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Facebook Social Networks

How Facebook Plans To Build Its Metaverse (axios.com) 38

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
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.
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How Facebook Plans To Build Its Metaverse More

How Facebook Plans To Build Its Metaverse

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  • Please no. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Asynchronously ( 7341348 ) on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:39PM (#61936107)

    I hope Facebook burns a shit ton of money on this project only to have it crash and burn.

    • Metaverse (unlike multiverse) has been "crashing and burning" [wikipedia.org] since near the beginning. We're just not ready for it technologically or socially.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        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!)

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

          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

    • Yes please. They just don't get it, no one wants them expanding into more of their life, we want less intrusion.
    • If this sorry lineup is the launch of their great plan for the "future of the internet", then they have already set themselves up for failure. They are taking away a few reasons to drop out of VR, but they aren't adding anything that will make people want to go there and stick around.

  • Metaverse? Are they deliberately trying to make themselves sound like cartoon villains?

  • Metaverse is the metric system! Shouldn't it be the Yardverse!?

  • 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

    • Have you seen the Oculus Rift? It's great, and selling rather well.

  • 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

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I can text or email asynchronously while doing other things.

    I can't sit in a video or vr meeting that way.

    • Both of my boys (18 and 20) have VR headsets (not the FB ones). I tried it a few times, cool for about 15 minutes then you realize you have a brick on your head and can't interact easily with your surroundings. Am I going to type in mid air on a virtual keyboard? Nope. When my boys first got them them they were so excited. After a while even they conceded the tech has many faults to deal with.

      • 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)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:47PM (#61936567) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 ) on Thursday October 28, 2021 @03:53PM (#61936827) Homepage

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mattr ( 78516 )

      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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DThorne ( 21879 )
      VR has been dying for some time, studios invested millions prepping to make content until they figured out nobody wants to drop hundreds of dollars per person to come over on Sunday and wear helmets in somebody's living room, especially since the failure of 3D television. I find it humorous he still wants to dive in head first to this technology. Part of me thinks it's all a scheme to leave that tainted Facebook name behind. As far as Snow Crash, I don't think Zuck suggested he would be replicating milli

  • The most exciting news I'll ever hear about Facebook is when it finally has that eternal 404.

  • 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."

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