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Comment by turtlebits | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of Meta/Facebook, but this clearly states it was sponsored by Meta, not created by.

It looks to be created by the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/rethink/)

I mean their actual new core product that they are apparently betting the company on is absolute dogshit as well to be fair. Take a look at this and the replies

https://twitter.com/metaquestvr/status/1551943338038726657

That doesn't look... awful? For realtime graphics on a 120hz screen, that's not any worse than Memojis and leagues better than whatever Samsung's ill-fated AR garbage was.

I get a kick out of watching companies take the piss for bad art direction, but I really struggle to imagine a better solution here. Would people prefer photo-scanned faces mapped onto a low-res mesh? Methinks it would be even further into the uncanny valley...

You are kidding me right?

Nobody looks at that and feels like that’s even remotely in the ballpark of something anyone is ever going to be excited to use.

I hate Facebook. I'm excited for more VR/Metaverse.

It would be different if they just wanted VR to be a success. But to replace Facebook's once-in-a-economy golden goose money ultra-printer with it? Thats so much to ask as to be comical.

How would you design it differently?

In fairness to them, VRChat is/was the dominant VR social avenue and it doesn't exactly have cutting edge visuals. But there is something quite bland about that meta video. Like you have all this creative freedom and you choose a desk and some bobble heads.

I may not have picked the most charitable example, although I don't know why Meta would sponsor something that shows the platform in a bad light. But I've never seen anything that looks good from Meta. Starting around 1:00:00 in this John Carmack interview, you can see an environment made for talking about VR to the press, and it looks like crap. https://www.facebook.com/RealityLabs/videos/1264023127446649

I think Facebook has just chosen a graphical style for their "metaverse" which makes it really hard to make anything beautiful or interesting. To me it's reminiscent of Corporate Memphis (which FB arguably invented) - an extremely safe and bland visual language which is chosen to avoid drawing attention or making a statement.

https://www.hov.co/blog/post/the-rise-of-the-globohomo-art-s...

True, although they at least approved this monstrosity. It looks to be nothing to do with Oculus though.

Oculus software is by and large well done in my experience, from the hand tracking to mapping out the layout of your room and its furniture.

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