Meta wheels out Deloitte to plug the metaverse. Is anyone actually convinced? Meta Platforms, Inc., which changed its name from Facebook two years ago to signal its commitment to the so-called metaverse, continues to insist that the vaunted digital environment has economic potential. Of course it has yet to realize that potential, or anything remotely like it. The social ad biz spent $13.72 billion on …
- "Normies" think it look utterly naff and creepy.
- Techies know it's complete bollocks and simply designed to harvest info.
No one's fooled by this Meta rubbish except some greedy investors who think Saint Mark is the golden goose that keeps giving. Social media isn't quite the same as it was 20 years ago when we were a lot of more gullible. I'm not saying everyone is 100% savvy about the evils of social media these days but I think people are finally starting to realise how insidious and vile social media is. Sure it has it's positives, it's good for creatives to meet up and share ideas, but for most people it's quite literally "a brain slug" that drains time, hope and brain cells.
Yeah, but the Metaverse will allow us to experience Second Life from a Third Person perspective.
Personally, I'm waiting for the second generation metaverse where I can use my shitty real world VR headset to enter a world where I can buy a much better headset to join the meta-metaverse with. If I can get away with a cheaper, wireless headset in the real world, and leave all the wires and faff in the metaverse where my more expensive and higher spec headset is, then it will have solved a real problem and to save myself wasting time I'll just have an AI use the wireless headset for me and leave it in a data centre. That way, I can still be at the pub and take part in the future. Every problem solved with tech.
First Person, Third Person, Meta-Second Life.
I'm down. You do realise though that Facebook will have to work out how to incorporate 3 pairs of legs in that setup though, unless Meta-Second Life is a third party platform...they're struggling as it is with zero legs.
To be fair to Facebook though, if they really wanted to create a truly realistic virtual experience, for me at least, they'd need to incorporate some sort of nasal pollen delivery system to ensure that I am just as allergic to the metaverse as I am to the real world. Otherwise it'll never be convincing for me. If I can't jog through a field of Oilseed Rape, slowly feeling my lungs tightening, eyes burning, sinuses throbbing and my snot covered t-shirt sticking to me then the immersion will be broken.
But you've just described what Zuckerberg is trying to sell. In his metaverae you'll be able to experience the joys of running through the rape seed field with none of the drawbacks.
Winner right there. Though you'll need the compulsory added extra touch and feel pack for the full experience.
Sure it has it's positives, it's good for creatives to meet up and share ideas, but for most people it's quite literally "a brain slug" that drains time, hope and brain cells.
Facebook is general is quite good for connecting people who wouldn't otherwise have connected. For certain things such as fan groups for particular niches this is incredibly good; certain interests can't work on a local scale and need to be run at a national (or international) level to gain adequate members to really work properly with an adequately large and active member base.
As you note, the platforms make money by keeping people on them as much as possible. In some ways this can be a positive, such as by providing connections to things that you find interesting. The downside is essentially people allowing the technology to use them, rather than them using the technology. This especially appears to be the case on smartphones where you'll constantly get alerts about something that you don't really care about. I have a featurephone rather than a portable web browser and I find Facebook reasonably valuable for the purposes that I use it for, but I don't expect i'd have that view if I was accessing it via smartphone.
This said, I have no idea who is supposed to be the target market for the Metaverse. From my point of view Facebook would have found some form of Augmented Reality more valuable.
It also has all the baggage of repeated and consistently violating user's privacy rights by Facebook/Meta. Change the name as many times as you like, Zuck, it will still reek like the manure pile it is... even if you DO spend billions on making it 3D. Good luck convincing me to buy stereo goggles to strap on my head to look at your monstrosity.
Nobody wants to work in VR. Nobody.
It's entertainment. Games, "experiences"/short immersive "films" (for want of a better term), and certain kinds of product demo where the human scale is important (architecture etc).
There is a niche market for certain kinds of training, but it's miniscule and will never cover the VR development costs alone.
Using a headset for longer than about half an hour at a time is uncomfortable for the vast majority, then you need a break. Even the professional Twitch streamers do that.
There are some niche markets perhaps. Maybe surgeons would benefit from an immersive view when they are doing microsurgery. Mechanical engineers might want to "walk through" their designs occasionally. Architects and interior designers could use this to show their clients what things will look like.
But the idea people will strap these to their head so they can have an meeting in VR like Zuck was promoting is just ludicrous. The only reason people are doing video for meetings (which didn't really take off until covid forced everyone to work from home) is stupid managers who want to be able to see if their underlings are paying attention, it doesn't contribute anything to the meeting beyond that. There's certainly no benefit for making it an immersive experience as if you were really there.
VR is not showing a walkthrough on a flat screen, putting some goggles/glasses on the client and letting them move through the space themselves as if they are really there. You can show all the pictures of a new remodeled kitchen you want, it isn't the same thing as moving around in the space and seeing whether the placement of the stove and sink work for you, if the cabinet heights are correct and so forth.
"A collective agreement to harmonize digital standards and protocols for platforms and devices would enable users to transition seamlessly between digital spaces."
If Meta had ANY interest in that, then they wouldnt have locked down the Oculus Headsets to only use the Oculus store right? People could happily buy from Steam, or the HTC store or wherever else, and play the games on their Oculus headset, right? right?
*chirp chirp*
Does anyone remember why this idea of the name meta and the metaverse was thought up?
Does anyone remember that it happened when the firm called facebook was under scrutiny for fucking with everybody's privacy?
Does anyone remember that the whole idea of the metaverse was created as a distraction of what really goes on at facebook?
It was a 1010 dollar "investment" to make it all go away by making people forget and distracting them. See, how it worked. Who cares about the costs. Nobody is talking about how they still fuck with everybody's privacy and lives any more. It is all a "cost of doing business". Added now with paid for reports to make it seem real.
The man appears to be a first class example of someone that got lucky but chose to believe it was his genius that created the Facebook expire. (An all too common occurance amongst the commercially successful)
He has applied this genius to stearing the company into a dead end that almost literally nobody else can envision as a success. But one that plenty of people have seen stumble and fail miserably in the past.
Ego driven management. It's not new, but it is desperately expernsive for the investors that haven't yet figured out this Meta incarnation is on a road to Myspace.
There is some hope, since Meta has the wealth to buy itself out of this dead end. It needs to get on with that if it isn't to sink.
Personally, I hope it does sink and that it takes Zuckerberg with it. But wishes rarely come true in my experience.
Interestingly, from the Executive Summary, it would seem a basic unquestioned assumption is that demand for the meta verse will be akin to that for mobile, hence the figures cited in the projection:
"based on the level of investment that is currently predicted, we estimate that the metaverse could contribute between US$402bn and US$760bn to US annual GDP by 2035."
So I suggest there has been an indulgence in reality distorting substances by the report’s authors, because, unless we go full.Matrix, I don’t see the Metaverse (or similar VR)being anywhere as useful.
I’m a little surprised Thomas didn’t pickup on this glaring flaw in the report.
"If you want to experience the metaverse for under £30, just go dogging with a welding mask on and a pair of maracas and wave them around for 2 hours."
Aha! Now this sounds like the authentic voice of experience speaking. But I thought if you flashed your headlights someone else provided the maracas...?
It's not really experience, I was inspired by Uber one year and decided that I wanted to solve a problem in the dogging space. So I built a crowd hailing app. The premise is, that not everyone can turn up at the right place at the right time to be fucked in front of a crowd of strangers and some people have busy, professional, lifestyles and need to fit their dogging in around a busy schedule. Enter...Doggr. The crowd hailing app.
Simply find a layby to shag your ugly wife (or indeed, somebody else's ugly wife while her husband watches) in, then fire up the app and summon a local group of Doggrs. The app shows you a map with all our local "Doggr" crew and ongoing sessions, simply pick the ones with the rates that fit your budget (or set your rate and join an active session) and within minutes, you're fucking your wife in front of a crowd of strangers.
We're not only solving problems for Doggrs though, most of our valued team are also part time Uber/Deliveroo drivers. Who use the time they would usually be standing around earning nothing, to stand around and get paid to watch a couple of aging hippies fucking in a Morrisons car park at 11pm while they wait for the next drunk person to order a kebab.
He has no clue what companies are like. Companies don't even want people working from home anymore let alone having to buy VR headsets for all their staff so they can have "VR" meetings. Say that to our grounds team or the painters and decorators, that they have to stick on some VR headsets to join the VR meeting, that will go down well.
I spent a few hours with a friend's kid's Oculus. The display resolution was too low, particularly the perceived depth-of-perception-resolution, and the controllers' precision and response times were too low for enjoyable first-person-shooter gaming.
The games I tried all were Fisher-Price-like, with Windows XP-style, bright primary colors. I felt as if I was walking around in Toontown. It would be okay for SimCity or Minecraft, but not a lot else.
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