Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Renames to Meta

about.facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 1001 posts

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#231

Post by CoolGuySteve »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #134
joshenberg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I wonder. Early VR adopters/technologists hate what happened to Oculus and there aren't a lot of newcomers to that market. I don't think cheaper headsets are going to fix that in the near future so I don't know whom they're targeting. Seems risky to lean into something where the experts already think you screwed up.

Quest 2 is outselling past VR headsets by leaps and bounds according to news reports. The decision to make a standalone headset and build their own app platform was absolutely the right one from a growth standpoint, even if the hardcore VR consumers aren't biting. Early VR adopters are going to buy the next best product and have no loyalty.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next gen Switch has a VR headset accessory and blows the entire market away the same way the iPod and NES did to their predecessors.

The required parts to make a 60Hz 1080p headset are entering the $100 cell phone market and that segment of components are more or less what Nintendo traditionally uses in its handhelds.

Nintendo also has a long history of "blue ocean" products that tweak existing technologies to make them more mainstream.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#232

Post by jimkleiber »

deelowe wrote: post #148
nyt-maps wrote: post #19

My god, if you get it, you get it. They are going all in on metaverse / have decided that the future of oculus is the primary long term bet, not facebook itself. And they have the money to make it so. This is incredibly scary, and probably a good investment.

I hope they have serious plans for changing how VR works today. VR quickly loses it's appeal after a few hours. The isolation it brings with it is a huge issue. AR holds more promise in terms of mass appeal but I'm not sure we have that one quite figured out yet technically and from a UX perspective.

I know very little about VR so maybe this will be very off.

My guess is they want to address that isolation aspect by making it feel better to interact with others, bringing more people together in the VR space.

But this is me interpreting your "the isolation it brings with it" as people just exploring VR by themselves.

Did you mean something else?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#233

Post by adpirz »

ra7 wrote: post #119
nyt-maps wrote: post #19

My god, if you get it, you get it. They are going all in on metaverse / have decided that the future of oculus is the primary long term bet, not facebook itself. And they have the money to make it so. This is incredibly scary, and probably a good investment.

Don’t like Facebook one bit, but Zuck is almost always spot on with his bets. So yes, incredibly scary as it has a high likelihood of succeeding.

This discounts a lot of failures and products without real success:

- Facebook Apps

- Facebook Home

- Facebook Workplace

- Facebook Portal

- Facebook Essentials

What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed them.

I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't have a track record of building anything worthwhile outside of their core offering (ie, the Facebook product).

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#234

Post by rektide »

mdoms wrote: post #137
daviding wrote: post #36

If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…

> Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I have yet to see a single federated system that has demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's usual playbook, which is proven.

The world wide web used to have a host of proprietary servers for it, but those for the most part got eaten by Apache (which latter renamed to Apache Http Server). And then a host of new open-source http servers and libraries.

Sometimes what's good for markets & the world doesn't have to be owned & commercial. Sometimes the availability of resources such as info-resources like httpd can beget enormous commercial success while themselves not having much commercial success.

A Tim O'Reilly saying comes to mind: create more value than you capture. In some cases, without setting free the core idea & letting people run wild, you'll never stand a chance of capturing any value what-so-ever.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#235

Post by hackernudes »

daviding wrote: post #36

If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…

I think there is at least a chance that they handle Meta differently - at 1:28:24 in the keynote[1] Zuck says "...that means that, over time, you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services".

[1] https://www.facebook.com/facebookrealitylabs/videos/56153569...

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#236

Post by ryandrake »

ssully wrote: post #174
daviding wrote: post #36

If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…

Our version of a persistent virtual space was never going to be like fiction. There will be 3 or more competing metaverses, none of which have any interoperability.

Or hundreds of incompatible little ones. If VR really takes off "We need to add chat to our app" will become "We need to add our own metaverse to our app."

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#238

Post by bsanr »

Kye wrote: post #141
bduerst wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the market has repeatedly shown there isn't much demand for persistent virtual worlds?

VRChat seems to have landed on something close to the right balance of whatever it takes to make it happen. It's apparently easy enough for someone to make a whole meme world for an event in the news in time for it to be relevant: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/11/9/21557029/four-season... The video in the initial tweet is up to 2.1 million views: https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560?... VR…

If only. Arguably, part of their secret sauce is their restrictiveness of new users. You have to spend quite a bit of time in-game to gain the ability to even be seen by a lot of other users, and more still to be able to upload avatars and worlds. I'd planned on opening an art gallery space on the platform this summer, only to find that I didn't have enough friends to reach the "trust" level necessary to upload worlds. It's probably a good thing for the quality of the community itself, but anathema to growth or casual use.

(And as for me, I'm stuck trying to figure out how to hack up a WebXR experience with, ah, limited programming skills. Until then, it should be at https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_559152a2-44d3-44... , but it's inaccessible without adding me as a friend and accepting an invitation to an instance I spin up. So, practically useless. And support is no help in terms of what, exactly, I'd need to do to raise my trust level.)

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#239

Post by haaserd »

Does this remind anyone else of that time that Comcast renamed themselves Xfiniti to distract from their terrible customer service, rather than fixing their horrible customer service?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#240

Post by blhack »

Some of you guys seriously need to get out of your bubble. Facebook is an extremely popular service. Many, many people use it every single day, and love it.

This is not a rebrand to avoid regulations, or make people like it again or whatever. Facebook has been signaling this as the direction they wanted to go for quite a long time now.

Post reply on HN