Is it me or is this a Facebook version of 2nd Life?

Have the headsets gotten good enough to read text?

This looks like Charlie Brooker's wet dream

anything that makes it easier for corporations to program humans like rats in a labyrinth is inherently a bad idea

It's still facebook.. so no thanks

On the Internet, you can be anything you want. Facebook thinks most people will want to be a generic floating body with a cartoon human head. They missed the point - self expression is what people want.

wonder if there are any eggs?

Nope.

Ready Player One?

ready player one

this video alone triggers vomiting on me already, not speaking about actual device and experience.

Give me OASIS, Zuckerberger-san!!

Facebook already owns your face from a 2D space perspective. Just go ahead and give them literally a high-fidelity 3D pointmap of your face. What could go wrong?

Here is my marketing content.

"I am already in a world where I feel great. I have a rule. Never touch another man's creation.

New things that interests me are already within me, why would I go out and learn something new to create something which I already have in my brain ?

Ever expanding universe - ? Why would I build an universe in someone else's land while I can trust myself and build in my mind? Because its not creativity. Creativity is only when you bring out your thoughts in form of a material world.

ok ok.

I think thats why I have a pen and paper.

I write.

I draw.

I scribble.

I share to people whom I see face to face.

Not by wearing a digital mask.

With my naturally, many light years developed exo-skin as my mask.

That's how I respect my ancestors and anyone before them. It all reaches till the source of the light which is sun."

With this attitude and mindset of a living organism which knows what and who it is, would you expect me to fall for your trick?

Formatted content is here https://iminui.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/facebook-horizon/

Sorry I should have said, it’s called Rec Room

Probably means Rec Room or Altspaces. With that said, VRChat is certainly not just bare bones chat. There are rooms for everything with all kind of games. Think Roblox.

They seem to be throwing services at the wall and seeing what sticks, lately. I really see nothing compelling here, unless it is something that has been done better by someone else. I wonder what union of "unrelated" services will yield Facebook exactly the same degree of tracking that they lost to recent regulations.

I miss the company that built my DK2.

The vr world is perfect for someone who has no friends, does not trust people, can not physically or mentally go and meet people. A world where your avatar is modeled after everyone else’s avatar so everyone looks normal and alike is a very welcoming world. Maybe if you could imagine the worst possible situation and circumstance of the real horrible existence that is the actual life of someone else. You may see that the opportunity how ever brief to feel that warmth (love) that a vr metaverse offers would add to a life. That in turn will benefit them so when they take that head set off their life has been enriched and maybe even a smile would replace the tears that nightly put them to sleep. The mind is very powerful and vulnerable. The positive effect that this Horizon can have is amazing.

I will be waiting

I strongly recommend not looking directly at large noisy pixel scrolls.

I haven’t played with VR sets too much, but I think one practical limitation is whether it gets physically tiring over a shorter amount of time vs traditional video games or doing something on your phone? I mean, do people actually spend hours with a VR set like they might playing Fortnite etc?

This is less technical, but I think branding this as "facebook X" was the wrong call, unless they're trying to market this to parents who don't wanna take care of their kids who aren't old enough for Fornite yet.

I hope Google Earth (or similar) does a VR world that maps one to one with the real world, but makes traveling, flying, etc., trivial. Meet friends in the desert, on a cloud, on the Moon, in the oval office, but a virtualized real place. In other words, make it a map of actual reality instead of a fantasy reality. Allow sharable fantasy/historical/speculative overlays, but focus on croudsourcing real details, current conditions, the world as it is.

It could become more of a way to interact with the world than to escape it.

Go to a real world park instead.

My colleagues were excited by the prospect of Facebook's new Dating feature. I couldnt think of any 'layman' reasons not to use it.. they weren't too concerned with their privacy nor did they care if others had their data, because they "did normal stuff and had nothing to hide"..

How do you guys bring the point around to average people who don't care about privacy?

This is unnecessary, total bullshit and will fail. Facebook seems incapable to learn anything about VR and I don't understand why.

Sansar , High fidelity , vrchat ... they all struggle to get traction (and mostly fail) - why does facebook think they can do better

I would like to see an artwork of an Oculus headset as a facehugger from Alien: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/9d/1b/b5/9d1bb5d1c30cebd812ba87512...

This thing will not be "playable" on Oculus Go? $$-wise?

...Who on earth thought it would be a good idea not to have legs?!

They're a bit late to copy vrchat

A VR world controlled by a corporation I simply do not trust. Think I'll pass on that.

My only real objection to this is that it's another social media owned by Facebook.

Looks awfully boring and bland.

I am instantly thinking that they’ll be gathering every move people make in this world and use this for more ad targeting.

Decentraland without user-generated content? Club Penguin Island all over again?

The fact that FB can task developers to this, but not the breached servers (of a 3rd Party but who has access to highly confidential material) I’ve reported via their BB page that are online right this second is somewhat insulting to me.

If this comment gets downvoted, be suspicious. It is going to be well written, but it is does contain accusations against Facebook. My real name is in my About Section so I have no fear of libel. I hate to play this card because I am sort of immunizing myself (or trying to) against downvotes, but you can look through my comments and it’s not something I’ve ever done before.

1. The 3rd Party who led to the breach at Doordash is also a Facebook contractor. A significant amount of Facebook data has been stolen because of this.

2. Dashlane, Deliveroo (UK), Netflix, Uber, AirBnB, Quora, EventBrite, BetterDoctor, and about 10 other firms that I know of are also clients of this contractor as their data was also leaking or obtainable through extremely simple exploits.

3. Yes I did file a Bug Bounty with evidence. FB has acted...sort of...but the evidence is still online, at this moment.

4. I have already begun conversations with ISC2 asking for a significant amount of CISSP cert holders at FB to have their certifications revoked for breach of ethics violations via the “good of society” clause and negligent blindness. I absolutely made sure to have a carve out saying they probably were just ignored by management, and in such case for the names I cited to ignore my claim (and I would write a written public apology if asked).

5. I get that everyone here is tired of FB negativity here. Me too. Just a little longer if you don’t mind.

Uncanny valley has a new definition: Facebook Legless Avatars (FLA)(wed)

I'm intrigued, but the marketing sends a shiver up my spine

DISCOVER YOU

DEFY PHYSICAL LIMITS

EVER-EXPANDING UNIVERSE

Cripes-on-a-bike

There is an email in the summary of the commenter profile.

Woah. Things like this are why I don't have FB account anymore. Also why I shorted their stock. Fingers crossed for December.

Yours Truly.

Frankly, we're starting to live in a very Cyberpunk world these days.

Does he impose it though, or just uses it as a filter to find the next game administrator? He doesn't enforces anybody to participate. Perhaps comparable to a requirement list for a job, though it's a bit of a specific requirement.

Startup idea: time configurable short range signal jammer

Me, an old fart, looks at Houseparty/Airtime: That's nice! I could see myself doing that with friends. I haven't really thought of how important It's to see peoples faces. The kids are alright!

Me looks at a VR world run by facebook: Screeches and sees the worst imaginable dystopian future marching towards me.

6 years from now? Maybe. It depends on Apple - if they release a VR headset by then, it might become an iPhone moment for VR. However it seems like they are focusing on AR, rather than VR, so who knows.

I really enjoyed SL for a few years. At one point in some role play world that involved hunting or being hunted with bow and arrow or melee weapons. I had played plenty of other purpose build FPS but enjoyed that SL game more despite the crap graphics, laggy scripts, weapons, hacks etc. It felt more visceral.

I never spent a cent inside of an FPS but probably spent a few thousand dollars in SL.

Sure but the parent post was talking about the graphics. Second Life looked good when it launched but is so old that it looks outdated. It tried to look realistic while both Horizon and Rec Room goes with the Mii look. My point is that Rec Room is a better comparison since it uses the same graphics style, is way more popular/up-to-date and is also VR.

Going to be interesting how Facebook will handle the (legal) fringe and subvert creativity when it doesn't fit their business model.

Any such VR world should be openly developed and not be provided by a corporation who can selectively put anything in there and inhibit anything going against company policies.

This is Black Mirror waiting to happen.

Do the same hundreds of millions of people that still use Facebook have both the tech affinity and the spare bucks to shell out money for a Oculus headset?

To hundreds of millions of people around the world, a significant amount of leisure time and 449 euros is a pipe dream.

Well, if nothing else, they'll probably be a bit less... flexible in the avatars they let you use.

This probably won't actually stop people.

What if it's targeted at kids/teens/young people and is lightweight "casual" playing experience? Wouldn't this look be preferred?

Sometimes ultra-realism takes the fun nature out of things.

Simpsons and South Park could easily use high tech graphics but the simple nature of it all is what makes it appealing . Same with Minecraft or even Zelda.

It's also easy to build expansive worlds with breakable objects that don't require tons of physics and special effects to make something like a box exploding look realistic.

The Nintendo Switch is by no means powerful hardware. But Breath of the Wild looks beautiful on it because of the art style.

I really don't think VR needs to wait half a decade for hardware to catch up. Existing systems can create beautiful experiences with the right artistic decisions

The speed of light says no. “The cloud” will always have too much latency to do acceptable vr. To meet your deadline for a 120hz video frame, your signal can travel at most 1500 miles in a vacuum, closer to 1000 miles in copper/fiber.

On the A16Z podcast, Marc Andreessen (IIRC) said something like "VR is not for Silicon Valley where you wake up every day thinking of all the awesome things you can do. VR is for all the people whose everyday life is terrible."

When you think about it in those terms it gets seriously dystopian. You put your AR goggles on for your 10-hour shift at the Nike factory, then you pop a protein pill and put your VR goggles on for the rest of the day, spending your meagre income on whoever bid most for your eyeballs on Google.

> People have lived for centuries without it. In those years there have both been plenty of fulfilled lives and unfulfilled lives. Clearly, the shiny happy virtual world is not a prerequisite for a fulfilled live.

One could say the same about anaesthetic - but I'd still prefer to have the choice! But I won't be rushing to sign up for this. I don't use FB, and think they (& Google for that matter) are a malign force in the world.

> it should take time and effort to talk to people all over the world

No, it shouldn't, that was the whole point of the global Internet (ignoring its origins), to drill into people's thick skulls that in the end we're all very similar, that most of the "local culture" crap it's just that, CRAP, and deep inside we're all driven by the same fears and desires. That ANY kind of war means just fighting against other people that are just like you and that in the end it's not worth fighting. That we can have the global village, and keep our special tribal/nationa/race identities too, there's no contradiction there.

Hope AR, VR and later neural implants get implemented and deployed in ways that empower this vision instead of the opposite, that they manage to push further in the one-world-interconnectedness direction of the 90s internet.

I used to dislike corporations like Facebook... but now I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a globalized world ruled by such corporations, than in a separated and restricted one ruled by governments representing "nations"! I'd swallow the AI-powered-corporate-surveillance part as a minor inconvenience if it manages to deliver the "one world" dream... I'm just afraid that most corporations aren't truly powerful and globally distributed enough, in the sense that they could at least in theory overpower the governments of most of most of their base countries if push comes to shove and they need to fight them for more freedom and connectivity. Maybe if they'd drop central control and organize themselves more into "cells" or something similar... there's got to be something in the whole Ethereum and distributed systems experiment that can become successful and power this. Heh, maybe once Libra gets traction more can be built on top. Go Facebook!

One of the most exciting things I remember about first getting the Internet in the 90s was (especially as a socially-anxious introvert) being able to jump on an IRC server and chat mostly anonymously with just a nickname, to people I didn't know, without the awkwardness that real-life interactions could bring me at the time.

As a high-school kid, I could be on the same footing as a distinguished scientist. Or I could make friends in other countries.

Even my parents, who aren't technically-inclined, were excited by that and thought it was amazing.

I sometimes feel like the Internet went from being a place that you explored to find new people and new viewpoints, to one where many people just stay in their own bubbles.

No, this is not a bug. How did we get from there, to here? :(

You realise you are using the internet right now?

What? Why?

Do you see a lot of games that run well in 4k@120hz? VR is much more demanding. Maybe if you spend $20k on a box with 8 GPUs it will be able to run it. But it’s not just GPUs, you also need much better headsets (much higher refresh rates, 8k+ resolution, wide FOV, very good eye tracking for the foveated rendering, much higher dynamic range). Most importantly, creating all that photorealistic content is a huge effort, and you need a lot of it for VR. How much are you willing to pay for it?

Your parent post is true. This isn't about PC GPUs where the cooling hardware alone weighs almost as much as the entire standalone headset. These headsets are based on mobile phone hardware and need to deliver stereo rendering at 75 to 90Hz to make the user comfortable. Also, heat dissipation is a lot harder for a box strapped to a face that can't reach 50 to 60 degrees. You need to make lots of compromises for that.

Well, it certainly is technically possible.

> it's really surprising how powerful GPUs have gotten. Improvements over the last few years have been very nonlinear

These improvements did not come at fixed cost, though. Prices for top-of-the-line GPUs have been increasing (as well as die sizes, power consumption, and manufacturer margin). Together with Moore's law, that already brings nonlinear improvements, the available computation power has increased a lot.

However, those GPUs are very expensive. Most people just can't afford them. And if few people can afford them, it's hard to justify paying a whole army of developers (like AAA game studios) to bring that kind of experiences.

Run the game in the cloud, stream to the VR. The more you pay for cloud computing, the better your graphics. Why no company is doing that already?

I would have put that under "gameplay" (see "teleportation" vs "regular FPS" movement types), but I guess it's a bit of both...

> If it takes 4ms to generate a frame you’re down to < 500 miles from the data center. If you need to pad for packet loss you’re down even further.

As I understand, edge computing locations tend to be in most major cities in the regions covered, providing tens-of-miles distance to most people in major markets.