From my experience playing social VR, I think Facebook Meta has it all wrong. If you go around VRChat communities you'll find an overwhelming amount of anime girls and furries make up the user base and creator base. In VR, your avatar isn't just a little picture next to your name, it's your body and your identity. Some people will pay hundreds or thousands for an artist to make a custom and unique avatar for them, or they'll spend hundreds of hours learning and making stuff themselves. Some people like to be a robot, a hologram, a pooltoy, some people like to have four arms or be a centaur, there's different styles and body proportions, practically anything is possible and creativity is the only limit. There is a whole economy of avatar asset creators on sites like booth and gumroad, and there are artists who make a livelihood off of doing 3D avatar commissions.
Facebook Meta is basically trying to throw all of this away and pretend none of it exists, and force people into one-size-fits-all humanoid avatars that people can customize slightly with some sliders and options. In fact they weren't even sure they could trust people to have legs. It effectively simulates the real-life feeling of having body dysphoria and not being able to change your body. It's virtual reality for christ's sake! There's no physical reason why somebody couldn't be a Blender default cube if they wished...
Facebook Meta is trying to make a sterile platform safe for business meetings and advertisers, while simultaneously trying to attract users and creators so that it's not a ghost town and has actual things to do, while still trying to retain a monopoly on avatar customization so that they can eventually earn massive wealth by selling virtual clothing for $10. The result seems to be a massive waste of money that ends up catering to nobody (except to Zuckerberg?). It feels a bit like if they made a computer in the early days of computing that didn't support programming, just because they hope if this nifty "computing" idea ever takes off they'll have a monopoly on programming
I was at an event where people were making these avatars, many first time users. One person who gave feedback at the end said he was frustrated he could not get the avatar to look like him.
I think whatever the hell Meta is doing with their weird alien humanoids is far from "normie" appeal as well. The furries and anime girls seem more normie in comparison.
I don't know if there is some middle ground that would actually be appealing to some definition of a "billion normie"s. Maybe actually photorealistic looking humans? Making the graphics not look like it's from 2003? Or going the other way: make them look like the Mii characters with Nintendo? Something totally different? Maybe appealing to the furries and anime girls would be actually a good idea at first, to build up some "power users" or whatever, and then attract more casual users.
I share the sentiment of the Instagram users in the article and the grandparent; it is baffling to me why the product looks so terrible, with so many resources poured into the Metaverse.
> Almost as astonishingly, revenues at the division have actually fallen from the 2021 high of $2.3bn, to $2.1bn in 2024...
Not sure why this is astonishing. It was new back in 2021. People tried, mostly hated it, and moved on. Honestly, I'd consider the $200mn drop a victory.
It depends how good the AI is and how it's used etc. It would for example be neat to walk around in a massive AI generated multiplayer city that has a lot of intricate details.
“Metaverse” is a moving target and has one goal for Meta: get everyone off the platforms that can eat their lunch (Chrome, iOS, Android) and onto a platform where Meta can start collecting 30% from everyone who wants to play.
People don't want to interact with the human-generated content, why would AI-generated content change their minds? I have yet to meet anyone who uses the metaverse, and it's not for lack of funding on Meta's part.
That’s because you aren’t 12 years old. Ryan George (a YouTuber) made a video where he checked out the metaverse and it was basically exclusively filled with children. He played metaverse worlds for around 5 hours straight and didn’t meet a single adult the whole time. It’s children using their parent’s old Meta Quest 2 headsets they bought during the pandemic because they were bored, then forgot about.
Until I locked my headset down my kid got onto the metaverse a few times without me realizing, and playing a bunch of random “experiences”.
Anything that can generate metaverse activities can do the same for flat-screens, which meta has been failing to convince people away from for many years despite billions of dollars of investment.
You can't blame them for trying though. Their cash cows aren't going to last forever. Actually, I don't understand why this company has such a high valuation. From all the FAANG, it seems to be the less diversified.
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Facebook Meta is basically trying to throw all of this away and pretend none of it exists, and force people into one-size-fits-all humanoid avatars that people can customize slightly with some sliders and options. In fact they weren't even sure they could trust people to have legs. It effectively simulates the real-life feeling of having body dysphoria and not being able to change your body. It's virtual reality for christ's sake! There's no physical reason why somebody couldn't be a Blender default cube if they wished...
Facebook Meta is trying to make a sterile platform safe for business meetings and advertisers, while simultaneously trying to attract users and creators so that it's not a ghost town and has actual things to do, while still trying to retain a monopoly on avatar customization so that they can eventually earn massive wealth by selling virtual clothing for $10. The result seems to be a massive waste of money that ends up catering to nobody (except to Zuckerberg?). It feels a bit like if they made a computer in the early days of computing that didn't support programming, just because they hope if this nifty "computing" idea ever takes off they'll have a monopoly on programming
I think whatever the hell Meta is doing with their weird alien humanoids is far from "normie" appeal as well. The furries and anime girls seem more normie in comparison.
I don't know if there is some middle ground that would actually be appealing to some definition of a "billion normie"s. Maybe actually photorealistic looking humans? Making the graphics not look like it's from 2003? Or going the other way: make them look like the Mii characters with Nintendo? Something totally different? Maybe appealing to the furries and anime girls would be actually a good idea at first, to build up some "power users" or whatever, and then attract more casual users.
I share the sentiment of the Instagram users in the article and the grandparent; it is baffling to me why the product looks so terrible, with so many resources poured into the Metaverse.
Not sure why this is astonishing. It was new back in 2021. People tried, mostly hated it, and moved on. Honestly, I'd consider the $200mn drop a victory.
Until I locked my headset down my kid got onto the metaverse a few times without me realizing, and playing a bunch of random “experiences”.
Like physically there's just no way to make sunglasses a decent AR or VR display people would use all the time voluntarily.
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