The main problem with Metaverse is that it it's an amusement park without any rides.
Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides. A Mandalorian spin-off series of interactive VR episodes that can be experienced with a group of friends? A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. Nobody's going to buy headsets to make a goofy looking avatar and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg in a Second Life remake. Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
The management of that rideless amusement park is also a little concerning. I'd love to see VR finally go mainstream, but I'd prefer it if pretty much anyone other than Meta were behind the platform that catches on first.
A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that.
There's a lot of VR content out there, and some of it is excellent, and some of it ties in to popular franchises (PS5 VR has a Star Wars game), and occasionally it's both (Halflife: Alyx for example) . None of it is enough to drive VR to be mainstream entertainment.
IMO the hardware simply isn't good enough for the mass market yet.
* Motion sickness is still a really big problem
* If you're short-sighted and wear glasses, then the picture will be blurry for you. The original PSVR worked around the issue by pushing the lends out so you could comfortably wear glasses and the headset, but none of the modern headsets afaik include this affordance. Wearing contacts isn't an option for a lot of people.
* Way too expensive. I can afford one pretty easily, but most people can't. For roughly the same price as a Quest you can get an iPhone SE which is going to offer significantly more value to the average person
* They're too heavy! People complain about a 240g iPhone being too heavy in the hand. The Quest is 503g on your head, and this headset in particular doesn't distribute weight very well. PSVR is slightly heavier, but is at least slightly more comfortable than the Quest due to its weight distribution.
I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
I really enjoyed using my friend's VR headset to slowly play through Half-Life: Alyx. I could manage about one level at a time before needing to take the headset off and take a break, because of motion sickness + how uncomfortable the whole thing was. I think there's still a lot of R&D to do before headsets are really in a position where regular people start buying them up en masse.
>IMO the hardware simply isn't good enough for the mass market yet.
>I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.
Forgive my ignorance, this is a genuine question.
Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse? I see this massive push from the tech industry, a lot of public disinterest, and companies are still insisting that we want this. Do we have public polls that confirm people do crave the metaverse to the extent that tech wants us to? What is making them so confident beyond just hope?
1) People’s tastes vary. But millions of units have sold so people are open to it.
2) My non-techy 60+ year old aunt tried my Quest and kept raving about it and bought one.
3) It has potential to be more immersive. Having messed around with Quest, there are demos of things that are step functions of experience beyond what you get with a TV experience: the eye opener for me was front row seat in a small venue with your favorite band, up close and personal. When the video+3d resolution get better, it will get way more compelling.
Entertainment is all about feelings. An immersive experience provides even more ability for evoking them. People do seem to value more-immersive where possible if you look at the history of TV+movies… if the distractions can be eliminated.
But if the packaging tells you not to let people under 13 years to use it (because their eyesight is still developing?) (and I love the honesty), it’s fair to say the tech isn’t fully there and you aren’t going to capture the next generation of kids with spare time on their hands, among many other factors.
There is also not a lot of free compelling content on Quest unlike the internet; rather they are very geared towards selling you $20 apps in their store. I respect the need to monetize but there is also a fair bit of learning still needed on marketing and business model side for both the platform and apps to drive me to keep opening the wallet. I felt like I explored most of the free content and apps in under 10 hours. Value for money just wasn’t there for me.
I did feel like the tech was “good enough” that this tech would get there eventually. That is a key threshold to cross and imho has been crossed. But I am also reminded of my old (pre-iPhone-eta) WindowsCE mobile phone with stylus and web browser in my pocket. There was value there… but it was also greatly mitigated by being cumbersome in various ways.
> 1) People’s tastes vary. But millions of units have sold so people are open to it.
Is this an indication that people want the Metaverse, specifically, or are open to VR in general?
I am not much of a gamer, and probably the last person who would ever be interested in a VR headset. But I can see the appeal of VR games. I can't, for the life of me, see the appeal of "the Metaverse."
I see "the metaverse" as the liminal space between actual VR apps (games, business, whatever). If you're between rounds of a VR game you don't want to remove the helmet while waiting and chatting so you'll hang out in a VR-enabled lobby where you see each other in your in-game outfits. Eventually enough games will have VR lobbies that you'll hang out with people in other games' outfits as you all wait for your game to start.
Ditto business. If you're in VR because you're reviewing architectural renderings or whatever, you'll probably keep the helmet on for a few minutes between meetings and as such, seeing your coworkers come out of other virtual meeting rooms and hang around at a virtual water cooler gives you a bit of that hallway conversation that you're now missing, and provides a continuity of experience.
None of this is where the money is though, at least not now. You're still playing a game, or using business software, and that's what you pay for - not the lobby. That's why, I think, Meta and stuff seems so silly. They seem to expect that you're going to want to use it for its own sake, as opposed to it being equivalent to the Facebook UI - something you use to get the real value, not the value itself.
This is also a great question. Beyond that, of the millions of units sold, I'd be curious to know how many of those are upgrades from the same early adopters vs first-time buyers. Also, what has the trajectory of new user adoption looked like?
> Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?
To answer that, we first need a good answer to the question: "What the hell is the 'Metaverse' supposed to be?"
Because as long as that isn't answered, the question reads: "Do people, on the whole, even want another corporate buzzword?", and I think we all know the answer to that one.
People don't want the metaverse for themselves, but Meta's customers have never been its users.
What people (the customers) want is a dashboard that lets them dispatch memes to other people (the users). Meta already sells that. But they want those memes to affect the users' behavior, and Meta is betting that they can turn a stream of user biometrics (collected by the headset) into a way to better tune the meme-delivery-to-desired-behavior pipeline.
Or at least that's what they've convinced the decision makers. It's probably a long way off from working and instead that narrative is just being used to justify building something sci-fi.
> Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?
My take?
As a general question, no, they don't. And they won't.
However, they may want it for niche applications. Games would be the big one, but also perhaps certain industrial applications and other business functions. Although the business uses are probably better served with just AR instead of a whole "metaverse" (depending on your definition of "metaverse").
Which brings up the definitional problem. We have the metaverse and people love it -- we just call it the internet. So I'm assuming that when people say "metaverse", what they really mean is "VR worlds".
0% interest rates make companies throw money at useless products looking for returns because there wasn't any better use for the money. It's been like that for 5+ years, but this whole NFT/Bitcoin/Metaverse/AI meme series is the peak.
Here's to hoping that these higher interest rates make companies make actually useful and profitable products instead of a bunch of meme products.
I do anyway. I find the entire concept oddly compelling. To fabricate a completely immersive online world is just fascinating to me. I would love to see this work someday.
Unfortunately, today I can't even use VR for more than a few minutes before I'm ready to vomit and my eyes feel like they're being pulled out of my head.
Hmm I could be wrong about this. My personal experience with the Index was that glasses were really uncomfortable, and I've heard from friends that they've had issues with other headsets. Maybe we all have large glasses? :)
I didn't know about the lens inserts. Those are cool and definitely fix the issue if people can find them.
Just another datapoint - I've never had issues with glasses either.
My larger reading glasses tend to come off when I remove the headset because they touch foam padding but my regular glasses fit in every headset I've tried (other than Magic Leap's stupid "goggles" form factor - the Vive Elite XR however is fine).
Also I’ve used the Oculus 2 for many hours and never had issues wearing glasses or getting motion sick. Maybe that was your VR device or a personal thing?
> Also I’ve used the Oculus 2 for many hours and never had issues wearing glasses or getting motion sick. Maybe that was your VR device or a personal thing?
Same thing with the Index.
The only issues I had, despite wearing glasses, were:
- Nearly going through a glass door while trying to take cover, and ending up in the hallway.
- The cable. Too short. Easy to tangle. Easy to trip over.
- Wondering why I suddenly had arms and where my awesome gloves had gone whenever I looked at my hands in the half-hour following any long session in Alyx.
The motion sickness thing is a person-by-person thing, but it’s a significant percentage of folks who experience it. Enough that it would probably prevent VR from becoming anywhere near as widespread as TV or smartphones, unless it can be solved for.
Any research on how many people experience it? I’m not convinced it’s as wide spread as people say. Usually the people on HN who always say this (usually in doomer VR will never work posts) never seem to be people who have spent much time using VR, and either relay hearsay or only played around with VR once with some old device for a short period. It takes time to get used to VR and not all devices/content are the same.
I’d be surprised if it was more than 5-15% of people after long term exposure and across a wide variety of content… which would be a problem yes but hardly a market killer and the tech is always getting better.
The only world vr would work the way meta wanted is a world where everyone social distances forever. There's a slight chance if it's a hyperrealistic environment where you can actually see people in the eyes. No one will replace akwardly looking at the ground as everyone directs the attention to you with a bobbling 3D avatar as their main interaction with other people.
For MOST people, the motion sickness is caused by your real world motion not matching the motion your eyes see. As a result, games that don't make you use the controller to move around (Beat Saber, Space Pirate Trainer, Pokerstars VR, and more) don't usually make people sick.
But games where you move through the in-game world without moving in the real world (Any racing or flying game, any game where you make your character walk using the controllers) are nearly guaranteed to cause sickness. Many games that require your character to walk around get away with this by using teleportation.
This is why I've always said that putting someone into a racing game or roller coaster simulator or something like that as their first VR experience is doing a major disservice to VR adoption.
Ok, fair enough. I'm imagining a room with all 6 sides covered in OLED panels. The hard part is to implement binocular vision. Shutter glasses could work I suppose, maybe even allow multiple people to use it. Refresh rate 2*n*120 Hz, where n is the number of people in the holodeck.
I think there is also a different issue - in a time where some people seem to be keenly aware of how much time they spend looking at screens and are making efforts to reduce that, the Metaverse (and any VR, really) wants to dial that up even more, instead consuming your full attention when using it
It doesn't matter how good the VR output is if I can't recline in my comfy chair with a VR helmet on and then run around a fantasy world fighting monsters and throwing fireballs while lying motionless in the real world.
That's the VR future science fiction has promised.
3D TV's didn't catch on, I think part of the issue is to get over the early adopters into mainstream there is the hurdle of wearing something over your eyes for hours at a time. The vast majority of people (aka mainstream) don't enjoy it. If people don't enjoy simple lightweight 3D glasses, they aren't going to enjoy the VR form factors out there.
I'm choosing the word enjoy because its not something like a car dashboard being touchscreen where people deal with it, this is entertainment and hobbies. If people don't enjoy it, they'll go do something else. VR will have niche use cases for sure and there will be some people that enjoy it but its not going to be mainstream.
I really like that analogy "amusement park without any rides". I really do think Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed.
But back to your analogye, it applies particularly well here because Disney are a master of delivering experiences and do exactly that through every possible medium. So if one sees Disney walking away from the Metaverse, that's not something I would interpret lightly - despite the rounds of firing being interpreted as a cost saving measure, it's just 50 staff members and not all of them are leaving the company. Disney aren't short of cash, so if they saw a future in the Metaverse they'd be there for defensive reasons alone.
Rather I think Disney realise that their own VR-initiatives will stand on their own, and their involvement would be propping up 3rd party platforms rather than yielding a benefit from them.
I think Meta are hoping that the Metaverse would emulate the Smartphone/Soft-store model, where developers would do the heavy lifting for the platform, but the crucial difference here is that a Smartphone is useful before even loading a single piece of 3rd party software. Everyone already had a phone when smartphones became a thing - but right now no one is walking around with a VR headset, or anything even vaguely approximating that.
> Meta et al were too excited by the idea of the business potential of parallel worlds to notice that in the "what's in it for me" equation, ordinary people came up empty handed.
No, this was Mark's personal Quest for the Next Big Thing. No one else in the company is delusional enough to believe it will go anywhere, they're just getting a fat paycheck.
VR going mainstream is difficult until they can get people to take anti-nausea meds with them.
The biology of humans works against VR in a lot of ways, and most people don't like the idea of taking anti-nausea pill just to experience VR.
(I take anti-nausea pills when I do VR, because VR is absolutely mindblowing)
I don't get nausea, but even without that I hate the experience of actually wearing the things. I find I get a lot of eye strain that prevents me from playing long sessions, the weight/bulk is uncomfortable, and it can get quite hot wearing a headset for any length of time. I think almost everybody will find VR goggles uncomfortable in SOME way.
These things are fun to mess around with, but I think very few people will ever want to wear goggles like this for more than an hour or so at a time, which inherently limits their appeal and potential applications. My widescreen monitor has none of these issues and it's plenty "good enough" for most games.
I think you are referring to old VR experience, the tech is pretty mature now, latency is super low, tracking is good, on pretty much any model. I play a lot of VR games and never get sick. The only one where I got a little dizzy was with 6dof FPS, which isn't really due to VR specifically.
Although it is true some people get sick easily in VR, those people tend to also have trouble with car sickness and sea sickness. I suppose you can say the same about cars and VR for that group.
I'm a woman, apparently women have a much lower tolerance for VR. Some people theorize its due to avoiding damage to the child during pregnancy.
So even on my very high end setup (Index 120hz,4090 rtx), I still get nausea.
It also takes a while for people to get their VR legs, and I don't have time for using VR very day, it's more like once a month.
I'm sorry to hear that. There are definitely differences in tolerance between people.
However I don't think this is specific to the tech any more, just the experience, similar to flying a plane or being on a boat. But It used to be that everyone would get nauseous due to immaturity of the technology as the parent comment was implying, and that's no longer true.
I'd say the main problem is human beings are not mature enough to be trusted with such a service, it will be a rape and pillage campaign for all your data and all your interests and all your imagination. We create predator services and pretend they are 'just services', burning the end-user's trust for any similar "services" after they sour from the treatment of the first one they tried. We have a serious maturity problem in the human species, and it is dragging all our progress down and backwards.
> A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that
But probably a lot less than would watch a Mandalorian animated or real life spin-off TV series - and the VR version costs a lot more to create.
A lot of companies (Disney, Magic Leap etc) have spent a fortune trying to make the killer VR content but have failed. Apart from the sports/exercise apps (probably not enough to support the FB metaverse) are there any that would make people purchase a headset for?
My kids and I would have been pretty happy with just access to non-game elements. They must have already made loads of 3rd spaces and models - just being able to hang out and explore them would be brilliant.
Then if they started to layer gaming on top of that... my kids would be pestering me even more than they already are for a vr set-up.
It seems to me that everything in VR almost have to be fan-made or at least a-financial passion project, or else nothing works. Meta did not end up with that creepyverse by cutting costs, they ended up with it by throwing gold bullions at walls.
There's no way Disney had not made internal studies, the problem must have been that they can't set up a management and/or production model they like && that works for VR.
The only explanation I have for this is that to succeed in vr you need to do a lot of UX innovations. And innovation doesn't work well in most corporate environments.
It is an amusement park without rides operated by an entity who most people actively distrust.
Facebook/Meta IMO has poisoned the whole social media space to a degree, where the expectation I have for social media platforms in general has become one of "this is getting worse over time". Instagram now sucks more than it sucked before Facebook bought it. Facebook now sucks more than Facebook 15 years ago. Reddit now... You get the point. They could have done nothing except maintenance and neutral technical upkeep and the result would have been better than what we have today. And the only reason why we don't have that better thing is profits (or the lack thereof in the old platforms).
This tells me that capitalism is really bad at organizing social platforms (not that this surprises me).
I do not really think that is true. There is more than 2 billion active users on WhatsApp which is owned by Meta. Many people reading hackernews distrust them, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the general population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
There was also Secrets of the Empire[1], but AFAIK The Void no longer exists. It's too bad - the haptic/physical-props-and-environment aspect worked really well IMO.
Sounds like a video game to me, something that Disney has weirdly struggled with, having tried on several times to get into video games big time, only to shy away at the huge expense and challenge.
At the moment they've circled back to merely licensing out their IPs to other publishers.
Disney should get more into video games, and VR is great for video games.
VR for "metaverse" whatever it is that is. Not so sure!
The last time I went to Universal in LA, all the rides had a VR component to them, the real-life amusement parks are turning to VR + motion. Some of these were jiggly seats, others had flying platforms, and others pulled you in a train through VR scenes. (The ride that people liked the least was minions, which just had tipping and shaking seats, but the 3D made people sick.)
> Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
This is the refrain of Disney's theme park marketing, but I disagree. It's the fact that people want to say they were there. It's 100% the brand and nothing more. Marketing doesn't have to be, and often isn't, rational.
This is at the absolute core of why theme park experiences sell but VR does not. Nobody cares if you "experienced" something in the comfort of your own home. Until the price of VR comes down to absolute rock bottom prices, there will not be acceptance of "VR experiences" and even so it's still a gamble whether anyone cares enough to buy that to experience on a whim frequently vs plan a vacation around it... I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
I am going to sorta disagree. I see your point and I am sure there is some of that. But hands down Disney parks are some of the best parks I have been to. With universal being a very close second. I am also probably never going back (price ratio is wrong and getting worse).
In this case a VR exp would have to feel like going to a park. However, there is something that is missing (or many somethings). You hanging with your friends and family. Now they could also all go get headsets and you hang together. But that seems oddly not the same. Buying that overpriced popcorn and basically 'fair food' is also part of it. Disney would have the best shot at making a park into a game. As most of their rides are 'dark rides'. Basically trains going thru experiences. A fixed park is little more than a carnival but in a fixed location and cleaned up nicely with theming. VR strips out the carnival aspects and is only theming. That strips out part of what you are going for.
I have also been to parks all by myself. That is what wearing a VR headset would feel like. It is not a good experience. You could say 'oh all your friends could get headsets too'. True but at that point you are now looking at similar costs as just going to the parks.
Oh man, this is not correct. As a dad who just went back to Disney after not having gone since I was 11 years old... We made fun of, "the brand" the entire time. All our friends would look down on us for handing over our hard earned money to a pretty gross fascist organization like Disney. We posted pictures, but only of our experiences.
For myself (a sample size of 1) it is all about the magical experiences and memories my child gets from experiencing a fantasy world of fun rides and adventure.
My son cried tears of joy after getting off the Cars ride. His childhood imaginary friends were brought to life in such a compelling, thrilling, nostalgic way that he was brought to tears at 15.
He got to build a droid and he went outside and used it to entertain and enthrall another smaller child for 45 minutes.
He got to live, for a day, in an immersive and joyous world he never imagined he could see and touch and be a part of.
Its not irony. I bought the magic DESPITE a poisoned brand.
Not to be pedantic, but even with a personal VR suite, it's still virtual.
A flight sim, regardless of how sophisticated, is still always going to be of a lesser experience than real flying unless you can actually die in the sim.
I'm not suggesting that an ideal flight sim should kill the player if they crash, but rather suggesting that, as an example, a pilot behind the controls of a real plane that has to make a series of instantaneous decisions when a dangerous situation comes up like engine failure will have been "battle tested" in a very real way where his/her life was literally on the line.
Of course not having to risk your life is also a big advantage of virtual as well.
The whole metaverse thing has felt like a buzzword-without-meaning that was never going to live up to the hype (at least in any meaningful good way), but still sucks for the people losing the jobs.
The metaverse is the ultimate, final instance of the "... but on a computer!" fallacy [1], even moreso than the "virtual worlds" that prompted me to originally write that article. It's reality... but on a computer!
We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time.
Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits.
The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse".
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)
It may finally take off if/when VR is just another feature of portable, broadly popular AR glasses.
Until then, it loses for anything but niche applications, because it's doomed by the popularity of the smartphone. Nobody wants a social network (or whatever) that can't be reached from their smartphone, or that sucks to use on there, which means nobody wants VR as the primary interface to anything, making it rather pointless.
The whole market is spinning its wheels until or unless someone finally manages to get normal people excited about AR glasses, which means some serious hardware advancements. Whatever's the "next big thing" has to be as portable and usable-everywhere as smartphones, or it's doomed. The Web boom among normal folks wasn't because they started sitting at desktop computers way, way more, but because computers got ultra-portable and cellular Internet got cheap enough to actually use. They're not going to clamber to join anything that they can't comfortably and non-dorkily use at a coffee shop or in line at the grocery store or while sitting on the couch watching Netflix or what have you.
I remember on my first day teleporting into a random location around some mansion, and an expensive-looking female avatar yelled at me how dare I spawn at a private property. Later I ran through some bars and shops and never visited this swamp again.
I agree, and one can say “but videogames” however that doesn’t seem to be what any of this is reaching for. People play “realistic” videogames, which has an element of reality in creating a 3D world, but it tries to tell a story that one can escape into away from our everyday lives. Instead the point for the Zuckerberg metaverse is in mirroring reality but with even more control given to the corporate machine to feed you ads and convince you to buy more things. Who wants a hyperreality built by advertisers? That sounds like hell.
It reminds me of the brief fad when some folks really thought VRML or 3D Java or Flash interfaces to websites was going to be The Future not just for games or art project, but general web navigation. Turned out to suck for nearly everything, total dead-end.
Flash did end up influencing the animations of CSS. I'm not sure about the other technologies you mentioned, but I think the delineation here may be that the idea was the future, not the tech.
No, I don't mean 3D animated elements, I mean 3D interfaces.
Think like if you went to Amazon's website and had to navigate product categories by moving around in an FPS-like interface. This was a thing for a while—it never went big, but there was real excitement around it and some effort was put into it, only to find that (obviously) it sucks for anything but games (duh) and maybe art projects of some kinds.
Disney is the sort of company that might have made some interesting rides. A Mandalorian spin-off series of interactive VR episodes that can be experienced with a group of friends? A lot of people would have bought VR headsets just for that. Nobody's going to buy headsets to make a goofy looking avatar and hang out with Mark Zuckerberg in a Second Life remake. Experiences are what sell new entertainment technologies and Disney owns the IP to some pretty compelling experiences.
The management of that rideless amusement park is also a little concerning. I'd love to see VR finally go mainstream, but I'd prefer it if pretty much anyone other than Meta were behind the platform that catches on first.