"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQkYBbM9YyM

Why does it seem like every 5 or so years there's this big VR push, when afaict no one gives a fuck about VR, wearing VR goggles, hanging out in VR rooms doing VR stuff, etc.? Leave that shit for astronauts and surgeons to use and stop trying to convince me it has a real purpose or place in our lives.

I'm pretty convinced that very few people want a screen on their face, but I’m probably just an old guy.

VR won’t take off for mass adoption until VR porn feels like getting your dick sucked instead of just looking like it.

I've seen clips on Pornhub that are designed to be watched while wearing VR goggles and they're fucking bizarre to look at, like footage of conjoined twins shot through the world's most warped fisheye lens.

Thank you for your sacrifice

no one gives a fuck about VR

Maybe the bedridden, agoraphobic, the prisoner, etc. But yeah it's pretty clunky at this stage

feels like getting your dick sucked instead of just looking like it

Brainstorm (1983) was a cautionary tale

https://vhistory.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/watching-porn-on-company-equipment.jpg

I would be too afraid of the soulless avatar of MarkZuck to ever venture far into the Metaverse.

Mark's VR head is gonna suck our dicks?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3drvj0CC8

finally set to appropriate music

(probably start the video a few minutes in)

Rolling 2021 Meta Thread

actually Meta is the name of the company. Facebook is the monster

— BR⚢KE (@BabblingBrookeA) October 29, 2021

Ad is creepy. Name is dumb. I kind of feel like deleting FB but more likely I’ll just keep using it the way I use it and never migrate to any of the VR bullshit.

I'm no business expert but surely things that need fancy peripherals never really take off?

How many cycles of "VR is just about to take off, massively" have we been through now?

Still only know two people irl who actually have Oculus headsets and, afaict, they are both gathering dust in a corner.

I literally know no one. I feel like I've been wrong about technology adoption enough times before that I won't place any bets, not to mention that Facebook has the market power to push this stuff really hard if it wants to. But I find nothing remotely appealing about Zuck's pitches for this. I just sat through a video that involved friends meeting up on some kind of virtual spaceship to play poker only to be constantly interrupted by people messaging them to check out a video of a dog, and also one of them is a robot that doesn't look anything like the real person. During COVID I did about three zoom hangouts and a couple of virtual movie watches with friends and they were all kind of depressing - better than literally nothing but hardly the future I want. Not seeing how strapping on a headset is going to make that better.

ah the final frontiers of profit

“We’re getting flack for being cavalier about the psychological damage caused by Instagram... Let’s hook everyone up to VR and see what happens!”

body image will hardly be a problem when you don't need your body anymore

How many cycles of "VR is just about to take off, massively" have we been through now?

Soccer, sport of the future. Kickboxing, sport of the future.

But I find nothing remotely appealing about Zuck's pitches for this.

But I find nothing remotely appealing about Zuck's pitches for this. = fixed

Also, it's kind of hard to see how you would monetize any of this (which I imagine is massively expensive to develop and run) except for MORE ads. So now even your poker night is interrupted by the revolutionary new cotton tee shirt that everyone is talking about.

A newsletter I subscribe to had a really good piece about this whole thing:

Facebook's Name Change Is An Act Of Meta-Desperation

The literal only news story from today is about Meta, a company that used to be called Facebook. The most important part of this story is that I correctly predicted the name, proving that I am an incredible, beautiful genius. The second most important is that a trillion-dollar company, a company where one man holds 60% of voting power, has totally changed its mission from “we make social media stuff” to, and I quote, “finally put people at the center of our technology…[and]…can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”

The abrupt, bizarre name-change that includes eradicating the Oculus VR product name apparently has “nothing to do with the leaks” that show TheFacebook/Meta/MakeMyNudesFight.com intentionally engineered their product to cause genuine harm to human beings for profit, which is usually reserved for health insurance companies and arms manufacturers. The reality is that it likely does, but I can also believe that he was considering this beforehand, if only because he’s tried to wheel out the awkward metaverse narrative before with his trademark “look at me, one of your regular human males, talking to you” cadence.

While Facebook may now be concerned with the metaversal, the reality is that we need to stop humoring Mark Zuckerberg with sycophantic access journalism and begin evaluating how this may be the beginning of the end for a trillion-dollar company. Members of the media have willingly accepted the narrative that this is Zuckerberg’s attempt to move Facebook away from being known as a social media company from a company that has proven, at best, that it can influence many people at once but not necessarily accommodate them.

Facebook has and will continue to be the place where billions of people connect, and I believe its social side will continue to do something, though its user growth is slowing. What should trouble you is that Meta/Oculus has only sold a few million headsets total. This would be fine - hell, it would be positive - if Zuckerberg hadn’t just shifted his entire company to focus on the metaverse, with the primary way of interacting with said metaverse being a headset that even in its best iteration still has to work out how to stop giving people motion sickness.

honestly this is all a LOT stupider than i anticipated. vr?????? it's kind of shocking. like is this just some kind of bait-and-switch or something? totally bizarre.

so much tech 'vision' at this point is about things that no one actually wants to do.

Read a couple of stories on how people locked out of FBook and desperate for customer support bought Oculus goggles just for access to a help line, then returned the goggles once the problem was fixed.

Apparently they admitted in a call that the fully functional metaverse (i.e. virtual environment you can do all kinds of shit in like attend social gatherings and work meetings) is 5-10 years away. Under those circumstances, it seems like a really bizarre move to change the name/brand now.

So basically "In 5-10 years we will have Second Live 3-D"

*Second Life

More like "no life," right?

Apparently they admitted in a call that the fully functional metaverse (i.e. virtual environment you can do all kinds of shit in like attend social gatherings and work meetings) is 5-10 years away.

Wait but ... why? We know how to do this now. Maybe they meant 5-10 years until normal people wear VR headsets?

it's just the best smoke and mirrors that a team of deeply weird rich people completely detached from reality could come up with at short notice

It's like 3D movies (and more recently television), a bad idea that refuses to go away and rears its head again every decade or two. It doesn't matter that modern 3D glasses have vastly technologically improved since 1950s red and green cellophane filters.

how this may be the beginning of the end for a trillion-dollar company.

Did this author see their last quarter earnings?

3D movies are great

No

I saw Fury Road in 2D and it was annoying to see all the 'gotcha!' 3D stuff without the glasses

Ugh, I watched Dune in 3D last night and the 3D was pointless at best, ruined the compositions at worst.

I saw Fury Road in 3D and it gave me a massive headache. Ruined an otherwise awesome movie.

I saw Fury Road in 5D and was killed

My 12-year-old son plays something called "Gorilla Tag" on VR 24 hours a day.

WATCH: Sneak Peek at Facebook metaverse pic.twitter.com/rUGGiJeMLr

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) October 28, 2021

Things that just have to be Tim and Eric skits

I'm...actually speechless right now. I guess this is a pretty epic way to tank your enormous company, if such is your wont. I'm sure it will go over swimmingly with Facebook Meta's increasingly old and tech-baffled audience.

Neither Fury Road nor Dune were shot in 3-D.

“I saw a version of a movie that had been deliberately made out-of-focus on a computer and it was hard to focus on”

headsup @ Zuck: The Sims already exists

most movies taht are released as 3-D these days weren't shot for 3D

Was Zuck in 3D before or just rendered as such for insertion into Meta

I'm really just scratching my head at this tbh, like you build everyone up for this big announcement and name change, but then the announcement is "We're going to have this awesome thing in 5-10 years, and here's an unappealing rendering of it." Like Tesla's supertruck announcement was bad enough, but that was at least a specific product meant to come to market in a semi-specific amount of time.

it's very comforting to see how they have no idea what the fuck to do

the only good VR thing I ever did was at Disney Springs, through The Void, they had a Star Wars VR themed thing for 25 bucks where you put on a suit and it actually rendered a real reacting environment in your headset and rendered you and everybody else as rebels dressed as Stormtroopers, you got a gun that shot lasers and got to shoot at Stormtroopers and watch them fall over dead, and hten Darth Vader came and attacked you at the end.

of course the pandemic happened and now it's permanently closed. it'll probably be replaced by some third tier company who isn't as good at it who does something like "VR Jigglypanda" which gets stuck and freezes at uncomfortable places.