91–100 of 391 posts
So "Ready Player One" with Zuck in charge? No thank you.
I think that's their goal, they issued a copy of the book to each Oculus employee. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-gives-all-its-employe...
I'm surprised how negative the comments here are, even if it is true that 'metaverse' is turning into a pretty silly buzzword. I think there's still coherent concepts defined by it (interfaces becoming much more inline with what humans find natural, integration of VR+AR capabilities, and the 'Internet' becoming more and more 'real life' in general). Facebook is absolutely one of the best-positioned companies to be ab…
>> “A good vision for the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability”, Mr Zuckerberg said, adding that there should be protocols like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) internet standards for defining how experiences will be built. Except defined by Facebook, so not really anything like W3C.
Are there any facebook products that have "the sense of interoperability and portability"? Seems like most of their properties strive for the opposite...
The Verge podcast[0] where Zuck made this comment was quite revealing. Without naming Apple specifically, Zuck managed to communicate an intense fear that Facebook would be locked out of Apple's upcoming AR platform. Is the 'metaverse' inevitable? Or is it merely sci-fi wishful thinking? If 'interoperability' and 'decentralization' means that you can't avoid targeted advertising, I'll pass. [0]: https://www.theverge.…
Anything but an open and radically-decentralized interoperable set of standards and you're Running On Someone's Specific Hardware. That means that they and the country (or other municipal structures) might have opinions on what you can run on their hardware, and thus the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse will be invoked at the start.
As you slide toward less interoperability and more corporate/government control, you're going toward the Johnny Mnemonic territory (maybe without the cyberdolphin). You'll have to hack your way around the place, and that means that the ordinary folks are left out. They might not have the smarts, the hardware, the wetware, and so on.
Further levels of control and you're into Second Life -- one platform, one company, but perhaps some local rules/anarchy. And if you're still thinking of the children, the Metaverse eventually looks like Club Penguin. You can finally rest assured that the concept is functionally dead when we are all sending each other only various emojis of unrealistic skin tones.
So, the question then becomes, does anything in the Facebook/Zuckerberg history suggest where on that spectrum we will land?
As a side note, I believe that pretty much any version of this Metaverse means targeted ads. On the controlled side, the people running the hardware will want money, and that means ads. On the uncontrolled ads, randos will want money, and that means that they'll do whatever they can to sniff your activity and monitor you, and then send you ads.
Every time Facebook has a press conference to the tune of "what if we were even more immersive" it strikes me as incredibly tone deaf given how many problems they engender already just with a regular web app.
Looking forward to logging in once and drawing as many dicks as possible in zucks metaverse before I'm banned.
This sort of disruption will probably be considered virtual terrorism one day... Imagine the CIA torturing some poor soul over dicks in the zuckerverse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh man. there have been at least three efforts i'm aware of to standardize the metaverse in the last 30 years. none of them really went anywhere. fb was invited to participate in the last one i paid attention to (VWRAP), but they politely declined.
And now they'll take all the ideas from the previous efforts, pick the ones that will make them the most profit (revenue - development costs) and tada a new propriety, privately controlled ecosystem that slowly replaces whatever is out there. See, for example, Open Graph replacing Dublin Core.
The Verge podcast[0] where Zuck made this comment was quite revealing. Without naming Apple specifically, Zuck managed to communicate an intense fear that Facebook would be locked out of Apple's upcoming AR platform. Is the 'metaverse' inevitable? Or is it merely sci-fi wishful thinking? If 'interoperability' and 'decentralization' means that you can't avoid targeted advertising, I'll pass. [0]: https://www.theverge.…
We can sure hope.