I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter.

> Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow?

I mean, that would be nice for users, but:

a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally* able to give up ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, basically

b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?

And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed).

* in the sense of "this is the fundamental basis and goal of the company," not in a U.S.-founding-document sense

This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die.

Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can.

Edit: clarify

(In general the maximize profit meme does need to die tho)

which was added thanks to your parent comment.

The relevant legal standard is "Don't abuse the company for your own ends", not "you must do everything to get as much money as quickly as possible, consequences be damned!"

This would be an interesting test case. The limits on what he can or cannot do are remarkably ill-defined.

Those organizations and people that adopt the meme become more powerful and choke out all those entities that don't.

You can't just choose not to pursue profits at any cost if there are ANY competing entities out there that choose to do so.

Why that is is where the fundamental disagreement is. One of the proposed reasons is too much regulation, the other is too little. It's (in my opinion) probably both - too much poorly applied, and not enough where it's needed.

Hunt around for just a few minutes on the google search, "do corporations have a legal obligation to maximize share value," and you'll see that what you said is the myth that gets repeated -- this one link probably summarizes the argument against the myth in the most neutral way:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

The second paragraph gives two such cases: AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow and Shlensky v. Wrigley.

To summarize the case, Ford was sitting on a huge amount of cash. Some shareholders, in particular the Dodge brothers, wanted it paid out as dividends. Ford said no, and specifically:

"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes"

Had he said less, or even nothing, that would have been fine. Management is entitled to make whatever business-related decisions they see fit (the "business judgement" rule). If the Dodges disagree with those decisions, they can sell their shares and reinvest the money elsewhere.

Had Ford said more "...and we think doing so will grow the market for our cars", "help us retain our skilled and motivated workforce" or something else vaguely related to success of Ford Motor Company, that also would have been fine.

Unfortunately, what Ford said fell into a gap where it was clear that what he was doing was not a business decision; he was using the shareholders' money for his own personal ends, charitable though they may be. Shlensky v. Wrigley is an interesting comparison. The Cubs refused to have night baseball games due to some...idiosyncratic beliefs about the "true nature" of the sport. This reduced their potential profits, but was nevertheless okay because chasing after the "purists" OR going for mass-market appeal are both reasonable business decisions.

(This is not my argument; it's made in this article: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1384/)

> At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule

What is the business judgement rule?

> The business judgment rule is a case law-derived doctrine in corporations law that courts defer to the business judgment of corporate executives.

In other words, if the CEO of a company says that he did something because e.g. he believed it was better for the long-term health of the company, the court will generally take his word for it, barring evidence of deliberate malfeasance.

What one cannot do is as Ford did, which was to deliberately try and hurt other shareholders.

That's the wrong question.

The right question is "how many FB users would accept a free headset that advertisers paid for in exchange for access to your data and exclusive rights to place ads in front of you?"

The social dynamics are completely different. Second Life showed that very clearly.

The three biggest things in Second Life were fantasy consumerism, fantasy entrepreneurship, and fantasy sex.

Unless FB is getting into those markets it's going to find the metaverse a tough sell.

Not least because the whole point of fantasy is that it's not really you. So that immediately conflicts with FB's only-real-identities dogma.

I feel like we’re all hoping that there will be a VR version of the early web, free and open, and mostly just neat things to connect with or about. I worry there is increasingly no chance of that.

On the other hand, oculus is state of the art in virtual reality. I don't know if any other hardware or ecosystem as well developed as theirs is.

Maybe a vocal minority like us HN-folk, but I don't think that by ourselves we really matter in terms of numbers.

It was like the Matrix scene where Neo was learning, then leaves the simulation and says "I know Kung Fu".

She used computers for social media and looking up recipes, so not very savvy at all. I don't think there's a correlation between interest in VR and technicality. Maybe between _vocal_ interest in VR and technicality.

The internet network and it's forbears was funded largely by the US DoD (not the army specifically I don't think?) (and as a huge portion of academic computer science continues to be, btw), but most of the people involved in creating the internet and the things built on top of it, technologically and socially, including those allocating significant material resources to it's development, were not in fact military personnel (let alone in the army specifically?).

What I meant is that the people involved in building it were focused on things other than making money. (This may be hard to believe, that any human endeavor can take place except motivated by extreme profits, but it's the case). They were also not, by and large on the whole, especially motivated by military advantage, although some may have been, including some of the funders. But it was not in fact, largely, built as a national-security-focused or military/militarized network (sure, subsets of it were, there was a MILNET; it was a part of ARPANET and later separated from it, which shows that it was not the whole); nor was it built originally as a giant surveillance system for the purposes of commerce and profit (or law enforcement).

$300 * 3 billion people, so $900 Billion give or take which coincidentally is right around the market cap of the entire company.

$200+ billion. They can't afford it. They couldn't get the manufacturing for it, either.

A very good point. I think the financing would be less of an issue, honestly; $200 billion a lot of cash up front, but spread out over five or ten years it's well within their FCF if they wanted to allocate it that way.

EDIT: As another comment pointed out, FB might also be able to convince advertisers to subsidize some (or all) of the costs of "free" headsets for the masses, if they wanted to try this scheme.

About 0.6-1 trillion dollars, give or take.

20-50 times what they earn per user.

Of course, the essence of your point is true: Facebook doesn't make as much per year per user on average as a headset costs.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...

0. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/oculus-will...,

3 billion fb users x 100 per unit = 300 billion

A letter to everyone would cost 3 billion

I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising company to be building "the metaverse".

I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse.

It's one use-case I can kind of see benefiting from blockchain protocols: enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse, by recording transfers of avatars and assets between the "metaworlds" making up the metaverse ("digital identity scarcity" is still an unsolved problem though, I think)

I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one?

Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction.

It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems.

We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.

Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel the secondary market - from which creators see little to no gain. Surprise, Pablo Picasso (nor his estate) doesn't see a dime from the speculation on his art at high-society art auctions - the verifiability of art (i.e., NFTs) benefits overwhelmingly speculators, not creators.

I watched the FB keynote today and some parts were just dystopian. Instead of street art being on a wall for everyone to look at, the VR "street art" expired after mere seconds, requiring you to "tip" the creator to simply keep looking at it? Can we not financialize every moment of existence? FB's vision for the metaverse feels a lot like being nickeled and dimed every 3 seconds for all eternity, where every interaction is commercialized. It's hard to imagine any kind of real shared human experience emerging from this. It feels like FB looked at the state of the real world - where commercial interests are grafted onto the human experience, and decided to just skip the human experience part and go straight to the commercialization part.

Digital scarcity is just such a depressing failure of imagination - artists can produce copies of their art at literally zero marginal cost! Instead of producing art for one customer at a time, they can now produce art that can be sold en masse - so everyone can have access to the art they admire. Why does a pair of virtual metaverse sneakers need to be one-of-a-kind? Why can't we instead sell copies of the sneakers to everyone who wants it, and the price would be low because the marginal cost of production is zero? Why can't we revel in the widespread abundance - provided to both the community and the creator - rather than wallow in the artificially-induced scarcity?

More importantly, do we actually want to try and cement a system of perpetual ownership or revenue in an abundant digital world? Doesn't this go directly against our goal of encouraging creators to keep creating?

I think that one of the downside of current content models based on IP and access rights are that many companies (from Disney to Nintendo) have discovered that they can augment their revenue streams basically in perpetuity by locking down decades-old pieces of content, preventing other people from building on that content or sharing it, and then endlessly reselling and recycling it. Because they have the ability to restrict even normal people from building on their work in even non-commercial settings, they have no real competition or incentive to keep iterating on their work or to be responsible stewards of their IP. This is not the outcome that we wanted from IP law, and I feel very hesitant to try and cement it into a technology.

> from transfer of ownership

I think an important concept to get about the Internet is that content ownership isn't scarce. We have moved into a world where I can give something to you without losing it myself. There is no "transfer" of ownership at all, in the digital world there is duplication of ownership. This is a giant shift from how the real world usually works; and with our laws/businesses, we have made a deliberate choice online to ignore that paradigm shift and instead try our absolute hardest to make sure that "ownership" continues to be an exclusive right that can be transferred.

It's understandable why we've gone down this route, but it is nevertheless a complete denial of what an interconnected digital medium is and what it's capable of. I hope that as we move forward and continue to iterate on the Internet that we gradually get closer to embracing the Internet's strengths rather than hobbling them.

Ignoring all of the other criticisms of NFTs for a second, the underlying goal of NFTs as a technology is to undo the existence of digital files. It's to undo the invention of copyable data and to step backwards out of the Internet back into an older world where when you handed someone a CD you no longer had the CD. I think that even if all of the other problems with NFTs were fixed, that's still just not a goal that's worth pursuing.

I don't think it'd be controversial to say that the world would've been poorer for it - and George Lucas too. If the goal is financial success for artists, mass distribution always beats selective exclusion, and if the goal is broad cultural impact the case for mass distribution is even clearer.

Humans want to enforce certain forms of scarcity. Trying to be utopian about it just ends up creating unintended externalities.

That's not necessarily true. In fact I don't think that holds at all. They've bought smartphones and laptops for hundreds and thousands of dollars and pay many tens of dollars every month to access the Internet. People are already paying quite a bit to access content on the Internet.

The problem with paying for most types of content is the content is not worth the amount of money it's practical to charge for it. Charging money on the Internet is expensive and has lower bounds below which no one will even conduct a transaction. That lower bound is about a dollar and so many transaction fees come out of it a seller is not going to end up with a whole dollar and the buyer will end up paying more than a dollar.

A blog post, gif, or YouTube video is not worth a dollar. For most people they're not even worth a whole penny. They're certainly not worth an up front payment sight unseen.

In the early days of the Internet charging for content was even less practical and more expensive than today.

Advertising on the Internet, like advertising in other media, is a way to "charge" users some fractional penny to access some content. In aggregate the content creator can make money based traffic. While AdTech has reached asinine levels of intrusiveness the concept of advertising isn't necessarily bad. It also doesn't exist just because users are cheapskates.

You're correct to criticize advertising, but I also want to push back a little bit on the "utopia" of paywalls as a funding method for the web.

There's a difference between paying for content creation and paying for content itself. Content creators and their time are actually scarce resources, even online. Content itself is not a scarce resource; once something is created it becomes abundant. So both IP laws/paywalls and advertising are attempts to monetize and artificially restrict/control some other abundant and/or uncommoditized resource instead of engaging with the actual scarce resource/activity that we care about incentivizing.

As such, both advertising and IP-enforced pay-for-access models have negative externalities that arise from them being indirect monetization models. With advertising, we deal with negative externalities such as privacy violations and clickbait. With pay-for-access models, we get externalities like DRM, SaaS, endless content recycling, and a general lockdown of culture itself.

With both payment schemes, we are ignoring the actually scarce resource that is actually in real demand by the market: creators and time. But instead of trying to come up with schemes to monetize that and instead of trying to imagine what a market based on creative/useful output would look like, we've instead become obsessed with making other resources artificially scarce or artificially commoditized. We fight against technology and human nature itself instead of thinking about how we can fund the real scarce resources that still remain.

This could be a longer conversation; there are multiple theories about how to pay for creation, and a lot of debate about what models are sustainable there. Too long of a conversation to get into right here. But the really short version of this conversation is that you are very correct to look at advertising as an imprecise, indirect way of measuring value, and you are correct to point out it has a lot of negative externalities. But you're making an assumption that pay-for-access models haven't had their own negative externalities, and I don't think that assumption holds up. I think we've seen a lot of suppression of innovation and general culture because of our current funding model for IP. Of course a theoretical Internet where people paid for content access would have turned out different; but would it have been better? I don't think that's a safe assumption at all.

At its worst the current pay-for-access model sometimes decreases the creation/availability of content because it incentivizes recycling and restriction of existing content, and restricts other creators from building on top of and preserving existing content -- essentially denying a universal human instinct that has been around for almost as long as humans have existed.

There isn't an easy answer about how we should remake a content economy in a world without digital scarcity (ask Open Source devs how hard this is), but recreating digital scarcity and pretending that we're still in the old system probably isn't the right way to move forward. We should try to consider how people can more directly pay for the resources that are actually scarce: not content itself or the bits on your computer, but instead content creation and maintenance and the people who are able to make the things we care about.

The more directly we monetize resources that are actually scarce and the less that we rely on indirect models of monetization, the fewer surprising/negative externalities we'll see in the long run.

> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse

Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data are instead motivated by selling users things they don't need.

Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory?

One of the great things about digital worlds/goods is they exist in microscopic (nanoscopic now) electrical circuits. They use practically no resources and can be duplicated for next to nothing. They also take up very little physical space to store. They're free from or at least resistant to most natural phenomena that create scarcity.

Because as Second Life demonstrated we don't seem to have many good ideas for incentivising creation otherwise.

Any system implement artificial scarcity would be a DRM system. In order for you to able to "wear" virtual Nikes (because you paid for them) and me not be able to "wear" them (because I didn't) the metaverse could not be open and federated.

In order for me to see your virtual Nikes I'd have to retrieve the mesh and texture files for them. My system would have to be locked down such that I couldn't pull those files out of my local cache.

From your side of the issue, would you (the hypothetical royal you) pay for virtual Nikes if I could tell my client device to ignore remote resources? What good are your virtual Nikes if people can choose not to see them?

Obviously replace Nike with any IP holder even down to the smallest of small time creators. A metaverse with artificial scarcity would be the walliest of walled gardens with a giant moat on the outside. The only way to make that work is to have a completely locked down and closed system.

Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/

Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free.

Their existing prototypes are outrageously embarrassing. I'm the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, awkward, and embarrassingly goofy. At least The Office has some endearing quality (sorry for the weird comparison).

I'm not sure if it's Mark Zuckerberg's influence or what... but everything about Facebook lacks some sort of jour de vive. Like, their idea of "making work fun" is stuff like... an astoundingly cringe-worth video about healthcare open-enrollment? This kind of thing dumbfounds me https://vimeo.com/639318528... and I don't even consider myself a cynical person.

All of this feels only a few degrees removed from Jonestown.

They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the public at large has no knowledge of that. All the public knows is that it's decent hardware for a super low price compared to the competitors, it doesn't require a PC, and it's what most of their friends with a headset are using.

Can't really call having the most popular headset not succeeding, even if it is probably subsidized with their massive ads money making machine.

The Oculus is great, but the way it's actually used today (games/social VR chat mostly) is still pretty niche.

Facebook is really pushing this new metaverse use case that blends VR with work/meetings/etc. I personally think it's a non-starter, they seem to be trying extremely hard to manufacture a trend, rather than capitalizing on an existing one.

But I've been completely wrong about Facebook twice before, so what do I know.

https://vox.run if you want to check it out. Supports any WebXR browser and the dev tools are built in.

I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true.

< 30 is the _largest_ proportion of facebook users

https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-u...

Even putting Facebook aside Oculus is dominating the VR space due to cheap hardware, which I would bet is a ton of < 30 people.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/265018/proportion-of-dir...

My point here is consumers don't _actually_ care about company morals, despite the prevailing narrative.

It's a statement that no one thinks "oh cool facebook" about literally anything they say or do. Their greatest successes in terms of social capital over the last decade have involved buying other companies.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems while everyone uses Facebook to some extent... no one likes it.

Similarly, I like Reddit a lot. There are a ton of shitty subreddits but so what, I just don't go there.

On the other hand, I hate Facebook. I wish I could find an easy way to stay connected to my existing friend network without the amount of vitriol I feel toward how my feed is organized.

Hey now, not everybody is on FB.

> I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true.

I'm not sure that you can equate demographics and usage statistics to feelings about credibility. For example, I use a certain world-eating online retailer/marketplace a few times per year, but never for anything where I think there is a reasonably high chance that I would be purchasing counterfeit goods, because of my concerns about credibility.

One of the best dystopian explanations for the Fermi paradox is that intelligences eventually figure out how to immerse themselves in high fidelity fantasy worlds and basically sit around and masturbate until some black swan event like a planet killer astroid or a gamma ray burst destroys them. Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.

There seem to be three possible futures on offer today:

(1) A Brave New World with AR, VR, social media dopamine loops, ARGs and conspiracy LARPs, cheap drugs, and sex robots where the meaning of life is to withdraw into a fantasy world and masturbate until you die. This offers the comfort of rewards without challenges.

(2) Reactionary movements against modernity itself, proposing that we instead re-embrace feudalism or some kind of totalitarianism where the state or some Ubermensch gives us purpose. This includes authoritarian fundamentalist religious movements, the alt-right, neoreaction, etc. This offers the comfort of the "devil we know" and futures that resemble our past.

(3) SpaceX Starship and the next frontier, a future where we embrace difficult adventures in the real world with high risk but high payoff. This offers the least comfort but a lot of growth and experience.

Choose wisely.

I'm not against what you describe nor do I think it's mutually exclusive with option (3), but so far IMHO leftists have offered no solution to some of the inherent problems of this vision.

The biggest one is how to make democracy work.

How do you do good work under a democratic model? The Soviet bureaucratic model isn't truly democratic and as every engineer knows nothing good ever comes from a committee. How can democratic governance produce efficient, polished, practical, cost effective outputs?

How do you avoid perverse incentives, runaway complexity, endless bikeshedding, or stagnation due to "vetocracy" like what exists with California housing? How do you prevent the seemingly natural formation of an oligarchy?

So far I don't think democracy has ever existed except at tribal scale (below Dunbar's Number). All former and current attempts are oligarchies with a degree of democratic veto power or a democratic facade.

I think this problem is closely isomorphic or maybe even identical to the open problem of efficient and secure fully decentralized computing and global consensus in distributed systems without hidden centralization or brute force approaches like Bitcoin proof of work. (... and Bitcoin PoW is in reality an oligarchy if you look at the largest pools ...)

I've not read the book, but according to this interview [0] something closer to half of all pre-modern societies had something resembling democracies (the rest being the autocrats we tend to expect from history).

Some were a bit different - for instance, in many cases elected representatives would have a fixed mandate on issues that they had the authority to make decisions on. Anything broader meant going back to the constituents to ask for an extension of power.

I'm hopeful that human society has already solved some of the problems of democracy - modern society has just glossed over those solutions with not-invented-here syndrome.

I'm also hopeful that technologies built top of cryptocurrencies (like smart contracts and DAOs) will enable new ways for humans to coordinate.

Mechanisms like quadratic voting and funding appear genuinely new to me - and particularly promising!

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGkhWUureVg

That's a common adage, yet some of our most used technologies are created or maintained by committees - the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects.

Regarding your point about democracy vs oligarchy, this is to some extent a spectrum. There are few truly democratic (one man one vote) organizations, that is quite true. But I still have much more of a say on how my city is run than my company.

And there are some examples of huge co-ops with a great degree of success. The biggest is the Mondragon corporation in Spain. They're by no means an example of a perfect democracy, but again - workers clearly have much more of a say there than in most similarly sized corps.

Also, some of the countries on Earth with the biggest quality of life happen to be some of the most democratically run as well - Switzerland perhaps being the most striking example.

The sheer amount of effort put by those in power in making sure those below them don't get any ounce of power also shows that they see the potential risk to their status if some of these things happen - thinking here specifically of the huge union busting industry, and of efforts to discredit any leftist candidate that makes it onto the world stage (like the disgusting accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn, or the insinuations of being anti-black against Bernie Sanders).

I think "created or maintained by committees" here is not precise enough. In most of these cases, especially in the case of net technologies, ECMAScript, and C++, a committee came into place only after independent vendors began to blaze the trail on their own. The committee's job here was to take existing implementations and distill them into a standard. This is important because individual entities often have almost no incentive to cooperate otherwise.

However, there are examples of initiatives created top-down by committee that ended up becoming too complicated to achieve actual usage. The OSI Model vs the TCP/IP model [1] is a good example of this failure.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Compar...

I would suggest looking at libertarian left instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism, in particular.

It feels as if abusive societies are the norm (and we have seen that in breathtakingly dark glory with the ascent of surveillance capitalism) but the historical pattern seems to be pointing to the gradual discovery of tools (institutions, behaviors) that eliminate these local minima. Alas it may not be happening fast enough to prevent drifting into a bottomless pit.

The main current issue with the "metaverse", imho, is not who will control it, but is it actually a breakthrough communications technology that is worthwhile developing to its "full" potential? Its "wow" factor feels really gimmicky. I am thinking that if it feels like a gimmick maybe it is a gimmick. But I do acknowledge that a combination of preliminary implementations and not have discovered yet the use cases what would really make it worthwhile may change the picture at a future point.

You say this with a maybe as though it isn't already a certainty.

Nothing can stop it from happening. There will always be brainpower available, willing, and capable of contributing to computer aided fantasy and isolation. Not that it has to necessarily be a bad thing, mind.

OTOH plenty of things could make it impossible to succeed with a starship.

I don't know if you have a more narrow view of this idea or specifically mean VR/AR, but that just sounds like what massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft are. I think Roblox is even a broader use case, though I am fairly unfamiliar with that.

MMOs have been very viable from both a business and user stand point and have been a fairly big thing for going on a quarter century or so at this point. Whether these branch into more of the Second Life non-game social space or into being largely AR/VR driven is pretty up in the air, but it's not some sci-fi concept really.

Really? Everything that's not named World of Warcraft seems to die out, usually in less than a year. It's a genre that's been a notorious recipe for failure for most companies not named Blizzard.

MMOs aren't eating the world like in 2005, but they're a solidly-established genre that looks here to stay.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-o...

[1] https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass...

[2] https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/05/meet-the-man-who-red...

[3] https://tech4gamers.com/amazon-mmo-new-world-registered-a-pe...

But MMO in general today are massive, far bigger than WoW ever was. Though, there is also far more diversity regarding world-sizes. From smaller worlds for some dozen to hundred users, to bigger world with thousands and ten thousands, to the big massive virtual continents that WoWs era defined, we have them all now.

Then we have the endless amounts of wargames[1], shoots[2] and old browser-games[3]. Or the newer genre of battle royale, where we have hundreds of players per session in some game. Though, there is not much richful interaction between the players outside the game, it's all just simple chat or even none at all. Though, I heard Fortnite has gained some persistent world-aspects outside the game-sessions?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_...

> but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?

I think their point is more that they will offer the graphical virtual space for the players to wait and meet between the games and work, while others will create the games and apps which people than can enter from this space. My understanding is, they offer technology and the connecting point, not the content. The same way they already do it today with plain old 2D crud-interfaces.

Blizzard was to the gaming industry what people often believe Apple is to the hardware industry. They were the only ones that invested in polished UI, coherent UX, etc. and it was so incredibly noticeable.

I'm sure a lot of this was pressure to get something out quickly to make a "WoW killer", which is what gaming media branded basically every MMO that launched after WoW.

They're an environment crafted to scratch a dopamine itch by providing instant gratification for work, with a social layer attached on top. I write this as someone who used to play MUDs back before MMORPGs even became a thing.

Unless Facebook is planning on releasing their own WoW branded as the metaverse, I don't see how they're the same.

There are some niche products with stable worlds, but those are a minority of a minority.

You’re going to see more games like Genshin Impact and the phantasy star online update. Open world multiplayer games without the massively part.

Roblox largely is the modern source mod scene but monetized.

The video in the initial tweet is up to 2.1 million views: https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560?...

VRChat or someone building on their proof of concept is likely to make it happen. It won't be Facebook with its VR Slack.

(And as for me, I'm stuck trying to figure out how to hack up a WebXR experience with, ah, limited programming skills. Until then, it should be at https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_559152a2-44d3-44... , but it's inaccessible without adding me as a friend and accepting an invitation to an instance I spin up. So, practically useless. And support is no help in terms of what, exactly, I'd need to do to raise my trust level.)

I did enjoy wandering around the TARDIS though.

The required parts to make a 60Hz 1080p headset are entering the $100 cell phone market and that segment of components are more or less what Nintendo traditionally uses in its handhelds.

Nintendo also has a long history of "blue ocean" products that tweak existing technologies to make them more mainstream.

The idea that it's refresh rate or resolution that's keeping VR from becoming mainstream seems ridiculous when even a relatively friendly platform like PSVR ships with this bundle of cables: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/So...

Occulus seems to realize this but their software side still needs work.

A 480p game on the Wii is still a playable game. An art style that leans into the low resolution will also look fine. While it might not have looked as good as a PS3 it's still playable.

A VR headset with imprecise orientation sensors and a slow refresh rate will make you sick. Your visual input won't match what your proprioception says about your body's positioning. Even if you manage not to get sick such a system isn't usable for non-trivial durations. A low end VR system is not worth any amount of money because it's not practically usable.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen-door_effect

Yes, cables are also something that lowers immersion.

1080p: I disagree, that can either be good or bad depending on the content. E.g. original iPhone was only 320x480, but Apple made it feel good.

Yes, you can see the pixels. But it’s easy enough to ignore that if the content is compelling.

The difference is pixels per degree.

That one? That company lacks innovation?

In a similar vein to phone based VR that we’ve had since Google Cardboard. Modern headsets fuse gyro, accelerometer and camera feature tracking together to stably track the position of the headset and hands/controllers.

And finally, you example (splatoon 2) only needs to compute 2 degrees of freedom in movement (rotation left-right - or yawing, rotation down-up - or pitching, since rolling isn't relevant with a dot target), while VR systems depend on 6 degrees of freedom (yawing, pitching, rolling, elevating, strafing and surging - all of these for at least 3 devices at the same time: your head, left hand and right hand). Unfortunately controls in VR are quite complicated, and accelerometers, gyroscopes (and magnetometers which are also used in VR systems to know the reference to the floor) are simply insufficient (but necessary since the positional sensors can't keep track all time with occasional occlusion, such as having one hand passing over the other or leaving the tracking area), which is why the same sensors on the switch are used in every VR headset and controls in addition with even more sensors and algorithms.

EDIT: the camera system also helps a lot with defining gaming boundaries in the room and being able to quickly see if I accidentally leave it, I already punched my monitor once and that's with a barrier that always get visible when I approach something in my room.

Adding 3 additional axises change nothing. Nintendo didn’t do it because it’s very niche to require that. It costs pennie’s more to get a 6DOF gyro vs a 3DOF. The question is the need. Do you need to rotate the yaw of your hand? Nope.

So my statements stand. The VR folks seem to be on a “we’re more superior than thou” kick with gyro controls.

A gyroscope is used to detect orientation/angular velocity (spinning), the sensor to add the other degrees of freedom is already there in most modern controllers and smartphones (the accelerometer). The issue is still accuracy I'm afraid.

>Do you need to rotate the yaw of your hand? Nope.

I'd certainly enjoy to open doors and make a simple goodbye gesture in VR.

They also complained about discomfort when resetting center on the gyro control. Something else Splatoon 2 nailed gracefully.

Not sure whether the appeal of Quest 2 is in the standalone-ness and the app platform - or whether it's about being around half the price of comparable headsets before it, perhaps even being sold at a loss

1) How do I share something physical with friends remotely in VR? Think food and drinks.

2) How do my other senses come into play? What if I want to smell my mothers perfume? Or feel and smell the ocean breeze?

3) Walking

There are still very large blockers we simply don’t have the technology for. This attempt will fail just the same.

Both have a purpose, both are subsets of the same demographic... but both vote very differently with their wallets.

Personally, I don't mind FB taking over the casual market. There are still alternatives and the technology will advance faster with such a big company behind it.

That being said, I won't be touching the Metaverse unless I can't avoid it.

One step closer to real life Shadowrun.

It really seems like they're tipping their hand here.

And not only it is a dystopia, but the Big Bad in the story is literally the guy who owns the physical metaverse infrastructure:

> “I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse — the entire Street — exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.

He's also pretty open about his methods:

> “Yeah, you know, a monopolist’s work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.” ... “Y’know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted up Ma Bell?” “Just barely.” The reporter is a woman in her twenties. “You know what it was, right?” “Voice communications monopoly.” “Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business. Moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, one at a time. Government busted them up—at the same time when I was starting cable TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It’s like if they figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the airplane were being introduced.”

Having just one metaverse everyone uses seamed like the worst thing in Ready Player One - because then one entity can control it and for their rules and morals on all participants.

Much harder to do that with multiple competing incompatible metaverses.

NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.

MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?

NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

- https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/64/Harry-Potter-and-the...

They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web and still end up with one of the most popular hubs.

If people who value their privacy can setup their own hubs, i'm pretty much OK with Facebook speeding up the advancement of AR/VR technology for the next several years using their advertisement dollars.

Thanks I needed the laugh.

> I think the most important piece here is that the virtual goods and digital economy that’s going to get built out, that that can be interoperable. It’s not just about you build an app or an experience that can work across our headset or someone else’s, I think it’s really important that basically if you have your avatar and your digital clothes and your digital tools and the experiences around that — I think being able to take that to other experiences that other people build, whether it’s on a platform that we’re building or not, is going to be really foundational and will unlock a lot of value if that’s a thing that we can do.

https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...

A digital identity registry/provider? Did they finally recognize that gamers or people in virtual worlds want to escape their RL identity?

Or is it just another hopeless try to enforce their digital "singular identity" authoritarianism?

if they don’t have a marketplace that wraps what “other people build” I’ll eat my hat

That feeling when you don't have a single original idea, and unironically view Black Mirror episodes as a blueprint.

There is no polarization at all. I don't know a single person who is happy about being forced to use FB in order to be able to use the equipment they have bought.

"…but connecting people was always much bigger…it was always clear that the dream was to feel present with the people we care about…here we are in 2021, and our devices are still designed around apps, not people. The experiences we’re allowed to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever, and high taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the way that we are meant to use technology. The Metaverse gives us an opportunity to change that, if we build it well. But it’s going to take all of us…Together, we can create a more open platform."

When he says this, I hear between the lines that the platform will be open to all contributors as long as the "open platform" belongs to Meta. How does he not realize that by seeking to dominate and own this "open platform" instead of working outside of his company to build a truly open platform with others is actually open?

Does he not read enough sci fi or literature in general to know that by having so much power and not seeking to let go a bit more, he opens himself up to the same risks and temptations faced by myriad dystopian villains?

>We don’t think about this as if different companies are going to build different metaverses. We think about it in terminology like the Mobile Internet. You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet and I don’t think in the future it will make sense to say that we are building our own metaverse either. I think we’re each building different infrastructure and components that go towards hopefully helping to build this out overall and I think that those pieces will need to work together in some ways.

https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...

Of course not; buying up competitors is much more practical (why build what you can buy?). So this is presumably the same strategy Facebook plans for any competing companies that make successful use of whatever open systems underlie "the metaverse".

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/faceboo...

The BuzzFeed journalist shared a video on her Twitter that illustrates use of metaverse by Facebook HR

https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos

https://player.vimeo.com/video/639318528 (Ctrl+U, Ctrl+F mp4)

https://archive.org/download/facebook_open_enrollment_2022/F...

What the journalists are not discussing is whether and how "the metaverse" will be used to surveil people and support advertising. No discussion of whether/how it embodies "privacy by design". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design

[1] https://www.facebook.com/facebookrealitylabs/videos/56153569...

If I was FB I would have announced at least a protocol or some technical foundation, even if it's purely preview.

But with the current discussion, I'm surprised we haven't heard more from other players in the field except facebook. What about the makers of VRChat or Second Life? Metaverse-style virtual realities are their bread and butter - and now for the first time, we have a discussion about this subject that includes the larger public. Shouldn't they be all over this?

And yet, the only ones talking about the "Metaverse" seems to be Facebook - pardon, Meta. So I wonder, if this whole Metaverse discussion an actual discussion at all or is it just Facebook kicking up dust?

"If you can't change the product, change the packaging."

Wouldn't that be fitting because the word comes from a bad sci-fi pulp story?

Did you bother to watch the Keynote? That's what they said they are doing.

I have yet to see a single federated system that has demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's usual playbook, which is proven.

Sometimes what's good for markets & the world doesn't have to be owned & commercial. Sometimes the availability of resources such as info-resources like httpd can beget enormous commercial success while themselves not having much commercial success.

A Tim O'Reilly saying comes to mind: create more value than you capture. In some cases, without setting free the core idea & letting people run wild, you'll never stand a chance of capturing any value what-so-ever.

No one should own it, the only non-dystopian metaverse would be open hardware and software and decentralized/p2p connectivity.

Meta, ortho, para.

Paraverse. Orthoverse.

We can't keep using metaverse now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Identity_Integration....

Neverse for short.

I don't want them to own it. I'm 100% sure.

I am absolutely certain that nobody should own it.

whether you agree or disagree, the more interesting question is the details behind what Meta could build

the answer is not federation. federation doesn't scale.

> So while it’s nice that I’m able to host my own email, that’s also the reason why my email isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update. So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today.

Contrast with WhatsApp where they control the entire stack from client to network to server. They can push a single set of updates and everyone has the new hotness.