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Mark Zuckerberg spent $20 billion on his new virtual reality project, but it’s boring, empty and clumsy
This should have been an easy task: an article about a country dedicated to Meta, one of the largest companies in the world, once known as Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg, the last of the founders of the Big Four tech companies who still runs his company full-time, is using his majority stake to make a big bet on the company’s future.
He has pledged to spend $100bn (£83bn) over the next decade – yes, billions, not millions – to make his company (now renamed Meta to reflect its new focus)) become the winner of the next generation internet.
So when New European commissioning editor Jay Elwes suggested that I take this as a topic and see how the bet goes, about $20 billion spent since Zuckerberg’s new focus, I was happy to accept the assignment. I didn’t even notice the danger, the simple and seemingly harmless next words – “go look around” and “look at how it looks.”
Little did I know that this supposedly simple effort would shatter what little sanity I had left – well, I’ve lived in peace for the last few years – leading to physical injuries, relationships with (real) cat fights, and a complete… bloated existential crisis in virtual reality toilet.
But all this is still in my future. Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s worth considering what the “metaverse” really is. As is the case with many concepts in big tech, people are completely divided on what the Metaverse is and isn’t, and how big it is.
The overall concept is a livable online space, often understood as powered by virtual reality (VR), that connects many different worlds and activities. If you can currently surf the web with one program, check your bank with another, and play a game with a third, in the Metaverse you could at least conceptually do all of these things in one continuous experience.
The current reality is far from it, but Meta bought Oculus, the leading manufacturer of VR headsets, back in 2014 – assuming it wasn’t a major new issue for Zuckerberg – and Team A has been constantly updating their VR experience ever since. headsets.
It has a few hardcore headsets aimed at gamers that need to be paired with a high-end PC, but its flagship consumer model is the Quest 2, which runs without a PC and lets you enter Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse.
Meta promises that Horizon Worlds will offer “a virtual world with thousands of experiences to explore.” This includes places where you can play games, chat, watch live comedy, or watch stars like John Legend and Billie Eilish. The idea is also that, like Minecraft or Roblox, you can also create your own “worlds” in the Horizon universe, which can then be accessed by other users.
Begging, borrowing or stealing Quest 2 headsets many times, I bit the bullet and shelled out £399 on the UK Meta store just to write this column (don’t say I didn’t do anything for you, dear reader).
At first everything looked fine. The Quest 2 comes in a very nice box, and by itself – a white earpiece with a rubber band to keep it on your head, plus two very attractive hand controls – seems to have very good specs and workmanship. Maybe that would be… nice?
My first hands-on experience with Quest 2 quickly dissuaded me. As soon as I tried on the headphones (after fiddling with the straps for a long time, trying to stretch them enough to fit my head), I immediately got a whole new life experience – now I know what it’s like when a weight is pulled on an elastic band Block pressed my glasses tightly to my face.
Taking the Quest 2 off my face and squinting painfully at the box and instructions, I saw that there was a strange piece of plastic that I should have glued to the headset if I wore glasses. After just a few hours (well, minutes) of further fiddling, I was able to put the earbuds on without any real pain, and I just had to come to terms with the fact that they tightened up every time I took them off my goggles.
“It’s time to get to know the virtual world,” I told myself briefly – too optimistically – and was finally able to turn on the headset, greeted with blurry double images and instructions for adjusting the distance between the headset’s lenses until they were in focus.
What follows is akin to trying to test your vision on a diorama, constantly trying to see if the lens in the new location is sharper or blurrier.
The future looks set to be a busy one for eye fatigue clinicians, assuming robots can’t do the job either. After another long period of physical fiddling, I got to the point where I could actually see in the virtual world, despite a lengthy ritual of shuffling every time I put on and took off my glasses and headphones. Well, no one said the future was going to be easy.
At this point, I finally, finally, really enjoyed Quest 2, and I can say that my first experience was very real: I could literally believe that a loading screen was floating in front of me – almost filling my entire field of vision. – Tells me that the headset is downloading a software update, please wait.
Eventually it was done, I re-enabled the whole painful setup, then patiently waited for the right controller to update (stopping either hand) and then the left controller to do the same. If I ordered this for a 9 year old on Christmas morning, he would have graduated from college last summer and would have been estranged from me for at least the last three years, all those years I wasted installing this damn headset.
Next up is setting safe boundaries, which is really cool: your headset dimly shows the room around you, and you can tell the device where it is by touching the floor. You then “draw” the boundaries of the “safe” areas you’ve cleared to play with your Quest 2. If you hover close to their edges, a virtual wall will appear in your field of vision, reminding you not to get lost and/or trip over furniture.
This part of the process was only messed up by my scary cat who thought my hand movements on the Quest 2 were irresistible bait, causing me to be ambushed several times by a creature I couldn’t see thanks to a piece of plastic. into my head.
What happened next made what happened before seem like child’s play. The headset had to be connected to an app on my phone, my meta account had to be connected to my Facebook account, and a lot of code had to be entered in different interfaces.
Every time I take the headset off it automatically goes to sleep but every time I go to my laptop for help it complains that I’m out of my safe zone so I spend a lot of time reading help pages and running to to your safe. zone, trying to remember the codes I’m supposed to dial by firing fake lasers at the floating virtual keyboard. With every failed attempt, I felt another tiny piece of my soul slip away, never to return.
The world is turning, the continental plates are drifting, the years go by, and at last I have truly entered the world of the horizon. I even convinced him that as an “experienced player” I can trust that I can use the joystick on the controller to move and not to teleport (recommended for new users). Loading screens showing flashy characters, unicorns and more floating across a calm lake are almost beautiful, even if the graphics look like they’re from the PS2 era.
Mini “Welcome to the World” is almost funny. In just nine attempts, I managed to pick up and throw a paper airplane. The next action, using the controllers to launch the ring in the air, is also fun – turning your head to see things is exciting.
Of course, immersion works both ways. Turning around to see where I should go next, I forgot that what you do with your hands is done with the movements of your hands, and the other legs – legs – are joysticks. Before realizing my mistake, I instinctively stepped forward and tripped over the coffee table. Another victory.
It may be my fault, “Welcome to the World” is almost instant entertainment. I try to feel better about it and enter the strange, empty world of Horizon World. Every time I come, there is almost no one there. I went to the arcade and everything I tried was a game that in 1993 would have been called obsolete.
I tried the Comedy Club instead – saw the most people I’ve ever seen in Horizon Worlds before or since, six guys seemingly chatting around a campfire. But their voices seem contrived and their conversations so trite that I wonder if they’re real after all – or is there some kind of automatic account that makes the world feel crowded?
Enter a real comedy club where… there is no comedy. Of course, one of the benefits of virtual reality is that you can record and replay live performances, but if they take advantage of that, I can’t figure out how.
Instead, I tried to leave, chose the wrong door, and found myself in a truly confusing place – a male urinal, in a virtual world where everyone is floating torsos and no one needs to write. There are fake “posters” on the walls, and if I click on them, I’m teleported to a world created by someone else, right next to the toilet. The utterly inexplicable despair of being trapped in an imaginary urinal in an empty virtual world made me, for the first time in my life, see in the heroine a way out of existential anxiety. Instead, I eat toast.
The last experience I tried was to visit some virtual shows as they will play 24/7 for a limited time. Sitting on an empty virtual stage and watching a clunky 3D video of someone performing… repulsive… The size changes depending on how far you are from the stage: sometimes the artists are the same height as you, and sometimes they are hang over your head like three-story giants.
One user stands on a balcony and jumps, while the other appears to be watching from the center. Any attempt to take a screenshot here makes me grab the “crowd” but erase the artist – presumably meaning that copyright issues in the metaverse have long since been resolved. At least there is something.
If this is the future of the Meta, then the Meta has no future. Its future is dull, empty, and unwieldy—full of eye strain and set-up problems. He’s not ready for the masses. This is a product that finds an audience, not something that someone does to satisfy a need. It has cost enough money so far that you can give £250 to every man, woman and child in the UK and still spend less.
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Post time: Mar-10-2023