How Facebook Plans To Build Its Metaverse (axios.com) 38
Facebook unveiled a series of new moves in augmented and virtual reality on Thursday, as part of its longer-term effort to help build a "metaverse" that will bring physically distant people closer together. From a report: Facebook has said this is its next major push, but it comes as the company is under intense scrutiny for how it is managing the impact of its existing services. The company is using its annual Facebook Connect conference to outline a series of new features and products, as well as some investments to spur adoption of the technologies. Among them:
Horizon Home: Facebook is making the home screen on Oculus Quest more social, allowing friends to gather, watch videos together and dive into games and apps.
Messenger calling in VR: This will start with being able to call from VR and eventually that will be a launch point for hanging out in virtual reality.
Bringing more 2D apps to VR: More than 20 apps are coming to Horizon Home, with the ability to be placed on a virtual screen. Apps include productivity titles like Slack and Dropbox as well as Facebook's own services, including Instagram. Developers will also be able to offer their own progressive web apps for use in VR.
Horizon Marketplace: The company plans to operate its own marketplace where creators and developers can sell their own virtual goods.
On the augmented reality front, Facebook is adding hand and body tracking to its Spark AR developer tools as well as Polar, a new app that allows people to create augmented reality filters without needing to code.
Horizon Home: Facebook is making the home screen on Oculus Quest more social, allowing friends to gather, watch videos together and dive into games and apps.
Messenger calling in VR: This will start with being able to call from VR and eventually that will be a launch point for hanging out in virtual reality.
Bringing more 2D apps to VR: More than 20 apps are coming to Horizon Home, with the ability to be placed on a virtual screen. Apps include productivity titles like Slack and Dropbox as well as Facebook's own services, including Instagram. Developers will also be able to offer their own progressive web apps for use in VR.
Horizon Marketplace: The company plans to operate its own marketplace where creators and developers can sell their own virtual goods.
On the augmented reality front, Facebook is adding hand and body tracking to its Spark AR developer tools as well as Polar, a new app that allows people to create augmented reality filters without needing to code.
Please no. (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope Facebook burns a shit ton of money on this project only to have it crash and burn.
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Metaverse (unlike multiverse) has been "crashing and burning" [wikipedia.org] since near the beginning. We're just not ready for it technologically or socially.
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The Circle and Ready Player Two seem highly relevant. Any other dystopian books to recommend?
But I agree with the FP's sentiments. (And I still think the most promising solution approach for all corporate cancers would be a pro-freedom anti-greedom tax system. Let's make the path to higher retained earnings lead to smaller companies!)
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I mean, the entirety of the cyberpunk genre from the 80s/90s sorta fits. The Metaverse was the Brand Name of the VR in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (i still re-read this every few years). Basically its megacorps, franchise nationalities, hackers turned into advertising coders, and a really interesting early imagining take on meme warfare. The Metaverse is the product of a megalomaniacal Conservative monopolist with close ties with a huge Prosperity Gospel-type cult leader... It's certainly a better read th
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And don't forget the underage sex.
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Facebook being there makes me not want to go there.
Metaverse? (Score:2)
Metaverse? Are they deliberately trying to make themselves sound like cartoon villains?
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When The Incredibles [imdb.com] are fighting against Facebook, then one has reached peak cartoon villain.
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Re:Metaverse? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds more like AOL 2.0
Metric systeme? (Score:1)
Metaverse is the metric system! Shouldn't it be the Yardverse!?
Interesting idea, but (Score:2)
It's very likely to fail.
Actually making it work well is hard, really hard, harder than they imagine even if they think it will be hard.
I worked in the VR biz in the 90s. I saw the hype and fantasies, and the difficulty and disappointment when trying to make it work at anything beyond a minimal level.
I predict that some sort of scheme like this will succeed someday, but there will be LOTS of failure and wasted money along the way.
I predict it will be kinda like nuclear fusion power, always 30 years away
Jurassic Park (Score:3)
Remember the 3D interface the computer whiz was navigating through just to get the door locks to engage as her buddies are holding the door closed with all their might so the raptor wouldn't eat them? Remember all of the tension this scene caused in the moviegoers?
This is why these types of interfaces were never popular.
If only she could've just typed in "door lock *", but of course then we wouldv'e never gotten to experience the suspense.
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That was a filesystem navigator.
Realistically speaking, whether you used a GUI with a good design, a GUI made to be eye candy, or a command line, you wouldn't figure out what to do before the raptors got you. Any real system is going to have far too much stuff to dig through. Your only hope would be finding a purpose-made GUI with a quick to locate "lock doors" button. Otherwise locating what exactly you need to do and in what order could easily be a days long ordeal.
Re: Jurassic Park (Score:2)
That would've made sense, perhaps a general emergency lockdown button that could've been an actual physical button to send the command to all systems.
I bet the lardass was about to get to that, but he was too busy putting together the "you didn't say the magic word!" taunt and putting together the canister he used to steal the embryos.
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Have you seen the Oculus Rift? It's great, and selling rather well.
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That link/quote is misleading, as it is only talking about units sold at the beginning of 2021. The context clarifies somewhat.
Here is a better, more readable chart: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
I have to ask who cares at this point? (Score:2)
We're getting story after story after story about this stupid metaverse idea that's probably going to take them years to turn into usable software. It's Facebook, trying to get their slimy claws deeper into people's perceived reality. For me that's a big heaping helping of terrifying blended with a stupendous amount of shaken in who gives a shit. I don't see this succeeding, but if it does it just makes the entire world that much worse. Why is slashdot so obsessed with it is the real question. Maye we
Re: I have to ask who cares at this point? (Score:3)
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Google Glass ought to have been a teaching moment.
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Oh goodness gracious (Score:2)
I can text or email asynchronously while doing other things.
I can't sit in a video or vr meeting that way.
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Re: Oh goodness gracious (Score:2)
Fred Brooks writes in one of his books about how he was working on a VR gizmo to help chemists visualize and "walk around" large organic molecules hovering in a holodeck thing.
The chemist trying it out likes it for about 15 minutes and then says, "can I have a chair to sit down?"
So Zuckerberg Finally Read "Snow Crash," Did He? (Score:4, Informative)
Back in the 1990's, not long after Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash was released, a bunch of groups wasted a bunch of money trying to create the metaverse. While 3D graphics ranged from "primitive" to "non-existent" at the time, the real problem was what I called The Database Problem.
There's probably a more formal name for it but, at its most basic, The Database Problem is that, to accurately render the world, you need the latest state of every object in the universe. In other words, you need to keep each client's database of object state perfectly in sync with everyone else's at all times, which is impossible. Even if you constrain that to "latest state of every object you can potentially see," that's still impossible in the general case.
Recall the penultimate scene in Snow Crash where millions of people are gathered in a single virtual location. That's millions of avatars sending state updates for position, orientation, facial expression, etc. etc. etc., and all those parameters being sanity-checked, collision-checked, visibility-checked, and then re-sent to those same millions of users. Impossible.
Even if you try to "simplify" things by adopting the Luna/Stadia model and dumb down the client to just display a video stream generated by a giant server complex, even if you assume the servers can have instant access to all object data (no, you can't), you still have to render millions of individual viewpoints at 30+ FPS. Impossible.
We learned all these lessons 25 years ago. "Second Life" still sucks. MMORPGs are still laggy. Now it seems Zuckerberg is going to spend billions of dollars re-learning what we already know.
Re: So Zuckerberg Finally Read "Snow Crash," Did H (Score:2)
So if a founder starts displaying signs of severe mental illness, delusions in this case, what is the company protocol for handling somebody in such a high position.
Re:So Zuckerberg Finally Read "Snow Crash," Did He (Score:4, Informative)
That problem mostly went away with time, improved hardware and improved designs.
Second Life back when it started pushed the limits of what was possible. The amount of data needed was a huge strain on home internet connections, and everyone still used hard disks, which made their central servers scream under the load. I think they bought some ridiculously expensive RAM based storage solution to deal with that issue. Multi-core CPUs were new technology.
Today, the same stuff is downright pedestrian. Disk space is plentiful, which means a client can cache everything. Consumers can get gigabit internet connections. SSDs doing insane amounts of IOPS are consumer tech, not to speak of the amazing stuff you can put into a server these days. I've got a 16 core consumer CPU. There are services like AWS that already figured problems like "serve lots of pictures to a million people", and you can just buy that from them.
The state synchronization issues are solvable just the way SL does it -- you don't need to know what's going on far away. With some intelligent optimization by knowing everyone's camera position and view distance you can make it so that in a world with a million people, everyone only needs to know anything about the dozen nearby them. If that's too onerous you can ditch the continuous world SL uses and just go with independent instances like VR chat -- that trivially scales as much as you like on modern cloud infrastructure.
SL today is a pretty smooth experience compared to when it started.
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The way to minimize that problem is with a "foeva" analog, where each individual only tracks a limited number of things. 128 should be enough. Everything else is lazy, where you only sync it when you need to.
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Real time communications implies a sliding scale of level of detail. I think there can be an imperfect but acceptable solution to delivering a real time view even of a million avatars, though it may take time to get to the point that you could hold a stadium sized event with high fidelity. Perhaps it may require clients to handle some of the processing and provide an approximated aggregate streams for broadcast to distant viewers, but it is not like a million molecules in the same droplet that could collide
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Give it up already. (Score:2)
The most exciting news I'll ever hear about Facebook is when it finally has that eternal 404.
Join the other verse ... (Score:2)
So, that is The Zuck trying to entice us to join the Necromonger faith and cross the threshold into the Underverse ...
I believe, the correct response is: "I bow to no man."