The main problem with Metaverse is that it it's an amusement park without any rides.
Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides. A Mandalorian spin-off series of interactive VR episodes that can be experienced with a group of friends? A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. Nobody's going to buy headsets to make a goofy looking avatar and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg in a Second Life remake. Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
The management of that rideless amusement park is also a little concerning. I'd love to see VR finally go mainstream, but I'd prefer it if pretty much anyone other than Meta were behind the platform that catches on first.
A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that.
There's a lot of VR content out there, and some of it is excellent, and some of it ties in to popular franchises (PS5 VR has a Star Wars game), and occasionally it's both (Halflife: Alyx for example) . None of it is enough to drive VR to be mainstream entertainment.
IMO the hardware simply isn't good enough for the mass market yet.
* Motion sickness is still a really big problem
* If you're short-sighted and wear glasses, then the picture will be blurry for you. The original PSVR worked around the issue by pushing the lends out so you could comfortably wear glasses and the headset, but none of the modern headsets afaik include this affordance. Wearing contacts isn't an option for a lot of people.
* Way too expensive. I can afford one pretty easily, but most people can't. For roughly the same price as a Quest you can get an iPhone SE which is going to offer significantly more value to the average person
* They're too heavy! People complain about a 240g iPhone being too heavy in the hand. The Quest is 503g on your head, and this headset in particular doesn't distribute weight very well. PSVR is slightly heavier, but is at least slightly more comfortable than the Quest due to its weight distribution.
I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
I really enjoyed using my friend's VR headset to slowly play through Half-Life: Alyx. I could manage about one level at a time before needing to take the headset off and take a break, because of motion sickness + how uncomfortable the whole thing was. I think there's still a lot of R&D to do before headsets are really in a position where regular people start buying them up en masse.
3D TV's didn't catch on, I think part of the issue is to get over the early adopters into mainstream there is the hurdle of wearing something over your eyes for hours at a time. The vast majority of people (aka mainstream) don't enjoy it. If people don't enjoy simple lightweight 3D glasses, they aren't going to enjoy the VR form factors out there.
I'm choosing the word enjoy because its not something like a car dashboard being touchscreen where people deal with it, this is entertainment and hobbies. If people don't enjoy it, they'll go do something else. VR will have niche use cases for sure and there will be some people that enjoy it but its not going to be mainstream.
I really like that analogy "amusement park without any rides". I really do think Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed.
But back to your analogye, it applies particularly well here because Disney are a master of delivering experiences and do exactly that through every possible medium. So if one sees Disney walking away from the Metaverse, that's not something I would interpret lightly - despite the rounds of firing being interpreted as a cost saving measure, it's just 50 staff members and not all of them are leaving the company. Disney aren't short of cash, so if they saw a future in the Metaverse they'd be there for defensive reasons alone.
Rather I think Disney realise that their own VR-initiatives will stand on their own, and their involvement would be propping up 3rd party platforms rather than yielding a benefit from them.
I think Meta are hoping that the Metaverse would emulate the Smartphone/Soft-store model, where developers would do the heavy lifting for the platform, but the crucial difference here is that a Smartphone is useful before even loading a single piece of 3rd party software. Everyone already had a phone when smartphones became a thing - but right now no one is walking around with a VR headset, or anything even vaguely approximating that.
> Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed.
No, this was Mark's personal Quest for the Next Big Thing. No one else in the company is delusional enough to believe it will go anywhere, they're just getting a fat paycheck.
VR going mainstream is difficult until they can get people to take anti-nausea meds with them.
The biology of humans works against VR in a lot of ways, and most people don't like the idea of taking anti-nausea pill just to experience VR.
(I take anti-nausea pills when I do VR, because VR is absolutely mindblowing)
I don't get nausea, but even without that I hate the experience of actually wearing the things. I find I get a lot of eye strain that prevents me from playing long sessions, the weight/bulk is uncomfortable, and it can get quite hot wearing a headset for any length of time. I think almost everybody will find VR goggles uncomfortable in SOME way.
These things are fun to mess around with, but I think very few people will ever want to wear goggles like this for more than an hour or so at a time, which inherently limits their appeal and potential applications. My widescreen monitor has none of these issues and it's plenty "good enough" for most games.
I think you are referring to old VR experience, the tech is pretty mature now, latency is super low, tracking is good, on pretty much any model. I play a lot of VR games and never get sick. The only one where I got a little dizzy was with 6dof FPS, which isn't really due to VR specifically.
Although it is true some people get sick easily in VR, those people tend to also have trouble with car sickness and sea sickness. I suppose you can say the same about cars and VR for that group.
I'd say the main problem is human beings are not mature enough to be trusted with such a service, it will be a rape and pillage campaign for all your data and all your interests and all your imagination. We create predator services and pretend they are 'just services', burning the end-user's trust for any similar "services" after they sour from the treatment of the first one they tried. We have a serious maturity problem in the human species, and it is dragging all our progress down and backwards.
> A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that
But probably a lot less than would watch a Mandalorian animated or real life spin-off TV series - and the VR version costs a lot more to create.
A lot of companies (Disney, Magic Leap etc) have spent a fortune trying to make the killer VR content but have failed. Apart from the sports/exercise apps (probably not enough to support the FB metaverse) are there any that would make people purchase a headset for?
It seems to me that everything in VR almost have to be fan-made or at least a-financial passion project, or else nothing works. Meta did not end up with that creepyverse by cutting costs, they ended up with it by throwing gold bullions at walls.
There's no way Disney had not made internal studies, the problem must have been that they can't set up a management and/or production model they like && that works for VR.
The only explanation I have for this is that to succeed in vr you need to do a lot of UX innovations. And innovation doesn't work well in most corporate environments.
It is an amusement park without rides operated by an entity who most people actively distrust.
Facebook/Meta IMO has poisoned the whole social media space to a degree, where the expectation I have for social media platforms in general has become one of "this is getting worse over time". Instagram now sucks more than it sucked before Facebook bought it. Facebook now sucks more than Facebook 15 years ago. Reddit now... You get the point. They could have done nothing except maintenance and neutral technical upkeep and the result would have been better than what we have today. And the only reason why we don't have that better thing is profits (or the lack thereof in the old platforms).
This tells me that capitalism is really bad at organizing social platforms (not that this surprises me).
I do not really think that is true. There is more than 2 billion active users on WhatsApp which is owned by Meta. Many people reading hackernews distrust them, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the general population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
There was also Secrets of the Empire[1], but AFAIK The Void no longer exists. It's too bad - the haptic/physical-props-and-environment aspect worked really well IMO.
Sounds like a video game to me, something that Disney has weirdly struggled with, having tried on several times to get into video games big time, only to shy away at the huge expense and challenge.
At the moment they've circled back to merely licensing out their IPs to other publishers.
Disney should get more into video games, and VR is great for video games.
VR for "metaverse" whatever it is that is. Not so sure!
The last time I went to Universal in LA, all the rides had a VR component to them, the real-life amusement parks are turning to VR + motion. Some of these were jiggly seats, others had flying platforms, and others pulled you in a train through VR scenes. (The ride that people liked the least was minions, which just had tipping and shaking seats, but the 3D made people sick.)
> Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
This is the refrain of Disney's theme park marketing, but I disagree. It's the fact that people want to say they were there. It's 100% the brand and nothing more. Marketing doesn't have to be, and often isn't, rational.
This is at the absolute core of why theme park experiences sell but VR does not. Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. Until the price of VR comes down to absolute rock bottom prices, there will not be acceptance of "VR experiences" and even so it's still a gamble whether anyone cares enough to buy that to experience on a whim frequently vs plan a vacation around it... I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
I am going to sorta disagree. I see your point and I am sure there is some of that. But hands down Disney parks are some of the best parks I have been to. With universal being a very close second. I am also probably never going back (price ratio is wrong and getting worse).
In this case a VR exp would have to feel like going to a park. However, there is something that is missing (or many somethings). You hanging with your friends and family. Now they could also all go get headsets and you hang together. But that seems oddly not the same. Buying that overpriced popcorn and basically 'fair food' is also part of it. Disney would have the best shot at making a park into a game. As most of their rides are 'dark rides'. Basically trains going thru experiences. A fixed park is little more than a carnival but in a fixed location and cleaned up nicely with theming. VR strips out the carnival aspects and is only theming. That strips out part of what you are going for.
I have also been to parks all by myself. That is what wearing a VR headset would feel like. It is not a good experience. You could say 'oh all your friends could get headsets too'. True but at that point you are now looking at similar costs as just going to the parks.
Oh man, this is not correct. As a dad who just went back to Disney after not having gone since I was 11 years old... We made fun of, "the brand" the entire time. All our friends would look down on us for handing over our hard earned money to a pretty gross fascist organization like Disney. We posted pictures, but only of our experiences.
For myself (a sample size of 1) it is all about the magical experiences and memories my child gets from experiencing a fantasy world of fun rides and adventure.
The whole metaverse thing has felt like a buzzword-without-meaning that was never going to live up to the hype (at least in any meaningful good way), but still sucks for the people losing the jobs.
The metaverse is the ultimate, final instance of the "... but on a computer!" fallacy [1], even moreso than the "virtual worlds" that prompted me to originally write that article. It's reality... but on a computer!
We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time.
Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits.
The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse".
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)
It reminds me of the brief fad when some folks really thought VRML or 3D Java or Flash interfaces to websites was going to be The Future not just for games or art project, but general web navigation. Turned out to suck for nearly everything, total dead-end.
What is fascinating about that there is just absolutely nothing good there. It isn't a case of a decaying thing, or a thing that contained a scam. The entire thing is nothing, rotten, worse than any videogame. It's really quite amazing.
It would be not notable at all except, there is a huge amount of money being passed around in it in order to achieve basically nothing.
The dreams about the metaverse discussed at the beginning are also just wild and bizarre. It seems to me that a lot of tech people and investor types are just bored and letting their imaginations run wild. AI taking over the world, living fully inside the metaverse, every object in the world being inside the metaverse to the point where the metaverse is considered more accurate than reality etc. They may as well be talking about time travel or faster than light travel. In reality we have...a worse version of second life
It's a shame that decentraland got millions to create a cold empty place , while open source 3d worlds like opensimulator which have a few thousand enthusiastic users, even willing to pay for their digital lives, remain completely unfunded and abandoned
Also watched it yesterday and I really can just summarise the video like this:
Massive crypto scam by people who are now bound to overhype the whole thing. Regular folks fall for it because they buy into the vision and have to believe otherwise everything falls apart. Companies fall for it because FOMO. Incredibly cultish.
The video is good but I don’t think it is worth the watch unless you have morbid curiosity about that particular project, or you want some crypto related cathartic release. I don’t feel better knowing the gory details of how terrible everyone and everything is in this circle.
That's very relevant: some people here are discussing the viability of VR and/or online games - these already exist, and are not commonly thought of as the meta verse. You don't need the meta verse to create a game!
The metaverse is businesses pushing for a platform which brings nothing of value, just for them to extract rent from those using it.
Facebook's approach to the Metaverse is a classic example of building based on "what's in it for us", not "what's in it for them?"
Thinking "what's in it for us" leads you to build a universe that you get to lord over. Putting interesting things that people want in it is someone else's problem.
Thinking "what's in it for them" leads you to build a single interesting thing people want. Then you expand it into a universe from there.
I think Zuckerberg assumed that what's in it for the user would be the same as it's always been at Facebook - socialize with your family and friends.
But why would I expect VR to be better than a Zoom call when Zoom calls with family and friends are already so wonky? Do I want to endure the same weird audio/video connectivity crap, only made even more uncanny by being immersed in it? Seems more honest to just keep it on a screen.
It wouldve been cool if they weren't so bloated/incompetent. The glorified skype usecase was always lame to me.
The potential for workflow efficiency (you can effectively have as many monitors as you want with the profile of a VR headset, remote work is even more portable than a laptop, looking at another desktop can be just as intuitive as another monitor on your own, more immersive and tune-able environment to focus on work) & display of data in 3d that is otherwise too unnavigable in 2D were really promising. Maybe we'll get there in another 10 years when the VR tech cycle completes its orbit again.
It's worse, why would I expect VR to be better than facebook video. I think facebook video is worse than zoom, to the point that internal employees will use zoom for meeting sometimes.
I feel like they should have built the world's best group video/audio product in 2 months, made it free, and used that momentum for metaverse
Also completely missing the part of the population who likes async communication with friends and family via any sort of messenger or text, and deliberately not anything interactive like video. But ok, we might be a minority.
Went in expecting to see at least a 1000 employees laid off.. but 50? Can that even be called a 'Division'? Is that Division on par with other divisions Disney runs, like Disney Studios (Marvel Studios, Disney, Pixar...), Streaming (Disney+, ESPN+) or the Theme Park division?
I don't think Disney had any metaverse building ambitions. This "metaverse" team was probably working on designing NFTs and digital "assets" for any metaverse that emerges.
This is an uninformed take based on recollections of what they've released and my understanding of Disney's competencies.
Somebody watching closely will hopefully have more insight.
Which sounds like it could be why it isn't a "division" any more. VR feels like an all-or-nothing play where Disney throwing a bunch of Disney IP, +AAA quality worlds, PR & marketing dollars and carefully-selected hardware partnerships could mainstream VR as family friendly entertainment, whereas making assets for other people's open worlds participated in by a niche group of adult men seems like the sort of thing that's more likely to lead to reputation damage than significant revenue streams
My guess from having worked in close proximity to the executives involved is that it was more of a skunkworks/prototyping group, possibly partnering with ILMxLab, Pixar, Disney Animation, and the streaming group. While Disney is not really a tech company, there are pockets of high end expertise which I think are relevant to the loosely defined “metaverse.”
Mike White, the exec leading the group, reported into Kareem Daniel, who was central to Chapek’s vision of Disney. So it was a significant role. Mind you, Daniel was fired about five seconds after Iger returned.
Terminology varies widely between companies but terms like "division" are usually based on position in the org chart rather than size. It looks like the metaverse division was organized under Mike White, whose title appears to have been "SVP of next-generation storytelling." It's common for a group that reports at the SVP level to be called a division, even if its small. The higher up in the org chart you find a group, the more important it probably is to the strategic focus of the company, even if it's small.
That not how the word "division" works when talking about business, Instagram was made of 10 people when it already had billions of users and if Disney or anyone else had bought them it would certainly be a "division" given that their tasks are a separate entity from their rest of the org.
When I onboarded at IBM, during legal and compliance training they said “the easiest way to get promoted to executive at IBM is to do something wrong, and get quoted in the press about it”. The idea being: the media will refer to anyone who works for a company as an ‘executive’ regardless of how accurate that term is to their actual role.
Similarly, in news reporting, every department is a ‘division’.
It was one of Bob Chapek's visions, so as expected was extremely half arsed.
He had very little concept of what Disney should be doing so just thew out a bunch of ideas with very little budget and expected them to work, whilst also penny pinching beyond belief.
VR, meta verse always seemed overhyped to me. Combine real time 3D model generated from MetaHuman + AR + ChatGPT + voice and you have a business that will dwarf Apple. I bet people would easily pay 100/month for AR companion based on their celeb crush or whatever other AR companion they crave.
Seriously, anyone with an interest in AR/VR and even a passing tolerance for anime ought to give Dennou Coil a chance. For those curious, it's better than just safe for work, it's a family friendly series that you could watch with your kids (or your parents).
My biggest issue has always been that users are really damn good at immersing themselves using just a screen and a controller, and that's about a hundred times more convenient than any VR system.
> users are really damn good at immersing themselves using just a screen and a controller
Not only that, but VR/AR doesn't solve any incremental immersion blockers. My brain is very good at 'not looking away from the screen,' it's awful at overriding my inner ear balance, temperature sense, smell sense, circadian rhythm, etc.
Sure but that limits the applications. Want to have Gordon Ramsey to advise you while you are cooking? Or have r2d2 roaming your house? or play poker at your actual house with lock stock and two smoking barrels characters? and so on ...
The immersive VR rides that they are coming up with at the amusement parks are pretty good. The Avatar Dragon ride, Rise of the Resistance, etc...Universal Studios is going in this direction more aggressively, however it seems (just check out the new Mario ride).
I think you're confusing rides, Flight of Passage (Avatar) to the best of my knowledge is not VR (maybe traditional 3D glasses), Rise is definitely not VR (not even 3D) and Mario Kart is AR with a headset overlaying graphics over physical sets. None of them are VR in the traditional sense of the word.
The biggest test of VR at theme parks in the US came with various Six Flags around the country strapping VR goggles (Samsung IIRC) on some of their coasters and drop towers. They're pretty widely regarded as failures. I got to try two of them and they definitely were not a plus to the ride experience, especially on a drop tower where the view from the top is half the fun.
The Mario kart ride is probably the most disappointing I’ve ridden in my life. It’s just a slow roller coaster with an overlay of other karts using HoloLens.
The point of useful technology is to make things more convenient. This is less convienient than typing queries on a keyboard, even if there were no HMD involved.
Pretty sure people had the exact reaction when online dating came out thinking you must be some social outcast. Or when some people chose to WFH way before it became remotely normal and were branded antisocial for choosing to not be in the office with the colleagues.
Why be such a hater? I don't get it.
Just because some people are into different things than you or what society deems 'normal' doesn't make them weirdoes.
Or lonely or bored. Want a cyberpunk cyborg dog that can speak in a voice of darth vader? Want Cara Delevingne to be your english lang tutor? Want to pair program with Linus Torvalds? Want Neytiri from Avatar to be your personal Yoga instructor?
Forget Disney and Meta. Epic just shipped the metaverse. It's here. Now.
Epic just shipped the Unreal Engine editor as a plug-in for Fortnite. Most of the things you can do with Unreal Engine as a game developer are now available to Fortnite users. What's created doesn't have to look anything like Fortnite.
Pretty cool. Reminds me a bit of Cube 2: Sauerbraten, which had realtime collaborative editing, too. Pretty cool thing for the age it came out in, and it's open source.
I mean fortnite has had already had film festivals, and "concert" experiences you can experience with your friends. I've been through some, and its kinda fun.
They seem to be wanting to build the tools, to build that. They know its a tough road, and being resourced starved (compared to facebook) they're trying to do it a more "open" way with the other game engines participating (He mentions Godot, Unity in his talk), artists etc. Its part of Tim Sweeney's thing to break down walled gardens. Epic being privately held, sort of doesn't have to deal with shareholders...
Nobody even knew what the Metaverse was actually supposed to be, but once Facebook renamed itself to Meta every big company wanted to have their part of the Metaverse too. If Zuckerberg spends billions on it, it must be important after all.
It was quite ridiculous how everybody suddenly kept talking about Metaverse without there even being as much as a vague idea how it would look like. Even Facebook's own presentation on the Metaverse was devoid of vision and just kept repeating stuff that Playstation Home did 10 years ago or that Habitat did over 35(!) years ago. Avatars, customization, multiplayer and that was it. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not a Metaverse, that's just a regular old multiplayer social app of which we had numerous in the last few decades, both inside and outside of VR. There was no vision of how to evolve that beyond that, even the really obvious stuff was nowhere to be seen (online shopping in VR, anybody?).
Some companies tried to mix some crypto bullshit into it to make another Second Life happen, but even that's not new, LindenLabs already had their own VR game that failed with Sansar.
Metaverse was really hype about nothing, just Zuckerberg spending billions on something trying to stay relevant and everybody else wanting their piece of the cake too. Took them a while to realize that there never was any cake to begin with.
Meanwhile people that care about VR just hang around in VRChat or play VR games, without any of that Metaverse nonsense.
I'm excited by the idea, but repelled by Facebook's vision of it. An open-standards metaverse would be interesting, especially with the prospect of infinite AI-generated content.
I’ve looked at the few things out there like decentraland and they’re hilariously bad. Like I can’t tell if they’re being serious. Even Metas offerings are extremely amateurish and unimpressive after who knows how many billions. The headset is impressive but not ready for the general public for some years
VRChat exists, and a lot of companies(Meta included) are excited, to be able to make their own fan-made continuations; which are so massive in number it is collectively called the Metaverse.
GPT will be an integral part of the metaverse. AI assistants make content much easier to create, and the whole point of the metaverse is aggregating all the content everyone in the world makes. These products are complements and in fact GPT might be meta's saving grace since 3D content is so tedious to make currently.
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find any information about the phrase “the Indians are collecting firewood like crazy”. Could you provide more context or details about where you heard or saw this phrase?
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Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides. A Mandalorian spin-off series of interactive VR episodes that can be experienced with a group of friends? A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. Nobody's going to buy headsets to make a goofy looking avatar and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg in a Second Life remake. Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
The management of that rideless amusement park is also a little concerning. I'd love to see VR finally go mainstream, but I'd prefer it if pretty much anyone other than Meta were behind the platform that catches on first.
There's a lot of VR content out there, and some of it is excellent, and some of it ties in to popular franchises (PS5 VR has a Star Wars game), and occasionally it's both (Halflife: Alyx for example) . None of it is enough to drive VR to be mainstream entertainment.
* Motion sickness is still a really big problem
* If you're short-sighted and wear glasses, then the picture will be blurry for you. The original PSVR worked around the issue by pushing the lends out so you could comfortably wear glasses and the headset, but none of the modern headsets afaik include this affordance. Wearing contacts isn't an option for a lot of people.
* Way too expensive. I can afford one pretty easily, but most people can't. For roughly the same price as a Quest you can get an iPhone SE which is going to offer significantly more value to the average person
* They're too heavy! People complain about a 240g iPhone being too heavy in the hand. The Quest is 503g on your head, and this headset in particular doesn't distribute weight very well. PSVR is slightly heavier, but is at least slightly more comfortable than the Quest due to its weight distribution.
I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
I really enjoyed using my friend's VR headset to slowly play through Half-Life: Alyx. I could manage about one level at a time before needing to take the headset off and take a break, because of motion sickness + how uncomfortable the whole thing was. I think there's still a lot of R&D to do before headsets are really in a position where regular people start buying them up en masse.
I'm choosing the word enjoy because its not something like a car dashboard being touchscreen where people deal with it, this is entertainment and hobbies. If people don't enjoy it, they'll go do something else. VR will have niche use cases for sure and there will be some people that enjoy it but its not going to be mainstream.
But back to your analogye, it applies particularly well here because Disney are a master of delivering experiences and do exactly that through every possible medium. So if one sees Disney walking away from the Metaverse, that's not something I would interpret lightly - despite the rounds of firing being interpreted as a cost saving measure, it's just 50 staff members and not all of them are leaving the company. Disney aren't short of cash, so if they saw a future in the Metaverse they'd be there for defensive reasons alone.
Rather I think Disney realise that their own VR-initiatives will stand on their own, and their involvement would be propping up 3rd party platforms rather than yielding a benefit from them.
I think Meta are hoping that the Metaverse would emulate the Smartphone/Soft-store model, where developers would do the heavy lifting for the platform, but the crucial difference here is that a Smartphone is useful before even loading a single piece of 3rd party software. Everyone already had a phone when smartphones became a thing - but right now no one is walking around with a VR headset, or anything even vaguely approximating that.
No, this was Mark's personal Quest for the Next Big Thing. No one else in the company is delusional enough to believe it will go anywhere, they're just getting a fat paycheck.
The biology of humans works against VR in a lot of ways, and most people don't like the idea of taking anti-nausea pill just to experience VR. (I take anti-nausea pills when I do VR, because VR is absolutely mindblowing)
These things are fun to mess around with, but I think very few people will ever want to wear goggles like this for more than an hour or so at a time, which inherently limits their appeal and potential applications. My widescreen monitor has none of these issues and it's plenty "good enough" for most games.
Although it is true some people get sick easily in VR, those people tend to also have trouble with car sickness and sea sickness. I suppose you can say the same about cars and VR for that group.
Dead Comment
But probably a lot less than would watch a Mandalorian animated or real life spin-off TV series - and the VR version costs a lot more to create.
A lot of companies (Disney, Magic Leap etc) have spent a fortune trying to make the killer VR content but have failed. Apart from the sports/exercise apps (probably not enough to support the FB metaverse) are there any that would make people purchase a headset for?
Would it need to? It's a video game, right? Once you have the base elements, it could be pretty cheap.
There's no way Disney had not made internal studies, the problem must have been that they can't set up a management and/or production model they like && that works for VR.
Facebook/Meta IMO has poisoned the whole social media space to a degree, where the expectation I have for social media platforms in general has become one of "this is getting worse over time". Instagram now sucks more than it sucked before Facebook bought it. Facebook now sucks more than Facebook 15 years ago. Reddit now... You get the point. They could have done nothing except maintenance and neutral technical upkeep and the result would have been better than what we have today. And the only reason why we don't have that better thing is profits (or the lack thereof in the old platforms).
This tells me that capitalism is really bad at organizing social platforms (not that this surprises me).
I do not really think that is true. There is more than 2 billion active users on WhatsApp which is owned by Meta. Many people reading hackernews distrust them, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the general population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
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What boggles my mind is why did Facebook just not buy Second Life directly.
Porn powers the second life economy.
It is an interesting place, but if FB bought it the moral torchbearers would burn the investment to the ground.
[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Secrets_of_the_E...
Sounds like a video game to me, something that Disney has weirdly struggled with, having tried on several times to get into video games big time, only to shy away at the huge expense and challenge.
At the moment they've circled back to merely licensing out their IPs to other publishers.
Disney should get more into video games, and VR is great for video games.
VR for "metaverse" whatever it is that is. Not so sure!
And even if it had rides, they wouldn't be that amusing...
This is the refrain of Disney's theme park marketing, but I disagree. It's the fact that people want to say they were there. It's 100% the brand and nothing more. Marketing doesn't have to be, and often isn't, rational.
This is at the absolute core of why theme park experiences sell but VR does not. Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. Until the price of VR comes down to absolute rock bottom prices, there will not be acceptance of "VR experiences" and even so it's still a gamble whether anyone cares enough to buy that to experience on a whim frequently vs plan a vacation around it... I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
In this case a VR exp would have to feel like going to a park. However, there is something that is missing (or many somethings). You hanging with your friends and family. Now they could also all go get headsets and you hang together. But that seems oddly not the same. Buying that overpriced popcorn and basically 'fair food' is also part of it. Disney would have the best shot at making a park into a game. As most of their rides are 'dark rides'. Basically trains going thru experiences. A fixed park is little more than a carnival but in a fixed location and cleaned up nicely with theming. VR strips out the carnival aspects and is only theming. That strips out part of what you are going for.
I have also been to parks all by myself. That is what wearing a VR headset would feel like. It is not a good experience. You could say 'oh all your friends could get headsets too'. True but at that point you are now looking at similar costs as just going to the parks.
For myself (a sample size of 1) it is all about the magical experiences and memories my child gets from experiencing a fantasy world of fun rides and adventure.
What is you basis for saying that?
> Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home.
By that rationale nobody would play vide games.
I believe it comes down to the experience. The experience of VR is simply not good enough to attract people.
Vr is fun but virtual.
We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time.
Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits.
The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse".
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)
"The future is a dead mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse"
https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q
It would be not notable at all except, there is a huge amount of money being passed around in it in order to achieve basically nothing.
The dreams about the metaverse discussed at the beginning are also just wild and bizarre. It seems to me that a lot of tech people and investor types are just bored and letting their imaginations run wild. AI taking over the world, living fully inside the metaverse, every object in the world being inside the metaverse to the point where the metaverse is considered more accurate than reality etc. They may as well be talking about time travel or faster than light travel. In reality we have...a worse version of second life
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It is long but worth a watch. You don't need to stare at the screen the entire time - if you can hear it and look up occasionally, it's fine.
Massive crypto scam by people who are now bound to overhype the whole thing. Regular folks fall for it because they buy into the vision and have to believe otherwise everything falls apart. Companies fall for it because FOMO. Incredibly cultish.
The video is good but I don’t think it is worth the watch unless you have morbid curiosity about that particular project, or you want some crypto related cathartic release. I don’t feel better knowing the gory details of how terrible everyone and everything is in this circle.
Hadn't clicked the link yet but just reading that made me think "Oh I bet it's Folding Ideas!"
Wasn't disappointed. Thanks OP for the link.
The metaverse is businesses pushing for a platform which brings nothing of value, just for them to extract rent from those using it.
Thinking "what's in it for us" leads you to build a universe that you get to lord over. Putting interesting things that people want in it is someone else's problem.
Thinking "what's in it for them" leads you to build a single interesting thing people want. Then you expand it into a universe from there.
But why would I expect VR to be better than a Zoom call when Zoom calls with family and friends are already so wonky? Do I want to endure the same weird audio/video connectivity crap, only made even more uncanny by being immersed in it? Seems more honest to just keep it on a screen.
The potential for workflow efficiency (you can effectively have as many monitors as you want with the profile of a VR headset, remote work is even more portable than a laptop, looking at another desktop can be just as intuitive as another monitor on your own, more immersive and tune-able environment to focus on work) & display of data in 3d that is otherwise too unnavigable in 2D were really promising. Maybe we'll get there in another 10 years when the VR tech cycle completes its orbit again.
It's worse, why would I expect VR to be better than facebook video. I think facebook video is worse than zoom, to the point that internal employees will use zoom for meeting sometimes.
I feel like they should have built the world's best group video/audio product in 2 months, made it free, and used that momentum for metaverse
This is an uninformed take based on recollections of what they've released and my understanding of Disney's competencies.
Somebody watching closely will hopefully have more insight.
Mike White, the exec leading the group, reported into Kareem Daniel, who was central to Chapek’s vision of Disney. So it was a significant role. Mind you, Daniel was fired about five seconds after Iger returned.
Similarly, in news reporting, every department is a ‘division’.
He had very little concept of what Disney should be doing so just thew out a bunch of ideas with very little budget and expected them to work, whilst also penny pinching beyond belief.
* https://youtu.be/hSm_vG586II?t=38 (safe for work, as is the whole series)
* https://youtu.be/hSm_vG586II?t=212
The anime series itself is really good. Kind of a science-fiction mystery story.
* https://youtu.be/6vJPJHhs2Xs (also safe for work)
That one has a less fleshed out / "natural" use of AR compared to Dennou Coil, but it's still pretty good.
It's only 6 episodes, and should be available on Netflix in most countries already. Not sure if Dennou Coil is.
Not only that, but VR/AR doesn't solve any incremental immersion blockers. My brain is very good at 'not looking away from the screen,' it's awful at overriding my inner ear balance, temperature sense, smell sense, circadian rhythm, etc.
That can change.
The biggest test of VR at theme parks in the US came with various Six Flags around the country strapping VR goggles (Samsung IIRC) on some of their coasters and drop towers. They're pretty widely regarded as failures. I got to try two of them and they definitely were not a plus to the ride experience, especially on a drop tower where the view from the top is half the fun.
You put the goggles on and ask for Einstein and a chalk board. Then you have a conversation.
I hope the XR future is more creative.
Pretty sure people had the exact reaction when online dating came out thinking you must be some social outcast. Or when some people chose to WFH way before it became remotely normal and were branded antisocial for choosing to not be in the office with the colleagues.
Why be such a hater? I don't get it.
Just because some people are into different things than you or what society deems 'normal' doesn't make them weirdoes.
In other contexts, it's rich white guys dreaming of leaving their puny body and becoming Ubermech with the help of tech...
Epic just shipped the Unreal Engine editor as a plug-in for Fortnite. Most of the things you can do with Unreal Engine as a game developer are now available to Fortnite users. What's created doesn't have to look anything like Fortnite.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGck_8QNHTk
Which of course Apple, Google and Meta should not be able to monetise - only them.
They seem to be wanting to build the tools, to build that. They know its a tough road, and being resourced starved (compared to facebook) they're trying to do it a more "open" way with the other game engines participating (He mentions Godot, Unity in his talk), artists etc. Its part of Tim Sweeney's thing to break down walled gardens. Epic being privately held, sort of doesn't have to deal with shareholders...
https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=4074
It was quite ridiculous how everybody suddenly kept talking about Metaverse without there even being as much as a vague idea how it would look like. Even Facebook's own presentation on the Metaverse was devoid of vision and just kept repeating stuff that Playstation Home did 10 years ago or that Habitat did over 35(!) years ago. Avatars, customization, multiplayer and that was it. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not a Metaverse, that's just a regular old multiplayer social app of which we had numerous in the last few decades, both inside and outside of VR. There was no vision of how to evolve that beyond that, even the really obvious stuff was nowhere to be seen (online shopping in VR, anybody?).
Some companies tried to mix some crypto bullshit into it to make another Second Life happen, but even that's not new, LindenLabs already had their own VR game that failed with Sansar.
Metaverse was really hype about nothing, just Zuckerberg spending billions on something trying to stay relevant and everybody else wanting their piece of the cake too. Took them a while to realize that there never was any cake to begin with.
Meanwhile people that care about VR just hang around in VRChat or play VR games, without any of that Metaverse nonsense.
(Note: /s, not even close to the real definition)
People intuitively 'get' the Metaverse, and if it was good, everyone would be doing it.
I remember that crap from like 25 years ago, this is kind of the 3rd try and it failed, but I'm betting the next evolution will hit.
Now it won't be exactly the Metaverse rather just '3D / immersive' but still, it will take over.
I'm worried it's the start of Idiocracy though.
Metaverse make me 'meh.'
Maybe if I hadn't played Everquest in 1999, nor any 3D network game since then, I would have been impressed.
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find any information about the phrase “the Indians are collecting firewood like crazy”. Could you provide more context or details about where you heard or saw this phrase?