Snapchat's Evan Spiegel Dismisses Facebook's Metaverse as 'Hypothetical' (theguardian.com) 28
The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions as "ambiguous and hypothetical" as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap's experimental AR Spectacles over the next year. The Guardian: Speaking ahead of the Snap Partner Summit, the company's flagship annual event, Spiegel argued Snapchat was uniquely placed to guide the next decade of technology thanks to the company's vast array of augmented reality services, such as the "lenses" that are used by millions of people every day.
[...] The updates sound like they could be the foundations of a shared virtual universe of the type that Facebook recently decided was so fundamental to its future that it even rebranded the company as Meta. But, Spiegel says, the word "metaverse" is never uttered in Snap's offices. "The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different."
[...] The updates sound like they could be the foundations of a shared virtual universe of the type that Facebook recently decided was so fundamental to its future that it even rebranded the company as Meta. But, Spiegel says, the word "metaverse" is never uttered in Snap's offices. "The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different."
Re: I have another name for Facebook's "Metaverse" (Score:2)
It rhymes with hypocritical.
Geopolitical?
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Worthy of Ridicule?
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It rhymes with hypocritical.
Nipple listicle?
I find his statement "ambiguous and hypothetical" (Score:3)
With that said, it sounds like Spiegel is just mad that Facebook got to this dead-end first. Totally a case of sour grapes.
Re: I find his statement "ambiguous and hypotheti (Score:2)
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For most people VR works far better as a plot device in novels and movies than as an actual device in real life.
Re: I find his statement "ambiguous and hypotheti (Score:2)
Yep. It's like the idea of holographic interfaces ala Minority Report. VR as it's likely to be for the horseshoe future is for most people a solution in search of a problem. While interesting for games or interactive media, it's inferior to old fashioned video for communicating with people.
It's for good reason the most popular web content is simply existing mediums (text, photos, video) delivered through new systems. It works!
What does Meta have over 2L? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meta is an interesting project, with a lot of man-hours going into it. However, is the average person going to use it on a long basis? We already have 2L, which everyone and their brother was looking to license an island for, then things dried up. Social networking is good because you can pull up your phone, type something, do some doomscrolling, and then go to your next thing. A VR world takes a lot of dedicated time, which few people have these days, and if they want a VR world, they are going to be doing some sort of game.
I just don't see whom Meta is pitched to. VR on this scale is a great market, but there isn't any interest, and FB/Meta doesn't really have the advocates and evangelists that a company like Apple or even Microsoft would have. There just isn't anything that it improves on. Making people have to don VR glasses to wait in a virtual waiting room for hours on end is not going to be a selling point.
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Idunno, man. My living room is pretty messy. I put on those goggles and all the pizza boxes just go away.
Actually, they're counting on holoaddiction. (Score:2)
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Meta is an interesting project, with a lot of man-hours going into it.
It's really not. Some of the commercials are interesting [youtube.com], but they have nothing to do with the product Facebook is actually building. I draw your attention to the fact that in the commercial, people actually have legs.
Re:What does Meta have over 2L? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Metaverse done right would not just be another VRChat app. It wouldn't even be an app in the classical sense. It would be a digital platform that combines all the other existing platforms in one unified experience. You can see bits and pieces of that all over the place right now. Be it things like Microsoft's PhoneLink allowing you to stream your phone to your PC, Apple's Universal Control allow seamless sharing of mouse/keyboard between your devices or SteamLink allowing you to play PC games on your TV. All of those break down the borders between devices.
Now imagine that applied to a AR/VR headset, instead of the headset locking you out from the world, it enhances it. If you look at your phone from within VR, you can still see it, but since you are in AR/VR it can now display content beyond the limits of the physical device. And things get really interesting once you start adding multiplayer on top, as now it's not just you that can look at your own devices, you can also invite friends and see what they are up to on their devices. Teleconferencing and screen sharing would become trivial and automatic, it's not something you have to setup, it's something you can just do by meeting up with people in the Metaverse.
All that said, I don't expect Facebook to build this. While they certainly are throwing money at the problem, they seem to lack a real vision on what to do with it. Even now, almost 8 years into VR, they can't even manage really basic stuff, like making their VR offerings (e.g. Venues) available on other headsets or using VR for their own presentations and conferences, those still happen in the form of plain 2D video. There are apps on Quest that go in that direction (e.g. Immersed), but Facebook still has a lot of catch up to do here. Facebook Horizon so far still just looks like a lame VRChat clone, not like a proto-Metaverse.
Microsoft did a lot of good groundwork with WMR Portal, if they would add multiplayer to that it might be the closest thing to a Metaverse on the market right now. But so far they don't seem very motivated pushing it forward, WMR Portal hasn't seen any substantial updates in years and the WMR headset brand has been decimated and only a single headset is left on the market. Though they are bringing Microsoft Teams to Quest2, so they haven't given up completely.
Apple on the other side might be able to build this. They control both the hardware, OS and a lot of the services, so they can make a headset that tightly integrates with them all. If they can release a headset that can compete with a monitor in terms of resolution and clarity, that might be a start of a Metaverse. It might still end up being a very Apple centric Metaverse of course, but it would be an actual product, not just hollow talk. And given how things have worked in the past, it might inspire a lot of other manufactures to jump on the hype train.
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I just wish people would stop trying (Score:5, Insightful)
Also don't like the implication that I'm such an idiot that I'll pay money for a receipt of a badly drawn picture of an ape or an ape.
Metaverse will be real (Score:1)
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Re: Metaverse will be real (Score:2)
Probably not. Androids, at least Soong-types, don't use contractions.
In other words ... (Score:2)
Spiegel says, the word "metaverse" is never uttered in Snap's offices. "The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different."
Like a poem, lyric or Haiku [wikipedia.org] no one understands.
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Did you really think that people might not know what a haiku is?
What these people forget. (Score:2)
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The word “metaverse” has been around since the MUCK/MOO/MUSH days in the mid 1990s. One of the first commercial metaverse I can think of is Illuminati Online’s, but I’m sure there are others.
Graphical ones are not uncommon. Furcadia and 2L come to mind.
I don’t see how FB/Meta can try to expand this market. This isn’t like the smartphone or mp3 market where as soon as Apple stepped in, everyone and their brother thought it was cool. Heck, even Apple tried a stab at thi
Homer Simpson to Peter Griffin: (Score:2)
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From Snapchat's IPO (Score:1)
All Spiegal is saying: Our vaporware is still as relevant as theirs.