Whenever I find myself even mildly excited about VR hardware I ask myself what it looks like if Facebook truly succeeds in this? Like what if they got massive adoption and are able to tie in all their revenue engines within a walled-garden VR setup? What if they succeed and get tons of enterprise customers?
It would be absolutely awful right? Like the worst parts of dystopian fiction with microtransactions and popups and all kinds of other cruft in a 360 field of vision some how mandated for gaming and work. World-wide, probably tying into education and basic information access.
I have never gotten over Microsoft putting ads on the Windows desktop. It felt like the Rubicon was crossed at that moment: no longer would my personal computer be mine. And that was from a software company doing it to software that I paid for.
What should we expect from an advertising company?
My journey is Windows -> Mac -> Linux. I hope to stick with Linux (or at least OSS operating systems) for the remainder of my career. My computer is mine, and it's never felt more like mine than it does now.
It's not without its bumps and warts, but I highly recommend it.
Also, gaming isn't perfect, but it's really quite good for the kinds of games I play (mostly indie games on Steam).
Just recently got a System 76 machine and they really nail the whole experience. Last time I tried to do 100% linux desktop was probably around 2016, and while it wasn't bad, gaming was impossible except for a hilariously small number of titles and I still had trouble with drivers for most everyday things, had wifi problems etc. It was not bad, but not really something I could use 100% of the time.
Pop!_OS has been great so far, and most importantly, Linux gaming is now really, really incredible. I don't do much multiplayer gaming these days, but I've played a bunch of new titles including CyberPunk 2077 and Stray, plus nearly my entire back catalog, and they play perfectly without any fiddling to get them started.
Most important:
> My computer is mine, and it's never felt more like mine than it does now.
I hadn't realized how slowly my Mac had become more and more Apple's machine over time. I felt like I was slowly losing control of more and more of the device and more things were also Apple's things (for example files stored on iCloud which is both convenient but also feels like I'm really using Apple's computer).
Linux desktop, and getting back to using mostly OSS again really made me enjoy computing again and realize how much everything else feels like you're working on a big advertising box.
I went from Windows -> Linux -> Windows with a Linux VM. Honestly Linux is just too much of a hassle to get it working right directly on the hardware - I always had issues with either drivers, sound, multiple monitors, etc. And while I'm sure these could be resolved one way or another I just don't have the time (anymore) to troubleshoot my own system every other month. Windows is perfectly fine for web browsing, text editing, gaming etc. - while I can program in a familiar Linux environment. Added bonus: whenever I change computers I can just copy the VM image to the new one and continue instantly.
I went Windows 10 to Linux. Gaming is more than ok, thanks Steam, and for those games that don't run under Linux I have double boot. My whole Windows career I insisted in Pro liscences, the peivate always felt wierd. And aince Windows 11 simply unusable, Win 10 Pro is still accwptable, every time I see a Home version I feel like crying... The last Windows were I really felt like my computer was as mine as it does with Linux was NT and Windows 2000. With the same shenenigans for installong software from third parties like under modern Ubuntu, maybe that plays a role too.
the store is part of the OS, you cannot delete the app store, you cannot use an alternative app store, and you cannot turn the ads off. Ads are part of the OS.
If my phone automatically recognizes addresses but refuses to recognize the world’s leading map service and instead sends me to the App Store to use their second rate app, it’s certainly an ad.
It seems that you are unaware that Google maps uses location data to make ads follow you around. That seems like a pretty good reason for Apple to protect its users from Google’s data collection machine.
I want google maps to use my position data so that I know where traffic jams are in real time. It has saved me a bunch.
Apple Maps still sends people to strange places when you leave the city. (Apple Maps once sent us to the middle of a farm field, which was funny at the time, so I was glad it happened.)
But they are? Under Settings, there is no "Apple Arcade" where I can decide whether to enable it or not. It's on top of all settings, and it pushes me to do it. It's an ad.
This doesn’t make sense. Of course you can decide whether to enable Apple Arcade or not. Obviously it’s a paid service, so you have to pay to enable it.
It's a banner on top of settings that has to be forcefully hidden, it's not in the Apple Arcade setting. Many people are explaining to you that if it behaves like an ad and smells like an ad, it's an ad.
I feel that you are either arguing in bad faith, or determined to defend Apple at all costs. I guess when your car manufacturer will start showing you "Enable Entertaining Package Plus for 14$/mo" in your car dashboard, you will be happy, think "of course I can decide whether to enable it or not", and probably feel very clever.
I'll certainly never use Windows again; for any reason. The idea of built-in advertising within an OS is absolutely a line too far crossed.
Doesn't matter that you can disable it; it's the existence of the advertising alone that tells me enough about the garbage philosophy of the company producing the software that I want nothing to do with it, and I could never rightfully recommend it to anyone.
Isn't it mainly plugs for stuff like their web browser or office products? I feel like the only way around that is using some kind of OSS or linux. Apple is always pushing their stuff on me. iCloud, The TV app, the music app, oh sign up for apple health. Plus if you use iOS, you basically need to use their web browser.
This is what I've been worried about too. Meta isn't betting the farm on a shitty Second Life ripoff because they think consumers will want it. I think they're doing it because the end users are going to be low-level work from home employees who have no choice in the matter.
I'm increasingly convinced that Meta isn't betting the farm at all. They just wanted to rebrand away from something that reminds people of election manipulation and teen suicides and toward something that reminds people of the future.
All this VR stuff seems to be an experimental group combined with a marketing budget to cure FB's brand.
You think Meta is spending billions on a PR exercise ? Be serious.
There are many companies including Apple and Microsoft who do think that VR has the potential to offer ground-breaking new experiences and as such worth investing in.
Yes - I do think Meta is spending single digit billions on a PR exercise. That is not an unreasonable marketing budget for a several-hundred-billion-dollar company that is currently experiencing huge losses in brand value, and they are certainly looking at how to get a piece of the VR pie in order to get a discount on it.
the end users are going to be low-level work from home
employees who have no choice in the matter.
What is the incentive for businesses to buy and mandate the use of proprietary VR headsets for their employees, low-level or otherwise?
There would have to be killer apps for those headsets. Things that can't be done as well (or done at all) with traditional interfaces.
I haven't heard many ideas being thrown around for things that would actually benefit from VR.
There are certain niche applications that are easy to imagine. Maybe some CAD/CAM stuff, maybe remote surgery or some shit.
But the vast majority of things people do would have no benefit. You're not going to crunch through help desk tickets faster in VR. I realize people probably said the same things about traditional computers 50 years ago, but there were also a lot of folks that were bullish on them. I just don't see it with VR.
Surveillance is the big one, I think. Speak to anyone who has worked at a call center. They track you like crazy, and keep every metric imaginable. Imagine how much worse it would be if they were enabled to literally track your eye movements.
It's easy for me to imagine architects spinning models around Minority Report style with their hands, going on virtual walkthroughs, etc with VR apps.
It's less clear to me that these would actually improve the process. I realize that a 2D projection of a 3D object is always going to be a bit of a compromise, but are today's 2D interfaces and displays actually holding things back?
I'm thinking of the wave of "Minority Report" style interfaces that were proposed after that movie came out. They seemed to "obviously" be the future. But after a while everybody realized that moving a few cm on a mouse/trackpad was actually orders of magnitude more efficient than waving your arms around like a maniac for ten hours a day.
I found that book to be nauseatingly ham-fisted and this quote is a great example. It really beats you over the head with the theme, but also begs the question would people actually put up with that?
The book is fundamentally nostalgic. There’s very little depth or “future” in it (which is not a slight; I don’t think Cline was going for anything different).
I find it to be nostalgic in the worst way. It seems to miss the spirit of its source material at every step, it wallows in gatekeeping, and is just in a way cringey.
Based off a casual perusal of almost any news site without an ad blocker, yes. Yes they will.
Based off some scroll positions on Facebook, 80% might be a bit low.
As a side note, it's a quote from a fictional character that's (sadly only slightly) exaggerating a real problem for effect. It's not intended to be taken as a gospel truth.
I’ve never seen anything that approached 80% of the screen space being ads, and plastering that much of your view in VR is preposterous.
I understand that it isn’t meant to be a literal prediction about the future, but it’s still bad writing. The whole book is just so terrible tedious. Every character constantly says out loud at length what their motivations are. The villains give long speech’s like som 80s cartoon but lacking all of the flair and fun of the source material.
I get it. You didn’t like the book. You can stop the pretentious pontification upon how little you liked it and why everyone else should despise the book and every quote from the book just as much as you do.
No one else needs to dislike it as far as I'm concerned, people like what they like. Mostly I was eye rolling at using a quote from it as any form of contemporary social commentary.
Current FB is forced by reality to be an ads company. If they can find an alternative that lets them not be an ads company, then VR might be their path to redemption?
MSFT is putting ads in windows because charging for windows is not working as a business model anymore for them, so now it's a freemium product. You barely if at all see ads in office and related products, and thats because it's a product you can only pay for. Many enterprises will flat out refuse to use "Meta Enterprise VR" if it comes with a ton of ad tech crap, and are totally willing and wanting to pay the difference for it anyway. Too many juicy contracts will be missed to FB's competitors.
Apple is expanding their ads business a lot too.
So it really can go multiple ways, and I don't think FB is going to be the only real competitor in the VR space once it starts ramping up, especially with all the hints that apple is working on the space. You also have things like sony's playstation VR as a strong third competitor, not to mention the background PC VR stuff that exists already.
Because they can make more money without it. There is an obvious huge push to get into the corporate space with this by meta, and corporations will not abide by ads for shit they pay for. And more seriously, they will have hard contractual and legal requirements to not be surveilled.
thats not what leaving it on the table means. Apple shows you ads on their devices and services, they just gatekeep third parties like facebook. Any devices and services facebook makes absolutely would be vehicles for ads just like apple.
There's no reason for there to be any difference. Pretending any company is going to leave the money on the table for non existent good will is wishful thinking. No one will trust them regardless.
This 100% - especially a social media company that is shedding revenue left and right. What do you do when you are losing revenue? Find new revenue streams. What do you sell to get additional revenue? More personal data. When a giant corporation becomes desperate, they will sell anything they have in any way they can to make up revenue - I can only imagine what they will end up having to do to make up these lost revenue streams... probably not so good.
I work in Northern Europe. Someone at my company decided it would be great to introduce the so-called "Facebook for work". It's literally the worst of all worlds: you get the distraction you don't need while working, no fun, artificial corporate virtue-signaling and just plain department-flexing. After a few months
everybody stopped using it but I'm sure we're still paying for it.
The extent of your usage of an iPhone is rarely mandated, and most people I know use the iPhone primarily for photos, iMessage, a browser (usually Chrome? At least in my circle) and an email account.
For those functions, Apple is hardly slamming you with recommended content and ads. Instead, you pay an initial premium for a solid bit of hardware. And if you want more, say if you want to store a lot of photos on their servers ($), you pay for it with more money.
Have you ever used an Oculus Quest before? Between the full-screen Apple Music pop-ups and "suggested apps" when you search on the App Store, I think my Quest actually has less advertisements than modern iOS...
Regardless of platform, the problem is still the same, and the solution is equally plain. Apple and Meta should both be allowed to sell hardware - they're both really good at it! Their software needs an opportunity to compete with the community though, otherwise they'll never have their best interests at heart. The good news is that both companies already hire thousands of software engineers to work on their software. It's economically impossible for them to make inferior software even if we do force them to do the right thing. Win/win!
> Have you ever used an Oculus Quest before? Between the full-screen Apple Music pop-ups and "suggested apps" when you search on the App Store, I think my Quest actually has less advertisements than modern iOS...
The GP was saying what would happen in the future. iOS v1 and v2 had the same amount of advertisements as Quest.
Meta is going for the same exact play as Apple did with smartphones, but with VR.
They understand the downsides of being tied to ad revenue more than anyone else. They want to make money from Oculus Store and headset sales, just like Apple does with App Store and iPhone.
Meta is going for the same exact play as Apple did with
smartphones, but with VR.
Kinda? Revenue-wise, yeah.
Appeal-wise... yeesh. Mobile phones and the internet were already very mainstream-popular before Apple launched the iPhone.
VR, not so much. The appeal is extremely niche, and there's really just no demand for it.
Geeks were excited about having computers in their pockets. Literally nobody I know is excited to strap a dorky piece of puke-inducing hardware onto their head outside of limited gaming uses.
> Geeks were excited about having computers in their pockets. Literally nobody I know is excited to strap a dorky piece of puke-inducing hardware onto their head outside of limited gaming uses.
I'm getting flashbacks to everyone complaining about the lack of buttons on the original iPhone, and how bulky/heavy it was in comparison to the micro-phones of the era. And how it was less powerful than comparable PDAs of the era.
I guess we'll see how well this comment ages in the same time period.
Every successful technology has had legions of naysayers. Cars. Video games. Graphical operating systems. iPhones. Solid state drives. Electric cars.
But that's not what I'm talking about here.
I'm talking about the lack of folks enthusiastic about VR. All of the technologies I just named also had a groundswell of excitement around them; people who saw the promise.
I guess we'll see how well this comment ages in the same time period.
Sure, write it down.
I'm reminded of the "hype" around 3D movies and TVs about a decade ago. Remember how that was going to be the next big thing? 3D Blu-rays and stuff?
But you literally never heard people excited about that tech at ground level. From geeks to normies the reaction was a giant yawn. That's what this whole VR thing feels like.
The question to me is why we should expect Meta to compete effectively in the high-end/high-margin space with Apple, which it sounds like they will be by sometime next year.
I’m struggling to think of any aspect of this product—save social—where Apple hasn’t demonstrated marked superiority to Meta over a decade. Software. Hardware. Logistics. Supply Chain. Marketing.
Is the “Social Network” enough to overcome all that? I doubt it.
Can you load your own OS? Can you use your own VR client to connect to VR spaces? As mentioned in another comment, sideloading is against the ToS and clearly not at any kind of parity with Facebook-blessed app distribution channels.
They've made moves that telegraph limiting this. There are now warnings every time you run a sideloaded app that doing so for reasons other than active development is against the terms of service.
My grandfather retired at 50 because he refused to us a PC when it became required (~1985 or so). He was lucky that he worked for a company that had pensions and bought people out into early retirement often so he had that option. If the adoption of VR is anything like that, I'll be looking for my out too.
Why is it that all news, including tech news, just fills me with endless dread nowadays? I surely can't be the only one who feels like this. Like what do we have to look forward to in the event that we don't have to face a depression, get drafted, see another pandemic, realize more of the effects of climate change, or get nuked? Wearing stupid goggles for 8 hours a day and paying Zuckerberg $50 for a virtual "I Hate Mondays" t-shirt? Oof.
Then remove yourself from that live and start reconnecting to higher values.
Seems like you are stuck in the consumerism / professional world.
Reconnect to the people around you, nature, the things you love etc and just start to dial down those things that are filling you with dread. It's not going to get any better, but the things that matter are still there underneath all that nonsense that you are being sold.
Commodifying software was a mistake that resulted in all sorts of perverse incentives. We first saw Microsoft succumb to it, then Amazon, and are now watching Facebook, Apple and Google all create a mustard-gas-miasma of dark patterns and rent-collection. Really, it's our fault for not recognizing these threats during the dotcom boom.
You're typing this on a piece of technology that presumably you appreciate having access to, have you considered that there were likely many people in the generation before you who assumed something like HN was impossible and that all web tech or personal computing would be purely negative / dystopian? Turns out it's a mixed bag of good and bad. As is the world. There are beautiful things happening right now all over the world and there are horrible things. The happiest people seem to be either really excellent at accepting the horrible things or looking the other way, but in both cases they make sure their eyes are focused on the good as well and not just the bad.
You would probably enjoy listening to Hal Sparks on Twitch or YouTube. He's a comedian-cum-political commentator who is extremely well read and has made it his job to explain why the world ain't ending. He's in a beef with The Young Turks whose business plan is the exact opposite, even though they're supposedly on the same side politically.
He faces the worst of what's going on, watches some of the most toxic... er, "media clips", and tells you why they're wrong and dumb and why you should actually be optimistic, based on confirmable facts and, as another comment mentioned, wisdom.
Depends on what your circumstances are and how little you’re willing to live with. If you’ve got very few desires then you don’t need much. If I don’t end up married with kids I think I may just buy a good motorbike, a good tent and a good stove and travel indefinitely.
This specific issue is my personal hobby horse and how to avoid the worst of it is the subject of my essay writing and personal research:
https://noahnorman.substack.com
The Meta "stack" or core competencies they wish to align in this product domain, set up a profoundly dystopian world.
Their interest in being the platform is to own next-level surveillance of you for as much of your waking life as possible. They intend to track every gesture, your gaze, and (soon) your biometrics,
so as to feed their other big build out area, ML and similar tools for making superhuman insights about you and your interests,
which they they marry to their bread and butter, selling you to any and all comers regardless of any ethical concerns or concerns about societal consequence whatsoever. (That's not even hyperbole, it's a simple statement of fact.)
I don't believe they're ahead on this, but we can also expect to be ever more successfully manipulated by AI-powered chat bots increasingly well-tuned to provoke "engagement" and emotional response, through which to steer our beliefs behaviors and limbic system. C.f. Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina.
A friend made me try his rig against VR porn once, and picked a scenario which leveraged gaze and similar monkey-mind cues like whispering in one ear up close, to trigger all the "intimacy" responses.
Or: made me try the "walk the plank off the top of a skyscraper" demo. I knew perfectly well I was 1" off the floor on a 2x4. I could not step off.
We are utterly defenseless against what is coming,
and if there is one company in the public consumer sphere which has demonstrated that it utterly untrustworthy as a steward of our individual and collective wellbeing, it's Meta.
I dearly hope they crash and burn before they can foist this hellacious future on those of us unable to get out from under it.
There's a short story called the Lifecycle of Software Objects. It introduces the idea of platform wars, e.g. competition between various metaverse worlds. I see this playing out with Horizon, maybe Roblox, Epic, etc. Things are mostly interoperable across platforms but some have limitations.
Having the choice for digital worlds would make it a little less dystopian. But I think the bigger thing is having competition with hardware, for the 'next-level surveillance' reason you highlight.
I believe AR/VR is the next great step, but that the personal benefits are generally underestimated and the work value, especially for knowledge workers, overestimated.
An AR headset you can wear while fixing a car has massive value. For writing code or project managing less so. People don’t really want to be more present in remote work meetings not to mention there’s no added business value. But enterprise is a huge market so you have to try to market to it.
I would think it would turn Facebooks business to resemble Apple's, which I think we should all root for if we want to get away from the ad centric product they push on everyone today.
In what way? I see it as exactly the opposite of Apple's business. Where Apple makes services in order to sell more hardware, Meta (like Google) is in the ad business, so their hardware is ultimately just a way to attract more eyeballs.
This is why we're frantically building out http://thirdroom.io/preview on Matrix as a free & open alternative to the Facebook walled garden. It feels a little crazy that on one hand we're trying to outrun WhatsApp with Element, while also at the same time we're trying to outrun Horizons with Third Room, but someone's got to try...
Amazing a website/company/man whose claim to fame is a service that lets people watch videos and pictures in a virtual rolodex that happened to do a better job at letting people upload videos and pictures in a virtual rolodex assumes it can tackle 100x technical challenges better than any other company. All they have is capital, though I guess that's really all you need.
I wonder about what happens when people pass the tipping point of prioritizing the virtual world over the physical world. That is even bleaker than trying to surmise who, in the end, might "own it" because once it's to that point we've already lost it all.
Wouldn't these devices cause anxiety and depression related mental problems?
Humans need humans to feel okay and happy, and if these things remove lots of that (a digital avatar isn't the same thing) ... that could be dangerous?
Whilst if they automatically shut down for the rest of the day, after 3h usage, then maybe more ok.
* * *
For deep focus mode software development though, having no distractions, a 360' wide virtual screen (or 180' would be enough) could be lovely. I could fit ... 9 editors side by side. And different project tree views, and a 30'' web design window and Dev Tools. In just a pair of glasses
Global warming shows that we have already passed that point. People care more about status and lifestyle than life.
But is it bleak? When we go all in on virtuality, and the resolution is high enough and all senses are covered, what would be missed from the physical world?
>It would be absolutely awful right? Like the worst parts of dystopian fiction with microtransactions and popups and all kinds of other cruft in a 360 field of vision some how mandated for gaming and work. World-wide, probably tying into education and basic information access.
I don't get what exactly is awful about this. Having to use it? Can't you take it off when you don't want it? How is it any different than glowing rectangles being "mandated for gaming and work ... probably tying into education and basic information access"?
Not to be snarky, but this response feels like a very privileged perspective on the notion of consumer choice. Yes, you can "take it off whenever you want", but if you are in dire financial straits, and your employer makes you wear it for your entire shift, what are you going to do?
Think of it from the perspective of technology today. I'm a software engineer, and given that we're on HN, you're likely something similar. Most people can't negotiate the terms of their employment as much as we can. We are lucky, in that if we see a job that requires invasive corporate spyware on personal devices, or worse yet, proctoring software, we can simply not apply.
"take it off when you don't want it" obviously refers to after you're stopped working. I thought the comparison to glowing rectangles immediately after would hint at this, considering that you're basically required to stare at glowing rectangles to do most white collar jobs. Yet, nobody is upset or calls this a dystopia, aside from the standard anti-work rhetoric of having to work in the first place.
If I’m working somewhere and they make VR mandatory I will be handing in my notice immediately. I may even refuse to work a notice period if they insist on me working in VR throughout it. If it becomes the industry norm then I will find another industry to work in, even if that means a significant pay cut.
AR glasses that are identical to normal glasses but with some useful information overlayed, that I can live with. VR, absolutely not.
It would be absolutely awful right? Like the worst parts of dystopian fiction with microtransactions and popups and all kinds of other cruft in a 360 field of vision some how mandated for gaming and work. World-wide, probably tying into education and basic information access.