Facebook gives a glimpse of metaverse, its planned virtual reality world

> Zuckerberg rushing into every new fad with billions of dollars has somehow tricked people into thinking that's what big tech is about and all of them should be shovelling money into this. Zuckerberg failed every single fad he tried. He's becoming more irrelevant every year and only the company's spoils from the past (earned not less by enabling, for example, a genocide to be committed in Myanmar link ) help carry them through to the series of disastrous idiotic decision Zuck is inflicting on them. - VR with Oculus. It never caught on, for most people who own one, it's just gathering dust. - Metaverse. They actually spend billions on that? ▶ this video - LLAMA is absolute trash, a dumpster fire in the world of LLMs Zuck is now trying to jump again on the LLM bandwagon and he's trying to...buy his way in with ridiculous pay packages: link . Why is he so wrong to do that, you might ask? He is doing it at the worst possible moment: LLMs are stagnating and even far better players than Meta like Anthropic and OpenAI can't produce anything worth writing about. ChatGPT5 was a flop, Anthropic are struggling financially and are lowering token limits and preparing users for cranking up prices, going 180 on their promises not to use chat data for training, and Zuck, in his infinite wisdom, decides to hire top AI talent for premium price at a rapidly cooling market? You can't make up stuff like that. It would appear that apart from being an ass kisser to Trump, Zuck shares another thing

Execute to me would be providing the user experience they're showing in their own videos, many of which are simply not possible with headset technology. ▶ this video Just a ton of little things. Woman floating horizontally in space. Possible to render. Not possible to convey to the player. Cards, basically impossible to actually have cards that have good physics in a networked game like that. The smooth floaty motion and spinning is particularly dumb.

The problem is that VR sucks and there's no way around that with the current trajectory of tech. Take this cringey "demo" from meta: ▶ this video It's not possible. It's just not possible with the tech we have or will have any time soon. Start with 35 seconds in. Person on the right is floating legs out. This is impossible. It's possible to render that, but it's impossible to feel like you're floating in that position. We can ignore the presumed motion sickness. The video heavily implies that is her reality. But it's not. We cannot achieve the kind of presence you see in this or other popular things like ready player one. What is she really doing in the real world. Sitting down? Standing up? Mark says "Whoa, we're floating in space", which is, for the record, so incredibly unimpressive for a digital world but whatever. He is not floating. He will not feel like he's floating. He will need either shitty physics or stupid controllers to move around. Which is fine for a game, but it's not going to set up the scene they're showing here. They're also nimbly dealing cards with their hands. Good luck building that network replicated physics engine and hand inputs. Black girl does a backflip. Sure, we can do backflips in games. But she also clearly has a lot of fun doing it. This person really feels like they're doing a backflip. Impossible. And lastly, looking at abstract shitty visuals is not that interesting! People can't spend the majority of their time in VR if they're not at home. Ev

The metaverse singular seems an odd concept. There will be all sorts of virtual worlds where you can socialise with other real people through VR avatars as there already are such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, Fortnite and so on. Also I guess Minecraft? Whether Meta will be able to dominate the scene if the way they do photo sharing I dunno. Their demo video doesn't enthuse me ( ▶ this video ). I guess they may be able to work the network thing - I put my photos in insta/fb because thats where my friends/family are. But will I go on Meta to chat to mum? Probably not. I think text messaging/phone are fine for that.