things like QR codes on posters being highlighted, "hologram" store mascots that everyone walking by can see with AR glasses, answering an "AR" phone call while still being able to see around you (and not having to hold your phone up to your face as in video calling - early versions of this could use iOS Memoji before consumer face-scanning tech gets good), virtual computer screens to do programming or other work *anywhere* without monitors (while still being able to respond to external stimuli), etc. Maybe you could even portray yourself as a custom avatar (instead of your actual body) to those with AR glasses.

IMO an early prototype of the metaverse is already here: Ingress/Pokemon Go. These games don't use fantasy-land maps, they use the Earth and real-life locations. Data and user-interactions are layered on top of that.

On the other hand, any kind of VR metaverse will likely be a poor-man's Second Life, just prettier and with far more restrictions. I'm sure there's a market for that, but it's not really civilization-defining.

The AR part of ingress and Pokémon go is really just a gimmick IMO. Everyone turns it off after a while because it works simpler without it.

The idea of integration with real places is ok but just a gameplay mechanic and not really a compelling or fun one I think. I think most of the popularity of Pokémon go comes from it being Pokémon. It's really just Ingress with some Pokémon skin and a mini-game slapped on.

I think we shouldn't think of Niantic as a "leader" in the AR realm. What they're doing is not pushing the envelope. They're just exploring the fringe inside it.

> The AR part of ingress and Pokémon go is really just a gimmick IMO. Everyone turns it off after a while because it works simpler without it.

That isn't what I was referring to. Layering user interactions on real-life locations is more akin to the metaverse in my mind than any kind of VR derivative. Whether the game was fun or not is also irrelevant, the metaverse won't be a "game."

I was also clear I was speaking of a hypothetical future with perfect AR.

Or you know Google Maps, Yelp, etc. Any kind of local search or data.

But hardware has to come first. None of this is possible while we're still in the "magic window" step having to look through our phone screens.

All of the discussion around the internet as if it's something we should take seriously has me baffled. It's an ill defined concept and the effort is being led by a government department that hardly anyone trusts or even likes.

As far as I can tell it's the telephone but on a screen with a typewriter. Or in other words it's the telephone but with extra steps in the way of obtaining the information or completing the transaction, not to mention the increased hardware costs (screens are expensive) and wiring costs associated with this superfluous fluff.

I just don't understand how they aren't being laughed out of the room. This is fantasy level stuff and it's going to be an absolutely massive failure.

- People of the 80's

Literally no one said that.

I think for a lot of people FB is just part of the landscape, like paved roads or baseball caps. Things are the way they are and people don't ask questions. People use FB for the network effect, and because it's the status quo, not because it's technologically amazing or morally correct. Most people just don't think about it.

They've got a ton of money and billions of people more or less locked into their ecosystem. They're not being laughed out of the room because they've got a lot of what is considered a valuable resource today -- money and eyeballs / attention. In that way, they're a terrifying contender that will most likely win, even if them "winning" means creating a horrific reality for others.

I saw a local Baptist church sign that said "Streaming Sat/Sun at Facebook.com/..."

Never in my wildest 90s imagination would I have imagined any part of that coming to pass.

PS: And as to the value of eyeballs & attention, why does everyone think Chrome is the most used web browser now? Don't laugh at Facebook's ability to push things.

My very catholic mother has always been very picky about going to mass with Priests she enjoys.

She enjoyed getting her pick via streaming during the lockdowns. Could attend mass from many different churches virtually.

I don't think they will most likely win just because they have eyeballs and attention. It's necessary but not sufficient. Take Marketplaces for example. It worked because facebook had the eyeballs and attention to seed the buyer and seller side of the marketplace. But it was also just a way better experience. I could post my used iphone in 30 seconds vs. 5 mins at my computer on craigslist. The thing with metaverse is that the use case hasn't even been proven yet. We knew people bought/sold used stuff on craigslist. And we know facebook's implementation was better. We don't know people want the metaverse, and we don't know whether facebooks implementation will be better. However, if both are true, they have the eyeballs and attention to grow and succeed with it.

> it's going to be an absolutely massive failure.

And if it's not, and like a smartphone it becomes a requirement for life in the modern world, this is the step where I say nope and go full Ted innawoods for good.

Can we share a cabin?

It's multiple things, it's cross platform 3d information, using your avatar from one platform in another etc.

It's future AR and VR tech.

It's placing things in the real world.

But mostly it's a land grab to be the platform everyone else wants to integrate with, based on the assumption that AR glasses will exist in the future.

Niantic's Lightship SDK is another attempt, be the platform everyone else builds their AR stuff on.

The only people I see excited for "web3" (which I believe has become a blanket term for the metaverse, NFTs, and other crypto schemes) are those carving out real estate there for themselves in order to become future landlords.

Web 3.0 was already getting old ten years ago, I could have sworn we were on Web 4.0 or 5.0 by now...

I’ve been hearing Web 3 everywhere too. To be fair Web 3.0 never caught on and this is Web 3, not Web three point oh.

Ah, so the "new hotness" is just a Web 3.x point-release. Gotcha. :P

Yep. At some point, maybe after the 4.x or 5.x releases, someone will get fed up with point releases and push for an aggressive release schedule on new Webs and incrementing the whole version number each time.

I hope to be present at that meeting so I can deliver a swift Service Pack to his face.

How about naming the releases after the year and month. So we can be in 21.11 release of the web now. New release due in 21 days...

If you're excited about web3, it's to be expected you'd be looking for ways jump on the opportunities you believe it presents.

If you're a grifter, you're very much excited by opportunities for grift.

On one hand, I am of the laughing crowd. On the other, I have to wonder if there is something I (we?) are missing if these highly paid marketers and engineers are going after it.

Surely it's not so shortsighted as to be about a few (<10) percent in investments? There has to be a longer term plan if not that. Maybe I am wrong.

At the end of the day, I'm standing back, wondering which fire will blow out first.

Engineers and marketers are all steered into that direction by C-level visionaries who bet on a very high-risk / high-reward idea. This idea dials up all kinds of biases in people.

For example, the article which started this thread criticizes Apple for moving into AR. This is despite AR being very feasible next step in having actual working tech applicable in real-life situations. Feasible and down to earth idea is being compared to a distant wild guess which has a high risk of never happening, yet somehow it loses this comparison.

There is a certain irony people call this Web 3.0 all over again. Web 3.0 was originally envisioned by influencers as heavily relying on semantic web and anthologies[1]. Despite all the visions, 14 years ago few of these things actually happened.

Could it be that people are just very bad at predicting the future? Could it be that we mis-invest into wild visions based on their popularity, instead of solving boring down to earth problems?

“Ah shit, here we go again.”

[1] http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/web-30-semantic-we...

Headsets today are not that expensive and they're getting cheaper.

And basically no one wants to wear them besides some hardcore games and other niches. Certainly not going to wear one for a business meeting.

This to me is one of the sticking points I've been wondering about: Are VR/HR headsets just inherently too uncomfortable for mass adoption, or will we be willing to put up with them? Surely this depends on a lot of societal/economic factors (i.e. a "you do it or don't eat" job market, say) and the evolution of the form factor (size/weight/quality/individual ergonomic options).

Is it just a variant of "button-less on-screen keyboards?! we will never!" or is there something more fundamental?

I'm curious about the state of the art of serious research on this, if anyone has some good links/references.

>Surely this depends on a lot of societal/economic factors (i.e. a "you do it or don't eat" job market, say) and the evolution of the form factor (size/weight/quality/individual ergonomic options).

I think the former is a way bigger factor than the latter, here. Even on the old first-gen HTC Vive, I was entirely comfortable "working" 8+ hour days wearing one (coding, painting, and sometimes gaming). They've also improved massively since then in weight, weight distribution, softness, and heat management.

I'd say the biggest detractor is how they look (and some other smaller factors like not being able to feel "safe" cut off from your surroundings, but all major VR companies are working on that, too). However, how they look ends up not really mattering much if you're VRing from home, where no one can see you.

Really, you could code on a Vive? What resolution would your IDE be in? Did it bring any real benefits over coding on a flat monitor?

Would you have a visual of your keyboard or were you just touch typing?

This was a good blog post and discussion of someone working full time in VR.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678041

Thanks! That's interesting.

Basically no one has tried them.

I use mine 30 hours a week, coding in ImmersedVR. You can make them comfortable. I feel like most commenters here haven't actually tried VR, or maybe had a bad experience.

Everyone already has a phone or desktop computer. Hardly anyone has a VR headset. VR headsets with good enough resolution for comfortably reading text is still very expensive, but even if the cost was cheap it's competing against something that everyone already has.

$300 is a barrier to plenty of people but it's really not a sticking point for a lot of the target demographic.

From an employer POV, a hypothetical equivalent $300 VR headset would be cheaper than two 4K 27" screens. Cost could even incentivize adoption, really.

It's certainly an interesting concept. I'm not an expert but from what I've come across, it's currently very expensive to match the resolution of a 27" 4K monitor that's 2 or 3 feet away from your eyes. This is because the headset would need a very high pixel density on the very small screens sitting a few inches from the user's eyes. I'm sure someone has done the calculation somewhere but I couldn't find it. This page says we're at 2,000 pixels per eye but we need 4,000 to get "Immersive VR" (not sure if that will fit this use case) https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/virtual-reality-desktops-save-...

So it might happen eventually. People are actually leveraging "Virtual Desktops" now, but accepting the inherent resolution issues.

> it's competing against something that everyone already has.

thankfully (?) we have forced-obsolescence and improvements in tech so over time, as things improve, they may make different decisions.

> Everyone already has a phone

Also i doubt the VR/AR headset would compete with a phone.

At the very least, Facebook is/will be throwing a lot of money at the development of the metaverse, and people naturally want to be on the other side of those transactions. Also, many believe Zuck is some super genius and whatever he devotes the majority of his time to will be worth several billion dollars in short order.

It's kinda true though... Oculus became a billions of dollars company almost overnight after Facebook acquired it.

I don't like FBs business model regarding privacy but they sure have put VR on the map. It's entirely possible it would have fizzled out without their involvement.

And this is really how the stock market works these days. It's more about belief and dreams than real-world financial results. If many people believe it's going to be big, it will be worth billions.

>and the effort is being led by a company that hardly anyone trusts or even likes.

This isn't true at all, Instagram and WhatsApp are hugely popular even with people who are anti-Facebook.

The rebrand makes a lot more sense when you realize just how diverse their product offering is and many people very vocally against FB still use IG and WhatsApp.

"The eminent, on the other hand, are almost forced to work on a large scale. Instead of garden sheds they must design huge art museums. One reason they work on big things is that they can: like our hypothetical novelist, they're flattered by such opportunities. They also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress the audience. A garden shed, however lovely, would be easy to ignore; a few might even snicker at it. You can't snicker at a giant museum, no matter how much you dislike it. And finally, there are all those people the eminent have working for them; they have to choose projects that can keep them all busy." -- Paul Graham, "The Power of the Marginal"

> I just don't understand how they aren't being laughed out of the room. This is fantasy level stuff and it's going to be an absolutely massive failure

I agree with your sentiment but there are many utterly ridiculous ideas that people take seriously, think NFTs for instance. From that perspective, the metaverse isn't that crazy. And something could get out of it even though it's not the original vision that you describe.

And there are seemingly unreasonable ideas that become huge success. I didn't foresee the smartphone revolution (i thought we couldn't get a proper UI from a small device). I also thought youtube would be a failure.

That being said, I wouldn't bet one penny on the metaverse.

I think VR and metaverse concept so interesting right now is because it is the next "post-social network" evolution. Content and information become less relevant, but "internet" social standing, appearance and "existence" [1] becomes more important.

What's why NFTs are so popular right now.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_precedes_essence

The Meatverse is where the action is. It is estimated that by 2050, at least half of the world's population will be made of meat (mostly). Not only that - this has been true for as long as our species has been around.

The Meatverse is high-bandwidth, high-definition, and high-protein. The Meatverse is the future.

You think Apple introduced low energy cpus for fun? I think they work on AR mixed reality glasses and in 10 years it will be standard. Carmack said that currently they are limited by thermals to make nice device.

Yep, some people laugh at new ideas. They are also the same set of people who cry about Rich-getting-richer when they had the same set of opportunities as other new millionaires to invest in these laughable ideas.

> new ideas

Your post makes it sound like many new ideas succeed. This is certainly not the case, "new ideas" happen all the time, everywhere, spawned by both small and large companies and individuals. Most of them fail, and everyone wants to be "the new internet".

> they had the same set of opportunities as other new millionaires

This is not true for the majority of cases. If you take a look at millionaires and billionaires and their parents, most of them already started at what many would consider rich/wealthy (or very close to it). But the exceptions obviously make for better stories and headlines.

Totally agree.

To add: it's an orchestrated effort to distract people from realities of the world (including FB's own troubles).

Nothing in this metanonsense helps people to be more productive in solving real world problems.

> distract people from realities of the world

And that's exactly what people want. Escape. Just like with games, movies, sports, arts, etc.

> Nothing in this metanonsense helps people to be more productive in solving real world problems.

Unless you read the shared article where the author describes using this tech successfully to be more productive at work.

But, what if they're serious about it and other companies will try to join into the fray? You can't just assume that this is some kind of fantasy-level stuff.

Comfort is the big one. VR headsets are annoying to wear. This push just screams that Zuckerberg is trying to justify the Oculus acquisition.

I think AR + new input device is ulimate game. VR is good test bed.