Meta’s brave new horizons
35 comments
·February 19, 2025a2128
From my experience playing social VR, I think Facebook Meta has it all wrong. If you go around VRChat communities you'll find an overwhelming amount of anime girls and furries make up the user base and creator base. In VR, your avatar isn't just a little picture next to your name, it's your body and your identity. Some people will pay hundreds or thousands for an artist to make a custom and unique avatar for them, or they'll spend hundreds of hours learning and making stuff themselves. Some people like to be a robot, a hologram, a pooltoy, some people like to have four arms or be a centaur, there's different styles and body proportions, practically anything is possible and creativity is the only limit. There is a whole economy of avatar asset creators on sites like booth and gumroad, and there are artists who make a livelihood off of doing 3D avatar commissions.
Facebook Meta is basically trying to throw all of this away and pretend none of it exists, and force people into one-size-fits-all humanoid avatars that people can customize slightly with some sliders and options. In fact they weren't even sure they could trust people to have legs. It effectively simulates the real-life feeling of having body dysphoria and not being able to change your body. It's virtual reality for christ's sake! There's no physical reason why somebody couldn't be a Blender default cube if they wished...
Facebook Meta is trying to make a sterile platform safe for business meetings and advertisers, while simultaneously trying to attract users and creators so that it's not a ghost town and has actual things to do, while still trying to retain a monopoly on avatar customization so that they can eventually earn massive wealth by selling virtual clothing for $10. The result seems to be a massive waste of money that ends up catering to nobody (except to Zuckerberg?). It feels a bit like if they made a computer in the early days of computing that didn't support programming, just because they hope if this nifty "computing" idea ever takes off they'll have a monopoly on programming
jimt1234
> Almost as astonishingly, revenues at the division have actually fallen from the 2021 high of $2.3bn, to $2.1bn in 2024...
Not sure why this is astonishing. It was new back in 2021. People tried, mostly hated it, and moved on. Honestly, I'd consider the $200mn drop a victory.
a012
Did they set their expectation much higher than that? Because it sounds like too exaggerating for 1% drop
tail_exchange
It's astonishing how much money they are pouring into a product that is just seems like a worse version of VRChat.
xyzzy9563
I think the metaverse will do well once they can use AI to generate content, or other AI game features.
flitzofolov
That's like adding puke frosting to a turd cake.
jen729w
Yeah but have you seen what people like to eat these days?
xyzzy9563
It depends how good the AI is and how it's used etc. It would for example be neat to walk around in a massive AI generated multiplayer city that has a lot of intricate details.
AlotOfReading
Are we labeling procedural generation AI now? There have been procgen city generators for decades. Here's a particularly nice example:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2859220/Vuntra_City/
Humans are really good at identifying the unreality of procgen because it loses the intentionality we expect from our built environments. Here's the author of that game talking about their solutions to the problem:
taeric
Sorta? Procedurally generated levels tend to not invite repeated playthroughs. Maybe this is a leap above previous efforts, but also maybe that isn't a problem.
I'm all for folks trying. I'm less enthusiastic it will pay off.
kevingadd
Check out Shadows of Doubt if you want an infinite supply of procedurally generated cities with intricate details. No multiplayer, though.
laweijfmvo
“Metaverse” is a moving target and has one goal for Meta: get everyone off the platforms that can eat their lunch (Chrome, iOS, Android) and onto a platform where Meta can start collecting 30% from everyone who wants to play.
briga
People don't want to interact with the human-generated content, why would AI-generated content change their minds? I have yet to meet anyone who uses the metaverse, and it's not for lack of funding on Meta's part.
wincy
That’s because you aren’t 12 years old. Ryan George (a YouTuber) made a video where he checked out the metaverse and it was basically exclusively filled with children. He played metaverse worlds for around 5 hours straight and didn’t meet a single adult the whole time. It’s children using their parent’s old Meta Quest 2 headsets they bought during the pandemic because they were bored, then forgot about.
Until I locked my headset down my kid got onto the metaverse a few times without me realizing, and playing a bunch of random “experiences”.
nitwit005
The population is mostly kids, but that doesn't imply it's popular with them.
cancerhacker
The few times I (50s male) tried horizons universe I felt a visceral creepiness - that any adult I “met” was likely there because it wasn’t technically within 100meters of a school.
VR Chat was less locked down and felt more self patrolled and honest. (On the other hand I wandered a common “watch a movie” vrchat video room instance where Nazi propaganda played and the people in the room were bro-asting about being racist anti-semites.)
null
recursivecaveat
Anything that can generate metaverse activities can do the same for flat-screens, which meta has been failing to convince people away from for many years despite billions of dollars of investment.
yodsanklai
You can't blame them for trying though. Their cash cows aren't going to last forever. Actually, I don't understand why this company has such a high valuation. From all the FAANG, it seems to be the less diversified.
HDThoreaun
Metas ad platform is unfathomably large. Their tracking capabilities on mobile make them the ad market most apps use to serve ads. Apple tried to kill that but turns out it wasnt so easy and meta came back as a better tracker than ever.
SmirkingRevenge
My gut says it's the hardware that holds it back more than anything else. It's all too heavy, clunky and inconvenient.
XorNot
But the thing is that's probably not solvable without fundamental breakthroughs leading to sci-fi level technology.
Like physically there's just no way to make sunglasses a decent AR or VR display people would use all the time voluntarily.
danbolt
I’m not a big PG stan, but gosh darn the submarine isn’t submerged here. It’s up in the air!
https://archive.ph/DQWhw