I’m seeing a lot of R&D solely focused on giving them the chance to extract rent through future silly things like buying artificially scarce houses in fbs metaverse. I’m barely seeing any “giving back” type research like AT&T created with their research in the internet.
Their end-game is very much obvious, but honestly they are so bad at it... I doubt they will manage to actually build anything successful to extract any value out of it. The reason why Facebook Metaverse is so cringey is because they have no clue how to make games or anything like it. The "real metaverse" already exist in Roblox, Fortnite and few other popular games that every teenager socialize in.
At the same time thanks to Facebook any average Joe can easily get consumer-ready VR hardware for around $400. We just really dont have many companies behind VR except for Valve and they're simply dont have enough manpower to create mass-market hardware.
My point is that we must appreciate those engineers who persuaded Zuck to spend money on VR hardware and research. Yeah their attempt at "metaverse" is laughtable, but investment into hardware is priceless.
> I’m seeing a lot of R&D solely focused on giving them the chance to extract rent through future silly things like buying artificially scarce houses in fbs metaverse
hwers's comment lacks some context, but there is some truth to it. Consider Carmack's comment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo @33:50 onward "A closed platform doesn't deserve to be called a metaverse, or does it?"
Making money in the Metaverse is a pillar of what makes a virtual world an actual world. (Ignoring of who does the money making for now) Scarcity is an integral part of it. Skins, models, rare items. In the virtual world it all scarcity is artificial by definition. Just like with second life and the linden dollar making it to real exchanges. Second life sold worlds as some kind of virtual realtor in the past, VRChat's users sell custom created skins and rigged models today and Meta wants to be the platform facilitating that tomorrow, but on a grand scale.
I also highly applaud Meta's contribution to FOSS btw.
