Exclusive: Meta to lay off employees in metaverse silicon unit on Wednesday

argo_yamato@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 176 points –
Exclusive: Meta to lay off employees in metaverse silicon unit on Wednesday
reuters.com
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This is the core problem. The overlap between people who use facebook and people who are interested in VR is not very big. Most people on facebook just want to see pictures of their grandchildren and are hardly the kinds of people who would be early adopters of technologies like this. VR enthusiasts on the other hand simply have no interest in whatever kinds of shit Zuckerberg has to offer. Some might hold their noses and try it anyway, but you're just making your potential userbase smaller and smaller.

This idiotic "metaverse" thing has always been a hilarious joke and is doomed to fail. This has been obvious ever since it was announced. Zuckerberg got lucky with facebook turning out to be a great way to creep on^W^W keep in touch with friends and other contacts. He's not a visionary and doesn't have a clue how to build a new thing people want from scratch. But he thinks he does cause he got lucky with facebook.

I worked at a university years ago and saw some VR prototypes for things like medical/surgical training, remote interaction (remote surgery, hazmat, etc) and other things. Very cool uses of the technology where it makes a lot of sense.

Seeing the VR used there the way it was makes me completely uninterested in using it for any sort of social/personal use any time soon. VR clearly has a lot of niche applications, but not as a general social/entertainment platform.

I'm interested in VR, but the cost of decent, non-oculus hardware is prohibitive.