Hey, the Zucc looks slightly less creepy as a VR puppet in that propaganda clip. I guess that's something.
For real, though. All of the marketing is "it's coming, it will be everywhere" which makes it sound roughly as appealing and positive as Covid. What is supposed to be the upside to the proles that are being pressured to take this all in? No matter what I read about it, it reads like a threat more than a promise.
Libertarians realizing they can apply pedo logic to life itself: if we get there early enough, they won't know what they're missing
So you know VR? The company formerly known as facebook decided they're going to do a VR thing, and now VR/AR and "metaverse" are basically synonymous. They haven't really done much of anything yet but we're supposed to be excited about it anyway.
Edit: this is my 400th post so you have to upbear it
virtual reality has been The Future for half a century now. imo it speaks to a society that, after the breakneck pace of the industrial revolution, the advances of the "space age," and the cyberneticization/financialization of the economy, has hit a wall, can no longer imagine that technology has the capacity to improve the lived-in world, only that it can provide increasingly elaborate ways to fill us with greater volumes of stimuli.
i think it's probably a doomed endeavor, and there's neither the broad desire nor the physical resources available to make a fully jacked-in lotus-eater world possible. i'm just trying to imagine why the people who choose where the money goes want it to be the inevitable next stage of human development.
The most charitable interpretation possible is that it's like VR Chat but with apps, so you (as your avatar) can work, shop, and play and it will all be one seamless experience.
...but honestly I don't think Facebook even knows what it is, because what they've shown is a bunch of separate bits that don't seem to fit together, and every single one is a solution looking for a problem. Nobody it going to get their whole office to set up VR headsets for meetings when Zoom exists, nobody is going to use a headset to do online shopping, nobody is going to strap in to a VR office in order to work on spreadsheets. It's already a hard enough sell to get people on VR devices when the experience on offer is completely unique, and everything in the metaverse looks completely banal.
It's a vaporware tech bubble like 3D TVs, AR, ARGs, or the last several VR hype cycles. We used to have these more often. Back in the early 2010s, every stupid tech idea was a "revolution" with its own pile of proponents and grifters. But it's been a hot minute, so I've forgotten all the better examples.
As far as bubbles go, I think it'll be a particularly large one, perhaps so large it does funny things in the real world. It's also kind of structurally interesting, if you're a nerd about the anatomy of bad ideas. But definitely just another piece of vaporware in the end.
I remember when Google Glass was supposed to be everywhere and everyone would have them and need them to function in the AR world that would be compulsory around, oh, some years ago.
Then people got tired of the glassholes being obnoxious and creeping on strangers.
There's a lot of social capital that :melon-musk: has left to burn through. If he didn't have such cringe tweets as his new addiction, his reputation would likely be unassailable right now.
I don't think ARGs are really a tech bubble. They happen sometimes and sometimes they don't. They're less trendy now, but still happen. Not really sure how you'd turn a massive profit off of them.
The metaverse should be like a VR version of the web, what it's instead going to be is a like a VR version of the facebook app platform where FB becomes the gatekeeper for your data while they collect it all themselves. And there is going to be a lot of data. Tons of insight into your behaviors. Plenty of opportunities for them to influence you.
Sounds great doesn't it. /s :angery:
Who is this for? Who wants this? Surely the techbros themselves don't actually want to VR shop at Wal-mart or whatever the fuck this is.
I'm not so sure. I know some :so-true: around me and words like "NFT" and "crypto" and even "cloud" are enough to get their attention no matter how janky or :sus-deep: the grift is. I think "shopping, but VR" may already have a captive audience. :desolate:
They probably want to grope other people's VR avatars then stalk them into real life, which will be easier than ever with all that data tracking. :so-true:
The end goal is to be able to like telecommute with your fortnight character. It is actually better than our current system and if it was done in a non marketized it would be a good part of a revolutionary system. way having friends over to play board games in AR would be rad as shit. Similar going to the DMV in VR would make things way easier.
Just about everything in techbro hellworld would actually be good and welcome if it wasn't billionaire vampires commanding and controlling it.
Why the fuck would anyone need to go to the DMV in VR? Literally anything DMV related can be done by filling out a form on a website, which doesn't require A FUCKING VR HEADSET SO I CAN VIRTUALLY WAIT IN LINE.
This would be easier for some people especially with accebility issues it might be preferable. I am not saying it the best option. But it is a good option with some utility. Maybe the DMV isn't the best example. Doctor's visits maybe. They are right now working on units almost as small as regular glasses. So I could see it being viable before too long.
https://secondlife.com
Which came out nearly 20 years ago already shows why this is a terrible idea.
if widespread AR/VR ever actually happens, I'm just going to be a crime guy doing robberies.
all these dorks focused entirely on the Celeb Deepfake Jumbo Titty skin they've applied to everyone they look at, and I'm walking out their front door with their key fobs and Vitamixes.
I think they want us to think that it'll be like the Oasis from Ready Player One where you can do literally anything and be whatever you want. Shoot zombies one minute and fuck your anime waifus the next. Imo the promises are purposely vague so you can interpret whatever you want into it and be hyped purely thanks to wishful thinking, we've seen how effective that strategy has proven to be recently with the whole NFT bullshit where every project promises the moon.
No idea what it's actually gonna be though.
New thing to sell people. Our TVs already have enough Ks most people can't tell the difference and 3D TVs bombed hard. Also VR/AR offer more interaction metrics to collect compared to a PC or smartphone.
4K, 8K, 12K only so many Ks you can have before most people don't care
It's just to get VCs on board with his plans for the future. I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg bought Occulus thinking of the gaming possibilities first, like everyone else who is normal also did, because there's real future for VR gaming. But Zuckerburger is currently facing slowing growth numbers for both Facebook AND Instagram, his two biggest cards, so he looked at his portfolio and now decided that VR is the future.
You know how media always portrays a future internet as some bafflingly unusable VR thing that's just all the inconvenience of a shopping mall combined with the security nightmare of internet-of-things bullshit, and how everyone who knows anything about computers is like "lol how fucking stupid, imagine someone being so fucking stupid that they'd make something this terrible for literally no reason"?
Remember Second Life, the weird parasocial quasi-MMO thing with digital real estate scarcity and other weird scams?
Facebook is trying to do the latter again, but turn it into the former this time around.
It doesn't even seem NEW. It doesn't really offer anything new except "get it all in one place" company town and company store rackets. The hype feels very artificial. Maybe it's less artificial in :so-true: hellholes full of techbros, though.
