At the last minute, Meta decides not to kill Horizon Worlds VR after all

VR will be on life support while mobile remains the focus, though.

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[Spiderman10]

So, we can by now safely say that anything Zuckerberg has come up with since Facebook itself has been a complete failure.

He's the Russ Hanneman of billionaires.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Meet the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative! https://metaverse-standards.org/news/blog/introducing-open-metaverse-browser-initiative/

click

"As AI-enabled AR glasses and VR headsets go mainstream, there is an urgent need to evolve today’s web infrastructure to deliver spatial services to these next-generation devices."

There must be something wrong with me because I don't feel a sense of urgency about that in the slightest.

 

[stormcrash]

Yeah, Mark tried on a DK1 and had a vision of the future. It's one of the leading symptoms of billionaire derangement syndrome - they confuse everything that occurs to them with brilliant ideas, and the sycophants that surround them don't contradict them.

Does anyone remember Internet.org?

Plus them thinking that Snow Crash or Ready Player one are brilliant visions for the future and not the dystopian hellscapes the authors intended to portray

 

[flunk]

I predict it remains laughable for years to come.

 

[Fatesrider]

They renamed the company for this?

The all you hire are eager yes-men, and are willfully detaching yourself from a reality that had more caution signs than a downtown skyscraper implosion all over the place, moronic decisions happen.

 

[plutokras]

I was looking forward to having less bloat on my Beat Saber machine.

 

[seelive]

The biggest sin of horizon world was integrating it with everything. If they wanted to have a separate app that's a Meta's take on VR chat or RecRoom, sure go ahead, blow a few billions on it. But by cramming it into the OS and shoving it into the users' faces, they not only sludged up the experience of the all VR users (including the only profitable portion of the users who are core gamers), but also created needless brand confusion.

If they had just focused on the VR core users all along, that sector would look a LOT better and maybe more mainstream than it is now.

 

[Wileee]

Worst waste of gaming dollars ever. Horrible VR interface and nothing worth spending any time on.

 

[markgo]

It’s amazing that they put approximately as much time, thought and consideration into business plans as I do into commenting on them.

I spent a whole 3 minutes coming up with this one.

 

[Mechjaz]

They renamed the company for this?

I had the exact same thought. (I also thought it was a play to abstract the company away from the toxicity of the Facebook brand, without actually doing anything to distance themselves from Facebook the ad business, but knowing how dumb, vain and self-centered Mark Zuckerberg is, that might be giving him and his toadies too much credit. It might really have been in pursuit of legless knockoff Miis.)

 

[Murry Wilson]

Bosworth is such a useless blowhard.

 

[Amiga4000T]

You would think that investors would stop trusting what Mark Zuckerberg hypes up after a failed thing like this but sadly that's not how it works...

 

[searaydriver]

I still have my virtual rollercoaster and that's ALL I need. That's all I need. That and my virtual theater and my virtual rollercoaster and that's it! That's all I need!

If you do not also have Walkabout Mini Golf, you’re still one shy. That along with Les Mills Body Combat are reasons alone to have a Quest 3.

 

[ronpadz]

click

There must be something wrong with me because I don't feel a sense of urgency about that in the slightest.

Fair, though I didn't immediately "feel a sense of urgency" for the internet when the www was first invented either.

 

[42Kodiak42]

There are more Standalone Meta-Headset users in VRChat right now than there are in the "Metaverse"
There are probably more Meta-headset users on Rezzonite than there are in the Metaverse right now.

 

[MarkBre]

Any kind of a metaverse was never going to work when it was owned by 1 giant company. It needs to be standardized, a protocol, that multiple vendors can operate within. Like HTTP or IRC.

This, 100% this! I was all excited by VR with the hype Oculus was generating, got the headset and was having fun when Facebook bought them and drained all the excitement away in a moment :-(
I got a pimax headset later but it was never the same.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Fair, though I didn't immediately "feel a sense of urgency" for the internet when the www was first invented either.

It might have been different if you were trying to justify your continued employment in a field that has been a cyclical non-starter.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

It might have been different if you were trying to justify your continued employment in a field that has been a cyclical non-starter as far as consumer adoption.

 

[42Kodiak42]

The biggest sin of horizon world was integrating it with everything. If they wanted to have a separate app that's a Meta's take on VR chat or RecRoom, sure go ahead, blow a few billions on it. But by cramming it into the OS and shoving it into the users' faces, they not only sludged up the experience of the all VR users (including the only profitable portion of the users who are core gamers), but also created needless brand confusion.

If they had just focused on the VR core users all along, that sector would look a LOT better and maybe more mainstream than it is now.

I think you're 100% correct on that last point there. Meta headsets are cheap and the OS is crap for integration with stronger hardware. Using a Meta headset with Steam-Link (allowing you to use it as an HMD in a Steam-VR setup) is fraught with technical difficulties and hurdles that turn it into a genuine downside attached to the hardware. All because Meta wanted to create a walled garden that nobody wanted to be a part of.

And now that I think about how the VR space has developed in the wake of the Metaverse, I'm kinda glad Meta fucked up as hard as they did. I'm glad they didn't get further into this space than making entry-grade headsets. I'm glad we got independent hobbyists pushing out things like SliveVR, FluxPose, and Babble. I'm glad that the Bigscreen Beyond team seems to be left to their own devices within their parent company. I'm glad that there was a demanding space for Valve to step up to again. And I'm fucking glad that the only part of the VR market that Meta holds ground over is cheap, entry-grade crap.

Because I can't imagine that we would be better off if Meta won its game of monopoly against a bunch of passionate hobbyists.

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

Zuckerberg has pivoted again. Now he’s rebranding himself as a rapper/singer, releasing an album and the first single is a collaboration with Afroman, called “I wasn’t going to dump $80B into the Metaverse, but then I got high”.

 

[Snark218]

We can't rule out the possibility that it was more of a "Zuck having a midlife crisis about not being Hiro Protagonist wrapped in a pitifully weak business case" thing.

The “I’m forty-what and we don’t have cyberspace or mars colonies?!?” brain rot is just a whole thing among the narcissistic tech billionaire class, isn’t it. And this was not a group of people who were super stable when everything was coming up roses for them, either.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Any kind of a metaverse was never going to work when it was owned by 1 giant company. It needs to be standardized, a protocol, that multiple vendors can operate within. Like HTTP or IRC.

Pour one out for VRML. I think I'm dating myself with that one.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The “I’m forty-what and we don’t have cyberspace or mars colonies?!?” brain rot is just a whole thing among the narcissistic tech billionaire class, isn’t it. And this was not a group of people who were super stable when everything was coming up roses for them, either.

It's that or speculative anti-aging biotech (Peter Thiel's vampire cult probably among the more dramatic) when they realize that even diet, exercise, and all the interesting endocrinology that's legal by prescription if you aren't getting if from shady sports medics in the locker room, can't save you from getting old; even if they can turn Jeff Bezos into amazonbasics Richard Riddick.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Pour one out for VRML. I think I'm dating myself with that one.

Back when there was a markup language for everything.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The biggest sin of horizon world was integrating it with everything. If they wanted to have a separate app that's a Meta's take on VR chat or RecRoom, sure go ahead, blow a few billions on it. But by cramming it into the OS and shoving it into the users' faces, they not only sludged up the experience of the all VR users (including the only profitable portion of the users who are core gamers), but also created needless brand confusion.

If they had just focused on the VR core users all along, that sector would look a LOT better and maybe more mainstream than it is now.

I suspect that it was the wrong move; but probably one baked so deeply into their plan that it wasn't really a 'mistake' in the 'bad call during execution' sense.

Facebook didn't go into VR to become a publisher of VR games; they went to make facebook hegemonic in what they thought would be a growing new medium, with a certain amount of 3rd party content tolerated as a necessary attractant; but purely a means to that end.

It also appears that they were bad at it; with people preferring some of the 3rd party virtual chat/hangout designs; but ignoring the people who were grudgingly tolerating a facebook login in order to get cheaper/newer VR headsets to do VR stuff in favor of trying to cultivate a potentially imaginary audience of people who wanted to do facebook stuff in VR seems like it was entirely the point. They wanted facebook and VR to be seen as inseparable; not facebook being an option for the third party stuff that people actually come for.