I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. By this time next year the CRTC will be managing Facebook and all other online activity including the proliferation of this sort of thing (OK, you'll probably get a pass from the warden if you stick to "alphanumeric text" and avoid accompanying video or audio). So, while you might not want to trust Zuckerberg, you won't have to. Put your faith in the arms of les fonctionaires in Gatineau: they know what's best for you, Matt. Trust them.
I think the best example of an applicable metaverse is from the Daniel Suarez novels Daemon and Freedom. But those are AR based rather than VR. The problem with the VR solutions is that it is trying to replicate reality. It has an uncanny valley problem and that when you engage in something like that you want to suspend disbelief. Microsoft has an interesting first gen product out for it, and I won’t be surprised if, like tablets, Apple enters the market in a couple of years with something compelling for the masses.
An important piece of context for this 'meta' initiative is that Facebook is leading the market for affordable VR with the Quest systems, which is the true value gain for them here. Their 'metaverse' is basically just a sleek OS for their headsets. But the Quest headsets are extremely impressive for their price (a big step up from PSVR), and don't require any computer or gaming console. $299 for the whole system.
Zuck is trying to orient the company towards VR and deliberately removing emphasis from the current social media platform. Seems wise to me, Facebook/IG has no guarantee of remaining a favored platform. Having the best stand-alone VR headsets with a sleek social OS + a healthy ecosystem of games/experiences seems like a more durable product to me.
Looking at the work uses I find the security implications huge. Hands up anyone who still trusts Mr. Z and Facebook (what ever its name is). Personally I'm still hoping the order comes down to break up the company. No company that big, and powerful is good for anyone.
There is a lot to unpack here, Mr. Gurney. Where to begin?
1) Let's start from the highly conceptual framework: the notion of embodiment, courtesy of the phenomenology theory of Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger. There is a growing number of research out there signalling that in order to construct our reality, we need our mind AND our bodies. So replacing Zoom or Messenger or Discord with a virtual world where your body and your mind can act together could be a game changer. You will not only need a headset, you may need gloves to go with it. Instead of cogito, ergo sum this will turn into sum, ergo cogito. People missing limbs can actually feel them in a VR situation.
The trouble here is that Meta is investing more in developing this VR than what they spend in combating misinformation and hate in their platforms. Very problematic.
2) Down the conceptual line, we have have the idea of full ecosystems. As Axie Infinity and Loot both prove, you can develop a fully fledged economy and society that is only tenuously connected to any form of reality. And that is why Meta is also looking into NFT and virtual wallets, as well as interoperability. This is part of a bigger issue: those using Robin Hood to squeeze the shorts and hedge funds, to users of Axie Inifinity making several thousand dollars to the "creator economy" and NFTs, you could argue that a new economic model is being built under our nose, and that the metaverse could host it all.
3) Connected to the mind-boggling amount of money Meta is throwing at this, and as Zuckerberg mentions early on in his one-hour video (geez, that is long, Mark), the metaverse would need to be as easy as it is to navigate a smartphone today. Plug and play, instant connectivity. So their efforts in hardware with Oculus plus their work on internet availability everywhere and throwing a ton of programmers into this project aim to make it much easier than it is today to jump to, shall we call it, The Matrix?
4) Last but not least are the very real problems a parallel reality may cause. Following the embodiment premise, people could create a "perfect" version of themselves making it very hard to leave the metaverse/Matrix. From dating to virtual meetings, if there are private rooms or encrypted places then life will become a lot more complicated. If people in places like India, according to the documents reported by Frances Haugen, have private Facebook groups planning horrible attacks on minorities, the metaverse has the potential of making things worse.
5) And as other commenters have pointed out, at this very perilous time for Meta, this is some sort of escape hatch to change the conversation towards something that is not how algorithms pursuing screen time are endangering society. Good luck with that. Mr. Zuckerberg.
Thank you for bringing up such a complicated issue that deserves a lot of intellectual firepower.
VR/AR has been a solution in search of a problem for 30 years.
Why would anyone provide even more methods for Meta/Facebook to build marketing profiles? I can only imagine the additional data that a VR headset could harvest.
Mark Zuckerberg is not real. He's a piece of space junk floating through the metaverse. He's a frat boy who wrote a little app, it went viral, it made a lot of money, it attracted a greedy capitalist horde of cling-ons. Mark Zuckerberg is not a visionary.
For those who are having difficulty envisioning the visionary's vision: the metaverse, there is a perfectly well-developed prototype of the Zucker Berg floating towards its Titanic, it's called Facebook.
The idea that the metaverse is some kind of escape hatch for the Zucker Berg to launch its corporate enterprise into another realm of reality and avoid the consequences of the current iteration, is not visionary. Uncontrolled Brain Fart seems like a more appropriate characterization. Desperate, delusion states of greed: look! I'm hiding behind my finger, no one can see us now! Ah, sure boss, anything you say!
As Matt notes, all the elements of the metaverse are already here: VR, avatars and social networking. 'Second Life'! Remember that? Anybody? Anybody? I had to do a Google search using keywords 'avatar, life, world' to try to remember the name of the damn thing.
If you want to picture what the metaverse will be like, as a product of the Zucker Berg Galaxy, check out the prototype, Facebook, a warring world of porn bots. Why would the moral centre of the Zucker Berg as manifested in Facebook not simply transpose itself onto this new manifestation of imaginary capitalism.
As the posse closes in on the Facebook Fabricators, the Zucker Berg teases the world with the idea that, no global warming is not real, crime and corruption are not real, nothing is real, just snap your fingers, swish your magic wand, and poof, the Zucker Berg launches you into a swirling snow globe of fun and frolic, a vortex of wind and waves. Drunken dancing humanity aboard the Titanic meet your Zucker Berg!
All your doubts will be resolved by very big tech-nerd Ethan Zuckerman (no relation) at The Atlantic. Rather than a link, just look there for "Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago"...and he did. That Zuckerman was one of those tech-kids of the 90s boom, and was given millions to develop a metaverse-like attempt, as people have been doing since 70s SF novels. He goes through several subsequent attempts, apparently there are online museums of VR/Metaverse development attempts. Most of them, comically bad.
Then he digs into the beta version that Facebook is showing, and it almost gets cruel with how lame the new effort is - most of the old mistakes repeated. Absolutely nothing to draw you to it. You'll be laughing at how hard this is going to crash by the end of the article.
The problem with most tech-titans is that they get one good idea that goes exponential, and think it's a talent, instead of a fluke. Since the original FUNDS their efforts to have a second act, they can go on believing it for quite a while.
An attempt at a VR business requires young enthusiasts above all, and Facebook is in sharp decline with that demographic. It's becoming Whiny Boomerbook, that their mid-life kids post grandkid pix to, for the family, but don't use for socializing. As for kids, any place where we olds hang out is actively repellent.
I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. By this time next year the CRTC will be managing Facebook and all other online activity including the proliferation of this sort of thing (OK, you'll probably get a pass from the warden if you stick to "alphanumeric text" and avoid accompanying video or audio). So, while you might not want to trust Zuckerberg, you won't have to. Put your faith in the arms of les fonctionaires in Gatineau: they know what's best for you, Matt. Trust them.
I think the best example of an applicable metaverse is from the Daniel Suarez novels Daemon and Freedom. But those are AR based rather than VR. The problem with the VR solutions is that it is trying to replicate reality. It has an uncanny valley problem and that when you engage in something like that you want to suspend disbelief. Microsoft has an interesting first gen product out for it, and I won’t be surprised if, like tablets, Apple enters the market in a couple of years with something compelling for the masses.
An important piece of context for this 'meta' initiative is that Facebook is leading the market for affordable VR with the Quest systems, which is the true value gain for them here. Their 'metaverse' is basically just a sleek OS for their headsets. But the Quest headsets are extremely impressive for their price (a big step up from PSVR), and don't require any computer or gaming console. $299 for the whole system.
Zuck is trying to orient the company towards VR and deliberately removing emphasis from the current social media platform. Seems wise to me, Facebook/IG has no guarantee of remaining a favored platform. Having the best stand-alone VR headsets with a sleek social OS + a healthy ecosystem of games/experiences seems like a more durable product to me.
Looking at the work uses I find the security implications huge. Hands up anyone who still trusts Mr. Z and Facebook (what ever its name is). Personally I'm still hoping the order comes down to break up the company. No company that big, and powerful is good for anyone.
There is a lot to unpack here, Mr. Gurney. Where to begin?
1) Let's start from the highly conceptual framework: the notion of embodiment, courtesy of the phenomenology theory of Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger. There is a growing number of research out there signalling that in order to construct our reality, we need our mind AND our bodies. So replacing Zoom or Messenger or Discord with a virtual world where your body and your mind can act together could be a game changer. You will not only need a headset, you may need gloves to go with it. Instead of cogito, ergo sum this will turn into sum, ergo cogito. People missing limbs can actually feel them in a VR situation.
The trouble here is that Meta is investing more in developing this VR than what they spend in combating misinformation and hate in their platforms. Very problematic.
2) Down the conceptual line, we have have the idea of full ecosystems. As Axie Infinity and Loot both prove, you can develop a fully fledged economy and society that is only tenuously connected to any form of reality. And that is why Meta is also looking into NFT and virtual wallets, as well as interoperability. This is part of a bigger issue: those using Robin Hood to squeeze the shorts and hedge funds, to users of Axie Inifinity making several thousand dollars to the "creator economy" and NFTs, you could argue that a new economic model is being built under our nose, and that the metaverse could host it all.
3) Connected to the mind-boggling amount of money Meta is throwing at this, and as Zuckerberg mentions early on in his one-hour video (geez, that is long, Mark), the metaverse would need to be as easy as it is to navigate a smartphone today. Plug and play, instant connectivity. So their efforts in hardware with Oculus plus their work on internet availability everywhere and throwing a ton of programmers into this project aim to make it much easier than it is today to jump to, shall we call it, The Matrix?
4) Last but not least are the very real problems a parallel reality may cause. Following the embodiment premise, people could create a "perfect" version of themselves making it very hard to leave the metaverse/Matrix. From dating to virtual meetings, if there are private rooms or encrypted places then life will become a lot more complicated. If people in places like India, according to the documents reported by Frances Haugen, have private Facebook groups planning horrible attacks on minorities, the metaverse has the potential of making things worse.
5) And as other commenters have pointed out, at this very perilous time for Meta, this is some sort of escape hatch to change the conversation towards something that is not how algorithms pursuing screen time are endangering society. Good luck with that. Mr. Zuckerberg.
Thank you for bringing up such a complicated issue that deserves a lot of intellectual firepower.
VR/AR has been a solution in search of a problem for 30 years.
Why would anyone provide even more methods for Meta/Facebook to build marketing profiles? I can only imagine the additional data that a VR headset could harvest.
Mark Zuckerberg is not real. He's a piece of space junk floating through the metaverse. He's a frat boy who wrote a little app, it went viral, it made a lot of money, it attracted a greedy capitalist horde of cling-ons. Mark Zuckerberg is not a visionary.
For those who are having difficulty envisioning the visionary's vision: the metaverse, there is a perfectly well-developed prototype of the Zucker Berg floating towards its Titanic, it's called Facebook.
The idea that the metaverse is some kind of escape hatch for the Zucker Berg to launch its corporate enterprise into another realm of reality and avoid the consequences of the current iteration, is not visionary. Uncontrolled Brain Fart seems like a more appropriate characterization. Desperate, delusion states of greed: look! I'm hiding behind my finger, no one can see us now! Ah, sure boss, anything you say!
As Matt notes, all the elements of the metaverse are already here: VR, avatars and social networking. 'Second Life'! Remember that? Anybody? Anybody? I had to do a Google search using keywords 'avatar, life, world' to try to remember the name of the damn thing.
If you want to picture what the metaverse will be like, as a product of the Zucker Berg Galaxy, check out the prototype, Facebook, a warring world of porn bots. Why would the moral centre of the Zucker Berg as manifested in Facebook not simply transpose itself onto this new manifestation of imaginary capitalism.
As the posse closes in on the Facebook Fabricators, the Zucker Berg teases the world with the idea that, no global warming is not real, crime and corruption are not real, nothing is real, just snap your fingers, swish your magic wand, and poof, the Zucker Berg launches you into a swirling snow globe of fun and frolic, a vortex of wind and waves. Drunken dancing humanity aboard the Titanic meet your Zucker Berg!
All your doubts will be resolved by very big tech-nerd Ethan Zuckerman (no relation) at The Atlantic. Rather than a link, just look there for "Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago"...and he did. That Zuckerman was one of those tech-kids of the 90s boom, and was given millions to develop a metaverse-like attempt, as people have been doing since 70s SF novels. He goes through several subsequent attempts, apparently there are online museums of VR/Metaverse development attempts. Most of them, comically bad.
Then he digs into the beta version that Facebook is showing, and it almost gets cruel with how lame the new effort is - most of the old mistakes repeated. Absolutely nothing to draw you to it. You'll be laughing at how hard this is going to crash by the end of the article.
The problem with most tech-titans is that they get one good idea that goes exponential, and think it's a talent, instead of a fluke. Since the original FUNDS their efforts to have a second act, they can go on believing it for quite a while.
An attempt at a VR business requires young enthusiasts above all, and Facebook is in sharp decline with that demographic. It's becoming Whiny Boomerbook, that their mid-life kids post grandkid pix to, for the family, but don't use for socializing. As for kids, any place where we olds hang out is actively repellent.