>I see little evidence for it.

Besides the fact that only 50 people are in the Metaverse right now? Literally nobody is using VR for meetings and work and stuff. Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions. At least with a video call I can see your face and you can see mine. VR? it's just voice chat with a stupid headset.

Absolutely. After covid, people are craving physical contact and outdoor activities. Travel and tourism is trending up. This idea that people want to put on a headset and stay indoors, netflix and chill or whatever is not happening. Maybe the niche hackernews/reddit crowd might prefer to avoid social contact and put on a VR headset, but I'm not seeing that in the local restaurants, bars, shopping malls, concerts, and theatres. They are crowded.

These are all problems that people are working on. There is no reason they cannot be solved.

A few 10s of billions of dollars along with a bunch of super smart people haven't made much of a dent, so I don't think vague assurances are going to cut it. Nobody can predict what technology will be like in a few decades, but I don't see any reason to be particularly bullish on VR. At this rate, even if it does happen at some point, Meta likely won't be around to see it.

They've literally made massive progress inside of 5 years. I don't know that we're watching the same space.

The goal is for VR to become a dominant platform and their progress has been far from massive. Some technical advancements along the way are nice, but won't matter without large numbers of users.

How many people visit the metaverse multiple times per day?

What percent of the population spends hours per day in a VR headset?

The answer to those questions needs to be much better than "miniscule" for this project to be any sort of success.

>> Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions.

> There is no reason they cannot be solved.

Explain?

The goal is not to replace human interaction, it is to replace phone calls and video chat. To make the experience better than those things is not an insurmountable task.

VR isn't just meta. There's 20k people in the Steam version of VRChat at the time of this comment.

Using a Quest we're clearly not there yet but we're also clearly far closer than a VirtualBoy.

Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.

Joining a meeting right now is as easy as clicking on 'join' on your phone or laptop. I can then see everyone in the meeting and they can see my facial expressions etc. VR doesn't add anything useful and removes a lot of social cues visible on video (or in person). I don't see why I'd accept employees joining a meeting using an avatar instead of showing up 'in person' (on video).

You're arguing about the experience today, not what it could be. I definitely don't want avatars.

I want this meeting to have higher immersion representations of the rest of the people in the meeting than boxes on a screen. I want to be able to shift my view to focus more on individuals. I want to be able to have a meeting with 40 people where I could still focus on a single person and see them with high-fidelity, instead of just having 20 of the boxes at low-res in front of me, with the rest off-screen. I want less eyestrain because I'm not just staring at a flat wall but my eyes are moving and shifting and re-focusing more. I want to have depth to things. I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody. All things I could do in the real world, but would be very hard to make seamless without a real-world interaction model.

Again, we clearly aren't there yet. But it's easy to imagine something better than what we have today.

How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.

My standard for the future (10+ years out) is "if i have to hit the keyboard or click the mouse it's failed." In that case I'll definitely still want to go back to in-person collaboration.

> How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.

My best guess of what this would look like would be much closer to glasses than a full headset (no "sticking" to the face) with very good ultra-wide cameras + image processing to capture your face and upper body language at the same time. Maybe toss in a desktop-mounted webcam too. Not 100% immersed/blackout, but quite possibly good enough to be better than a flat monitor with also isn't 100% of your FOV.

Video chats drop body language, natural speaking cues, reduces the quality of group conversations and more. VR even with some of the tech today restores a bit of that and gives the feeling of presence. I'm excited to see where we're at with it in 10 years, I agree that today we're not there.

That would be great if Meta was a VC fund placing hundreds of bets in the hopes of a moonshot paying off. But a (formerly) trillion dollar company placing such a big bet on such a small market is very surprising.

This is what I have an issue with.

This is a side project. Something to make sure FB has a foot in the game for when the technologies make "it all" (whatever that is) possible.

Part of me wonders if this is a decoy - look over here! While I do something useful elsewhere.