It appears Meta’s Horizon Worlds may literally and figuratively not have legs after all.
You can’t run with an idea if it has no legs?
the creepy Zuckerborg avatar just wants to read peoples minds.
It’s funny because the meta quest recently had an update that got rid of custom/user created environments for the home area and only gave you some shitty options. The default one was a shitty balcony that overlooked a big stupid tower advertising this and they made the “portal” to it permanent and unremoveable.
In addition to this almost every time you opened a menu it would pop up a fucking ad/link to enter the application almost every time.
Pretty sure now this was a desperate last ditch effort to try to increase traffic - but clearly NO ONE wanted it and it just pissed everyone off more.
If they want to save face to any degree they should revert that fucking patch ASAP. I miss my home environment being a fucking derelict warehouse.
I miss my original Oculus Home. Had a nice arrangement of furniture, a shooting range, a little shelf that held virtual cartridges of all my games, various little statues and trophies that you could display for achievements… and they just got rid of it all.
Immediately killed any interest I had in customizing my virtual space. Why bother if they’re just going to rug pull it at any time. They could’ve at least let us continue to visit it “offline”.
It always amazes me that some executives think that taking away customization is the way to get more traffic instead of driving away to people who put effort into making a customized thing
It amazes me that so many people bought this product from Meta. When the Oculus Rift was first announced I was so excited and hopeful that we were finally going to get VR right… then they got bought by Facebook and I knew right then that I’d never own one. Here’s hoping the new Steam headset can live up to the hype.
IT WAS STILL AROUND???
It’s funny how almost everyone from FAANG is failing hard in the gaming space. Like Google fails with Stadia, Amazon shutdown how many game studios, Netflix shutdown that studio that were making a Squidgame game and the Zuck dumped billions into the metaverse void. Looks like the Silicon Valley way of doing business just doesn’t work in the games industry.
and nothing of value was lost
(Except of course the billions of dollars spent building it)
That’s the only thing I like about this situation. That money went to the people who worked on the project.
Then they all get laid off. And they lose their health insurance. And their houses get foreclosed on.
But, for time they had employment and the money wasn’t going to a yacht maintenance crew and hookers
Did it really or did it just grow market caps
it wasn’t meta spending on privacy invading crap that sticks around so whether it ended up as salaries or fake money it didn’t go directly to bad things
Seems unlikely that zero of that investment benefitted projects like the upcoming Steam Frame.
How would the Steam Frame have benefited from Meta’s funding?
Because they were able to learn from the technology that was created.
They already had the valve index VR headset released 2 years before Meta’s metaverse became a focus in 2021
Holy tax write-offs, Batman!
VRChat is the most popular “metaverse” and it’s still growing every year.
So it’s weird to call the metaverse dead when Horizon wasn’t even in the lead among its competitors.
I get your point, I genuinely do. But the way the general public uses the term metaverse is to refer to Horizon, not that style of game/app in general.
VRChat is not owned by meta, therefore not part of the meta verse.
Metaverse is not the same as VR.
No but undeniably the death of the metaverse is taking VR with it, once meta leaves the VR space it will be exclusively for enthusiasts and low quality indie games.
once meta leaves the VR space it will be exclusively for enthusiasts and low quality indie games.
I literally never even heard of anything associated with Horizons that wasn’t a low-quality cashgrab or some kind of scam.
Valve is releasing a new headset.
Meta (the company hilariously rebranded with this non-sense as their foundation) has moved on to the next grift: AI and mobile video surveillance devices.
I love that they changed their name to show how serious they were about the metaverse being the future of tech and it never even came close to being a thing.
To be fair, they’ve been doing mobile surveillance for a long time.
Sure, but I did specifically say mobile video surveillance. Pretty sure their goal is to reduce the friction of taking out your phone to start capturing a video.
I’ve already ended a friendship over these stupid things.
after thier propaganda feeds in fb wasnt generating enough profit.
isnt meta kinda late in the game for AI anyways, apple was even later and they abandoned for the most part.
Considering they developed the framework everybody builds upon nowadays, I doubt it.
They’ve been in the AI game for about as long as everyone else. I would consider their lab to be one of the best in CV tech.
Not later than anyone else that hopped on the chat gpt bandwagon.
Metaverse was like the AI nobody asked for getting pushed into apps. Nobody wanted Wii Mii like hangout rooms where you have to water a clunky headset.
I never watered mine. Was that the issue?
I assumed face sweat was sufficient
I watered mine and now it makes weird smells :(
Ha! I can do that without an expensive headset.
Metaverse was like the AI nobody asked for getting pushed into apps. Nobody wanted Wii Mii like hangout rooms where you have to water a clunky headset.
I was willing to give a shot to something like the Metaverse, but the instant I heard it was a Facebook/Meta project I had zero interest and hoped it would die. This was my same experience with Occulus. These are both technologies I want for a cyberpunk future, but Facebook cannot be the one to control them.
I actually liked it back when it was called second life
I never understood why Second Life wasn’t ported to VR circa 2020.
One of the main oculus guy of Oculus stuck around after the buy out, until a couple years ago and rage quit. Because he said that Meta is killing it. So yeah.
They are killing it, but sadly they’re about the only ones keeping it alive, at least at an affordable price.
I wish VR was a commodity product, like TVs. Everything compatible with everything.
Let’s wait for the steam frame
I’m going to guess at comfortably 3 times the price of the Quest 3S.
They might surprise us, but in this economy, I doubt it.
I predict it’ll be four times the price, an overpriced toy with no games
Even his avatar looks dead.
Pretty life-like tbh
Say ‘goodbye’ already??
I never got to say ‘hello’ in the first place!!
Oh no! Shock! I would rather join MySpace before I purchased a house in the “metaverse”.
But a device you kind of use sometimes (if you remember you own it)
Oh shit I do own one. Thanks for the reminder
May I ask why? It seems like a huge risk due to being tethered to a Facebook account which could get banned at any time. Was the price too good to pass up?
They pretty much have a monopoly on standalone VR headsets atm.
With a throwaway meta account and ADB you can make it somewhat less of a privacy nightmare
Ah. I guess that’s why people were so excited about Valve making one. I’m not really that interested in VR, so I never really evaluated their vs the competition’s offerings.
Valve is still not making one that can do AR, so we’re still stuck with either Meta or Pico for that use case.
Not entirely true. They’ll have black and white cameras at launch and have an expansion port on the front of the device for potential color cameras in the future.
They just said AR isn’t their focus for this device, not that it isn’t possible.
And I get it - everyone I know that already has XR headsets doesn’t bother with AR as the experiences are limited (and I imagine the union between AR gamers and tidy environments with clear surfaces is pretty small).
I expect them not to focus on AR as the biggest usecase for it is for virtual monitor in a real life environment and not gaming. Maybe the give us a colour camera add-on, but I doubt it’ll be their focus from the get-go.
I got it for free like four years ago and have barely used it since
The metaverse, in some form, is nearly inevitable IMO. But it’ll be a federated-like infrastructure and I’m very glad Facebook will have fuck all to do with it.
It seems that you understand what the term “metaverse” was even supposed to mean; care to enlighten the rest of us?
Not them, but I think I’ve got a bead on it, assuming you treat it as a general concept and not a trademark:
It’s basically the Platonic ideal of a game lobby. Kinda like what Miiverse was supposed to be, or Ready Player One. They were both after my time but I think maybe kinda like Club Penguin or Roblox? Like an overworld with a custom avatar that you can socialize in and sync into other apps or games together.
It does seem basically inevitable, fast forward gaming 10 years and I’d be surprised if something like that wasn’t the norm.
Think gravatar meets roblox meets VRC scaled and decentralized as a VR web.
Like many crappy things these days, the name and some of the concept were stolen from good sci-fi. Snow Crash, in this case, in which it was as if the entire Internet was VR.
Which, the Web barely existed when that book was written, so wild visions of what the Internet might turn out to be were to be expected. And something like it remains a common cyberpunk trope to this day.
That said, I disagree with the other poster that it will ever happen, let alone is inevitable.
Also, one of the protagonists of that book lives in a storage unit with a roommate works five jobs and uses a pay toilet across the street¹ despite having worked at multiple wildly valuable start-ups. It is not a novel about good things or a good future.
¹at which he can’t afford the premium subscriotion that has toilet paper
It is not a novel about good things or a good future.
If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson’s short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I’m in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson’s works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.
I don’t recall those novels being explicitly sequels, but maybe?
He’s not a Utopian, but that’s part of the point. They’re doing torment nexuses. Silicon valley is just the torment nexus place.
we’ll live in pods and have jobs in second life
Read the book ‘snow crash’, he was trying to do an even more dystopian version of… Just that entire book.
Holds on all copies at the library on this 1992 book!
But it’ll be a federated-like infrastructure
Unfortunately I don’t see any guarantees for this. Unless the incentives that led to the enshittification of the internet disappear, the Metaverse will probably eventually look and function much the same. It really is that predictable.
Meta couldn’t make their digital shopping mall work with unlimited money. Tailscale made hosting from home 100x easier. Federation protocols are maturing. It’s fundamentally no different from hosting a Minecraft server, which even kids do
Perhaps an open set of standards at the least. Some form of super-oauth would be required but I should have clarified that the openness of a true federation-like model is aspirational: invisioned as a conscious and intentional rejection of the ever-increasing monetization, financialization, and enshittification of all mediums of social interaction.
People didn’t jump on the FB metaverse partly because it was shit, but partly because it was painfully obvious it was full of grift and a billionaire’s wet dream of further social monopolization. From the moment it was pitched, no one (but people who stood to gain) thought it would succeed. The friction and frustration has been increasing. The world falling apart makes the little nagging annoyances just that much more irritating, and people are starting to actively resist them rather than just rant and succumb. Social pressures are starting to move the needle too.
Yea, and asset ownership will make federated Social VR awkward. As in, few will put in time making spaces and games that can be instantly duplicated and rehosted.
It’s an upside that platforms have, they can do at least some moderation regarding content theft. It’s never perfect, but it’s better than a free for all.
For real, they should have either bought or cloned VRChat as a first step, and then looked into expanding from there. That shit is a metaverse that people willing go into primarily because it enables a ton of free expression.
Free expression? That doesn’t sound very brand-safe, how will we sell ads alongside that?!
Yes but that expression wasn’t commercial, so it wasn’t what the snow crash company really wanted.
