There are standards in terms of the delivery mechanism in WebXR (XR = one JS API for both VR or AR hardware), Three.js being the leading implementation.
My interest is in 360º photography (I have a Ricoh Theta Z1 camera). You can share immersive panoramas of far-off places (like the Mont Saintt Michel, France) with a cheap $200 Oculus Go (kindly subsidized by Meta). What’s even better, this works using open web technology, no proprietary platforms required unlike iOS or Android app development. Have a look at:
It works on desktop, on a phone with the accelerometer, and with VR goggles.
There is no standard for how metaverses should interoperate but then again I can’t see why they would want to, beyond links taking you from one to the other, just as websites have hyperlinks but no other connection.
Don’t get me wrong; I Absolutely Did Not Want ‘the metaverse’ to succeed; but no other project has cost Zuckerberg as much money for as little reward as ‘the metaverse’.
I was really, really, hoping that it could keep deathmarching to nowhere for a while longer.
No one on an earnings call is going to say out loud “I screwed up and spent billions of your money on my personal pipe dream. My bad. But don’t worry: I have a new pipe dream now! And it uses AI!”
Wouldn’t it be great if Zuck walked out on stage and said “We’re developing a new AI with the exclusive goal of having it replace me.”
What part of the Metaverse described in that book sounded cool to you?
I finally got around to reading Snow Crash recently, and I have to say, it really didn’t make the Metaverse sound appealing at all. The description of the place with stark, simple building shapes, black sky, etc sounded boring and dystopian, and the user interface (requiring long trips on a virtual monorail to travel around) seemed pretty bad. The main character didn’t do anything “fun” within that world other than visit a trendy club while in real life he was sitting in a self-storage shed drinking a warm beer.
I actually do have an old friend who is one of the very few people who absolutely loves the Zuckerverse and is going to be very disappointed by this development. For the past couple of years he’s been a true evangelist for VR in general and the Zuckerverse in particular. Oh well. I had another friend who was really, really into Second Life back in the day, and she found a way to move on, so I guess he’ll be ok.
Well, that leaves two questions, Monkey. First, what evidence did that dumb Business Insider article have for their assertion? As far as I can see, none whatsoever. Second, did the summary BoingBoing provided of that dumb article even accurately reflect what the dumb article baselessly asserted? And the answer is clearly no.
What do Fortnite and Minecraft have in common, other than they are virtual realities? What benefits would a cross-over have to justify the substantial engineering effort in achieving a cross-organization low latency interconnection? I’ve seen bizarre collaborations before, like the Lacoste x Netflix pop-up shop in London’s Covent Garden last weekend (T-shirts with the creepy alien crocodile from Stranger Things), nightmare-inducing if anything and completely pointless to me. We don’t demand that the game Elden Ring have some sort of connection to Jedi Survivor, they are separate realities and that’s perfectly fine.
Are you kidding? Despite the billions spent on the effort, Meta never even figured out how to have decent-sized groups of people have a low-latency connection within their own Horizon Worlds platform, using the hardware that’s designed and sold by Meta. So there’s no way that they’d be up to the task of creating some workable shared protocols.
Maybe they might have had a better shot at solving the problem if they’d focused on building a low-latency protocol between federated services, rather than dinking around with designing the infrastructure AND the content AND the marketing AND the monetization at the same time.
I’m not proposing crossing over disparate worlds, though that could maybe be a long-term goal, I’m talking about creating a protocol that would allow servers owned by different parties to federate in a shared 3d space. If Facebook had focused on that, rather than trying to handle the entire implementation up from server hardware to user eyeballs, it might have been more successful in getting people on board.
whenever something seems too dumb to be true, it’s even dumber than it looks.
in this case, he’s just bet on the wrong horse. sometimes that’s understandable: risk means accepting loss. but sometimes, like this, it was obvious to everyone what would happen
facebook isnt innovative, and zuckerberg isn’t either.
other people have already said, but to answer it directly: hardware and hardware subsides. those monstrosities of a headset aren’t cheap
( probably also things like up real estate, infrastructure, and server costs. )
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but how do you expect the news to come out when/if Facebook abandon their Metaverse plans?
I can’t see Zuck going on stage and saying “I fucked up, we’re going to spend all that money on X from now on”, but I can see something exactly like this happening, a quiet reduction in budgets, plenty of time for executives to golden parachute their way out, and in 5-10 years what’s left of the people working on it will be very quietly reassigned (or sacked more likely).
Meta wheels out Deloitte to plug the metaverse. Is anyone actually convinced?
[…]
To make the case for the economic bounty of the metaverse, Meta cites a study “commissioned by Meta and produced by Deloitte.” And guess what? The study Meta paid for finds that the social network is on to something – in as non-committal a way as possible.
There is a disclaimer about the third-party data cited in the report: “Deloitte has neither sought to corroborate this information nor to review its overall reasonableness.” But hey, who among us hasn’t issued a report we won’t stand behind? Just because Deloitte insists “no information in the Final Report should be relied upon in any way by any third party” doesn’t mean we can’t be blindly enthusiastic about investing in the metaverse.
