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

what if there was a VR game where you got to be in the band Oasis and the entire game was winning arguments with your terrible brother and threatening to quit the band, which gets you extra points

Maybe
You're gonna be the one that slays me
It's all for fun
You're my Player One

lol

My son wanted to re-watch Ready Player One last weekend, so it was fresh in my mind when Zuck walked into the room and there was the big robot guy

I think you might have been watching something else, Zuck is *small* robot guy.

We're going to have this awesome thing in 5-10 years

A 10 year rollout? (checks when this thread started) Facebook itself is only about 15 years old.

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

Desperation? Sure. But only because stock traders hate tech companies that have no whizzy narrative about how they will double in size and triple their revenue in a couple of years. There's a distinct chance that Zuck will only be worth $50 billion two years from now, FB will become a stale product only used by a billion humans, and he's in a panic over it.

Facebook's announcement that it is changing its name to Meta has caused quite the stir in Israel where the word sounds like the Hebrew word for "dead".

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-59090067

"A lot of this will be mainstream in the next five to 10 years," he said.

Is this the 5-10 years quote people are talking about? Cuz this certainly sounds like stuff is launching sooner than 5 years.

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

very, very few movies that were shown in 525 lines, cut to pan & scan, with swears and butts deleted, and advertisements for toilet cleaners inserted every ten minutes, were actually made that way

somebody watching a 2-D movie that has been deliberately made worse in a different format doesn’t mean that a completely unrelated 3-D movie sucks

I think the point wasn't that 3D movies suck, but that VR is much like 3D movies, in that it keeps getting revived as an idea, then is hyped as The Amazing Unstoppable Future, then it fizzles out and 2D or PR (Plain Reality) reassert their primacy for another decade or two.

Could have sworn one of the tech companies (Amazon?) quietly re-introduced cyber glasses again, too.

The glasses pair with your Android phone and can read out notifications, make phone calls, and play audio, including music and podcasts. You can also ask Alexa for rundowns of your calendar, the news, weather, and the usual things you’ve come to expect. A “VIP” filter will let wearers choose which notifications they want read aloud and which should remain only on their phone for later.

The Oculus VR head gear seems like an extremely clunky attempt to replicate the Star Trek holo-deck. The Metaverse, as envisioned by Zuckerberg, seems like he's trying to figure out how to make the Star Trek holo-deck sound like a place where the Enterprise crew would hold exciting business meetings.

I remember the first I'd ever heard of VR was around that guy Jaron Lanier in the early-mid 90's, and the goggles he had then look a lot like the Occulus goggles of today

https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/4/2018/08/untitled-e542612.jpg

The Meta thing keeps making me thing of Rhonda Fleming in Out of the Past.

think the point wasn't that 3D movies suck, but that VR is much like 3D movies, in that it keeps getting revived as an idea

yeah, exactly

every single 3D movie I’ve seen projected was good and fun*. I’ve seen a cool demo of a VR thingy with iirc semi-generative music by Herbert? but in both cases (afaict) the good examples of the form made by capable ppl on purpose get choked out of the market by things that aren’t rly examples of the form, made by people who aren’t trying to even make anything good. then the market itself implodes due to this.


* unless the Zemeckis/Gaiman/Avary Beowulf was one. that is not good, but is terrific fun

i remember when google sent someone out to a festival i was working with Glass and I tried it for ten minutes
i imagine i will do this for ten minutes too

How long until we can non self consciously record all of our existence tho

seems needlessly redundant

Xpost didn't u see that Black Mirror

Aimless: no one else who tell you this but no one gives a shit what your opinion is.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/29/zuckerberg_meta_facebook/

so kind of you to make sure I was aware. I wouldn't want me to go through life not knowing what a jerk you are.

if you wanna fight them you will probably find them...at the bar

I used to study Classics, and the word “meta” comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond”.

Why is this so funny?

I'm not interested until they get the Perky Pat layout finished. The Feelies is a better product anyway.

lol, that was the first thought I had when I saw the announcement, as well.

Sorry aimless…I was out of my mind last night…

When I was a kid and I'd visit my grandma in Chicago I remember her taking me to some pier mall thingy by the lake, forget what it was called but it was like a souped up entertainment mall that had mini golf. They also had this VR thing called Battletech, which was a mech war. I would always get really hyped up to play, and then it would feel like this huge buildup, but then it was just kind of an awkward and hard to control video game, although I would be convinced that I was into it and want to do it again anyway.

Navy Pier

this is interesting because i'm convinced that rich man zuck is literally just doubling down on infantilizing himself and his company as the way forward

this is interesting because i'm convinced that rich man zuck is literally just doubling down on infantilizing himself and his company as the way forward

Remember, the video in Infinite Jest that was so fascinating people would stare at it without eating or sleeping until they died was a blurry, infant's-eye view of a woman with big tits leaning down and cooing maternally at the viewer. If someone programs something like that into Meta-vision, or whatever it's called, when it launches, goodbye civilization.

the video rendering of the space "meetup" has really been sticking in my mind. It's kind of a fascinating artifact of Zuck's disconnect from most people, even moreso than his "just smoking these MEATS" videos. It reminds me of something from a really bad children's cartoon, and his whole affectless way of engaging in how "FUN" he seems to think other people will think it is. And I can't help but think that this is partly a situation of he has permanent control and no one can tell him "hey, this isn't actually appealing, most people don't want to replace going out with being floating robot at a space poker game that is constantly interrupted by dog videos, and also you shouldn't be in this video, because you are unappealing"

Haha, yeah, he's like Woody Allen playing the love interest in Woody Allen films.

He's like a super rich dude without kids showing up to a kid's birthday party with the worst or most mismatched toys and games ever.

"I bought him a Segway!"

"Mark, he's only three."

"Yeah, well, I'm sure he'll grow into it. Oh, I also got him half a cow, all organic, from a farm I own. He and his friends are going to eat well this summer, that's for sure! Anyway, gotta go, sorry I landed the helicopter on your garden."

was a blurry, infant's-eye view of a woman with big tits leaning down and cooing maternally at the viewer.

knowing DFW, it was probably buried in a twenty paragraph footnote

something from a really bad children's cartoon

I echoed this upthread - his Metaverse resembles some Nickelodeon show that was cancelled in 2003

Maybe all this is just too soothe Mark's inner child - a trustworthy robot buddy, and REAL friends that aren't on the payroll to build a fort with

Reminds me a lot of Sony's failed "PlayStation Home"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Home

infantilization is one of the primary motivations for people who are basically reactionary ime

not motivations but .. ways of being i guess

Was gonna say, if there was ever a time to indulge the general public's inner infant, that time is now

obviously i'm just spitballing but i remember the promise of the internet in the 90s was like .. virtual worlds that would replace social reality with a kind of utopia. anyone who believes that into adulthood.. it's like a different version of people who basically believe that disneyland is real life, that fantasy that they need to be real in order to successfully escape everything else, responsibility etc.

this is in some ways like an impossibly dumb remake of citizen kane

No one who actually wears glasses all the time wants a bunch of AR shit on their lenses. Sounds like another thing that will make me constantly think I need to clean them.

How sick would it be to wear world-occluding goggles and trip over my cat over and over?!

I'd visit my grandma in Chicago I remember her taking me to some pier mall thingy by the lake, forget what it was called

Lake Michigan, probs.

Haw.

Yet another angle on why this may all be really dumb (via Slate Money): it's not clear that we will actually have sufficient internet speed and bandwidth in most places to run this all the time.

where? in the world generally? something like a quarter of the world’s population has never used a mobile phone.

in the global_north full fibre is available in more and more places and it is essentially a solution without a problem: nobody needs 900Mbs up and down. there is no compelling application for those speeds - yet

i agree with ppl who say that things like the metaverse will probably start to exist but they’ll be created by people who are not facebook, it’ll be like, invite-only discord VR chats run by bronies

And once again we see William Gibson’s famous quote - “the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - come to life.

"...and also you shouldn't be in this video, because you are unappealing"

They could've paid a few mil and have John Legend or Pete Davidson or whoever we'd actually want to hang out with guide us through the metaverse.

https://vfxblogsite.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/96489-andysnoke.jpg

"Let me tell you about ... the metaverse."