VR isn’t a bad idea.
…Zuckerberg is just an idiot.
That’s really what it comes down to. Facebook has some neat branches and employees, but at the end of the day, its head decision maker is chronically flakey and makes catastrophically bad financial choices, repeatedly.
He’s just so freaking rich it doesn’t even matter.
I still remember the original Metaverse pitch basically being ‘We’re going to copy VRChat but without any of the bits people enjoy’
Having only seen videos of VR Chat, your avatar can be a 6 foot penis or a anime girl or a skeleton with a trumpet. And I think Metaverse was trying to provide that for businesses and the general public?
How can you create a social hub where you can’t be a 6 foot penis?
The original concept was more or less a virtual shopping mall with a character creator. Imagine VR chat but made by EA.
There will be a $12.99 monthly fee for imaging that
So WorldsAway but twenty years later?
I don’t know how to tell you but Worlds Away was 20 years old… a decade ago.
!Released September 1995!<
Delete this
Like it should be, as Neil Stephenson depicted it in Snowcrash, 1992…
Yeah and tied to your fucking meta account so next data breach your colleagues at work can learn that you chatted for hours with a 15 year old with a lewd anime avatar (or as lewd as meta would ever allow something to be) about your fursona.
And, in practice, take forever, don’t really promote it, and make it look like no one at Facebook has ever laid eyes on a video game.
He’s so stupid if he really thought companies were willing to buy a VR headset for every employee so they can go to virtual meetings (like actual meetings are not already a chore)
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Including Facebook.
Zuck loves a bandwagon.
He made WoW but corporate, deanonymized, and lacking anything interesting to do in it.
I can’t imagine why it failed.
Yeah, I don’t like the idea that failed ideas are a waste, because that kind of thinking stifles technological advancement.
I do like thinking that we can have both technological advancement and healthcare.
Most reasonable explanation for this crap I heard:
- facebook is just a website that makes money through tracking and ads
- people need to use a device to access facebook, so they can get tracked and see ads
- apple and google own all your devices and started to block tracking and ads (except their own)
- Zuck saw a risky chance by investing in VR. The vision was to get everyone on their VR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads
cuckedberg bet that VR headsets were going to take over, which even back in 2018 seemed far fetched. He’d have had a better chance to fortify his stranglehold by spending all that money making fb’s own custom android and securing deals with phone manufacturers.
These tech bros call them moonshots.
Which I can see them repurposing all the Metaverse stuff into glasses.
But not that I would touch that and feed the Zuck machine.
All this time, effort, and money spent to convince you to buy things you don’t need.
Now the vision is to get everyone on their AR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads through your smart glasses.
is that a fucking ai generated image of the metaverse
What’s really dumb is that VR could actually take off if it was done correctly, but these billionaires can’t think of literally anything besides profit so they base the entire model around that and just expect people to want it. If he had dumped an iota into further development of VR tech, and invested in some actual original VR content, games, etc then people would flock to it. That and actual affordable VR since everything is still overpriced since it’s considered a niche market.
It’d be super cool if it were self-contained and wireless…
Well it kinda is? Most of the time I’ve been using VR has either been on the headset itself or wirelessly streaming from a PC. My headset is old so the quality isn’t amazing, but by and large its always worked well.
That’s the Quest headsets whole thing. The games run on the device, and it has cameras for AR stuff, which is surprisingly intuitive. That being said, what impressed me the most was how solid streaming VR games from my PC (over Wifi 6) is. Pretty much indistinguishable from wired.
Valve’s upcoming new VR headset should be a little better at running games and will probably be great at Streaming, though it won’t do AR.
Note that this was a 10% cut. Meta has a lot of staff. They are also slightly pivoting to AR glasses, as they say Ray-Ban Display sales are much higher than anticipated. I think they see their chance of cornering the VR market as gone (probably because of android xr) (see https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-pauses-third-party-horizon-os-headsets/ ) but think they have a chance to dominate AR glasses / wearables.
For context, $77 billion is more than most nations spend on their military.
What we could have bought instead; a list of real problems that money could help significantly with, or fix entirely (generated with AI):
Universal Healthcare (Medicare for All)
- Est. cost: $3–4T per year
- $77B covers ~2–3 weeks of healthcare for the entire US
- Or ~6–7 million people for one year
- ~2% of annual national healthcare spend
High-Speed Rail and Public Transit
- Est. cost: $50–120M per mile
- $77B covers 600–1,200 miles of true HSR
- 3–5 major national corridors plus urban transit upgrades
Homelessness, Veterans, and Mental Health
- Est. cost: $150k–300k per housing unit; ~$25k/person/year care
- $77B covers 250,000–400,000 permanent housing units
- 10+ years of care for all chronically homeless
- 100% of veteran homelessness eliminated
Roads, Bridges, and Infrastructure
- Est. cost: ~$5M per bridge; ~$1M per mile of road
- $77B covers 15,000–20,000 bridge replacements
- ~100,000 miles of roadway rebuilt
- ~15–20% of all structurally deficient bridges
Domestic Semiconductor Manufacturing
- CHIPS Act: $52B total
- $77B covers 150% of CHIPS Act
- 3–5 leading-edge fabs
- Full AI, defense, and automotive supply-chain security
Fusion and Advanced Energy
- ITER reactor: ~$22B
- SPARC program: ~$4B
- $77B covers 3 ITER-class reactors
- 10+ SPARC-class fusion programs
Climate Resilience and Clean Energy
- Est. cost: ~$1B per GW renewable capacity
- $77B covers 60+ GW clean power
- Electrification of ~10 million homes
- Coastal protection and grid modernization across multiple states
Public Sector Scale Comparison
- Equals 3+ years of NASA’s budget
- Equals 10 years of US homelessness funding
- Exceeds annual defense budgets of most countries
The art direction in that screenshot seems to be “make everyone else look so weird Zuckerburg looks normal”
I predicted this crash and burn at the exact moment I saw it for the first time.
All these dickheads steal one good idea, and they think that makes them geniuses.
Imagine if he put that amount towards affordable housing in Cali
Honestly, that’s the government’s job after taxing the shit out of this billionaire.
Facebook is a boomer infested, depressing, idiot shithole. I’m not spending extra money for hardware so I can experience that in VR.
If I wanted to experience that, I can visit my shitty boomer mother for free in reality.
I detest everybody who posesses more than 5 million. All above is absurd greed and should be punished.
good. i hope he turns purple, and shits on the carpet before dying from embarassment.
The imagery there was just beautiful, a perfect 5/7.
My kids played Occulus for a good while. Played gorilla tag then bone something. They kind of got bored of it and now it just sits on a shelf.
Same. It was “Well, WTF do we do with this now?”
…and then dad took it and discovered simracing in VR…
Honestly, VR sim racing or just having fun in BeamNG is peak VR experience. Planning to buy a better steering wheel soon, g29 is just not going to cut it. Everything else has bored me quite fast
Simracing is the only thing I use it for. It’s enough to make it worth it, though.
Vr is fun, meta ruined it with their massive privacy breaches and locked down janky maliciously coded Facebook linked shitware.
Meta screwed up health care so badly that now they’ll never get their legs re-attached. /s
Would you take universal healthcare provided by Facebook, but they get to keep all your medical data?
No, because it will be great initially and then gradually erode into a system worse than we have now 🙃
You ever see that black mirror ep Common People?
Heh good question. If the healthcare is literally good. but yeah wth are they gonna do with the data
