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MaximumEffort433 t1_itww9t4 wrote

It's not like I'm boycotting Meta or anything, I just don't see the point, virtual reality meeting software seems like a product intended to create a market demand for itself.

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TechyDad t1_itx8iru wrote

I get ads for the metaverse all the time in a mobile game that I play. It touts how useful the metaverse will eventually be, but I keep noticing that people can do this using existing computers without expensive VR headsets that die after an hour.

For example, the ad said that city planners could study traffic patterns to lessen congestion. They show a bunch of people around a table with a holographic city display showing roads/traffic. Except, you don't need 3D virtual reality to model traffic. You can do this right now using any computer off the shelf.

The metaverse is a very expensive solution in search of a problem.

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Nf1nk t1_itxlbst wrote

I have a Rift and I bought a couple of art programs for it (Medium and Gravity Sketch). They are lovely for doing character work but if I want to do anything with any sort of precision it is very hard to work with it.

The biggest issue for me is that I generally do a hand sketched dimensioned drawing and coming out of VR to refer to it breaks the work stream.

I guess I could scan and import it but that isn't ideal either.

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bittabet t1_ityftql wrote

Their vision is a little more complicated than that. The idea is that these people in a meeting can be spread across the world but still collaborating like they’re in a room together. So if you’re in some smaller city you can still get maybe a great city traffic planner from across the country to come to your meeting and help you work through it.

I also think the pandemic made them tunnel vision in on improving remote work, whether or not people will really still be so heavily working remote in five years is questionable.

I’ve tried the latest Quest headset and honestly you get a glimpse of what they’re aiming for but it’s all very rudimentary and prototypey for now. Like they’ve implemented hand tracking that lets you interact without holding the controllers but right now it can only track the thumb and index finger somewhat acceptably and it was mostly an exercise in frustration compared to just holding a controller. They also have color video passthrough now but because it has to run at a very high framerate to avoid motion sickness the picture quality is mediocre. But with more powerful hardware and sensors from 2-3 years in the future I could see this being a genuinely desirable product. They’re basically trying to use VR headset technology to do the more advanced AR that Microsoft and Magic Leap have attempted but failed due to tiny field of views that destroy immersion.

I think given enough time and money they’ll make a desirable product. The risk here is that someone who already has access to more powerful chips and image processing like Apple enters the market and perfects it before Meta does, in which case all their massive R&D spend to figure this out was just money thrown into a furnace.

Honestly they need a partner who could address a lot of their shortcomings to pull this off sooner and to share costs. They’ve partnered with Qualcomm but I think someone like Nvidia would make more sense for what they need to accomplish.

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BaaBaaTurtle t1_itz9rfs wrote

>So if you’re in some smaller city you can still get maybe a great city traffic planner from across the country to come to your meeting and help you work through it.

Traffic is usually modeled in 2D, not 3D. There's no added benefit to a 3D visualization.

I model complicated fluid flowfields and while we've used the NASA 3D virtual reality visualization, it's usually just confusing. It's much easier for us as human beings to process the information in 2D.

The only area where the 3D really can be helpful is 6DOF modeling but again, we're talking a very specific application.

Jenny in accounting doesn't need a 3D representation of a spreadsheet on an expensive headset with shitty cartoon renderings of her coworkers.

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axonxorz t1_itzgmd1 wrote

> But with more powerful hardware and sensors from 2-3 years in the future I could see this being a genuinely desirable product.

This is where people just don't know. Oculus hardware is already 2-3 years behind on release, they've got 5+ years of R&D to catch up by that metric. The Valve Index was released in 2019 and it's still the best hardware in the game, with rumors of new hardware on the horizon with recent hires.

Inside-Out tracking as on the Quest is great for portability, but unless you are massive enough to curve light around you, tracking fidelity will always be sub-par in comparison.

Not being tethered is nice, but the system is a glorified cell phone mainboard and screen in a case for your face, the necessary battery and performance limitations will be there.

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TheStumbler83 t1_ityoj6w wrote

Wouldn’t someone have to develop all the 3d modelling and traffic flow data to present it in the meta verse. It’s like adding more work for no real benefit. Why not just use existing software that exists for such a specialised use case.

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O0O00O000O0000O t1_itx1lto wrote

My last year of college was during the pandemic. I was taking a business of entertainment class. My teacher was straight up bad and was a producer in 5 different projects during the semester.

Anyways, the only grade we received would be over our final project. She never put us into group for the project and we had to go to other professors just to get in contact with the department. Again, she was too busy making money on broadway.

The department chose our product to be based in VR. As we were now being judged by a different professor, this new one basically said “all VR is terribly unprofitable”. Forced to give a presentation on a vr product that doesn’t exist we come up with a virtual music festival in VR.

When the time to present comes the professor is magically back in class. The professor and all her fat cat business friends who are here to get free ideas from the next generation spent like thirty minutes shitting on our idea with basically the only problem being VR is unprofitable. She gave us the lowest grade without failing us.

TLDR spent 6 months of my life trying to get in contact with my professor while she demanded we do a project on VR as she’s making it big on broadway, we present the meta verse and her and all her fat cat friends are appalled we would present on VR after we were forced to, and they are disgusted that we didn’t somehow come up with the new revolution in entertainment for absolutely free.

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gaslacktus t1_itxe9c6 wrote

That's appalling. Did anyone file a complaint with the school's administration?

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r0botdevil t1_itximwt wrote

As a former university lecturer myself, this is something I would absolutely expect the administration to take action over. I mean if you have six months worth of unanswered emails to your professor, that alone is enough to warrant administrative action.

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O0O00O000O0000O t1_itxrled wrote

This was at The university of Texas at Austin. During this time they had an English professor ask students to send feet pics.

He wasn’t fired.

Also had a business law and ethics professor illegally charging students for ATTENDENCE.

Also not fired.

I tell everyone I know not to go there. Terrible school. Luckily I took the opposite of that professors advice and now I work at a theatre that isn’t owned by live nation and Ticketmaster. And I’m not on broadway with people who only care about margins and not art.

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r0botdevil t1_itzoaeq wrote

Holy hell, seriously??

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O0O00O000O0000O t1_itzqxma wrote

Yes, also had a director call a student the N-word. I also had a weather professor who only taught us about outdated meteorological instruments instead of tornados and hurricanes. Another professor in scenic design wanted us to fully learn architecture software in one weekend and replicate the interior of the Albany theatre, again in one weekend. Two kids were murdered while I was there. During one of them, they didn’t even send out a warning text so everyone on campus was sheltering based off word of mouth. Two of my most prominent professors were divorced and would argue about their marriage in the basement that’s how I figured out one had been cheating on the other. During one year, our theatre department, which was the largest in the world at the time, had one role for males in the entire year… a villain role. They also wanted to put on a play that included black people in white face and white people in blackface. Me personally, I was in a severely abusive relationship and I lived in a building that was a civil war hospital. I was terribly haunted and items would appear in my car like a bag of salt inside my taillight, a strange painted stone inside the crawl space I had previously cleaned out, or a drawing of a man hiding his face appearing inside my room. I have a fear of men hiding their faces ever since a man tired to attack me on my street but hid his face with his hands and ran when I saw him. I also would randomly throw up blood and the doctors didn’t know what it was. And I got arrested on false premises for drugs I didn’t have.

College was rough to say the least.

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cremaster_shake t1_itxf6r0 wrote

It's a terrible version of a stale idea, promoted as if the people behind it don't know a damned thing about the thing they're doing.

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supercyberlurker t1_itx2fj8 wrote

Yeah, basically idgaf about it. Rather replay cyberpunk again than do Metaverse

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