The "Metaverse"

Felon

Felon

Felon

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What happened to this thing?

I remember Facebook were ploughing $billions into it, but it just looks like a load of crap.

Does anyone here actually use it? The idea of trying to work whilst wearing a 3d headset doesn't appeal much to me :D
 
For me, they need to get a critical mass of users on the platform and the cost of the hardware is a barrier to that, £1500 for the new Oculus 2 pro or whatever, it looks good - but at £1500, hardly anyone is going to buy it, £400 for the old Oculus quest was pushing it.

I think they need to do something similar to what Amazon did with Kindle back in the day, they sold the Kindle readers for a very attractive price, they were mega cheap in comparison and they made their money from people buying the books - which led to a critical mass of users on the platform.

To me the Metaverse looks like an overly expensive tech demo, where I need to spend a load of money to even have a go on it, there's just nothing that really entices me.
 
mrk said:
These days VR is subjected to the living room for those cool demos to show friends who come over and aside form that I don't know of anyone else actively using VR on anything meaningful other than the odd game here or there and other VR things like Google Earth VR.
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I used to play a lot of Elite Dangerous in VR and it's awesome, it just sucks wearing a headset for hours on end, it gives me a headache, it's just not a nice thing to have to do..
 
mrk said:
There are a number of users yeah but compared to non VR games that base is tiny still, but it will likely grow if the number of AAA VR games and apps increase and appeal to a wider audience, and the use case currently for convenience as mentioned above (Augmented reality etc) means it's still too cumbersome to be used outside of a controlled environment - VR in a pair of glasses? That will be perfect etc.
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One of the big problems with VR imo, is that if you're a game developer - you want minimal barriers to people playing your game. The moment you have to go out and spend £1000+ on a headset, and the same again on a GPU that can power it at 100fps* or whatever, you're drastically reducing your audience.

*playing in VR at less than 90 fps is just awful, the moment it starts to stutter or you get frame drops, I have to take the damn thing off my head it's awful.
 
swillsy said:
All early tech was bad (useless) to start off with - my first MP3 player could hold 12 songs (and took a me a night to download on dial-up) but now we stream music from cloud services with 100 million songs. Anyone whose had a go on a Quest2 can see the potential of VR and he's just taking the first steps towards it.
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Thing is, with an MP3 player - we were solving a problem that kinda needed to be solved, everyone wants to walk around and listen to music without having to haul a huge box around, so the usage of smaller more compact devices skyrocketed - because it was a problem everyone wanted to solve.

With the Metaverse, I just don't see what problem they're trying to solve - it feels like they've created a "space" that they want everyone to dash into, but nobody has any reason to go there.
 
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aardvark said:
i honestly don't see the appeal.
It just seems like another 3D cinema/tv gimmick - people will get bored of it when the novelty wears off.
Like VR games - its a niche, and the majority of people have no interest in them.
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Yeah 3d TV was crap for a similar reason, you get a friend or somebody who comes around for the evening - yet you both can't watch a 3D movie as there's only one set of glasses.. (who wants to keep a spare pair for others to wear.... it's just not practical)

In reality, nobody really wants to sit watching TV with a pair of 3d glasses on, bottom line....
 
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GaryTheSnail said:
All these big tech companies need to shrink imo. They far too big.
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When I worked at Amazon AWS - going to Facebook was seen like the holy grail as an engineer, you go there - basically do what you like, no pressure and get paid a lot of money..
 
GaryTheSnail said:
When you worked.... so what happened?
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Did 2 years there, I just got totally burnt out, initially it's great - the sort of stuff you get to work on, but there's only so much I can take.

When I'm working till 10-11pm 5 days a week, and I'm still behind on 3x projects, and I'm getting battered into submission **** that.
 
GaryTheSnail said:
I'm confused, if you can do what you want why did you get burn out? :confused:
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Sorry I think I worded it a bit badly,

I never worked for FB, but whilst at Amazon - the perception of FB by Amazon employees was that FB was mega cushty and relaxed, a lot of people were always leaving Amazon to go to FB because there was very little pressure and lots of cash.
 
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