Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is still pushing metaverse. Next step, language translation Meta has had a bad start to the year. When it revealed its audience growth was at a standstill and it had already sunk more than $10bn into metaverse technologies, its share price plummeted 27 per cent. More than $230bn of Meta's market cap evaporated. In social media, if you aren't growing, you're dying. For Mark Zuckerberg …
Metaverse app allows kids into virtual strip clubs
"Inside VRChat, there are rooms where users can meet: some are innocent and everyday - such as a McDonald's restaurant, for example - but there are also pole-dancing and strip clubs. "
As is normal with the Zuck being's products, it doesn't care about you or your kids he just wants the data. Meta's VR technologies are WOEFULLY behind on parental controls, and any form of moderation control or even abuse reporting. Again it's an afterthought, not even that a minor footnote.
"we can all communicate with one another no matter what language we speak, or where we come from. And if we get this right, this is just one example of how AI can help bring people together on a global scale."
To translate from the primary language of Zuckspeak, "there are people in the world we haven't exploited yet."
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
To paraphrase the great adage regarding Orwell's 1984: It's not supposed to be a bloody instruction manual!
Unless this thing can actually materialise a drink in my hand, made to my exacting standards, it can go and zuck right off. I don't want a simulated coffee, I do not want simulated clouds, I want the warmth of sunshine on my skin, and the rough texture of sand under my feet.
They are also just reinventing Second Life, which was an interesting experiment, but got nowhere, mainly due to the nature of humans - and this has not changed over the last two decades.
"I quite enjoyed Second Life, until it got to the point where evertime I logged on some arsehole tried to sell me something."
This was already the metaverse failing, before the term was even invented.
See, Zuck's simpleton business case is each gullible idiot will buy something, every freaking 10 s. in there !
Of course, in the risk/assumptions department, Zuck has ignored 2 things:
- likely, no-one will spend all their free time buying some useless NFT there
- every single video game or virtual shop world may have completely different and incompatible engines and data models
But, to some rich moron like Zuck, those are just tiny details the tiny hands will eventually sort out.
Buy popcorn, mates, in 2-3 years, all this will collapse silently ...
Obviously the natural progression would be for humans to simply deposit their bot representatives into the metaverse to take care of work now that our jobs are all going to be in meta-offices, freeing us from having to wear funny glasses and leaving us more time to lie on a sunny beach.
That was my thought as well. Not only were the commands themselves completely scripted, but I'm willing to bet there was no AI scenemaker in there, even one that was trained only on those commands and thoroughly tested. I'm expecting some premade video slices were created and someone got the job of pushing the button to cycle in the next one as soon as he finished each command.
I'm more interested in what happens when you go off base with a neural network trained on the kind of material available to Facebook.
"Lets add some refugees on the beach over there! And some people throwing stones at them"
"No, no, that's not right. Refugees don't wear white linen and are unlikely to have champagne in a wicker basket. Although that is a lovely sunset..."
If my theory is correct, then you'll get some really weird blobs, some obviously pasted-in flat images, or a crash as soon as you give a command that wasn't expected in its exact form. AI systems that interpret textual data already have lots of problems understanding the main meaning of sentences. There's no way they have one that will correctly interpret "over there". It's the same story as when Google showed off its system for calling companies on your behalf using speech recognition to carry on a conversation. It sounded convincing (partially because they deliberately included unnecessary human sounds), but it turned out that they had run several tests on a person who knew about it and only included the successful one, thus making the product useless in practice and the demonstration a sham.
Oh good, Zuck is going to fill his Meta-fied Second Life with a bunch of virtual people. Then he will declare the Metaverse a success and spend his time chatting with bots.
And the rest of the world will watch him burn all his money on that particular pie in the sky.
I'm glad you believe that a computer program can teach itself. I can't wait to see how that turns Tay.
I really hope Zuckerberg does spaff a load of cash on this Metaverse and makes a massive loss on it.
VR is a gimmick and has been since the early VR headsets were rolled out in the 90s. The problem is it its fun for a bit, but the novelty soon wears off. Since headsets are expensive, you need a huge area to use it in safely, you look like a complete bell end wearing the headsets, and they can't be used on the go.
If I want to meet friends and have a picnic in a nice place, I can already do that, by meeting friends and having a picnic in a nice place. What exactly do I gain by putting on a VR headset and experiencing a virtual version at home? In what way is that better than the real world?
Meta is basically a company which has invented an expensive fleshlight and expects people to stop having sex as a result.
"The kinds of experiences that you'll have in the metaverse are beyond what is possible today"
I feel sorry for all of the twats involved with this - they seem seriously deluded. It makes me happy though that Zuckertw@ has staked his companies future on this carcrash and is now in a hole he can't easily get out of.
... Is how zuck is somehow managing to convince companies to go all-out into this thing, mostly out of FOMO, while everyone completely ignores that the vast majority of people don't have the money to buy a VR headset, much less a VR ready computer or videogame.
You know, the people that are actually supposed to "join" and "use" the metaverse
One of the great things - well, successful things - about social media is that you can do Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok/Bebo/MySpace (my age may be showing) anywhere and anytime. Whip out your phone and you're good to go: at home, on a bus, walking down the road, wherever.
So what the hell is the point of replacing it with something which requires a large (optics is optics) headset and therefore a good deal of space which connected to a powerful computer? Who wants a social medium then can only properly use at home?
There is a fundamental problem with all synthesised 3D experiences - TVs, VR headsets, movies, the lot:
When we look at something which we perceive as "far away" our eyes change focus and swivel apart, very slightly, and when we look at something we perceive as "close up" our eyes change focus again and swivel together. With all 3D systems the focal plane stays constant, so even though things appear to be moving towards or away from us, focus and eye orientation need to stay constant. This confuses the hell out of the brain and in most people causes headaches or nausea.
This will never fly.
Have they not considered the percentage of Facebook activity that takes place in a browser tab as a sideline to what you're actually doing, on mobiles during transit, and while ostensibly watching the telly?
i.e. Most Facebooking is a secondary activity, can anyone here imagine ever thinking "I'll dedicate the next half hour to Facebooking"?
Zuck's C5 moment?
Not surprisingly, the Frances Haugen hoopla seems to have petered out in Congress with nothing more than a tut tut tut and finger waving. However, it does seem to have had a strong personal effect on Mark, causing him to rename his company and retreat from reality into a Metaverse of his own imagination, shedding hundreds of billions along the way.
To Zuckereality, his demos are childish and pointless, if Zuck and his disciples really believe in this rubbish, there will be no need for monopolies investigations and dismantling, because the whole thing is going to implode, leaving mothing but but a nasty stain and litigation from distaught investors.
Everyone seems to think the metaverse is a single entitiy, it's not. The major players are all planning their own metaverses in order to maintain maximum control and extract maximum value when they start to attempt to make money. "metaverse" is just another buzzword that's total PR bollocks!
Zuckerberg is desperately in need of finding something to keep investors on board. So he tries to sell something that doesn't exist (and has no interest when thinking about it, but the pleb doesn't think, does it? ). Maybe they are interested in a virtual Brooklyn bridge.
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Metaverse was first coined in the novel Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, the Metaverse was a success in that book because life in general had become so shit people needed an escape, and a similar plot line was followed in Ready Player one.
I don't think are things are quite that bad just yet.
A Metaverse with current technology probably won't be a resounding success due to the limited time people will probably want to be wearing a VR headset with all the attendant eyestrain (I seem to remember in Snowcrash the systems used low powered RGB lasers to write the display directly on the eyeball, not something I'd like to be the alpha tester for!), headset mounting neck aches etc, plus all the attendant annoyances of online environments such as obtrusive advertising, virtual assault, theft and scamming and grooming etc. (and we know how good Zuch's been preventing this kind of thing already.)
Until we get the equivalent of a holodeck and a perpetual force field / people blocker I can't see it being a huge success in the same manner Facebook was initially.
The man who won't take "Because it's a fucking stupid idea" as an answer.
I live in hope that one day he'll realise that the Facebook thing was a one-off, he's never going to follow it and he should just take the money and run. However, I suspect he's just too dumb to figure it out.
Why? No one needs to be online all the time in an artificial world.
This after/during a pandemic when people were often blasted with computer screens all day. Sick of it? Yes.
I contend that Mark Z is a greedy idiot.
The amount of energy from people and the planet to make this “meta” (my ghod, really, Mark?) happen is unconscionably wasteful. We could instead…oh, aggressively address climate change, you know, as an example of keeping humans alive.
Also. Anyone with this amount of money should be ostracized.
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