If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story.
Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise.
I'm personally keen on the AR/VR space (surrounded by headsets here), but the early adopters are so polarized about Facebook/Oculus's involvement. I don't know if a rebrand (is this really that?) would be enough for the tech crowd to forget and move on.
> If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story.
I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter.
> Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow?
I mean, that would be nice for users, but:
a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally* able to give up ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, basically
b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?
And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed).
* in the sense of "this is the fundamental basis and goal of the company," not in a U.S.-founding-document sense
>I don't think Facebook is constitutionally able to give up ad revenue gains
This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die.
Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can.
> How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?
That's the wrong question.
The right question is "how many FB users would accept a free headset that advertisers paid for in exchange for access to your data and exclusive rights to place ads in front of you?"
At this point I'm confident I don't want there to be "a metaverse" at all, because under our current social and cultural systems, I am confident it will be very very bad no matter who owns it.
As to point B, they don’t even need to send one to all users - just the ones they think will be cash cows for advertisers. Everyone with a income and behavior pattern that makes them a super valuable ad demographic (say, 5% or even 1% of users) gets one for free while the rest of us pay our way on.
I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising company to be building "the metaverse".
I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse.
It's one use-case I can kind of see benefiting from blockchain protocols: enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse, by recording transfers of avatars and assets between the "metaworlds" making up the metaverse ("digital identity scarcity" is still an unsolved problem though, I think)
> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse
I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one?
Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction.
It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems.
We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.
> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse
Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data are instead motivated by selling users things they don't need.
> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse
Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory?
One of the great things about digital worlds/goods is they exist in microscopic (nanoscopic now) electrical circuits. They use practically no resources and can be duplicated for next to nothing. They also take up very little physical space to store. They're free from or at least resistant to most natural phenomena that create scarcity.
> I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse.
Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/
If what they're doing now is any indication, I don't think they'll succeed with it anyway. They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30.
Their existing prototypes are outrageously embarrassing. I'm the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, awkward, and embarrassingly goofy. At least The Office has some endearing quality (sorry for the weird comparison).
I'm not sure if it's Mark Zuckerberg's influence or what... but everything about Facebook lacks some sort of jour de vive. Like, their idea of "making work fun" is stuff like... an astoundingly cringe-worth video about healthcare open-enrollment? This kind of thing dumbfounds me https://vimeo.com/639318528... and I don't even consider myself a cynical person.
All of this feels only a few degrees removed from Jonestown.
Are you sure you aren't living in a techie bubble? Oculus consistently tops the best selling headsets list at amazon cnet, PCMag, etc.. The only non-developers I know with headsets all have Oculus or more rarely PSVR. Maybe they aren't cutting edge, but everyday people can't afford cutting edge anyway.
They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the public at large has no knowledge of that. All the public knows is that it's decent hardware for a super low price compared to the competitors, it doesn't require a PC, and it's what most of their friends with a headset are using.
Can't really call having the most popular headset not succeeding, even if it is probably subsidized with their massive ads money making machine.
Virtual reality was always dystopian. It's what happens when we don't have a frontier and turn inward to computer aided fantasy and isolation.
One of the best dystopian explanations for the Fermi paradox is that intelligences eventually figure out how to immerse themselves in high fidelity fantasy worlds and basically sit around and masturbate until some black swan event like a planet killer astroid or a gamma ray burst destroys them. Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.
There seem to be three possible futures on offer today:
(1) A Brave New World with AR, VR, social media dopamine loops, ARGs and conspiracy LARPs, cheap drugs, and sex robots where the meaning of life is to withdraw into a fantasy world and masturbate until you die. This offers the comfort of rewards without challenges.
(2) Reactionary movements against modernity itself, proposing that we instead re-embrace feudalism or some kind of totalitarianism where the state or some Ubermensch gives us purpose. This includes authoritarian fundamentalist religious movements, the alt-right, neoreaction, etc. This offers the comfort of the "devil we know" and futures that resemble our past.
(3) SpaceX Starship and the next frontier, a future where we embrace difficult adventures in the real world with high risk but high payoff. This offers the least comfort but a lot of growth and experience.
There are also leftist visions of a future world where we actually address the core problems plaguing our world and give workers democratic control over their own work, instead of leaving that up to wage slave owners who view all of us as human resources.
> Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.
You say this with a maybe as though it isn't already a certainty.
Nothing can stop it from happening. There will always be brainpower available, willing, and capable of contributing to computer aided fantasy and isolation. Not that it has to necessarily be a bad thing, mind.
OTOH plenty of things could make it impossible to succeed with a starship.
> the market has repeatedly shown there isn't much demand for persistent virtual worlds
I don't know if you have a more narrow view of this idea or specifically mean VR/AR, but that just sounds like what massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft are. I think Roblox is even a broader use case, though I am fairly unfamiliar with that.
MMOs have been very viable from both a business and user stand point and have been a fairly big thing for going on a quarter century or so at this point. Whether these branch into more of the Second Life non-game social space or into being largely AR/VR driven is pretty up in the air, but it's not some sci-fi concept really.
VRChat seems to have landed on something close to the right balance of whatever it takes to make it happen. It's apparently easy enough for someone to make a whole meme world for an event in the news in time for it to be relevant: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/11/9/21557029/four-season...
That's what I wonder. Early VR adopters/technologists hate what happened to Oculus and there aren't a lot of newcomers to that market. I don't think cheaper headsets are going to fix that in the near future so I don't know whom they're targeting. Seems risky to lean into something where the experts already think you screwed up.
Quest 2 is outselling past VR headsets by leaps and bounds according to news reports. The decision to make a standalone headset and build their own app platform was absolutely the right one from a growth standpoint, even if the hardcore VR consumers aren't biting. Early VR adopters are going to buy the next best product and have no loyalty.
Oculus sold 2 of every 3 VR headsets last quarter. If there's a lesson here, it's that you can't extrapolate mass market appeal from what early adopters think.
I would argue that early adopters/technologists of VR are comparable to PC gamers and Quest adopters are comparable to console gamers.
Both have a purpose, both are subsets of the same demographic... but both vote very differently with their wallets.
Personally, I don't mind FB taking over the casual market. There are still alternatives and the technology will advance faster with such a big company behind it.
That being said, I won't be touching the Metaverse unless I can't avoid it.
Our version of a persistent virtual space was never going to be like fiction. There will be 3 or more competing metaverses, none of which have any interoperability.
Or hundreds of incompatible little ones. If VR really takes off "We need to add chat to our app" will become "We need to add our own metaverse to our app."
That can actually end up more healthy overall & lead to some competition.
Having just one metaverse everyone uses seamed like the worst thing in Ready Player One - because then one entity can control it and for their rules and morals on all participants.
Much harder to do that with multiple competing incompatible metaverses.
Fun fact, in Matrix (if that's what you're referring to) people were originally enslaved by the machines to provide compute capacity of their brains. The battery part came later, when someone (studio executives?) jumped in, and said that's too smart and people wouldn't get it so it was changed to batteries.
Facebook is investing 10 billion dollars into the metaverse this year alone and will increase this amount in the future.
They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web and still end up with one of the most popular hubs.
If people who value their privacy can setup their own hubs, i'm pretty much OK with Facebook speeding up the advancement of AR/VR technology for the next several years using their advertisement dollars.
> I'm personally keen on the AR/VR space (surrounded by headsets here), but the early adopters are so polarized about Facebook/Oculus's involvement.
There is no polarization at all. I don't know a single person who is happy about being forced to use FB in order to be able to use the equipment they have bought.
"…but connecting people was always much bigger…it was always clear that the dream was to feel present with the people we care about…here we are in 2021, and our devices are still designed around apps, not people. The experiences we’re allowed to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever, and high taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the way that we are meant to use technology. The Metaverse gives us an opportunity to change that, if we build it well. But it’s going to take all of us…Together, we can create a more open platform."
When he says this, I hear between the lines that the platform will be open to all contributors as long as the "open platform" belongs to Meta. How does he not realize that by seeking to dominate and own this "open platform" instead of working outside of his company to build a truly open platform with others is actually open?
Does he not read enough sci fi or literature in general to know that by having so much power and not seeking to let go a bit more, he opens himself up to the same risks and temptations faced by myriad dystopian villains?
In the recent Stratechery interview with Zuckerberg, Mark seemed to indicate FB has no intention of _owning_ the metaverse. Rather, they want to build the technology and platforms that will go towards enabling it. His quote below:
>We don’t think about this as if different companies are going to build different metaverses. We think about it in terminology like the Mobile Internet. You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet and I don’t think in the future it will make sense to say that we are building our own metaverse either. I think we’re each building different infrastructure and components that go towards hopefully helping to build this out overall and I think that those pieces will need to work together in some ways.
> You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet
Of course not; buying up competitors is much more practical (why build what you can buy?). So this is presumably the same strategy Facebook plans for any competing companies that make successful use of whatever open systems underlie "the metaverse".
What the journalists are not discussing is whether and how "the metaverse" will be used to surveil people and support advertising. No discussion of whether/how it embodies "privacy by design". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design
I think there is at least a chance that they handle Meta differently - at 1:28:24 in the keynote[1] Zuck says "...that means that, over time, you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services".
I think immersive virtual worlds are an absolutely fascinateing topic - even though I don't see how our current ecosystem of centralized services and locked-down devices on the one hand and artificial scarcity by blockchain anarchists on the other hand can lead to anything desirable here.
But with the current discussion, I'm surprised we haven't heard more from other players in the field except facebook. What about the makers of VRChat or Second Life? Metaverse-style virtual realities are their bread and butter - and now for the first time, we have a discussion about this subject that includes the larger public. Shouldn't they be all over this?
And yet, the only ones talking about the "Metaverse" seems to be Facebook - pardon, Meta. So I wonder, if this whole Metaverse discussion an actual discussion at all or is it just Facebook kicking up dust?
There's a huge distinction that needs to be made between AR and VR. AR in public is a menace, for the same reason everyone not wearing one hated google glass.
While I’m not interested in VR at all, and only feel like should be used in limited areas, I agree on the issue of Facebook owning “the metaverse”. Many of the early adopters are already of Facebook and/or dislike the company, meaning that there are few people to help push the products.
> Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance.
I have yet to see a single federated system that has demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's usual playbook, which is proven.
The world wide web used to have a host of proprietary servers for it, but those for the most part got eaten by Apache (which latter renamed to Apache Http Server). And then a host of new open-source http servers and libraries.
Sometimes what's good for markets & the world doesn't have to be owned & commercial. Sometimes the availability of resources such as info-resources like httpd can beget enormous commercial success while themselves not having much commercial success.
A Tim O'Reilly saying comes to mind: create more value than you capture. In some cases, without setting free the core idea & letting people run wild, you'll never stand a chance of capturing any value what-so-ever.
I don't want any company to own it. I want it to be open technology that somehow exists completely independently of companies and governments. If a company must own it, I certainly don't want it to be an advertising company, least of all Facebook.
No, going back to your original premise the only thing 'interesting' for me about Facebook is how dismally awful the company is and how nakedly sociopathic Zuckerberg is.
There needs to be many metaverses, and NFT's should be able to be shared between them. It's dangerous to think about the prospect of a major company like Facebook (Or a DAO for that matter) locking up the entire universe.
The rebrand was introduced as a "One More Thing" during the event keynote.
A 2007 "One More Thing" was the announcement of the iPhone and the future of mobile computing. Now a 2021 "One More Thing" is the announcement of a company rebrand to avoid government regulation.
> For better or worse, it does seem Zuckerberg is as invested in making the "metaverse" the new future of Facebook as Jobs was with Apple and the iPhone
I don't think we should take that at face value; Zuckerberg of course has strong motivations to appear completely committed, including a desire to motivate employees, partners, etc., and a desire to distract from FB's current bad news (which might explain the timing - why now?). If we take it at face value, we are part of the messaging.
For one thing, FB's metaverse is an over-the-horizon technology and product, very much vapor at this point and one that may never happen. The iPhone went on sale months after Jobs' announcement (IIRC).
More interesting is that FB possibly has lost so much confidence in its brand that it's de-emphasizing it, which seems like an overreaction to me.
Just guessing: now Meta is a holding company of various social media "companies" so it'll be a bit harder to make a case that one company has a monopoly on the internet social media advertising.
They can even list Instagram on the market selling maybe a 5% equity.
Having watched the downfall of MySpace, Orkut etc, I thought (hoped) same thing might happen to FaceBook. But now it feels like they are going to be around, for a long, long time. I don't know if anyone is even trying to take on them, Google seems to have given up on their social products. FB might not be fashionable anymore, people might even curse them, but they'll continue to use them at some level :( And they have enough money to keep buying other companies and stay at least somewhat relevant
It feels like only regulators can take on them, but that too is unlikely to happen, except some feeble attempts in Europe
In London, in the area around the London Eye, there is a tourist trap that offers a very poor 'haunted house' type of attraction, usually something having to do with zombies. As each iteration of this tourist trap gains a reputation for being total rubbish and gains one star reviews online, every few months the attraction rebrands to another name.
This doesn't sound quite right, what's one of the names?
The London Dungeon is near the Eye and has been around since the 70s, albeit in different forms and location. They moved closer to the Eye due to rail station construction in 2013, I believe? Down the street from the old London Dungeons location is the London Bridge Experience, which generally gets better reviews and doesn't appear to be owned by Merlin Entertainment. I'd avoid both, but neither appear to match your description.
Same thing happens with Chinese restaurants in the states. New name, new sign out front, but oddly enough same fixtures, same items on the menu, and same folks behind the counter.
At least at that place everyone is in on the scam. Facebook execs have to smile and say good idea to Mark, when all they want to do is tell him that is stupid
Other interesting things said during the keynote: "and frankly, as we've heard your feedback more broadly, we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We're starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we're working on making a broader shift here within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a lot of people. Not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences and I get that, especially as the metaverse expands."
Also:
"As big of a company as we are, we've also learned what it is like to build for other platforms. And living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. Most of all, I've come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things, and holding back the entire internet economy. [...] We'll continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs so consumers and developers have choice rather than forcing them to use the Quest store to find apps or reach customers."
> we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account
I mean... Quest had this ability before. And Facebook took it away. And now they want us to clap for them when they say they're kind of bringing it back, at some point in the future, in some kind of limited capacity for work accounts?
Call me skeptical.
I'm not really aware of any platform (including Quest) where I would say that Facebook is doing a good job of supporting consumer choice, and I've read plenty of leaked internal communications from the company that suggests they're internally pretty hostile to the idea (Mark included).
Maybe they've turned over a new leaf, but if Mark wants us to all give him the benefit of the doubt that a metaverse is going to be different, he could start by showing this commitment with... any of their current products, really.
There's a lot of talk here about how Facebook is going to be moving into the bold new world of user agency and privacy and choice, and not much acknowledgement that Facebook is responsible for making these platforms what they are today. I don't like Mark's subtle insinuation that Facebook is doing something new or bold by getting rid of restrictions on Oculus that he created. Especially when he hasn't actually fixed the problem, he's just vaguely assured people that the problem might get fixed a year from now, maybe.
He wants credit for swinging in a new direction, and he hasn't actually swung in that direction. Well, prove it, Mark. Prove it with your existing products before you start bragging about how good your next product will be.
I assume this just means that they'll require a "Meta" account instead of a Facebook account, and it will come with all the same problems as creating a Facebook account.
Also, their "support" for sideloading, while better than nothing, requires a valid phone number or credit card number to sideload anything.
This. Whether it's linked with your other social media or not isn't the issue. And whether it's a "Facebook" account, "Meta" account, an "Oculus" account, or whatever, it's all still an account with Facebook and can be expected to have all of the baggage that comes with an account with Facebook.
Sounds nice, doesn't it?
However i believe they very recently starting requiring a validated dev account (i.e. with phone number) for devs to continue to sideload to their Oculus Quest, right?
Which is somewhat fine since you can use an anonymous prepaid SIM card. Oh wait, the amount of countries where you can still get a prepaid SIM card without ID is diminishing, all in the name of "fighting terrorism". The internet is not going in a great direction.
We'll continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs
I see this as a tacit approval of the thriving network of pirate games, something like the Adobe Photoshop model of proliferating and becoming the de facto platform.
Does facebook still have a real-name policy? interacting with people in the metaverse with my real name is the last thing I want (we all saw ready player one, no? does zuck understand the importance of anonymity?)
From what I've understood they're especially been enforcing it for Oculus.
That said there are privacy controls. You interact with other Oculus users through a customizable username. And your Oculus activity can be set to be shown to "Only me" (or Oculus friends, or FB friends, or public).
But FB themselves are obviously still collecting all the data they can.
You actually don't need to connect it to FB for now as it's only the new systems such as Quest 2 that are forced to link it to FB. However, they have threatened to change that in a year or so even for the Quest 1 and Rift.
Especially since the original Quest didn't require a Facebook account. It required a Quest account, but it didn't have to be explicitly linked to Facebook. (It's also one reason why I still use my original Quest and haven't gotten the updated model).
> ""and frankly, as we've heard your feedback more broadly, we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We're starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we're working on making a broader shift here within the next year."
Assuming not good or bad intent but meta intent would mean they're working on a meta account, so while you stop into a 'verse it's not your social, it can be whatever, but they'll link all your accounts in the meta umbrella.
I was curious what meta.com looked like before FB took control of the domain. Recent snapshots aren't loading for me, but post-2015 it looks like it was taken over by an AI company — the page titles include "Meta — Science Discovered" [0] and "Meta — AI for Science".
Prior to that, since around 2012 it was an unused Wordpress site [1] that redirected to meta.compgu.com (which is now "tekman.cc", a consulting firm or something.
And its earliest owner (at least as captured by wayback) was a California events company "Meta Productions: Producers of Meet, Mix and Match. Promoting awareness through metamorphosis" [2]
edit: out of curiosity, I just noticed that one of the most famous domains that refused to sell out [3] — steam.com — is now apparently for sale?
There was an actual AR glasses company named Meta before this. They failed a few years ago. I guess Facebook must have bought the trademark from them. But they never owned meta.com I guess. Their current site is https://www.metavision.com/
Before now, https://meta.com redirected to https://www.meta.org/ which is owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; now, there's a banner saying it will be sunset next March.
These trademarks covered: “promoting the goods and services of others via computer and communication networks using targeted and non-targeted methods; operating on-line marketplaces for sellers of goods and/or services … providing advertising space via the global computer network … creating on-line virtual communities … hosting electronic facilities for others for organizing and conducting meetings, events and interactive discussions via communication networks”
So pretty likely to conflict with Facebook.
However, they transferred all of these to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in May: https://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/assignment-tm-7299..., and as you mentioned, are now shutting down.
It’s not a great look. I would feel pretty bad if I had devoted years of my life to building meta.org to now see how it was used
...I can't tell if it's intentional that the page loads initially with the "facebook" brand in the uppper left and then quickly overwrites it with meta.
It's definitely not intentional. If it was intentional it would be animated, and there's no indication in the HTML that it's anything more than a FOUC.
The core idea of having a universal layer on top of reality that is owned by any company, at all, is utterly repulsive to me. I'm not sure I have the words to describe it.
The type of world Facebook is describing is always -- 100% of the time -- a dystopia if it is a privatized, corporate-controlled AR/VR layer where ordinary people need permission and contracts to interact with each-other. Anything any single company or coordinated group of FAANG companies make will be awful when scaled up to the level Mark is talking about. There's no promise they can make to me, there's no strategy they can pursue to ease my worries. Purely by virtue of a single company (or a group of FAANG companies) being in charge of it, it's already garbage.
Having said that, of all of the companies to try and assert control over a "metaverse", Facebook is probably amongst the least suited and most dangerous companies to do so. If they can't even run the Oculus platform competently, how can they possibly claim they're competent enough to run a giant industry-wide platform on top of Oculus?
----
> The metaverse will be a collective project that goes beyond a single company. It will be created by people all over the world, and open to everyone.
And this stuff is just complete nonsense. No platform that Facebook has ever been involved with has ever even remotely come close to being "collective" or "open" to everyone worldwide, and it's just wildly insulting to pretend that anything about that is going to change now.
Facebook can't even launch this announcement article without making a bunch of XHR requests and falling over if Javascript isn't enabled. So sure, let's all close our eyes and pretend that they're magically capable of building an accessible, open VR platform that respects user privacy/agency. What has Facebook ever done in its entire history as a company that would make us believe that they are in any way trustworthy or qualified enough to try and build a consumer platform/medium of this scale?
My kneejerk reaction is this will probably waste a lot of their money without much traction. But I'm also happy about Facebook wasting a bunch of their money...
All depends if they can deliver on AR before anyone else.
Gotta remember outside of Oculus, their entire product portfolio exists on top of the platforms of their competitors. This is their play to own the entire thing from the foundation up and the resources they'll be willing to use to accomplish that will be huge and really their only competition is Apple because Google gave up.
Not a chance. I've been wrong about a lot of things tech, probably even most things, but this isn't something I think most people want.
Metaverses have always been niche. Most people don't like things attached to their head. Remember 3D TVs?
But, perhaps you and they are right. For the first time in my life, I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no part in it.' Please don't take this as like, suicidal or anything, more maybe going off grid or moving to another country.
> I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no part in it.'
I feel like that about ever larger part of the whole tech world. I am torn - I can still muster a lot of techno-optimism when I think for example about possible benefits of advanced AIs for humanity. But than I imagine the world where the most advanced AIs are controlled by corporations like Google and Facebook... I have a bad feeling about this.
I am trying to find some reasonable middle ground between becoming a luddite and just continuing like I do not see all those unforeseen negative impacts produced by the genie that was once called the IT revolution.
They aren't going after the people who have realized over-technicalized life is bad for humans. They're going after the kids who grow up in it and will take until their 30s to realize they've had depersonalization disorders their entire lives.
I think you soon won’t need much attached to your head. What about when the tech is a light as a pair of glasses - then contact lenses. Far fetched? In 1995, when mobile phones were for the rich, and internet for the geeks, tell people you will be required to own a mobile phone and an online account in order to be allowed in a shop. That’s what it is in Australia right now.
A common argument for why humanity has never encountered extra-terrestrial life is that any hyper advanced civilization likely moved into a virtual world. Do you believe this is unlikely and humanity is not headed in this direction?
You are right. Pride comes before a fall, and Zuck thinks he is better than Cook, Musk, Bezos, by building the multiverse he will restore his place as the greatest technologist of our time
Maybe I'm too old, but I don't know a single person with Oculus, not even among my younger coworkers.
I don't discount that it could be the next big thing, because wtf do I know, but it feels very niche to me, and certainly not something that can get the engagement like a phone can. And in terms of money, Facebook itself is a printing press, I wonder what the business model is for this? Selling games or experiences? Billboards in an AR world?
Addicting people to living in a fake world where anything is seemingly possible, and then exploiting it. Basically the same M.O. as their other products, but on a "next level."
I got one. My honest opinion is that it's potential is immense, but I wouldn't suggest anyone to get one atm.
Professional headsets will likely become more widespread over the coming years and I fully expect that most desk jobs will replace their displays with a headset... But that's still at least 10 yrs off, likely longer. A prerequisite would be that it's not as stuffy/heavy to wear, but that's already happening at a surprising rate.
It also makes remote contacts (i.e. remote work, family calls etc) very different, as oculus just added face tracking to their newest headsets... So your avatars face mirrors your real face.
The presence you feel in these contexts is hard to explain and has to be experienced imo.
That's my experience, too. I know a lot of people who are very into tech, across the entire age range. I don't know a single person who owns one of these. But I think they're mostly used by the hardcore gamer crowd, and I only know a couple of those (and neither have a VR headset).
The only person with Oculus is Mark Zuckerber as he owns Facebook that owns Oculus. Maybe you mean Quest or Rift? I personally don't know anybody who owns an iPad.
We can call them whatever we want to. Fuck them for trying to take over both "meta" and "metaverse." This is them trying to become _the_ VR world just by having _the right name_.
I don't know anyone that calls "xfinity" anything but "comcast." I'm pretty sure "xfinity" was them trying to get away from their nickname "comcrap."
Imagine if the world collectively said "no" and kept right on calling them Facebook?
They're going to run around slapping anyone who uses "meta" or "metaverse" with C&D letters figuring nobody will have the money to fight them in court.
I'd chip in to the legal fund for whoever says "see you in court" to Facebook. I bet a lot of people would. Maybe someone like the EFF should set up a "meta defense" warchest.
I hope they have serious plans for changing how VR works today. VR quickly loses it's appeal after a few hours. The isolation it brings with it is a huge issue. AR holds more promise in terms of mass appeal but I'm not sure we have that one quite figured out yet technically and from a UX perspective.
I know very little about VR so maybe this will be very off.
My guess is they want to address that isolation aspect by making it feel better to interact with others, bringing more people together in the VR space.
But this is me interpreting your "the isolation it brings with it" as people just exploring VR by themselves.
Yeah, I'm a VR nerd but I now find that wearing a VR helment for too long creates a kind of existential loneliness that will be hard to solve with better technology.
This discounts a lot of failures and products without real success:
- Facebook Apps
- Facebook Home
- Facebook Workplace
- Facebook Portal
- Facebook Essentials
What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed them.
I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't have a track record of building anything worthwhile outside of their core offering (ie, the Facebook product).
>Don’t like Facebook one bit, but Zuck is almost always spot on with his bets. So yes, incredibly scary as it has a high likelihood of succeeding.
Instagram was growing like crazy, even faster than Facebook in its early days so acquisition was no-brainer. Instagram used Facebook's social graph so acquisition made even more sense.
On the other hand WhatsApp had hundreds millions users at the time of acquisition and Larry Page was very close to acquiring it before Zuck but Facebook offered more money that's why it turned out to be one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of Internet($19bn). WhatsApp's huge userbase and rapid growth could've endangered Facebook Messenger that Zuck was about to separate from main Facebook app and make it standalone instant messaging Facebook app.
So both Instagram and WhatsApp were no-brainer and made perfect sense and Facebook had cash pile to do it so they did it.
I think their internal definition of metaverse is probably less literal than people in the media seem to picture - I think they are actually betting on the future of however people communicate, whatever that ends up looking like, be that WhatsApp, social media, VR or something else entirely.
Even their presentation showed that with a solid mix of different ways of communicating and I'm pretty sure that wasn't just accidental. On one level its nice to see a much more expansive definition of metaverse (which IMO already exists) but on another terrifying that FB wants to be part of basically every human interaction.
I don't think this downplays Oculus, but they also announced today that they are going to start scaling back Facebook integration with Oculus and start allowing other login methods besides Facebook.
Honestly, I think this is less scary than having Facebook acting as a "public square". A meta-verse has a higher bar of entry than a website - including specialized hardware - and it's less likely that governments and businesses will distribute information exclusively in some meta-verse vs. it just being another channel for content distribution.
Websites once required "specialized hardware". And if you've got today's top end VR rigs, it's sorta obvious that the world is going to go this way - it's too good, and productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle for the mind". Plus it'll get way cheaper in the future. Note that I'm not talking about entertainment usecases, which are also good - I'm saying metaverse is clearly the future of work, with massive ramifications if Meta is able to invest enough to make it appealing to regular people. And I think Facebook has way more than enough resources to make this a reality.
Right now, work in the metaverse still looks like 8+ emulated screens floating in a sphere around you. And this is probably not the long term best way to work. The real question is what are the new primitives, is there a new underlying platform, can everyone get equal access to that platform, and who owns that platform.
Just like Apple is making intel chips obsolete with the M1 on Mac, Meta probably is aiming to make laptops obsolete/niche in the long run.
I can't tell you how many times i've had political conversations in VR while playing a game. It's not super common, but it happens.
I kind of fear a day when i'm just having a casual conversation with someone, and suddenly their voice becomes garbled becauese an AI detected they were telling me some "misinformation".
Is this bet on VR making the goggles a hardware requirement? So this new world will only be available to those who can afford gaming hardware and a high speed internet connection?
Readit News
Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise.
I'm personally keen on the AR/VR space (surrounded by headsets here), but the early adopters are so polarized about Facebook/Oculus's involvement. I don't know if a rebrand (is this really that?) would be enough for the tech crowd to forget and move on.
I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter.
> Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow?
I mean, that would be nice for users, but:
a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally* able to give up ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, basically
b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?
And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed).
* in the sense of "this is the fundamental basis and goal of the company," not in a U.S.-founding-document sense
This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die.
Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can.
Edit: clarify
That's the wrong question.
The right question is "how many FB users would accept a free headset that advertisers paid for in exchange for access to your data and exclusive rights to place ads in front of you?"
$300 * 3 billion people, so $900 Billion give or take which coincidentally is right around the market cap of the entire company.
$200+ billion. They can't afford it. They couldn't get the manufacturing for it, either.
About 0.6-1 trillion dollars, give or take.
20-50 times what they earn per user.
3 billion fb users x 100 per unit = 300 billion
A letter to everyone would cost 3 billion
I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising company to be building "the metaverse".
I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse.
It's one use-case I can kind of see benefiting from blockchain protocols: enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse, by recording transfers of avatars and assets between the "metaworlds" making up the metaverse ("digital identity scarcity" is still an unsolved problem though, I think)
I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one?
Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction.
It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems.
We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.
> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse
Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data are instead motivated by selling users things they don't need.
Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory?
One of the great things about digital worlds/goods is they exist in microscopic (nanoscopic now) electrical circuits. They use practically no resources and can be duplicated for next to nothing. They also take up very little physical space to store. They're free from or at least resistant to most natural phenomena that create scarcity.
Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/
Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free.
Their existing prototypes are outrageously embarrassing. I'm the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, awkward, and embarrassingly goofy. At least The Office has some endearing quality (sorry for the weird comparison).
I'm not sure if it's Mark Zuckerberg's influence or what... but everything about Facebook lacks some sort of jour de vive. Like, their idea of "making work fun" is stuff like... an astoundingly cringe-worth video about healthcare open-enrollment? This kind of thing dumbfounds me https://vimeo.com/639318528... and I don't even consider myself a cynical person.
All of this feels only a few degrees removed from Jonestown.
They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the public at large has no knowledge of that. All the public knows is that it's decent hardware for a super low price compared to the competitors, it doesn't require a PC, and it's what most of their friends with a headset are using.
Can't really call having the most popular headset not succeeding, even if it is probably subsidized with their massive ads money making machine.
I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true.
< 30 is the _largest_ proportion of facebook users
https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-u...
Even putting Facebook aside Oculus is dominating the VR space due to cheap hardware, which I would bet is a ton of < 30 people.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265018/proportion-of-dir...
My point here is consumers don't _actually_ care about company morals, despite the prevailing narrative.
Deleted Comment
One of the best dystopian explanations for the Fermi paradox is that intelligences eventually figure out how to immerse themselves in high fidelity fantasy worlds and basically sit around and masturbate until some black swan event like a planet killer astroid or a gamma ray burst destroys them. Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.
There seem to be three possible futures on offer today:
(1) A Brave New World with AR, VR, social media dopamine loops, ARGs and conspiracy LARPs, cheap drugs, and sex robots where the meaning of life is to withdraw into a fantasy world and masturbate until you die. This offers the comfort of rewards without challenges.
(2) Reactionary movements against modernity itself, proposing that we instead re-embrace feudalism or some kind of totalitarianism where the state or some Ubermensch gives us purpose. This includes authoritarian fundamentalist religious movements, the alt-right, neoreaction, etc. This offers the comfort of the "devil we know" and futures that resemble our past.
(3) SpaceX Starship and the next frontier, a future where we embrace difficult adventures in the real world with high risk but high payoff. This offers the least comfort but a lot of growth and experience.
Choose wisely.
You say this with a maybe as though it isn't already a certainty.
Nothing can stop it from happening. There will always be brainpower available, willing, and capable of contributing to computer aided fantasy and isolation. Not that it has to necessarily be a bad thing, mind.
OTOH plenty of things could make it impossible to succeed with a starship.
I don't know if you have a more narrow view of this idea or specifically mean VR/AR, but that just sounds like what massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft are. I think Roblox is even a broader use case, though I am fairly unfamiliar with that.
MMOs have been very viable from both a business and user stand point and have been a fairly big thing for going on a quarter century or so at this point. Whether these branch into more of the Second Life non-game social space or into being largely AR/VR driven is pretty up in the air, but it's not some sci-fi concept really.
The video in the initial tweet is up to 2.1 million views: https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560?...
VRChat or someone building on their proof of concept is likely to make it happen. It won't be Facebook with its VR Slack.
Both have a purpose, both are subsets of the same demographic... but both vote very differently with their wallets.
Personally, I don't mind FB taking over the casual market. There are still alternatives and the technology will advance faster with such a big company behind it.
That being said, I won't be touching the Metaverse unless I can't avoid it.
One step closer to real life Shadowrun.
Having just one metaverse everyone uses seamed like the worst thing in Ready Player One - because then one entity can control it and for their rules and morals on all participants.
Much harder to do that with multiple competing incompatible metaverses.
They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web and still end up with one of the most popular hubs.
If people who value their privacy can setup their own hubs, i'm pretty much OK with Facebook speeding up the advancement of AR/VR technology for the next several years using their advertisement dollars.
Thanks I needed the laugh.
That feeling when you don't have a single original idea, and unironically view Black Mirror episodes as a blueprint.
There is no polarization at all. I don't know a single person who is happy about being forced to use FB in order to be able to use the equipment they have bought.
"…but connecting people was always much bigger…it was always clear that the dream was to feel present with the people we care about…here we are in 2021, and our devices are still designed around apps, not people. The experiences we’re allowed to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever, and high taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the way that we are meant to use technology. The Metaverse gives us an opportunity to change that, if we build it well. But it’s going to take all of us…Together, we can create a more open platform."
When he says this, I hear between the lines that the platform will be open to all contributors as long as the "open platform" belongs to Meta. How does he not realize that by seeking to dominate and own this "open platform" instead of working outside of his company to build a truly open platform with others is actually open?
Does he not read enough sci fi or literature in general to know that by having so much power and not seeking to let go a bit more, he opens himself up to the same risks and temptations faced by myriad dystopian villains?
>We don’t think about this as if different companies are going to build different metaverses. We think about it in terminology like the Mobile Internet. You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet and I don’t think in the future it will make sense to say that we are building our own metaverse either. I think we’re each building different infrastructure and components that go towards hopefully helping to build this out overall and I think that those pieces will need to work together in some ways.
https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...
Of course not; buying up competitors is much more practical (why build what you can buy?). So this is presumably the same strategy Facebook plans for any competing companies that make successful use of whatever open systems underlie "the metaverse".
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/faceboo...
The BuzzFeed journalist shared a video on her Twitter that illustrates use of metaverse by Facebook HR
https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos
https://player.vimeo.com/video/639318528 (Ctrl+U, Ctrl+F mp4)
https://archive.org/download/facebook_open_enrollment_2022/F...
What the journalists are not discussing is whether and how "the metaverse" will be used to surveil people and support advertising. No discussion of whether/how it embodies "privacy by design". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design
[1] https://www.facebook.com/facebookrealitylabs/videos/56153569...
If I was FB I would have announced at least a protocol or some technical foundation, even if it's purely preview.
But with the current discussion, I'm surprised we haven't heard more from other players in the field except facebook. What about the makers of VRChat or Second Life? Metaverse-style virtual realities are their bread and butter - and now for the first time, we have a discussion about this subject that includes the larger public. Shouldn't they be all over this?
And yet, the only ones talking about the "Metaverse" seems to be Facebook - pardon, Meta. So I wonder, if this whole Metaverse discussion an actual discussion at all or is it just Facebook kicking up dust?
"If you can't change the product, change the packaging."
Wouldn't that be fitting because the word comes from a bad sci-fi pulp story?
Did you bother to watch the Keynote? That's what they said they are doing.
Dead Comment
I have yet to see a single federated system that has demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's usual playbook, which is proven.
Sometimes what's good for markets & the world doesn't have to be owned & commercial. Sometimes the availability of resources such as info-resources like httpd can beget enormous commercial success while themselves not having much commercial success.
A Tim O'Reilly saying comes to mind: create more value than you capture. In some cases, without setting free the core idea & letting people run wild, you'll never stand a chance of capturing any value what-so-ever.
No one should own it, the only non-dystopian metaverse would be open hardware and software and decentralized/p2p connectivity.
Meta, ortho, para.
Paraverse. Orthoverse.
We can't keep using metaverse now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Identity_Integration....
Neverse for short.
I don't want them to own it. I'm 100% sure.
I am absolutely certain that nobody should own it.
whether you agree or disagree, the more interesting question is the details behind what Meta could build
the answer is not federation. federation doesn't scale.
No, going back to your original premise the only thing 'interesting' for me about Facebook is how dismally awful the company is and how nakedly sociopathic Zuckerberg is.
A 2007 "One More Thing" was the announcement of the iPhone and the future of mobile computing. Now a 2021 "One More Thing" is the announcement of a company rebrand to avoid government regulation.
Dead Comment
I don't think we should take that at face value; Zuckerberg of course has strong motivations to appear completely committed, including a desire to motivate employees, partners, etc., and a desire to distract from FB's current bad news (which might explain the timing - why now?). If we take it at face value, we are part of the messaging.
For one thing, FB's metaverse is an over-the-horizon technology and product, very much vapor at this point and one that may never happen. The iPhone went on sale months after Jobs' announcement (IIRC).
More interesting is that FB possibly has lost so much confidence in its brand that it's de-emphasizing it, which seems like an overreaction to me.
"You've got mail!" LOL
The obvious distinction being Jobs, with his "one more thing," announced an actual product.
Here is list: https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/one-more-thing-3793072/
how does FB changing their name affect their chances at regulation?
They can even list Instagram on the market selling maybe a 5% equity.
It feels like only regulators can take on them, but that too is unlikely to happen, except some feeble attempts in Europe
It might as well act like a faceless corporation, but it is far from "faceless"... I think. Consider f.e. Tesla's face, or Amazon's face.
Could you elaborate on that please?
> "One More Thing" is the announcement of a company rebrand to avoid government regulation.
Aww, kids are so cute when they're having a temper tantrum
The London Dungeon is near the Eye and has been around since the 70s, albeit in different forms and location. They moved closer to the Eye due to rail station construction in 2013, I believe? Down the street from the old London Dungeons location is the London Bridge Experience, which generally gets better reviews and doesn't appear to be owned by Merlin Entertainment. I'd avoid both, but neither appear to match your description.
Also:
"As big of a company as we are, we've also learned what it is like to build for other platforms. And living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. Most of all, I've come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things, and holding back the entire internet economy. [...] We'll continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs so consumers and developers have choice rather than forcing them to use the Quest store to find apps or reach customers."
I mean... Quest had this ability before. And Facebook took it away. And now they want us to clap for them when they say they're kind of bringing it back, at some point in the future, in some kind of limited capacity for work accounts?
Call me skeptical.
I'm not really aware of any platform (including Quest) where I would say that Facebook is doing a good job of supporting consumer choice, and I've read plenty of leaked internal communications from the company that suggests they're internally pretty hostile to the idea (Mark included).
Maybe they've turned over a new leaf, but if Mark wants us to all give him the benefit of the doubt that a metaverse is going to be different, he could start by showing this commitment with... any of their current products, really.
There's a lot of talk here about how Facebook is going to be moving into the bold new world of user agency and privacy and choice, and not much acknowledgement that Facebook is responsible for making these platforms what they are today. I don't like Mark's subtle insinuation that Facebook is doing something new or bold by getting rid of restrictions on Oculus that he created. Especially when he hasn't actually fixed the problem, he's just vaguely assured people that the problem might get fixed a year from now, maybe.
He wants credit for swinging in a new direction, and he hasn't actually swung in that direction. Well, prove it, Mark. Prove it with your existing products before you start bragging about how good your next product will be.
Also, their "support" for sideloading, while better than nothing, requires a valid phone number or credit card number to sideload anything.
That said there are privacy controls. You interact with other Oculus users through a customizable username. And your Oculus activity can be set to be shown to "Only me" (or Oculus friends, or FB friends, or public).
But FB themselves are obviously still collecting all the data they can.
How much work does that take?
> I've come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things
A shot at competitors' app stores.
Especially since the original Quest didn't require a Facebook account. It required a Quest account, but it didn't have to be explicitly linked to Facebook. (It's also one reason why I still use my original Quest and haven't gotten the updated model).
Assuming not good or bad intent but meta intent would mean they're working on a meta account, so while you stop into a 'verse it's not your social, it can be whatever, but they'll link all your accounts in the meta umbrella.
Prior to that, since around 2012 it was an unused Wordpress site [1] that redirected to meta.compgu.com (which is now "tekman.cc", a consulting firm or something.
And its earliest owner (at least as captured by wayback) was a California events company "Meta Productions: Producers of Meet, Mix and Match. Promoting awareness through metamorphosis" [2]
edit: out of curiosity, I just noticed that one of the most famous domains that refused to sell out [3] — steam.com — is now apparently for sale?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160110141037/http://meta.com/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150228180854/http://meta.compg...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20081002050002/http://www.meta.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100425061122/http://meta.com/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20161023041828/http://steam.com/
Imagine acquiring a company via your non-profit purely to grab the name and domain names for your for-profit.
Announcement: https://cziscience.medium.com/meta-transition-5f66b1fae475
These trademarks covered: “promoting the goods and services of others via computer and communication networks using targeted and non-targeted methods; operating on-line marketplaces for sellers of goods and/or services … providing advertising space via the global computer network … creating on-line virtual communities … hosting electronic facilities for others for organizing and conducting meetings, events and interactive discussions via communication networks”
So pretty likely to conflict with Facebook.
However, they transferred all of these to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in May: https://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/assignment-tm-7299..., and as you mentioned, are now shutting down. It’s not a great look. I would feel pretty bad if I had devoted years of my life to building meta.org to now see how it was used
...I can't tell if it's intentional that the page loads initially with the "facebook" brand in the uppper left and then quickly overwrites it with meta.
What a joke. Is there a more bluntly obvious PR than inverting everything you're being criticized for?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The type of world Facebook is describing is always -- 100% of the time -- a dystopia if it is a privatized, corporate-controlled AR/VR layer where ordinary people need permission and contracts to interact with each-other. Anything any single company or coordinated group of FAANG companies make will be awful when scaled up to the level Mark is talking about. There's no promise they can make to me, there's no strategy they can pursue to ease my worries. Purely by virtue of a single company (or a group of FAANG companies) being in charge of it, it's already garbage.
Having said that, of all of the companies to try and assert control over a "metaverse", Facebook is probably amongst the least suited and most dangerous companies to do so. If they can't even run the Oculus platform competently, how can they possibly claim they're competent enough to run a giant industry-wide platform on top of Oculus?
----
> The metaverse will be a collective project that goes beyond a single company. It will be created by people all over the world, and open to everyone.
And this stuff is just complete nonsense. No platform that Facebook has ever been involved with has ever even remotely come close to being "collective" or "open" to everyone worldwide, and it's just wildly insulting to pretend that anything about that is going to change now.
Facebook can't even launch this announcement article without making a bunch of XHR requests and falling over if Javascript isn't enabled. So sure, let's all close our eyes and pretend that they're magically capable of building an accessible, open VR platform that respects user privacy/agency. What has Facebook ever done in its entire history as a company that would make us believe that they are in any way trustworthy or qualified enough to try and build a consumer platform/medium of this scale?
I'm pretty sure this literally just means "it'll have apps"
So it's "created by people all over the world, and open to everyone" in the same way iOS is. Sounds like a great replacement for reality
They are going all in on metaverse / have decided that the future of oculus is the primary long term bet, not facebook itself.
And they have the money to make it so.
This is incredibly scary, and probably a good investment.
Gotta remember outside of Oculus, their entire product portfolio exists on top of the platforms of their competitors. This is their play to own the entire thing from the foundation up and the resources they'll be willing to use to accomplish that will be huge and really their only competition is Apple because Google gave up.
Metaverses have always been niche. Most people don't like things attached to their head. Remember 3D TVs?
But, perhaps you and they are right. For the first time in my life, I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no part in it.' Please don't take this as like, suicidal or anything, more maybe going off grid or moving to another country.
I feel like that about ever larger part of the whole tech world. I am torn - I can still muster a lot of techno-optimism when I think for example about possible benefits of advanced AIs for humanity. But than I imagine the world where the most advanced AIs are controlled by corporations like Google and Facebook... I have a bad feeling about this.
I am trying to find some reasonable middle ground between becoming a luddite and just continuing like I do not see all those unforeseen negative impacts produced by the genie that was once called the IT revolution.
I think it is. Not the current crap hardware, but bit further advanced it definitely has a place.
The gamers are basically on board already, streamers would benefit too and porn has a big chunk in VR already.
Sharp headset that can render text clearly would be huge.
I don't discount that it could be the next big thing, because wtf do I know, but it feels very niche to me, and certainly not something that can get the engagement like a phone can. And in terms of money, Facebook itself is a printing press, I wonder what the business model is for this? Selling games or experiences? Billboards in an AR world?
Addicting people to living in a fake world where anything is seemingly possible, and then exploiting it. Basically the same M.O. as their other products, but on a "next level."
Professional headsets will likely become more widespread over the coming years and I fully expect that most desk jobs will replace their displays with a headset... But that's still at least 10 yrs off, likely longer. A prerequisite would be that it's not as stuffy/heavy to wear, but that's already happening at a surprising rate.
It also makes remote contacts (i.e. remote work, family calls etc) very different, as oculus just added face tracking to their newest headsets... So your avatars face mirrors your real face.
The presence you feel in these contexts is hard to explain and has to be experienced imo.
I don't know anyone that calls "xfinity" anything but "comcast." I'm pretty sure "xfinity" was them trying to get away from their nickname "comcrap."
Imagine if the world collectively said "no" and kept right on calling them Facebook?
They're going to run around slapping anyone who uses "meta" or "metaverse" with C&D letters figuring nobody will have the money to fight them in court.
I'd chip in to the legal fund for whoever says "see you in court" to Facebook. I bet a lot of people would. Maybe someone like the EFF should set up a "meta defense" warchest.
My guess is they want to address that isolation aspect by making it feel better to interact with others, bringing more people together in the VR space.
But this is me interpreting your "the isolation it brings with it" as people just exploring VR by themselves.
Did you mean something else?
- Facebook Apps
- Facebook Home
- Facebook Workplace
- Facebook Portal
- Facebook Essentials
What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed them.
I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't have a track record of building anything worthwhile outside of their core offering (ie, the Facebook product).
Instagram was growing like crazy, even faster than Facebook in its early days so acquisition was no-brainer. Instagram used Facebook's social graph so acquisition made even more sense.
On the other hand WhatsApp had hundreds millions users at the time of acquisition and Larry Page was very close to acquiring it before Zuck but Facebook offered more money that's why it turned out to be one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of Internet($19bn). WhatsApp's huge userbase and rapid growth could've endangered Facebook Messenger that Zuck was about to separate from main Facebook app and make it standalone instant messaging Facebook app.
So both Instagram and WhatsApp were no-brainer and made perfect sense and Facebook had cash pile to do it so they did it.
Maybe Second Life and those didn't take off as much because the technology wasn't yet there.
That being said, I still don't want Zuckerberg to be the king of it, but there are plenty of possibilities with high-definition VR/AR tech.
Unfortunately outside of Tweets, this is the best story I found on it at the moment: https://www.ign.com/articles/oculus-facebook-requirement-end...
To me that points to a 'log in with Meta' option.
Right now, work in the metaverse still looks like 8+ emulated screens floating in a sphere around you. And this is probably not the long term best way to work. The real question is what are the new primitives, is there a new underlying platform, can everyone get equal access to that platform, and who owns that platform.
Just like Apple is making intel chips obsolete with the M1 on Mac, Meta probably is aiming to make laptops obsolete/niche in the long run.
I kind of fear a day when i'm just having a casual conversation with someone, and suddenly their voice becomes garbled becauese an AI detected they were telling me some "misinformation".
Anyone know if people there are heavily influenced by his work?
How so? Searching for "metaverse" on LW yields 9 results, most of them are irrelevant.