Zuck is a pretty uninspiring orator, with a tendency to use flat metaphors and bland platitudes. He's also not much of a creative visionary. His version of what "metaverse" will be has Jetsons sort of logic. You get up, have some virtual toast and commute in a virtual car to a virtual office, then go home and feed your virtual pet. ... I'm exaggerating, but you get my meaning. JC, is, in contrast, quite inspiring.
Anyway, Zuck's easy to make fun of. Easy to underestimate too.
Back in the 90s, it was thought to have been proven that an AOL-like attempt to top-down control the WWW was doomed to failure. An open web was too powerful. Well... that was before Zuck.
In many countries, FB-only internet is free and that means FB-only internet is the internet for like a billion people. Meanwhile, lots of unsophisticated users who's first and only device is a smartphone are mostly just FB users. He defied conventional wisdom, made FB a walled garden. Zuck really did "do AOL."
Meanwhile, the IG & WA acquisitions are strategically flawless in retrospect. With his tactical skills in the early days, Zuck's managed to keep more shares and control over FB than other CEOs. He may not have style and he's not quite hip, but Zuck is effective in his strategies.
I'd like to believe Carmack is right and Zucks' lame, top-down VR metaverse is doomed... pun intended. But I also recall that Zuck bought John out, and he's the boss. That may not be coincidence.
Is underwhelming performance/delivery a deliberate strategy?
Carmack vs Zuckerberg I think can be summed up as follows: one builds things things people will genuinely like, and the other one force-feeds people until they like it and know no other option.
> In many countries, FB-only internet is free and that means FB-only internet is the internet for like a billion people.
I'm not so sure that this shows Facebook pulling off an odds-defying feat. AFAIK Facebook targeted people who would have never touched a mobile phone or have working internet otherwise. Any company with sufficiently deep pockets to subsidise internet for free could roll out a similar locked-down internet for these people.
Although Zuck is easy to mock about this move proves courage for a company as big as Fb.
In the end, zuck understands that the risk of not changing is much greater than the risk of staying the same. Technology is unstoppable
It proves he thinks everyone will follow along anyway
It proves Apple’s data labels and growing awareness digital ads drive little business, which proved Facebook is a non-contributor to the economy in a real way
Zuck is just looking to keep his good times rolling as interest fades. This isn’t courage, this is “the writing is on the wall, let’s try something sooner than later.”
Error 42: not the metaverse, a metaverse. the intrusive advertising, click bait metaverse. funded by advertising and includes google, facebook, youtube etc.
A pretty poor one, as it does great harm to the inhabitants. Intrusive advertising is based on being able to target specific people with messages (tracking). Different messages for different people. Gee, its almost like this mechanism might engender mistrust and divisiveness. Which in turn might fracture communities. And gee, one might even consider that foreign governments might use this as a weapon. Or potential dictators and other bad actors. Gee.
The clickbait metaverse is only one of an infinite number of alternatives. Each metaverse has a set of rules for how the inhabitants operate. Wikipedia and craigslist come to mind as non-members of the clickbait metaverse. Other rules would - for example no tracking - would create other metaverses.
Computer people have been trapped in a Silicon Valley mindset for decades, thinking there are universal rules to human interactions (namely game theory). You're spot on that many different universes/cultures are possible, and desirable.
We need a radical alternative to this shithole that Nation States and corporations have designed for us, or our children won't even have clear air or water left because we will have polluted everything, and for what?
I thought the juxtaposition between the cringey, overproduced keynote and Carmack’s talk was amazing. Just a guy in front of some monitors telling you the whole thing you just watched was nonsense. It was beautiful.
Having watched Zuckerberg’s keynote, I get the feeling he wants to feel excited again by building something new. Maintenance is a bit thankless and boring.
Carmack's point about it being about products is so important. Same way a game engine is an almost accidental side result from a great game, a worthwhile "metaverse" will be a accidental result of one or more great, useful products.
Have to say it's entertaining to see Carmack roast Zuck publicly.
The thing about the internet as we interact with it today that makes it so pervasive is that it generally enhances real world experiences. It doesn't replace them. It fills in the gaps in down time. People whip out their phones to text or take a video or catch up on social media or share something because the interaction is fast and the interfaces are complementary and the right balance of distracting enough to draw your attention, but not distracting enough that you can't convince yourself that you are loosely aware of what's around you. AR might work, but VR outside of your home seems like a stretch.
I'm a software developer and i pass literraly 80% of my time working to make my family survive to this world, and honestly the only thing that i have in mind it's to flippin go in the forest for a walk, i don't understand the thing of wanting so much to be isolated and wear a fucking VR mask, this world is fucked up !
I have an oculus, which I bought mostly out of interest. Not really a gamer.
Anyway, I use it once or twice a month to play a zombie shooting game with my brother, who lives overseas. We shoot zombies for an hour and chat. It feels kind of similar to golfing, bowling or somesuch. We can't do those in person, so we do it in VR.
So for me, VR is kind of a comms tool. A place to catch up. Alternative to video calls. Calling is great, but doing something together it just a normal way of bonding.
As always, the tech is a canvas. You can paint any pictures on it. That said, yeah... This kind of tech & gaming has shown a real proclivity for isolating us from reality and each other.
OOH, I think social VR has a lot of immediate potential, with current and next generation tech. It'll take a while before the user base, hardware, etc. will support blockbuster gaming, films and such. Social stuff can be more lightweight and simple. In that sense, fb is a sensible home for VR.
OTOH, fb's approach to software if goddam awful. Their whole paradigm is making software that makes people do things, not software that people do stuff with. That's likely to tip the balance in the antipattern favour.
Remarks like these remind me of something John Carmack said in Joe Rogan's interview:
>“There’s this piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it’s a terrible looking place,” Carmack told Rogan. “And people say, ‘This is the world you’re trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.’”
>“Is his life really better if he takes them off and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning. People don’t generally go, ‘Oh, you’re not experiencing the world around you because of air-conditioning’ … That is what human beings do, we bend the world to our will.”
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I will say this: I had to isolate myself for months during covid, because of chronic issues that increase the risk of getting ICU'd. And while I missed social contact and leisurely walking under the sun, I can't say that I ever felt imprisoned. If anything, in times like these I would love to have even the emulation of the experience that is walking through a forest without having to worry about my allergies, my joints, snakes or getting lost.
What this all means is that, you're not "better" or "worse" than me for wanting to go in the countryside. You're only different. The whole notion of "you have no life if you work in front of a computer most of the time" was absurd to begin with. How is doing something that I enjoy doing "no life"? The solution to that is simple: Instead of applying societal pressure by pointing out that someone refuses to have a life by focusing too much into games, programming, anime or whatnot to inspect the reasons why they're not attracted to what you claim to be as "having a life".
What I'm saying is, getting out once or twice a week to get my sun exposure for some vitamin D works just fine for me, and I hope people will stop pointing out that "I don't have a life because I prefer X over Y". It's wrong, it's borderline "no true Scotchman" and pivots over the real issue that is respecting people's preferences without feeling that you have "more life" than others.
It can be a pretty novel experience- neither VR headsets nor walks through a forest are substitutes for each other.
I have access to many many acres of forest, and am quite familiar with it. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I am unlikely to see many interesting places in person around the world... Pictures are nice, but will never do them justice. I wouldn't mind being able to take a 3d VR tour of them one bit.
Edit: That said, living in VR and never going for a walk through a forest would be utterly dystopian and nightmarish for me. The only thing keeping me from daily walks in the woods right now is hunting season.
In my mind the primary issue is the lack of quality of replication. VR tech is fine, but the quality is just not there. iPhones had a screen quality where you could barely tell there were pixels and eventually got to a high enough quality where no matter how close you looked you couldn’t see the pixels. That is the level of detail needed for VR to be get truly beautiful and our screens and processing power are simply decades away from them, let alone the quality of sound and the other senses.
I don't think any of these things are substitutes for each other. A book about the arctic is not an alternative to a visit. It's a substitute for another book, maybe.
The main way VFR competes with other stuff is competition for time, in the sense that TV, social media and such are.
This isn't for you. It's for the current generation of kids who've grown up having their attention spans destroyed by having a screen in front of them their whole lives.
A good chunk of them live online, having parasocial relationships with Twitch streamers and Youtubers, or buying skins to put on their characters in Fortnite. I have almost no idea what Roblox and Minecraft are besides world building, but kids get addicted to that too.
This reads very much like a “kids these days!” Complaint lodged against the next generation since time immemorial. Sure, some parasocial relationships can be harmful, and video game addiction is something to watch out for (though I’m not sure why you singled out Minecraft and Roblox specifically, they’re just fun creative games), but there’s nothing preventing a healthy balance of screen time, activities, and outdoor time with a bit of parental guidance.
If I had a kid, I’d be encouraging them to play Minecraft. I’m 25, and played during the very early days around 2009. I can’t see a way in which Minecraft was anything but good for my brain.
I regret the amount of my teens that I spent playing video games in general, but I don’t regret Minecraft. It’s such a genuinely positive and constructive experience in its openness. It’s like life - there’s no endgame or goal. No single way to play. You can decide you want to build a megabase connected by rail, you can decide you want to terraform a mountain, you can build crazy automatic machines to grow food or kill enemies for you. But it’s your choice, the game doesn’t push you in any direction outside of the very early game.
It also served as my introduction to computing - the in game wiring system is Turing complete. I learned about logic gates from Minecraft.
Yeah as a trail runner and technologist, I enjoy VR but I'm not sure anything could replace the sights, smells, and feeling of going on a run through the woods. Similarly I think there is room for both VR-sports (and e-sports) and traditional IRL athletics. One doesn't replace the other, but the skills, strategy, physical performance and endurance are very different to watch and to experience (each great/ fascinating in their own way).
Physical and virtual sports are similar in most regards, except when it comes to environmental impact. Taking a walk/swim in nature does little to no damage to your environment, unless you make it a big competition.
In comparison, any computerized activity will require tons of resources (and related industrial pollution) and slave labor to produce the hardware you're using, and more energy/resources to power the device. I'm not against video games, but do we need more hardware? Our hardware is extremely powerful already (though games are rarely optimized in any way) and as much as i can see human progress via Internet connectivity, i don't see any "usefulness" for VR technology: it seems to me that apart from requiring more hardware and potentially fueling gaming addictions and social isolation, there is little to no value proposition compared to Second Life and other software we've had for decades.
Nobody really wants that; which I think is what Facebook is missing (sorry, not calling them Meta just like
we still call Alphabet Google). I personally like VR, but in no way do I think it’s a replacement for the real world. For me, it’s just a more immersive video game experience that I can only handle for about an hour at a time.
IMO Facebook wants you to experience life entirely though their platform, because once you take a step back you realize that Facebook is this weird alternate world where everyone is angry all the time, truth has no meaning and there are no social norms.
Meanwhile, when you DO step back into real life, you realize many of the people who probably want to murder you online are perfectly nice in person. Or that most of the people you talk to on Facebook are people you used to be friends with but would never make time to see in real life because you’re not that close anymore. And that Facebook might not be reflective of reality, which threatens their engagement metrics. So they want to shape your reality to be less threatening to them. I couldn’t think of a more dystopian concept — fortunately the value proposition is not appealing to most.
I agree with you completely. It actually makes me angry that corporations will seemingly stop at nothing to rape the Earth for their own profit and control. They want to
replace everything natural and beautiful with a cheap simulacrum, and hope that the SSRIs and porn keep the population complacent while they take everything away from them.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's "fucked up". Do you think that about all things not aligned with your personal and subjective preferences?
I agree totally. All I want is to be more efficient at work and reduce the screen time so I can enjoy what the real world offers. Taking the red pill guys, not the blue pills!
VR has been a bust because decent VR requires a heavy thing attached to your head, basically an empty room in your house, and a computer that (at least pre-covid auto prices) cost more than many of the cars on the road in the United States.
My friend has had a vive for years, he has an entire room dedicated to it so you can actually walk around. Its being driven by a several thousand dollar computer and makes the room unusable for anything else as you have to keep the floor vacant so you can actually walk around. If I had a room to spare, and 5-6k dollars to drop, I'd have it but when you're taking home about $500 a week and don't have an empty room...
The cheaper options, where you're just sitting on your couch, aren't nearly as engaging or interesting (at least to me). Another thing to consider is how many people wear glasses, and how poorly these things work while wearing glasses because they mask them into your face and/or fog. If I want to get custom lens inserts, I'm looking at another $300-500 cost every 12-18 months (that's assuming any can actually accommodate my astigmatism and the prism requirements I need).
Whether or not more and more people will be unemployed or not due to advances in technology and shifts in society is probably up to debate. I personally think that we'll see more unemployment with uneducated folks. And even if they work it will be paid badly, unstable due to being easily replaceable and rather stressful and dull.
Same for having a family. Finding a spouse will be difficult for the disposable and getting children risky. So, also not an option for many.
And access to a forest - as in a place with nature where you can walk for half an hour without meeting anyone. Good luck with that living in the middle of some ghetto without public or individual transportation options.
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Those products will be the new Opium for the People. The new couch with chips in front of the TV. A sedation and escapism.
I share your feeling, but most people i know who grew up in the big cities don't even have any form of connection with or appreciation for nature. It's just not part of their "natural environment".
Nation States and corporations have rendered the western world so meaningless and painful that most of us will do anything to get out of it for a while... whether it's via drugs or VR or whatever means at our disposal.
it’s strange, i think it’s because the fact the we work with computers all day, to others it’s play time because it doesn’t remind them of fixing bugs or working with spreadsheets all day
We should talk more about that ‘crappy life’ outside the virtual world. China reduces kids computer gaming sessions and invests in actually improving living conditions. Facebook’s ad sponsored empire turns productive members of society into zombies amidst a crumbling infrastructure. There surely is room for VR and AR in improving aspects of life but Mark’s vision has a taste of dystopia.
The only thing China can reduce is online gaming. A reduction that will cause the kids to have less opportunity to connect with others, make friends, learn to cooperate, learn to trust people, learn to protect their identity and learn what to do when the trust is betrayed.
You know, the things that might come in handy in 20 years in toppling oppressive regime.
Meanwhile taking Chinese kids out of global shared culture that is increasingly more interconnected, virtual and gaming related so they only trust and feel at home when they are fed familiar government messaging.
But I'm sure goal of Chinese government is strictly improvement of peoples conditions.
As if China does not resemble a mass-surveillance state dystopia already? I'm not sure "improving living conditions" in a country where The Party dictates every aspect of life is something to aspire to.
Sometimes I dispare! Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, <insert-other-multinational-big-US-company>, all seem to be a threat to the open internet they themselves used to become what they are. Obviously MS and Apple were big prior but they did use the internet to become bigger and are a threat with their respective walled gardens.
I am not here to pretend I know anything about whatever the metaverse is, but I do know one thing if it's controlled by any of these companies it's gonna be bad for the people using it.
FB execs aren't stupid. This is not about the metaverse, it is about deflecting from bad press and ill will into mockery about this aloof nonsense.
A few weeks or months ago you probably noticed your sentiment towards facebook turn pretty negative. Just thinking about the company as dorky instead helps their bottom line.
We all know this project isn't going anywhere, including maybe everyone but zuck.
The more noise about this lame ass project instead of how fb is ruining society, the better for them.
Readit News
Anyway, Zuck's easy to make fun of. Easy to underestimate too.
Back in the 90s, it was thought to have been proven that an AOL-like attempt to top-down control the WWW was doomed to failure. An open web was too powerful. Well... that was before Zuck.
In many countries, FB-only internet is free and that means FB-only internet is the internet for like a billion people. Meanwhile, lots of unsophisticated users who's first and only device is a smartphone are mostly just FB users. He defied conventional wisdom, made FB a walled garden. Zuck really did "do AOL."
Meanwhile, the IG & WA acquisitions are strategically flawless in retrospect. With his tactical skills in the early days, Zuck's managed to keep more shares and control over FB than other CEOs. He may not have style and he's not quite hip, but Zuck is effective in his strategies.
I'd like to believe Carmack is right and Zucks' lame, top-down VR metaverse is doomed... pun intended. But I also recall that Zuck bought John out, and he's the boss. That may not be coincidence.
Carmack vs Zuckerberg I think can be summed up as follows: one builds things things people will genuinely like, and the other one force-feeds people until they like it and know no other option.
Until they didn't anymore because broadband infrastructure, now they're a prefix that you say before you say "Time Warner"
How long until we get to say "Meta Disney"
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I'm not so sure that this shows Facebook pulling off an odds-defying feat. AFAIK Facebook targeted people who would have never touched a mobile phone or have working internet otherwise. Any company with sufficiently deep pockets to subsidise internet for free could roll out a similar locked-down internet for these people.
It proves Apple’s data labels and growing awareness digital ads drive little business, which proved Facebook is a non-contributor to the economy in a real way
Zuck is just looking to keep his good times rolling as interest fades. This isn’t courage, this is “the writing is on the wall, let’s try something sooner than later.”
A pretty poor one, as it does great harm to the inhabitants. Intrusive advertising is based on being able to target specific people with messages (tracking). Different messages for different people. Gee, its almost like this mechanism might engender mistrust and divisiveness. Which in turn might fracture communities. And gee, one might even consider that foreign governments might use this as a weapon. Or potential dictators and other bad actors. Gee.
The clickbait metaverse is only one of an infinite number of alternatives. Each metaverse has a set of rules for how the inhabitants operate. Wikipedia and craigslist come to mind as non-members of the clickbait metaverse. Other rules would - for example no tracking - would create other metaverses.
We need a radical alternative to this shithole that Nation States and corporations have designed for us, or our children won't even have clear air or water left because we will have polluted everything, and for what?
Edit: Here's Carmack's keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo
That’s the vibe that I got.
Have to say it's entertaining to see Carmack roast Zuck publicly.
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Anyway, I use it once or twice a month to play a zombie shooting game with my brother, who lives overseas. We shoot zombies for an hour and chat. It feels kind of similar to golfing, bowling or somesuch. We can't do those in person, so we do it in VR.
So for me, VR is kind of a comms tool. A place to catch up. Alternative to video calls. Calling is great, but doing something together it just a normal way of bonding.
As always, the tech is a canvas. You can paint any pictures on it. That said, yeah... This kind of tech & gaming has shown a real proclivity for isolating us from reality and each other.
OOH, I think social VR has a lot of immediate potential, with current and next generation tech. It'll take a while before the user base, hardware, etc. will support blockbuster gaming, films and such. Social stuff can be more lightweight and simple. In that sense, fb is a sensible home for VR.
OTOH, fb's approach to software if goddam awful. Their whole paradigm is making software that makes people do things, not software that people do stuff with. That's likely to tip the balance in the antipattern favour.
>“There’s this piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it’s a terrible looking place,” Carmack told Rogan. “And people say, ‘This is the world you’re trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.’”
>“Is his life really better if he takes them off and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning. People don’t generally go, ‘Oh, you’re not experiencing the world around you because of air-conditioning’ … That is what human beings do, we bend the world to our will.”
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I will say this: I had to isolate myself for months during covid, because of chronic issues that increase the risk of getting ICU'd. And while I missed social contact and leisurely walking under the sun, I can't say that I ever felt imprisoned. If anything, in times like these I would love to have even the emulation of the experience that is walking through a forest without having to worry about my allergies, my joints, snakes or getting lost.
What this all means is that, you're not "better" or "worse" than me for wanting to go in the countryside. You're only different. The whole notion of "you have no life if you work in front of a computer most of the time" was absurd to begin with. How is doing something that I enjoy doing "no life"? The solution to that is simple: Instead of applying societal pressure by pointing out that someone refuses to have a life by focusing too much into games, programming, anime or whatnot to inspect the reasons why they're not attracted to what you claim to be as "having a life".
What I'm saying is, getting out once or twice a week to get my sun exposure for some vitamin D works just fine for me, and I hope people will stop pointing out that "I don't have a life because I prefer X over Y". It's wrong, it's borderline "no true Scotchman" and pivots over the real issue that is respecting people's preferences without feeling that you have "more life" than others.
And we see that it clearly has a very negative impact overall so idk what kind of argument is that.
"everything sucked so we destroyed our environment and enslaved ourselves to machines to make it bearable"
I have access to many many acres of forest, and am quite familiar with it. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I am unlikely to see many interesting places in person around the world... Pictures are nice, but will never do them justice. I wouldn't mind being able to take a 3d VR tour of them one bit.
Edit: That said, living in VR and never going for a walk through a forest would be utterly dystopian and nightmarish for me. The only thing keeping me from daily walks in the woods right now is hunting season.
I don't think any of these things are substitutes for each other. A book about the arctic is not an alternative to a visit. It's a substitute for another book, maybe.
The main way VFR competes with other stuff is competition for time, in the sense that TV, social media and such are.
A good chunk of them live online, having parasocial relationships with Twitch streamers and Youtubers, or buying skins to put on their characters in Fortnite. I have almost no idea what Roblox and Minecraft are besides world building, but kids get addicted to that too.
Lots of money to be made.
I regret the amount of my teens that I spent playing video games in general, but I don’t regret Minecraft. It’s such a genuinely positive and constructive experience in its openness. It’s like life - there’s no endgame or goal. No single way to play. You can decide you want to build a megabase connected by rail, you can decide you want to terraform a mountain, you can build crazy automatic machines to grow food or kill enemies for you. But it’s your choice, the game doesn’t push you in any direction outside of the very early game.
It also served as my introduction to computing - the in game wiring system is Turing complete. I learned about logic gates from Minecraft.
In comparison, any computerized activity will require tons of resources (and related industrial pollution) and slave labor to produce the hardware you're using, and more energy/resources to power the device. I'm not against video games, but do we need more hardware? Our hardware is extremely powerful already (though games are rarely optimized in any way) and as much as i can see human progress via Internet connectivity, i don't see any "usefulness" for VR technology: it seems to me that apart from requiring more hardware and potentially fueling gaming addictions and social isolation, there is little to no value proposition compared to Second Life and other software we've had for decades.
IMO Facebook wants you to experience life entirely though their platform, because once you take a step back you realize that Facebook is this weird alternate world where everyone is angry all the time, truth has no meaning and there are no social norms.
Meanwhile, when you DO step back into real life, you realize many of the people who probably want to murder you online are perfectly nice in person. Or that most of the people you talk to on Facebook are people you used to be friends with but would never make time to see in real life because you’re not that close anymore. And that Facebook might not be reflective of reality, which threatens their engagement metrics. So they want to shape your reality to be less threatening to them. I couldn’t think of a more dystopian concept — fortunately the value proposition is not appealing to most.
But: As evidenced by the Gaming industry and the Entertainment industry ($150b+ combined rev), folks do want to escape from their usual environment.
If you're Facebook, and your mission's to connect the world, then metaverse sounds like one plausible solution to make that happen.
My friend has had a vive for years, he has an entire room dedicated to it so you can actually walk around. Its being driven by a several thousand dollar computer and makes the room unusable for anything else as you have to keep the floor vacant so you can actually walk around. If I had a room to spare, and 5-6k dollars to drop, I'd have it but when you're taking home about $500 a week and don't have an empty room...
The cheaper options, where you're just sitting on your couch, aren't nearly as engaging or interesting (at least to me). Another thing to consider is how many people wear glasses, and how poorly these things work while wearing glasses because they mask them into your face and/or fog. If I want to get custom lens inserts, I'm looking at another $300-500 cost every 12-18 months (that's assuming any can actually accommodate my astigmatism and the prism requirements I need).
- you are working
- you have a family
- you have access to a forest
---
Whether or not more and more people will be unemployed or not due to advances in technology and shifts in society is probably up to debate. I personally think that we'll see more unemployment with uneducated folks. And even if they work it will be paid badly, unstable due to being easily replaceable and rather stressful and dull.
Same for having a family. Finding a spouse will be difficult for the disposable and getting children risky. So, also not an option for many.
And access to a forest - as in a place with nature where you can walk for half an hour without meeting anyone. Good luck with that living in the middle of some ghetto without public or individual transportation options.
---
Those products will be the new Opium for the People. The new couch with chips in front of the TV. A sedation and escapism.
Nation States and corporations have rendered the western world so meaningless and painful that most of us will do anything to get out of it for a while... whether it's via drugs or VR or whatever means at our disposal.
These will be the same software developers that will end up building Progressive Web Apps for smart glasses made by a big tech company.
Probably it will have both AR and VR capabilities built in and the use case will be to use AR for outdoors (and indoors) and VR for indoors only.
Like it or not, it is going to happen and they will be building it anyway.
You know, the things that might come in handy in 20 years in toppling oppressive regime.
Meanwhile taking Chinese kids out of global shared culture that is increasingly more interconnected, virtual and gaming related so they only trust and feel at home when they are fed familiar government messaging.
But I'm sure goal of Chinese government is strictly improvement of peoples conditions.
I am not here to pretend I know anything about whatever the metaverse is, but I do know one thing if it's controlled by any of these companies it's gonna be bad for the people using it.
A few weeks or months ago you probably noticed your sentiment towards facebook turn pretty negative. Just thinking about the company as dorky instead helps their bottom line.
We all know this project isn't going anywhere, including maybe everyone but zuck.
The more noise about this lame ass project instead of how fb is ruining society, the better for them.