The problem with Meta's Metaverse isn’t the Metaverse at all—it’s Meta. Their internal turf wars block true innovation, forcing developers who dare to think outside the “Apple App Store paradigm” to seek refuge elsewhere.

//------------- My personal Story as a Oculus-Ecosystem developer------------//

in 2018 I had just completed production of "TheBlue: Deep Rescue" for Dreamscape wherein we put up to 6 players into a local multiplayer experience to save a whale in VR. The "Shared space" VR modality was very exciting and I developed a way to create local multiplayer on Oculus Quest recreating the shared space local multiplayer modality

In 2018 I took the "VR Arena" experience I had developed to Oculus Connect and showed it to Carmack he said "That's Smart, you should keep doing this" and encouraged me to work with Oculus Developer Relations to release an app (here is a video of that: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2FTheVRLab%2Fstatus%2F...

Unfortunately when I went to Oculus Developer Relations they told me "We cannot move forward this modality because of legal reasons. Having multiple people in the same tracked space violates our health and safety notice wherein the users asserts there are no other people in their tracked space."

So this wasn't a technical issue rather a legal one that the Oculus had never considered putting multiple people into the same tracked space, but there was nothing technically blocking this modality and the user's loved it. (Kids especially: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2FTheVRLab%2Fstatus%2F... )

Despite having Carmack's support and multiple emails on the subject we couldn't get the legal team to budge so in 2018 I had to start looking for alternative platforms like HTC Vive Focus 3 which was just starting to come out. The tech was pretty powerful and could lead to numerous $profitable$ business models especially int he VR-Arcade and Teacher lead VR-Classroom sector (here is an AWE talk given on LBE use case: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FgOk6qiMvCC8 ) but the Pandemic put a stop on Consumer-Entertainment and we had to pivot to government grants during the crazy years that followed. Still we managed to do well over $4M in Government Grants from NASA, DOD and Department of Energy, and a few years later I moved on to Executive Production work and stopped developing the tech.

Fast forward a few more years Oculus brand goes away and Meta announces (5 years later) that you can now do local multiplayer on Quest as a way of pushing mixed reality experiences. I met the product manager for the tech at GDC and he was telling people this could make developers thousands of dollars. I mentioned to him I had already done $4M on local multiplayer w/ government grants and he was like "yeah but that wasn't with our SDK we just made so we're not going to case study that"....Just goes to show how every product manager has their own kingdom at Meta and they want to disavow any innovation that might be adjacent to their work...Which is dissapointing since Meta has still refused to do any real local multiplayer apps that lean into the tech.....shrug, oh well I've moved on. As have a lot of the other innovators in the sector from 2014-2020 that were creating novel experiences for Oculus

I am seeing a lot of "low information voters" talking about censorship when they fail to realize this is about state narrative control, and people getting offended when their confirmation bias is not being reinforced by their news feed.

Regardless of if your candidate "won" or "loss" when you get pass the Kayfabe I doubt we will see them "allow" an alternative to a centralized service. The previous admin wanted to control what you think, and signaling from this new admin is they will control who will tell you what to think. I remain pessimistic.

The (2) largest blocks that make a decentralized social network impossible are neither technical nor social, rather corporate. That is, Apple and Google wont allow any successful app that is politically apposed. Remember what happened to "Parlor"?

So even if there was a path to make an alternative the next question is who is going to risk jail to deliver it?

Don't forget that Ross Ulbricht was sentenced in 2015 to two life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus 40 years for making an alternative to eBay. The "crimes" he was charged with are no different than what you can buy on Facebook Marketplace.

//-----------SIDEBAR TRUE STORY-------------//

Did you know Bram Cohen made an improved version of BitTorrent that allowed P2P video streaming, and they decided not to release it?

Over a decade ago a friend of mine was in charge of BitTorrent and asked me consult with them on how to productize some new tech releated to streaming. I had previously seen scale on my prior startup after I pivoted away from making a P2P video streaming app called "SEER" (for server-peers), and decided to go centralized launching Vidiac and StreetFire the first UGC video sharing sites pre-youTube. (Achieved 1B streams in our first 18 months on 2 million streams per day)

My buddy at BitTorrent recalled my work rolling out a social video network and asked to take a look at Bram's new tech. Yeah, they had invented TikTok before TikTok, completely decentralized with no servers. However there was a problem, the lack of centralization meant there was no way to censor the stream. A User could take their iPhone to a movie and bootleg the entire event to their followers. BitTorrent at this point (~2014) was struggling to find a way to monetize legally under the unfriendly scrutiny of the MPAA whom they made their enemy for life.

In summary they decided the risk of running afoul with Hollywood and thusly the government was a non-starter. I did see a launch vector for them, (Launch internationally in New Zealand under a new entity with ZERO legal connection to BitTorrent) But they decided the upside wasn't their for their investors so the board said no and BitTorrent chose not to launch a decentralized P2P TikToK competitor in 2014 because of it.

Does this make sense though? If Masks work Then Less people get infected. If less people get infected then less people go to the hospital. If less people are in the hospital then less load/danger/exposure to health care professionals.

Hoarding masks for "professionals" amplifies their peril rather than reducing it.

We all recall the nightmare of the hospital back logs.

Honest messaging from the get go would have reduced a lot of suffering.

But hey, since when did the Government make smart well thought out decisions?

Expect incompetency.

This is the sort of legislation that makes it impossible to create competitors to incumbent social media platforms.

In 2004 I created a UGC video sharing service, Vidiac.com that white labeled video sharing websites Like streetFire.net, and 4,000 other speciality video sharing websites which were popular pre-youTube.

Back then we made a content moderation service so that site owners could keep content relevant to their site and remove the inevitable porn that would be uploaded. We had a small team of 3 Founder/developers and eventually grew to small team of 10 making a modest profit on 8Mmau after about $300K in friends and family funding.

There is NO WAY you could make a web business like that today. You would spend 5 times as much funding just building the moderation system to be compliant with all the government oversight and you would likely need full time people just rejecting content and reporting misbehavior to the FBI, never mind having budget for development.

YouTube as a site hasn't evolved a bit in basic UI/UX since it was acquired by Google and the only major new video service to come since has been TikTok. I'm convinced that all this authoritarian police state legislation has destroyed the evolution and improvement we used to see in UI/UX in the early 2000s. It has also entrenched the existing incumbent sites and there is little need for competition as there is nothing "next" for the user population to migrate to.

When I see government getting involved into moderating the content of websites I just shake my head now at how high the barrier to entry has become to innovate.

You may be right that the bipartisan support means this has a lot of inertia to overcome, but there is one clear solution to stop this tide, contact the campaign donors to your local congressional supporters and complain to them about the actions of "their" candidate. Boycott the donor's products, and raise question of their subversion of our freedom to assemble on the Internet. Raise the questions publicly and loudly. When the money changes it's mind, so to will their government puppets.

^^^This is Pre-Pandemic Punditry,
While it's been pretty fashionable to play to the audience saying VR is dead, VR today is doing quite well now that Standalone VR has come on the scene, and some of us (myself included) are producing well received content that's paying the bills.

I will concede that 8 years ago it was impossible to make a sustainable VR business in the consumer market.

However Today the world has changed and there are over 10M Quest 2 VR headsets in the market and now everything is different:

Solo Indie Developer "Another Axiom" Makers of Gorilla Tag has seen over 700K Daily Users and reported over $26M in Revenue
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.roadtovr.com%2Fgoril...

There are now more than 100 VR Titles with $1M+ in Revenue, 8 have over $20M in revenue
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.roadtovr.com%2Foculu...

Also in October of last year, Bonelabs netted $1M in its first hour of sales:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.roadtovr.com%2Fbonel...

• And it's no longer just Oculus in the Standalone VR Market.
• - BytDance has announced their Quest Competitor, the Pico Neo 4,
  https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2022%2F...
• - HTC Vive XR Elite just debuted at CES
  https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnet.com%2Ftech%2Fcomp...
• - and the OP hints Samsung is making their long awaited Successor to GearVR with this Google Partnership.
• • While AR is admittedly still struggling
  • - Microsoft has ditched AR to partner up with Oculus to bring software to VR
    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.iotworldtoday.com%2F...
  • - Apple has hard pivoted away from AR to debut their Standalone VR headset this year as an "MR" device
    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgamer.com%2Fapples...

  And while other sectors in Tech may be struggling, Linkedin is presently showing over 2,000 Job postings for VR in the past 24 hours
  https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fjobs%2F...

  Obviously VR is no where as large as other areas of tech, but keep in mind that Apple only sold 13M iPhones in their first 2 years, about the same as Quest 2. So VR is here, it's doing just fine and getting better every year.

Yes and no, I've played Elite in VR since 2015 and the VR experience has DEGRADED with each update as Frontier tries to chase the Fortnight crowd with less and less immersive gaming experiences in Odyssey.

Elite added VR as an afterthought in 2015, and as a seated cockpit experience it was perhaps the best of it's kind, but they never capitalized on this, and (innovator's Dilemma) VR was such a small portion of their user population that it was always the lowest priority to update and enhance

The issue is that Elite and most other AAA Games that come to VR are "VR as an Afterthought" creating an entirely wrong UX/UI for VR. Take Odyssey for example, even if you could convert it, a First person Arena Shooter is terrible for VR as the players do not run in natural motion, side strafing at unrealistic speeds and moving in wholey unnatural ways for the sake of "fast pace gaming"

Had Frontier deployed Odyssey as a VR first game, it might have actually been more of a success, and one must consider how that could be fun in VR and ported back to Flat screen 2D.

First up all the cockpit textures would have to be greatly enhanced as VR users often come with a couple of feet of a panel or display. So Higheer resolution LODs, secondly every button on deck should do something and interact with hand collision as VR users want to push a button, not navigate immersion breaking menus.

In Odyssey a user "teleports" from outside their ship, into the CMDR chair, but in VR, most VR users would actually enjoy hanging out with their friends on the observation deck at the front of the Anaconda overlooking an incredible view, Upgrading to bigger ships means more interesting play-spaces where "just being there" is fun enough, no need to force a game loop of "doing something" when simply being there is awesome in and of itself

Moreover, Odyssey handles Gravity in a terrible way breaking the "Cannon" of Elite not having artifical gravity. The VR Game "Lone Echo" shows what "could have been" as a user floats in zero G using hand holds to move around inside of a remote outpost, or wandering the halls of their ship with their crew. As Gravity increases Users would start to get a slight tug to the floor, and then transition into walking, making larger Stations with Variable gravity even more interesting to explore

All of these VR UX features could have been translated over to 2D, and honestly would have leap frogged Star Citizen......but hey Frontier wanted an ever smaller slice of the Fortnight Pie and now it is the mess that it is....I've explored the Galaxy from Beagle Point and back again, all in VR, but Frontier has done nothing but move away from VR users since they enabled the feature 7 years ago, so I find myself playing it less and less

Woulda-Coulda been great

It's pretty basic to hate on Facebook/Meta, and I for one am getting disappointed in the herd-think I'm seeing on this topic, so perhaps we should review the facts before jumping on the hate train.

8 years ago it was impossible to make a living as a VR content creator
Today entire studios are focused 100% on VR and some creators are seeing more profit from their VR content than iPhone App creators.

8 years ago VR was akin to USENET in the early 1990s, that is a small sub group of content creators made up of enthusiasts behind expensive complicated proprietary gear and high friction barriers to content consumption.
Today you can buy a VR headset at Best Buy and share an experience with your non-tech friends and family

8 years ago VR was impractical, without any defined use
Today VR has been empirically proven to be more effective for education and medicine, with down right compelling content like "Creed" and "Beat Saber" that are both fun and more of a workout than anything a Wii ever accomplished.

Finally today we know VR is "the final medium" is as much as every other medium (text, video, etc) can be reproduced inside of it.
Therefore we know VR is going to "be a thing" well into the future and a majority of VR's users are in the future.

Given all this, it would be UNWISE for Facebook/Meta to solely base it's future on propping up it's past products when we also know that social products have definitive life-spans and Facebook, Instagram and others have already far passed other "dead" products like MySpace, Geocities, etc.

So given all this, of course Facebook/Meta should invest in this future. I'm not saying they will dominate it, but at the very least they will SURVIVE it, into this next medium. They may not become the next "Google of VR" but these investments might at least insure Facebook/Meta can become the "AOL of VR"

Tech Companies that ignore this sector might just find themselves left behind leapfrogged by competitors that see and capitalize on the unique value this medium offers.

n/m

This paper will be cited by pundits as a negative for VR in the work place since it showed no "improvements" over standard modalities.

But seriously why would it if you put a user in front of a desk and keyboard in VR?

Much like the command line to the GUI was a paradigm shift in UX, this study is forcing the VR user to interact with the older paradigm (sitting at a desk) and (no surprise) can't exceed the efficiency of the previous system. A 2D GUI is highly optimized with decades of design thinking behind it, whereas VR is an entirely new modality.

I would argue that sitting a person in front of a mouse and keyboard in VR for a week misses the entire point (and value) of working in VR and is the key fault of this study.

A Better test of would be answering questions like "Does a crime scene investigator have a better understanding of a scene from 2D video or walking around a photogramatry scanned environment in VR"

Got to disagree, VR is inclusive of all other mediums, you can literally create EVERY other medium type inside of it, so the 'problem' is not that it's "limited in scope', the 'problem' is that it's limitless in scope ad the core use-case has not been exposed yet.

Same thing happened with the Internet, we had all the tools to create Twitter back in the mid 1990s, but the use case had to be uncovered and that didn't occur until ten years later.

Clay Shirky wrote “Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring” we're still nerding out about the VR as Tech, literally no-one has developed VR as a phone yet. I can't even share links with someone in VR yet. VRChat may be popular, but it's still primordial.

Now as far as 2D vs 3D, all I have to say there is information is dimensionless, and doesn't care how it's presented, but we have more time, experience and development in how to present information in 2D than we do in 3D. Consuming a Video from YouTube in 2022 is easy, consuming a video from Compuserve in the 1990s is a feat in engineering. VR and 3D computing have a lot more maturation needed to be comparable.

Sapere Vedere

@Darkling-MHCN just posted a link to Linux in a Pixel Shader On /. that's worth mod points Would give you mine if I had them

Top Down product design in full effect. Someone said "would it be cool if...." and suddenly SlashDot editorial is pushing something no one is asking for. Looking pretty sus

I hope someone mods lessSockMorePuppet's post up to a 5.

Yes yes and yes.

Left/Right is a construct of "the show" and 'political theater' is a veil authoritarians use to manage 'the audience'

Those demanding to silence opinions they disagree with are doing the good work of the Fascists by punching 'Down' One thing Libertarians and Progressives share as Egalitarians is they 'Punch Up' at Authoritarians.

By this logic shouldn't we shut down Facebook too? How many of the people that raided the capital had Facebook Accounts or used Facebook to share photos/videos from the event?