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Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse 'Sad' and 'Empty', Leaked Internal Documents Complain (cnbc.com) 250

Posted by EditorDavid from the un-friended dept.
It's been one year since Facebook changed its name to "Meta Platforms," remembers The Street. So after Mark Zuckerberg "bought the Oculus Quest VR headset, rebranded it Meta Quest, and formed Reality Labs solely to work on all projects related to the metaverse" — what happened next? Meta's shares and market value have dropped and Zuckerberg's personal fortune has shrunk, falling from $125 billion in January to $49.1 billion at last check, putting him No. 23 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Reality Labs is facing the hard reality that it's pouring out gallons of red ink, losing $10 billion last year and about $5.7 billion so far in 2022.

And leaked internal documents reveal discussions between Reality Labs management and employees, indicating that "Horizon Worlds" [Meta's flagship metaverse for consumers] is ridden with game-breaking bugs, leading to a "quality lockdown" for the rest of the year.
In fact, Horizon Worlds is also "failing to meet internal performance expectations," reports CNBC, citing internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal: Meta initially aimed to reach 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds by the end of the year, but the current figure is less than 200,000, according to the report. Additionally, the documents showed that most users didn't return to Horizon after the first month on the platform, and the number of users has steadily declined since spring, the Journal said.

Only 9% of worlds are visited by at least 50 people, and most are never visited at all, according to the report."
"An empty world is a sad world," one internal document reportedly adds. And Fortune cited some more discouraging statistics from the Journal's article: - Meta wants users to create their own worlds using Horizon's tools. Less than 1% are doing so.

- A tip feature to reward creators for their efforts has generated payouts of under $500 globally. Cumulatively, Horizon's worlds have brought in only about $10,000 in "In-World Payments".

- Retention rates for the Quest virtual-reality headsets — sold by Meta to access Horizons — have dropped in each of the past three years.
CNBC also notes that the report "comes as the company's stock falls, user numbers decline and advertisers cut spending. Meta shares are down 62% so far this year...." So how did Meta respond to the Journal's article? A Meta spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that the company continues to make improvements to the metaverse, which was always meant to be a multiyear project. Representatives for Meta didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

Meta has said it will release a web version of Horizon for mobile devices and computers this year, but the spokesman didn't have any launch dates to disclose.
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Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse 'Sad' and 'Empty', Leaked Internal Documents Complain More

Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse 'Sad' and 'Empty', Leaked Internal Documents Complain

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  • Eye sensitivity, dont want VR (Score:3)

    by AcidFnTonic ( 791034 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @05:54PM (#62969715) Homepage

    My eyes are sensitive and for whatever reason putting on a VR headset just makes my eyes water and feels like I'm looking into the sun without being able to look away. I literally will never ever use this and could care less.

  • A medical miracle (Score:5, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:02PM (#62969727)

    This may well be the first time that a Metastasis caused a cancer to die.

    • sigh... No moderator points today.... Someone please mod this up.

    • Actually, it's happened before that cancer metastasized and even made it to party in a lymph node, but then from what I could tell from immune assays, the immune system promptly woke up and killed the whole cancer, primary tumor and all. I've seen it happen. I dunno if it's a correlation/causation thing or what, but from the little I investigated, I think it pissed off the wrong APC.

    • Metastasis tends to kill most cancers as the host dies which we'd rather avoid if the host is civilization.

      There's a weird lack of correlation between the size of an animal and it's risk of dying from cancer known Peto's Paradox. One potential contribution is cancers effectively start stealing resources from other parts of the tumor. So this could be a corporate hypertumor.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AElONvi9WQ

  • The thing is he's probably right... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:07PM (#62969741) Homepage Journal

    I suspect VR is going to be a big deal... some day.

    Apple made the Newton way before the technology was ready and it flopped. But the iPhone/iPad was a huge hit.

    VR will likely be a huge deal... but not with the current tech.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sgage ( 109086 )

      I had this same thought, immediately followed by a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Please, no!

    • Re:The thing is he's probably right... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:30PM (#62969801) Homepage Journal

      > VR will likely be a huge deal... but not with the current tech.

      yeah, you need eye tracking, eye focus tracking, the equivalent of a 3060Ti for each eye, and something like Unreal 5 for dynamic depth rendering and trivial latency - just to avoid headaches and some of the seasickness.

      That's the bar for entry. 2029 maybe?

      The highres screens will probably arrive sooner but be hamstrung by the rest of the missing stack.

      Somebody will make some cool VR movies in 10 years with realistic actors and the ability to look all around the scenes. Maybe some people will get PTSD from a popular war movie and create a huge scandal.

      • Reprojection can solve that. I think the problem here is that Horizon is a solution in search of a problem. People already have efficient methods of communication. Horizon has to compete with texting and facetime and zoom. Good enough is good enough. The additional presence of Horizon is much more involving. People want to just send a message and get on with life or have a chat while doing other things. If people want an involving gathering, they will probably just play a game and voice chat at the same tim

      • Every discussion I read on VR seems to focus on getting the visuals right, whether it's by bruteforcing the resolution (8K here we come) or through the use of sophisticated eye tracking technology. If the goal of VR is to render a world as close as possible to being sensually real, whether we're dealing with fantastic beasts or flowers, then we can't stop at the seeing is believing.

        A VR version of Avatar should not just be full of blue sky and skin detail, but invoke the feeling we'd get say, from, hang-gli

      • yeah, you need eye tracking, eye focus tracking, the equivalent of a 3060Ti for each eye, and something like Unreal 5 for dynamic depth rendering and trivial latency - just to avoid headaches and some of the seasickness.

        That's the bar for entry. 2029 maybe?

        You mean like right now? The RTX 4090 exists, you know. I played HL Alyx on a GTX 1070 and it looked great anyway so that's not really an issue.

        VR games look great and a fun experience already. The problem the "metaverse" is a dumb idea. I don't want to "hang out" on facebook.Nobody wants to, as it turns out.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swell ( 195815 )

      - And he's right to make a bold move. Zuck & Wall Street both understand that FB has reached saturation and will begin a downward trend among users. And Wall Street insists upon growth. Without it FB will look like Yahoo! and others who failed to grow sufficiently.

      So Zuck took a big gamble. I think it took courage. I wish him well on this venture.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Think of VR and AR as classes of platform... obviously they have huge *potential*, but what they lack (aside from technical refinement) is a *killer app*.

      I think it's instructive to look at two factors that allowed PCs to take off. (1) The existence of a really useful app (the spreadsheet) and (2) the existence of at least one platform (IBM PC, MS-DOS) able to run that app and already in the hands of the people who'd pay a lot of money for what that app does.

      Now spreadsheets existed for a few years before t

  • Why have avatars log out? Once you're provisioned, you are in forever, as a bot or a bot controller.
    Why doesn't every game world do that? Costs some, but worth it.

  • The metaverse view device and controllers are a minor detail.
    Getting it to be something that works on a 2D display is hard enough,
    and it would have to do that.

  • VR is a hardware problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:33PM (#62969813)

    VR isn't a software problem. Software idiots are too stupid to be involved in VR at this stage. Facebook doesn't know anything about hardware. Does any Meta employee know how to build a display? No, they buy existing cheap smartphone parts and glue them together using Elmer's glue. The display in the Meta headset was developed to be used on smartphones. Instead of using an existing smartphone display, they should work with their vendors to develop a high enough resolution display that can make the VR experience great. I am talking about 8K per eye, not under-2K per eye BS they have now. If they can't make a VR headset with an 8K per-eye display, they should just shut down their company and go on a healthy diet of dick. I am serious. Anyway, jokes aside, what I am saying is that Facebook needs to solve the display and hardware problem before pussying around with software tricks to overcome hardware limitations. Michael Abrash, and Carmack, keep talking and making excuses about how hard eye tracking is, well all of the issues they mention seem to be because the frame rate of the eye tracking camera is too slow. If they got a faster camera, the software problem gets oomags easier.

    • First Person Shooters still can't create convincing worlds with objects you can move around, so why should we expect this crap to suddenly be feasible ?

      • A VR headset with foveated rendering and fast enough eye tracking needs only to render at VGA resolution or lower .. whereas an FPS on a desktop has to render at HD resolution or higher. The human eye can only see a few degrees of arc at high resolution at any one time. I mean, try to read more than a few words of this sentence without moving your eye, you won't be able to do it. The world only appears in high resolution because your eyeball scans around the scene so that the middle of your retina can see i

        • While true, as soon as the person using the headset moves their eyes you run into a problem. Your system has to detect the eye movement and adjust the high-res rendering position within your display.

          The system capable of doing this will come out around 2040. With the GPU for it probably becoming available and affordable a generation later. And I mean a human generation.

        • Thanks for the info re foveated rendering and refresh rates, did you also know that computers run on electricity and bears shit in the vatican?
          I am saying that the model that is being rendered has not enough complexity for realism. Old B&W footage of I Love Lucy is a low resolution representation of real 3d objects interacting, C.O.D. 12 is a huge number of GPU cores desperately trying to draw a 'realistic' picture of a less than huge amount of objects whose interactions are simplified to make the task

      • FPS was doing that well enough for me 20 years ago. Realism and being "convincing" isn't the problem, any more than a snowy black and white picture kept people from enjoying a good show on TV 40+ years ago. The problem is that VR doesn't add enough extra immersion to justify the discomfort. Immersion has more to do with the content than the delivery.

    • Double 8K displays at 120Hz. Nvidias latest $1100 (msrp) RTX 3090 Ti couldn't even handle Zuckeburgs ugly as hell avatar at those kind of workloads.

    • IMO it's not even a technical problem. The problem is that I can't think of a single practical use case for "the metaverse."

      VR and AR, sure. In specialized forms (i.e: developed by companies specializing in those specific domain areas). Video games are obvious. Training simulators for high-risk activities like flying or medical procedures, absolutely. But I don't think "the metaverse" is going to pave ground there.

      I don't think Meta has done much over the past year to actually market the metaverse to normie

      • Yeah. I could see if they had come a few years ago with something a lot more polished, and pushed it *hard* at the beginning of the pandemic as a way to get "out" and socialize... *maybe*.

        But at this point, as things are getting back to normal enough for at least your immediate friends... I just don't see the demand without something a *lot* more impressive to offer.

        That, and from what I've seen it really manages to show off how highly polished the original Wii graphics were 16 years ago. I mean, I can se

  • Utopia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:38PM (#62969821)

    Meta wants a huge, well-planned, sterile virtual city where everyone has the same generic look and the same generic housing and businesses.

    People, however, mostly don't want that.

    While Meta is busy making their failure, other companies are just planning on selling the tools to make and use a nice, colorful, random (and, yes, dirty and sometimes nasty) virtual world. Which will be a massive success in a few years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suss ( 158993 )

      People might be curious what hell aka Mark Zuckerberg's soulscape is like, but obviously don't want to stay there for longer than absolutely necessary.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      What they should probably do is license the technology to Rockstar and CD Project Red, and let them create the next Grand Theft Auto and Cyberpunk games with it.

      When people use VR to have sex with a dozen hookers, kill them, and then steal their money back... THEN they'll probably have a hit on their hands.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cirby ( 2599 )

        That's kind of where Nvidia is going with Omniverse.

        "Here's the tools to work in VR, with stuff to collaborate and create worlds. Do what you want with them, we'll sell you the servers and GPUs to run the whole thing."

  • Failed Market Research. (Score:5, Informative)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:47PM (#62969841)

    I don't think our good old Suckerberg has ever in his whole life grasped the concept of market research.

    He got lucky once, by stealing something, and after that basically just became a leech and just bought out all competition.

    Literally nothing other than ad-infested, privacy destroying Facebook has ever succeeded. Everything else was bought, not 'created'.

  • VR will ride the waves of business and society. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by az-saguaro ( 1231754 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:49PM (#62969851)

    The idea of VR and AR is inspiring in many ways, and eventually it will likely succeed and find its rightful place and implementation. But one thing we have seen in the digital age is that ideas need time to mature, and that the road to commodity taken-for-granted everyday usage is littered with failures and has-been's.

    Early OS'es like DOS & Unix eventually matured into MacOS, WIndows, and Unix, modern standards that built on the rough unpolished early beginnings. When Android came along, it was successful quite quickly in large part because it used computing and user interface paradigms that were already marketplace proven.

    The same is true for Netscape & IE maturing into the modern options. Palm and Newton never matured, but they spawned Blackberry and then iPhone giving us the modern industry-standardized commoditized handhelds we now all own and use.

    The dotcom bust of the late 90's tore down nascent internet businesses giving them time to reorganize into more durable successes. Same is true for AOL, Yahoo, and AskGeeves.

    Sadly, the great successes of those transition businesses, like Google, the new Apple, and Facebook-Meta allow them to have too much power and self-indulgence, losing their early everyman optimism and enthusiasm to a disregard for law and decency, leading to the current miasma of unbridled greed and sociopathic disrespect for their users.

    I do not have a Facebook account, never did, have little respect for the company or what it does. But, it is an important step in defining what VR could be. We all learn from failure as well as success. The best that could happen is that this foray into their Meta identity somehow tanks the company, or at least drastically downsizes it. Then its in-house talent will go somewhere else or regroup, and from those ashes a credible and successful metaverse will appear.

    "Successful" means something we can all buy and buy into, willingly, that it becomes normative in our society, to reap its pleasures and benefits. That is realistic and likely to happen at some point, and we will all agree that it is good ... for a few years until greed, ineptitude, and self-serving megalomania and sociopathy worm their way into those new and once admirable companies.

    • The power the big players have dramatically accelerates innovation in the hardware.

      But they have the money, and saying they are burning it is rather accurate.

      But this is good because of the hardware development speed.

      The burn part is starting to become apparent.

  • Bad Communication (Score:3)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @07:11PM (#62969905)
    I have an Oculus Quest 2 and had no idea I could log in to "Horizon" already. Part of this may be Meta/Facebook's absolutely terrible customer communication. Over the past year I've received multiple emails from Oculus and then Meta and then Oculus again telling me I need to make a Meta account with no explanation of what was happening to my Oculus account or my Facebook account, or what was new to use on the platform. It's all very confusing and I'm a software developer. I bought the thing just to check out the UI design patterns they're using and I have to say the new hand-based navigation (no controllers needed) is pretty slick and intuitive, but the product as a whole is a mess.

    • Kinda ironic that they try to know everything about you but don't even want to let you know enough to give it to them.

  • Sad and empty? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @07:19PM (#62969929)
    From what I've read, that pretty much describes Zuck himself. Coincidence?

  • Horizon Worlds? (Score:4)

    by ItsJustAPseudonym ( 1259172 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @07:33PM (#62969951)
    I'm not on Facebook, and I had never heard that "Horizon Worlds" existed until just now. I have to guess that it really is not that big of a deal, if the name isn't too visible outside of Facebook.

  • I'm feeling his pain (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @07:39PM (#62969959)

    Poor guy, finding himself only worth $49 billion dollars now. How can anyone live like that?

  • For the sole purpose of selling crap to people and we're surprised nobody wanted to show up. If Facebook couldn't buy out its competitors they'd already be out of business.

  • How Sad (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jimbrooking ( 1909170 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @08:33PM (#62970083)
    I think social networks like FB, Twits and the like are a threat to society. We can see what it's doing (and has done) to the US, and the rest of the world. The drug "crisis" is a wart, but social networks are a metastatic cancer. Zuck and his ilk are the Frankensteins of the age, creating systems they don't understand outside the context of making money in ways we don't understand, or understand but tolerate..

  • ... improvements to the metaverse ...

    An expensive VR headset that only be used on one site is bad enough: It's mediocre performance and the problem that pretending to move causes motion sickness, means a monetized imitation of reality is many years away.

  • Simpler alternative ignored (Score:3)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @09:57PM (#62970173) Journal

    Just have "screen-verse" where people walk around and do shit: a glorified MS-Bob. It would be cheaper and easier to join. Don't need the fucking goggles and 3D computations. If and when it gets perfected and popular, THEN release a VR version. Walk before you run.

  • Move fast and fix your damned code (Score:3)

    by kmoser ( 1469707 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @11:21PM (#62970325)

    "Horizon Worlds" [Meta's flagship metaverse for consumers] is ridden with game-breaking bugs, leading to a "quality lockdown"

    The consequences of "move fast and break things" is finally coming back to haunt Zuckerberg. Unfortunately the follow-up is "...and then spend ten times as much time and money fixing them as you would have spent had you designed them correctly in the first place."

  • What a mess (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Saturday October 15, 2022 @11:40PM (#62970345)
    I just tried it on my Quest 2. It was remarkably hard to find, actually. I ended up having to search the store. It isn't being promoted at all.

    However it was pretty easy to get started. The avatar options are depressingly boring... every Fallout game I've played, I would make an avatar with a green mohawk but, nope, no mohawk. They did have hearing aids though, which was weird. However, in the end, everyone looks like an expressionless plastic doll. It feels very corporate and stifling, not what I expected from a "metaverse" at all. I'd rather my avatar be more out-of-this-world, not a bland puppet with a dumb grin.

    After skipping the tutorial I enter a world and find... it's just a chat room. The world is peppered with little gimmick "games" where you awkwardly manipulate something until you get bored, but otherwise it's just a really exceptionally lame version of VR Chat. I went into some kind of event which was just a video stream, but got turned around in the lobby waiting for assets to load and accidentally left. I could only explore for about 15 minutes before I started to break out into a cold sweat and feel sick.

    I'm not sure what the use case is here but it's clear that Meta has no idea either.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vivian ( 156520 )

      Crappy graphics are the biggest problem with it IMHO - the graphics are just too substandard, like wii graphics from 10 years ago - and I have no interest in going into a VI environment like that. I don't need the environment to be totally photorealistic, but I am looking for something richer than what they have. Something like World of Warcraft is far from being a realistic environment, but is much more stylistically interesting than what they have for Meta.

      Likewise, a game like No Mans Sky (which works f

  • Behold, an elephant! (Score:3)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @01:00AM (#62970431) Homepage Journal

    Didn't Second Life try all of this years ago? I hear it's still around, but is it really relevant to anything beyond a core of true fans?

    What in the world makes Zuck think everyone will want to live in Zuck Land?

  • What did they expect? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @02:00AM (#62970465)
    You're not going to revolutionize society with entropy and parasitism. Ask the crypto dorks.

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