I just want cool hardware people can hack on. I couldn't care less about the metaverse worlds that they were building but I'm giddy as a child on Christmas at advances in the hardware lately.

The thing that always holds me back is the lack of open datasheet. Then again, I won't touch anything with an NDA,so that's probably more a me being picky problem.

I think they might be right in the long run but that they are pushing it too hard when it’s not ready yet.

People probably do want to collaborate in virtual rooms at work, but only when it’s better than video calls. Which it currently isn’t. And they don’t want to do it in a world controlled by zucc

I still can’t see what I’d be supposed to do during a work vr “call”.

A physical meeting already has everyone looking at a whiteboard or screen, which is already solved by screensharing. Even if you could fully recreate the experience of being in a physical room, what are you supposed to gain from that?

I don't know if you've tried co working in VR, or VR meetings, but "presence". Hearing a voice coming from a low resolution tile in a Webex is very different than having some resemblance of a human sitting at the same table, where they can look at you, smile, and you see them talking and hear their voice coming from them.

I much prefer VR meetings to Webex. Webex feels like a glorified shared phone call. VR feels like an actual gathering. With working at home, I think the "gathering" part of it has value, to me.

But, some people don't like change, so I think it's somewhat doomed, especially with the "older" crowd. I don't say or mean that in a derogatory way, because I see it in myself all the time, and it's more of a contextual optimization than a shortcoming. Some people have been doing Webex for decades, have mentally mastered that context, feel comfortable in it, and don't want to even try VR.

The dirty secret is some huge percentage of meetings are useless and so zoom is a godsend because you can “pretend to be paying attention” and actually getting work done.

I don't really think that's it, I feel like there is enough prior art (Second Life, VRChat, AltspaceVR, etc.) that we know this has potential and is feasable. Its just that their technology isn't even remotely competitive with anything. Its all just a clunky, buggy, uninspired mess.

Its everything from their corporate design story that bleeds into every world and avatar, the laughable visual programming tools to create worlds, the proprietary walled-garden approach to horizons, the privacy nightmare that is horizons, the operating system being this hacky unstable Android fork (don't ever look at logcat). Its like every single step of the way they made the wrong decisions and executed on them incompetently, no money in the world is going to fix this mess.

>Second Life, VRChat, AltspaceVR

NeosVR is the best example I've seen. But it seems to be severely stumbling because of internal conflicts.

Here's a good summary: https://youtu.be/0rvAKRWC82g

Forcing a mandatory Facebook account is "doing an ok job"...?

There is no mandatory Facebook account, anymore. It's now a mandatory Meta account. Facebook is only linked if you want it to be. Meta has said that this was in response to disapproval of the mandatory Facebook account.

Which naturally, if you don't create a Meta account till January they are gonna delete all your purchased vr apps.

I can't imagine they want to support two separate account systems, especially with the amount of potential PII involved (like eye/face tracking training data).

This required change is heavily communicated, when you put on the headset. Nobody will be surprised when their account stops working. Your comment makes it sound like it could possibly happen on accident.

I'm sure many people are going to be surprised to find their library deleted after not using it for awhile.

Fair enough, but "awhile" here is over 1 year. I guess I didn't consider that my daily use is extreme.

I haven't put on the headset in months and haven't gotten an email.

Thanks to the person that raised the issue so I don't lose my content.

Earlier this year I packed up a lot of my computer gear and stored in at the in-laws house, because we were putting our house on the market and this got us ahead on moving into a new place. Then the housing market tanked, my stuff including a Quest 2 is still sitting there, many months later, and I'll maybe be able to get back to it now mid next year.

I'm learning from you here now that I'm gonna lose all the paid content I have on my account?

Right, but they took a perfectly good (great for the time and the price) and messed it up for a couple years with a really ugly, oversharing, privacy threatening account system. I am sure many-- probably most-- people didn't care but I think early adopters and developers found it very alienating.

People say that the Meta account-- or the old Oculus accounts-- is the same as the FB account they mandated but really that isn't true. For a while they were essentially forcing you to run FB on your phone or browser to use the hardware. It was super yucky.

I really like their hardware and I appreciate that they are working on developing a platform. I just wish they could be content to sell a platform and sell aps on it, the way Apple does.

Metaverse as a general concept is not a bad aim and Meta seemed to have some interesting ideas.

But their presentation was clumsy at best and they had miles to go to convince critics that they were not aiming for a very dystopian interpretation of the concept. They failed spectacularly on the PR side. Probably enough to make their own engineers lose hope regarding both ethics and executive management.

> I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend

Spending billions of dollars on a subpar MMO game when better ones cost tens of millions at most to make - is bad?

> I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend

the only good that they were doing was decent hardware at a decent price...