The Metaverse Has Had a Very Bad Week

[Free]

Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse has always been about how he can rule it.

The Metaverse Has Had a Very Bad Week
Some of Meta's own employees are doubting the company's vision for the Metaverse.

It's been nearly a year since Facebook rebranded itself to Meta, and founder Mark Zuckerberg and the company are facing serious doubts from the public, media, and some of their own employees about the future of their focus on the Metaverse.

Just yesterday, Meta officially revealed its new Meta Quest Pro VR headset. The premium rig will cost early adopters $1499.99, and the headset was designed specifically with work in mind, rather than gaming. And as Zuckerberg shared with The Verge, Meta is targeting people who routinely upgrade their PC to instead opt for the Quest Pro, saying "Basically, this is a step toward all 200 million of those people who get new PCs every year starting to instead do some of the work in VR, in addition to all the folks who are gaming, hanging out socially, etc."

In a memo to employees from Meta's VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, the executive wrote, "For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly. Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

Ah. love. I'm pretty sure there are lots of people working for dog food companies who deal with this problem just fine.

 

[Caete]

If I am upgrading my PC every year, why am I going to dump 1500 for goggles when I can get another super fast 150TB SSD?
ALSO
How the fuck am I supposed to "do some of the work in VR" when upgrading a PC is real world physical thing?

Has anyone applied the updates and rebooted the zuckerbot lately?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

If I am upgrading my PC every year, why am I going to dump 1500 for goggles when I can get another super fast 150TB SSD?
ALSO
How the fuck am I supposed to "do some of the work in VR" when upgrading a PC is real world physical thing?

I think what they're trying to say is that they want people who upgrade their computer yearly in order to meet constantly rising work requirements, capability demands of new software etc, to skip a year of upgrading the box and spend that budget on a headset instead, and do some of their actual work-work in a VR workspace.

That's kind of a bad idea because VR isn't really super great for work tasks. There are a couple of narrow niches it fills, like a novel and "fun" way to have a meeting, or to communicate with collaborators remotely as you work; but for most cases right now at this point in time, doing "work" in VR practically means using a virtual simulacrum of 2D screens inside the "3D space" - kind of the same way you watch movies on "TV screens" inside SL - and that's neat for entertainment purposes where you're hanging out with friends but for doing actual work it's kind of dumb, you can just use your real-life 2D monitor screens for that, and even Meta's $1500 headset can't match the display resolution of your real monitor.

Like I do a lot of work in Blender, and if somebody showed me a way to broadcast a running instance of Blender into SL via media-on-a-prim so that I could "work on my Blender project while in SL", I'd be like "that's kind of neat" and then absolutely never use it.

 

[Free]

I think what they're trying to say is that they want people who upgrade their computer yearly in order to meet constantly rising work requirements, capability demands of new software etc, to skip a year of upgrading the box and spend that budget on a headset instead, and do some of their actual work-work in a VR workspace.

lol

 

[Noodles]

Like I do a lot of work in Blender, and if somebody showed me a way to broadcast a running instance of Blender into SL via media-on-a-prim so that I could "work on my Blender project while in SL", I'd be like "that's kind of neat" and then absolutely never use it.

The real problem, like all of the problems related to this sort of concept. Is it's neat, and a novelty, but you are either, say, fighting the SL interface, ON TOP OF fighting the Blender interface.

Or you are starting at some sort of "Media on a Prim" which is just a fake monitor, inside a fake world, inside a monitor. You could just keep SL open with Blender, if you wanted to be able to monitor for messages or whatever. I suppose "in theory" you could get another avatar to stand next to you and give input, but it feels like there would be better ways to accomplish that too, because that is likely only going to lead to problem #1, where you get to fight the world interface while trying to use software.