I think this pandemic has proved how sane the idea of a Metaverse would be.

Imagine meeting someone online, dating or friendship, you put on a lightweight VR headset and get transported to a replicated NYC rooftop bar, where loads of people from around the world are sitting, drinking and chatting. Socializing with a date or a group of people at the comfort of your home, going on outings, inviting your friends to your digital house, work meetings in a digital office instead of Zoom (I already seen companies doing this; VR meetings). People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world. Zoom, Skype, Discord will seem like old world relics.

It's like the appeal of World of Warcraft when it was a its peak, but not gaming - not appealing to just gamers. Appealing to everyone who's open to socializing online.

I guess it's just a matter of personal preference, because I can't relate at all. That would have sounded awful to me before the pandemic, and the experience of virtual everything during the pandemic only makes it sound even more awful.

> People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world.

Romantic relationships without physical proximity sounds totally dystopian to me.

I have definitely heard of more online relationships forming since the pandemic. IIRC I know of a relationship that has progressed to engagement since the pandemic that started as purely digital for the first year due to lockdowns and being in different countries.

Ultimately (as has always been true) the internet's greatest power has always been its reach. With free ubiquitous reliable video conferencing, you now have the ability to get to know someone anywhere in the world.

From a dating PoV you're basically getting a 2-3 order magnitude bump in potential partners. For many, I can see people giving up on the physical (in the short term) to find an emotional match a worthwhile tradeoff!

YMMV - my own life now sprawls the whole globe, things like WhatsApp made maintaining global family ties so so so much easier in ways people really take for granted now. My parents used to arrange by post a preset time for a 5 minute phonecall when they wanted to call their parents internationally. All trends point to remote connectivity getting more and more high fidelity.

Lots of people have long-distance relationships.

But even if you're not very into socializing online. You'll be able to sit and work at an EMPTY desk, with no monitor and no mouse, put on your lightweight headset, and suddenly have 3 large monitors appear in front of you which you can manipulate with your hands (think Minority Report, Tom Cruise), while working in a more aesthetically pleasing environment.

You'll be able to sit in your empty living room, put on your VR headset, and suddenly have a 100 inch TV in front of you to watch movies -- without having to buy this TV in real life.

Buying a monitor may seem as ridiculous as buying a fax machine.

Serious question, what DPI do you estimate VR goggles would need to have in order to replicate the experience of looking at a 4K monitor from 30 inches away?

If this fantasy technology were actually invented (and made comfortable to wear and affordable) then I'd buy it, sure, but I'll believe that when I see it.

It doesn't seem like FB is well placed to provide this experience though, aside from having a pile of money and engineers.

You'd have to think Apple could do the trick with their history of building integrated hardware/software experiences and a similar war chest, but it's also far enough away from the core products of most of the giants that some outsider might get there first.

An observation that your post reminded me of: why do all these metaverse concepts replicate very uninteresting real world scenarios? I remember watching Zuckerberg do a demo of a work meeting and everyone was in... a drab meeting room. In a virtual world of infinite possibilities!

God, if I'm forced to strap on a VR headset just to be social with someone at least put me on one of Saturn's moons, not an NYC rooftop bar.

You pretty much described VRChat, but it's off-putting because for some reason everyone's avatar is a furry or sexualized anime child.

Who the hell wants to do that? After this BS over the last two years? People will absolutely laugh at the idea. Most people are sick and tired of this virtual shit. FB could not have picked a worse time to hype up some unreleased virtual reality world.

I am now more convinced than before to short FB.

Roblox proved it. Fortnite is a close second. YouTube is where the money is at.

For someone missing context, why do you say YouTube is where the money is at? Help me understand.

My kids play roblox and minecraft and watch roblox/minecraft videos on youtube, hours and hours long. Some youtubers make 1 hour long movies, these 100 days on minecraft sagas. Just to put into perspective there are basically ongoing minecraft/roblox soap operas on youtube... Amazon has even picked up on this... My kids even make a few tiktok and youtube videos and have gotten huge engagement. Even the youtubers who do (in real life) IRL videos adopt things from minecraft/roblox /among us.

It is absolutely unreal.

Minecraft is more than a decade old at this point, but I’ve yet to see anyone over the age of 16 be interested in this kind of content. I’m not convinced that this will appeal to anyone but children

I'm pretty sure every tele-technology has had folks who found them just a bit too far beyond the pale. Why call when the people you want to talk to are a walk away? Why send a telegram when you can call? Why send email when you can send a telegram? etc. I also think even if XR does become a reality, it won't be _us_ that truly buys into it, but a younger generation that grows up in it and makes their own norms in it, the way much of my generation was on the early Internet, and the next generation was on the early Web.

For me the killer application is the ability to replace the office. There's already VR software that lets you have a virtual workspace with multiple monitors in VR. It would be so much more convenient to be able to have a large virtual office available to you in VR rather than building a large, physical office IRL.

It’s totally a batshit Hail Mary. Like it’s total vaporware at this point. Where is this metaverse? Where do I log in?

It’s all marketing hype and it’s creating dreams in peoples heads that will come crashing down when they actually use whatever this product is. Because whatever they ship, whenever they ship it, will be a thing that is huge and has little knowledge of what it’s market fit will be.

They aren’t starting small and nimble like a startup. They are betting huge high stakes games with almost no real market testing.

The idea of the metaverse has happened over and over throughout the last few decades and has failed every time. It will continue to fail until the technology backing it is utterly incredible. Oculus is nowhere close. We’re talking about needing an F-16 and currently having the Wright brothers’ airplane. Give it another 40 or 50 years and maybe it will be viable.

that's a very fixed idea of what it would take

You really have to try it before you pan it. It's a new class of computing. Google Cardboard and other non 6DOF VR systems don't count.

This gives them more (young) users, a better connection to their users, a ton of patents, and jumps them out of the smartphone era. They are dead in the water without a gambit of a similar size, buying up the competition (their previous primary strategy) only works as long as regulatory agencies are willing to play ball.

Then you’ve never experienced how transformative VR is and you lack vision.

Some of us saw the last wave of VR hype. It was around the same time as PalmOS, iPaq, and other handheld computing devices. It wasn't obvious to most people at the time that one of these technologies would transform the world. But visionaries saw it.

It wasn't VR then and it won't be now. VR has gained a foothold in this wave in its niches of gaming, other "entertainment", and random educational and military applications. General casual use beyond that is a pipe dream.

> General casual use beyond that is a pipe dream.

I'm happy to be proven wrong but this is my perspective as well. I just cannot imagine us delving so far into VR that is transcends beyond physical space. I mean at what point does that idea become dystopian enough that people decide to go outside and take a breath of fresh air, feel the grass, see and hear the planet?

You're very confident in thinking you know the future.

That's because I'm a time traveler. I'm living in the future (of the last hype cycle).

Strapping on a VR helmet is the opposite of everything most people want to do with their faces, their bodies, their lives. Contact lens form factor AR, if it ever arrives, could change the equation wrt human nature.

Transformative, can you be more specific? The "lack of vision" seems like an attack more than a justification that VR is something beyond a gimmick.

Sounds similar to what crypto fanatics say.