It appears Meta’s Horizon Worlds may literally and figuratively not have legs after all.
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and nothing of value was lost
(Except of course the billions of dollars spent building it)
That’s the only thing I like about this situation. That money went to the people who worked on the project.
Did it really or did it just grow market caps
it wasn’t meta spending on privacy invading crap that sticks around so whether it ended up as salaries or fake money it didn’t go directly to bad things
Seems unlikely that zero of that investment benefitted projects like the upcoming Steam Frame.
How would the Steam Frame have benefited from Meta’s funding?
Because they were able to learn from the technology that was created.
They already had the valve index VR headset released 2 years before Meta’s metaverse became a focus in 2021
Then they all get laid off. And they lose their health insurance. And their houses get foreclosed on.
But, for time they had employment and the money wasn’t going to a yacht maintenance crew and hookers
Holy tax write-offs, Batman!
Meta (the company hilariously rebranded with this non-sense as their foundation) has moved on to the next grift: AI and mobile video surveillance devices.
To be fair, they’ve been doing mobile surveillance for a long time.
Sure, but I did specifically say mobile video surveillance. Pretty sure their goal is to reduce the friction of taking out your phone to start capturing a video.
I’ve already ended a friendship over these stupid things.
Yeah those glasses are even ruining the rest of Ray bans sunglasses for me. Sucks because they fit my face well.
Those glasses are the evolution of VR.
The knockoffs are pretty comfortable, and much cheaper, and come with no gimmicky tech.
Yeah I wear knockoffs most of the time since I’m not very careful with them.
They still sell the regular wayfarers too, but I don’t want make people have to look twice to make sure I’m not surveilling them.
Ah, yeah. That makes sense. I’ve don’t that double take many times, and it gets exhausting. I appreciate you thinking of others like this. Seriously. Thank you.
Based. Corporate shit impacts the planet’s survival, there will be time for friends if we don’t go extinct
after thier propaganda feeds in fb wasnt generating enough profit.
I love that they changed their name to show how serious they were about the metaverse being the future of tech and it never even came close to being a thing.
isnt meta kinda late in the game for AI anyways, apple was even later and they abandoned for the most part.
Considering they developed the framework everybody builds upon nowadays, I doubt it.
They’ve been in the AI game for about as long as everyone else. I would consider their lab to be one of the best in CV tech.
Not later than anyone else that hopped on the chat gpt bandwagon.
IT WAS STILL AROUND???
Second Life outlived it lmao
it was also more advanced despite having been released like a hundred years before
Metaverse was like the AI nobody asked for getting pushed into apps. Nobody wanted Wii Mii like hangout rooms where you have to water a clunky headset.
I never watered mine. Was that the issue?
I watered mine and now it makes weird smells :(
Ha! I can do that without an expensive headset.
Metaverse was like the AI nobody asked for getting pushed into apps. Nobody wanted Wii Mii like hangout rooms where you have to water a clunky headset.
I was willing to give a shot to something like the Metaverse, but the instant I heard it was a Facebook/Meta project I had zero interest and hoped it would die. This was my same experience with Occulus. These are both technologies I want for a cyberpunk future, but Facebook cannot be the one to control them.
I actually liked it back when it was called second life
I never understood why Second Life wasn’t ported to VR circa 2020.
One of the original employees of Oculus stuck around after the buy out, until a couple years ago and rage quit. Because he said that Meta is killing it. So yeah.
They are killing it, but sadly they’re about the only ones keeping it alive, at least at an affordable price.
I wish VR was a commodity product, like TVs. Everything compatible with everything.
Let’s wait for the steam frame
I’m going to guess at comfortably 3 times the price of the Quest 3S.
They might surprise us, but in this economy, I doubt it.
I predict it’ll be four times the price, an overpriced toy with no games
But there are games for it? They say you can play most games on steam with it?
It’s funny how almost everyone from FAANG is failing hard in the gaming space. Like Google fails with Stadia, Amazon shutdown how many game studios, Netflix shutdown that studio that were making a Squidgame game and the Zuck dumped billions into the metaverse void. Looks like the Silicon Valley way of doing business just doesn’t work in the games industry.
Almost any other company and Stadia could have survived.
Stadia was amazing for what it was, so obviously Google had to kill it
VRChat is the most popular “metaverse” and it’s still growing every year.
So it’s weird to call the metaverse dead when Horizon wasn’t even in the lead among its competitors.
VRChat is not owned by meta, therefore not part of the meta verse.
Metaverse is not the same as VR.
VR is virtual reality. A mode of interacting with 3D space using a head mounted display.
The metaverse is just social VR where you experience a shared 3D space with others in VR headsets. Don’t let Mark fool you into thinking only they make social VR spaces/the metaverse. That’s what he wants. He didn’t invent the term. He just claimed it as his own. And in my opinion, pissed all over it too.
Might as well call Second Life a part of the Metaverse. It isn’t, but by your reasoning it would be.
You don’t use VR headsets in SecondLife. It’s a lame flat screen third person thing where you play with dolls.
SocialVR is about embodiment too. Being your avatar. Eye contact. Presence. Third person control of a character model is not the same thing.
No, You don’t. It is possible, and people do. VR ≠ The Metaverse. VR is used in all sorts of things that have nothing to do with The Metaverse
I’m not saying all VR is the metaverse. I’m saying SocialVR and the metaverse are the same.
And does the official client for SecondLife support VR now? I thought they abandoned attempts at that.
No but undeniably the death of the metaverse is taking VR with it, once meta leaves the VR space it will be exclusively for enthusiasts and low quality indie games.
Valve is releasing a new headset.
People here forget that a likely $700+ headset designed for streaming (let’s be honest we have no idea how many games will make native ports) is mostly gonna take off with VR enthusiasts. Like the Index this is an explicitly premium headset.
once meta leaves the VR space it will be exclusively for enthusiasts and low quality indie games.
I literally never even heard of anything associated with Horizons that wasn’t a low-quality cashgrab or some kind of scam.
Disagree. Roblox and Fortnite metaverses will continue long after VR disappears.
VR space it will be exclusively for enthusiasts and low quality indie games.
Good. It’ll finally have a fighting chance to be great.
I guess VRChat will still exist but getting into VR will be very difficult
I get your point, I genuinely do. But the way the general public uses the term metaverse is to refer to Horizon, not that style of game/app in general.
But a device you kind of use sometimes (if you remember you own it)
Oh shit I do own one. Thanks for the reminder
May I ask why? It seems like a huge risk due to being tethered to a Facebook account which could get banned at any time. Was the price too good to pass up?
They pretty much have a monopoly on standalone VR headsets atm.
With a throwaway meta account and ADB you can make it somewhat less of a privacy nightmare
Ah. I guess that’s why people were so excited about Valve making one. I’m not really that interested in VR, so I never really evaluated their vs the competition’s offerings.
Valve is still not making one that can do AR, so we’re still stuck with either Meta or Pico for that use case.
Not entirely true. They’ll have black and white cameras at launch and have an expansion port on the front of the device for potential color cameras in the future.
They just said AR isn’t their focus for this device, not that it isn’t possible.
And I get it - everyone I know that already has XR headsets doesn’t bother with AR as the experiences are limited (and I imagine the union between AR gamers and tidy environments with clear surfaces is pretty small).
I expect them not to focus on AR as the biggest usecase for it is for virtual monitor in a real life environment and not gaming. Maybe the give us a colour camera add-on, but I doubt it’ll be their focus from the get-go.
I got it for free like four years ago and have barely used it since
How can I say goodbye to a place neither I nor anybody I know has ever been
Even his avatar looks dead.
Pretty life-like tbh
Making it ironically the most photorealistic thing on the Metaverse.
What’s dumb is that they have the hardware for it, and 3rd party software can use the inside-out tracking to making your legs work (tho it’s still pretty jank compared to a physical tracker attached to your ankle or even a Kinect setup). What the fuck is Meta’s problem? Do they only have vibe coders on staff? Surely it’s not the jankiness they have problems with; the hand/finger tracking is also janky as fuck.
Facebook once explained that their mobile app is so huge because they encourage everyone to just roll their own thing instead of sharing code, because it’s faster to not have to coordinate or something. Well, if you never leverage other people’s work ever, you’re going to spend a lot of time reinventing wheels, and a lot of those wheels will look more like hexagons.
Lol! Ephebophile management philosophy!
This will die, but in one year GTA6 will release. People are already “working” virtual jobs for pennies in unofficial servers for the last game and Rockstar has prepared the ground even more for the next.
The metaverse, in some form, is nearly inevitable IMO. But it’ll be a federated-like infrastructure and I’m very glad Facebook will have fuck all to do with it.
It seems that you understand what the term “metaverse” was even supposed to mean; care to enlighten the rest of us?
Not them, but I think I’ve got a bead on it, assuming you treat it as a general concept and not a trademark:
It’s basically the Platonic ideal of a game lobby. Kinda like what Miiverse was supposed to be, or Ready Player One. They were both after my time but I think maybe kinda like Club Penguin or Roblox? Like an overworld with a custom avatar that you can socialize in and sync into other apps or games together.
It does seem basically inevitable, fast forward gaming 10 years and I’d be surprised if something like that wasn’t the norm.
Like many crappy things these days, the name and some of the concept were stolen from good sci-fi. Snow Crash, in this case, in which it was as if the entire Internet was VR.
Which, the Web barely existed when that book was written, so wild visions of what the Internet might turn out to be were to be expected. And something like it remains a common cyberpunk trope to this day.
That said, I disagree with the other poster that it will ever happen, let alone is inevitable.
Also, one of the protagonists of that book lives in a storage unit with a roommate works five jobs and uses a pay toilet across the street¹ despite having worked at multiple wildly valuable start-ups. It is not a novel about good things or a good future.
¹at which he can’t afford the premium subscriotion that has toilet paper
It is not a novel about good things or a good future.
If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson’s short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I’m in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson’s works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.
I don’t recall those novels being explicitly sequels, but maybe?
He’s not a Utopian, but that’s part of the point. They’re doing torment nexuses. Silicon valley is just the torment nexus place.
Read the book ‘snow crash’, he was trying to do an even more dystopian version of… Just that entire book.
Holds on all copies at the library on this 1992 book!
Others gave reference to the origins, but in practical terms think: gravatar meets roblox meets VRC, scaled and decentralized as a VR web.
That’s the most human looking picture of Mark Zuckerberg I’ve ever seen
Say ‘goodbye’ already??
I never got to say ‘hello’ in the first place!!
I miss the Playstation Home game. Wish that was vr.
