After Mockery, Mark Zuckerberg Promises Better Metaverse Graphics, Posts New Avatar (cnn.com) 63
What do you when people hate your $10 billion selfie? "Mark Zuckerberg, in response to a torrent of critical memes mocking the graphics of Meta's newest project, has heard his critics — and changed his selfie," reports CNN:
Zuckerberg debuted Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social app, in France and Spain earlier this week, sharing a somewhat flat, goofy digital avatar in front of an animated Eiffel Tower and la Sagrada Família.
The internet immediately jumped in, mocking what many users viewed as (hopefully) preliminary graphics for a venture that Meta has spent at least $10 billion in the last year.
New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose compared the graphics to "worse than a 2008 Wii game" on Twitter. Slate used the term " buttcheeks." Twitter was less kind: "eye-gougingly ugly" and "an international laughing stock" popping up. Many compared it to early 90's graphics and pointed out how lifeless and childish the Zuckerberg selfie looked. It quickly won the designation "dead eyes."
Well, Zuckerberg has apparently seen the memes, because on Friday he announced there are major updates coming — along with new avatar graphics.
In a CNBC report on how Zuckerberg "is getting dragged on the internet for how ugly the graphics of this game are," they'd actually quoted a Forbes headline that asked, "Does Mark Zuckerberg not understand how bad his metaverse is?"
The internet immediately jumped in, mocking what many users viewed as (hopefully) preliminary graphics for a venture that Meta has spent at least $10 billion in the last year.
New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose compared the graphics to "worse than a 2008 Wii game" on Twitter. Slate used the term " buttcheeks." Twitter was less kind: "eye-gougingly ugly" and "an international laughing stock" popping up. Many compared it to early 90's graphics and pointed out how lifeless and childish the Zuckerberg selfie looked. It quickly won the designation "dead eyes."
Well, Zuckerberg has apparently seen the memes, because on Friday he announced there are major updates coming — along with new avatar graphics.
In a CNBC report on how Zuckerberg "is getting dragged on the internet for how ugly the graphics of this game are," they'd actually quoted a Forbes headline that asked, "Does Mark Zuckerberg not understand how bad his metaverse is?"
Zuckerberg is a clown (Score:1)
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Not my fault
Yes it is. You're supposed to sanitize your data input before posting. We don't want no steenking unicode with its virus laden emojis
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"... and pointed out how lifeless and childish the Zuckerberg selfie looked."
It's OK. He always looks like that. I've never seen a picture of him were he actually looks like a real human.
Re:Zuckerberg is a clown (Score:4, Informative)
That's pretty much it. He's always looked like a tiny alien took over the corpse of an awkward teenager.
If anything, that avatar makes him look more human than he normally does.
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Every single person I've talked to that has had experience with VRChat, looks at Horizon Worlds and goes "what the crap is that, it's so ugly"
Sure VR-chat leans hard into anime aesthetic, but what does Horizon Worlds look like ? Like 1997 called and wants it's VRML texture-less world back.
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VRML had textures! Even video textures, if you can believe that.
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This is insulting to VRML it looked much better than this. ;)
Re: Zuckerberg is a [recognizable] clown (Score:2)
Anyway, that's the joke I was looking for but if it exists it hasn't been moderated as such. Any Avatar that is recognizably him is no good.
Which reminds me of the no good characters in the FP. Don't you have a unicode-dumb window you could paste and cut the text through?
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I think it is better not to let him know how he comes off. I remember back in like 2016ish when he was arguably considering the idea of a presidential run and started making press appearances in random places around the country. Some of the funnest memes on the internet, resulted.
Re:Zuckerberg is a clown(upvote) (Score:2)
upvote the above comment
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I know how to fix it (Score:2)
What people dont understand is that (Score:5, Interesting)
1. The real world has gone to absolute sh^&.
2. Neural interfaces are so good that you’re basically transferring bodies.
3. Most are 1 and 2 combined
Currently? None of these conditions are satisfied. As bad as the real world might be, nothing is made better by putting 5 pounds of nausea-inducing hardware on your head so you can view rough polygons that look like Mark Zuckerberg.
I want the metaverse here as much as the next techie. But I think it’s probably a century away. Neural interface tech isn’t even out of it’s diapers. We dont even have all the basic science in place yet.
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Completely agree. (1.) Will not happen anytime soon and (2.) is far, far off unless somebody makes some really unexpected discovery about the human mind. Pity.
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Completely agree. (1.) Will not happen anytime soon and (2.) is far, far off unless somebody makes some really unexpected discovery about the human mind. Pity.
I'm totally fine if the metaverse takes decades to become part of the social fabric. In the first place I think we have much more pressing problems that the metaverse will do nothing to help solve.
Secondly, I don't think our societies are mature enough for the "evolution" - if it is that - of "interfacing" with each other via VR. We need to get a whole lot better at meat-level interactions before we abstract the whole business to that degree.
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That seems like one of the big problems for 'the metaverse' in our context: As a genre, electronic escapism and telepr
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Since a metaverse is indistinguishable from a boring MMO, I propose that what will get people to use one without some sort of cataclysm that drives people into micro-dwellings or what have you is good games implemented in it. Over half of the American public now plays video games of some description regularly. One of the common fantasies in gaming is a single world that connects them together, in which actions in one game affect situations in others (or don't, as the case might be) and where the whole thing
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nothing is made better by putting 5 pounds of nausea-inducing hardware on your head so you can view rough polygons that look like Mark Zuckerberg.
Quote of the Month.
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4. A technologically dominant race of machines has taken over the world and raises humans as a "crop", the metaverse is used to keep the crop amused and docile while it is being harvested.
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Every sci-fi story with a thriving metaverse, falls into one of three categories:
1. The real world has gone to absolute sh^&.
We are frankly not all that far off from the conditions in the book where the term was first used. Governments haven't collapsed and been replaced by corporations, but many if not most of them are now effectively government by, for, and of corporations. By the time of the novel the biosphere is presumably not much more destroyed than how it is now, either. That happens somewhere in between Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (by which time the only thing preventing widespread starvation is nanobuilt food.)
So, n
no idea about france ... (Score:2)
... but thanks to rampant wealth concentration most spaniards are actually poor by european standards in the best case, simply poor on average. particularly the newest generations which are having a really hard time achieving independence. why would zuckerberg try to demonstrate his next gen fad amongst such a collective? metaverse is turtles all the way down ...
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Who knows why Zucky-boy does anything. He's a Dark Tetrad who doesn't give a rat fart about anyone other than himself.
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Spain has a ton of energy and optimism for the future, though. I don't know what Zuckerburg is thinking, but Spain has a bright future.
Face it, there's no amount of 3D magic to fix that (Score:2)
A punchable face is a punchable face, no matter how much you try to tart it up.
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Yeah, not to mention that even real-world Zuckerberg looks like a soulless automaton. Which makes me wonder if he sold it.
The graphics aren't the problem (Score:2, Informative)
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The lack of people shouting "privacy issues" or "imaginary assets" suggests they are correct.
No vision whatsoever (Score:5, Insightful)
Clear there there is no vision whatsoever here. Anyone can look at those screenshots and make fun of the simplicity of the graphics. They should have been well-prepared for this with a bunch of talking points about how people have been saying the same thing about Nintendo games for the last ~15 years since the Wii came out, and it hasn't stopped them from making amazing experiences.
There's also the creator side - it's wayyyyy easier for the average person to make low fidelity graphics and not zillion polygon models with perfectly aligned animations & high resolution textures. This should have been a huge selling point for them - "anyone can make stuff for the Metaverse!".
The fact that they are so insecure about the graphics and are prepared to just go "oh OK they're bad? we'll make them better!" just shows they haven't thought through this at all. It's just going to be lousy tech demo after tech demo while they focus on the wrong stuff.
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Nintendo may have had underpowered hardware, but they made good use of it to give their characters and locations some style. Zuck's selfie is just his shitty avatar in an awkward pose with a gormless look on his face, with a random Eifel Tower and some other unidentifiable building in the background, neither with any texturing or lighting applied.
His new updated avatar and location looks like complete crap as well.
The bigger issue is harassment in the Metaverse. If you are ever unlucky enough to try it, cre
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Great example: Goldeneye for the N64.
It had great gameplay and graphics that would blow away
anything that "Horizon Worlds" has shown, and the machine
was tiny compared to the cheapest digital watch you can buy today.
But it had great graphics hardware developed by Silicon Graphics,
and excellent sound.
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Great example: Goldeneye for the N64.
It had great gameplay and graphics that would blow away
anything that "Horizon Worlds" has shown
It was pretty impressive by the console game standards of the day, but PC gamers had already been playing Quake for almost a year when it came out, and the good Quake mods were starting to come out by the time goldeneye got popular. I got a N64 later when they got cheaper, and never gave two shits about Goldeneye. Pod racer was a lot better on the N64 with the memory upgrade than it was on anything but a really expensive PC, though.
But it had great graphics hardware developed by Silicon Graphics, and excellent sound.
Yeah, that's a thing about the N64. Once you got the memory upgrade you were
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it's wayyyyy easier for the average person to make low fidelity graphics and not zillion polygon models with perfectly aligned animations & high resolution textures. This should have been a huge selling point for them - "anyone can make stuff for the Metaverse!".
It would be cool if they found a way to scan an object with your phone and turn that into a part of the multiverse. If that happened, I would have something of the multiverse that was interesting.
Accomplishments (Score:2)
metaverse is facebook;s deadcat bounce (Score:4, Interesting)
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Zuck-the-fuck got lucky once (Score:4, Interesting)
He does have the skills to make something from that. He does not have the skills to come up with a good idea himself, except by accident. That he has a fuckton of money now is merely a defect in how things are organized.
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pretty certain he has a team of people coming up with stuff - its not just Zuck himself..
but yea...whatever.
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He probably selected these people himself to only come up with ideas he likes...
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He does not have the skills to come up with a good idea himself, except by accident.
He didn't come up with a good idea by accident. He stole an idea from someone else.
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He does not have the skills to come up with a good idea himself, except by accident.
He didn't come up with a good idea by accident. He stole an idea from someone else.
Yes, probably.
Am I the only one... (Score:2)
Am I the only one who doesn't understand why anyone would join his "metaverse", or any VR-based "life"?
Second Life (Score:3)
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Yes, and people can simulate sex there. And there's the rub, ha ha ha. Facebook wants to create something that is locked down hard so that disruptive behavior is impossible. But people want to be disruptive. Second Life proves that conclusively. The ideal case seems to lie somewhere in between. To my mind, the right answer is to let people have their own private spaces where they are in control, on their own servers, on their own (or leased) hardware. Zuckerfuck quite reasonably does not want to be responsi
Pav (Score:2)
No thanks, I'll stick to playing Pavlov VR.
Lifeless.. (Score:1)
More like totally XBOX360 avatars (Score:1)
Zuckerpunch! (Score:2)
Hire the xbox 360 avatar team (Score:3)
IMHO, the Xbox 360's avatars were the best, and found the perfect balance of 'cute' vs 'realism' for adults. They didn't look like a soulless corpse or RealDoll. They didn't look like creepy prepubescent adult-sized mutants. Their proportions weren't strictly "accurate", but they were visually appealing. Basically, they were designed by artists who understood aesthetics, and not merely by grunts trying to crank out reference bodies following some corporate standards document.
Nintendo/Mii? Hated 'em.
Xbox One's replacement avatars? Yuck. I kept my 360 avatar to the extent it allowed me to.
World of Warcraft seemed to strike a nice balance, too.
Oculus/Meta's avatars? Yuck. Hideous. No sense of personal connection. It looks like what you'd get if you went to a part of Europe stereotyped as having unattractive, inbred people with not-appealing proportions... then used them as your artistic inspiration.
Please. Find the team that did the xb360 avatars & hire them to re-create them for Meta. I might even pay a few dollars for a Meta avatar that's aesthetically similar to my xb360 one.
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oh, and for the love of fucking God, Xenu, and C'thulu... improve meta's facial-hair options. When I made my avatar, it felt like the choices all ranged from 'bad' to 'worse'. It felt like there was no middle ground between 'bland IT-guy goatee" and "demonic biker-viking-zombieâoe.
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IMVU had better avatars 15 years ago than this thing.
That metaverse looked awful (Score:2)
The avatar was a cartoon, in a bad way.
The Eiffel Tower was not at all accurate.
It looked like a high school project.
Given the state of graphics on screen, in video games and movies, this sort of shit should be totally unacceptable.
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Mark just wants to be a real boy. (Score:2)
Unfortunately his starting point is an android that looks less realistic than a wax museum replica of himself.