The Metaverse exists. It's called Youtube, Discord, Twitch, and whatever social games are the current center of the zeitgeist. The Metaverse trend was only ever the trend towards people doing their entertainment and socializing online instead of going to physical locations to do it and that is happening with or without peripherals that fully simulate physical immersion.
So because Meta decides to jump on the AI bandwagon that means they're done with the Metaverse? This does not follow. Meta spent even more on VR shit in 2022 than they did any previous year.
I think a major problem is that people don’t trust Facebook. I think another company could pull it off.<p>It’s always a bad sign when you feel like you need to completely rename your company.
Looking into my crystal ball… I disagree. AI will play a massively important role in his metaverse. If you can’t get people into the metaverse, fill it up with AI.
At the end of the day the "metaverse" will just be a bunch of servers that are keeping track of different application states that are sent to different VR clients. It's basically a VR MMO game (massive multiplayer online). It seems Meta did not see this connection well enough, considering John Carmack left with concerns, and he represents the pinnacle of this effort to take video games into a new domain. The Metaverse will have to leverage all the lessons from video games, or risk reinventing the wheel. On a side note, I'm surprised Epic and MS didn't contribute more to the actual metaverse, since they both have experience making games. I think Epic is probably in the best position to take this forward and Meta could follow (instead of the other way around).
Echo VR was the best thing I’ve experienced in vr. I did a community run web event where competitive players coached us for a week before we played a tournament. It was a blast! The combination of teamwork, spatial voice communication, and the hangout room really created community more than anything else virtual.<p>Echo (which was all I ended up using my quest 2 for) got me through a cold and dark pandemic winter. Then in the spring, I got back into ultimate frisbee which kinda scratched the same sports / community itch and is much better exercise!
The problem with making a VR layer on top of the Internet is that it's not something you can do alone. It has to be done in a manner that's organic/spontaneous with competitors being allowed to participate on their terms as much as yours (Meta/Facebook in this case). Zuckerberg didn't like this idea so he decided to strike out on his own to have the first mover advantage but such a move as we see can be a failure. Rather than just slowly building up a foundation on the Occulus and forming partnerships with indirect competitors like Sony, he chose to force the issue and just belly flop right into it. Now, it'll take a decade or two before anyone else even tries this effort in a concerted fashion again as too many shareholders with the memory of the last attempt will be there to put a stop to that (for good and ill imo). In the long term, the idea that VR or human-friendly interfaces will dominate the Internet isn't a bad prediction but as I've stated before, it must be done in a slow and careful fashion. You can't force tomorrow to come any sooner than it will and you can't do it alone.