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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

This is what I've been worried about too. Meta isn't betting the farm on a shitty Second Life ripoff because they think consumers will want it. I think they're doing it because the end users are going to be low-level work from home employees who have no choice in the matter.

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I'm increasingly convinced that Meta isn't betting the farm at all. They just wanted to rebrand away from something that reminds people of election manipulation and teen suicides and toward something that reminds people of the future.

All this VR stuff seems to be an experimental group combined with a marketing budget to cure FB's brand.

It's more dire than that from their business perspective.

TikTok is killing them in the social media space.

They lost billions because of their reliance on Apple, who rug pulled them with the iOS privacy changes.

This is what they're choosing to pursue in response to existential threats to their business.

You think Meta is spending billions on a PR exercise ? Be serious.

There are many companies including Apple and Microsoft who do think that VR has the potential to offer ground-breaking new experiences and as such worth investing in.

Yes - I do think Meta is spending single digit billions on a PR exercise. That is not an unreasonable marketing budget for a several-hundred-billion-dollar company that is currently experiencing huge losses in brand value, and they are certainly looking at how to get a piece of the VR pie in order to get a discount on it.

This would be true if they weren’t releasing good hardware as well.

There are over 20K full time employees in Meta’s Reality Labs working on metaverse tech… this is not a marketing exercise.

    the end users are going to be low-level work from home 
    employees who have no choice in the matter.

What is the incentive for businesses to buy and mandate the use of proprietary VR headsets for their employees, low-level or otherwise?

There would have to be killer apps for those headsets. Things that can't be done as well (or done at all) with traditional interfaces.

I haven't heard many ideas being thrown around for things that would actually benefit from VR.

There are certain niche applications that are easy to imagine. Maybe some CAD/CAM stuff, maybe remote surgery or some shit.

But the vast majority of things people do would have no benefit. You're not going to crunch through help desk tickets faster in VR. I realize people probably said the same things about traditional computers 50 years ago, but there were also a lot of folks that were bullish on them. I just don't see it with VR.

> Things that can't be done as well (or done at all) with traditional interfaces

I work from home and do daily standups, design reviews, architecture etc.

All of those could be significantly better with VR.

    architecture

Specifically, what about it?

It's easy for me to imagine architects spinning models around Minority Report style with their hands, going on virtual walkthroughs, etc with VR apps.

It's less clear to me that these would actually improve the process. I realize that a 2D projection of a 3D object is always going to be a bit of a compromise, but are today's 2D interfaces and displays actually holding things back?

I'm thinking of the wave of "Minority Report" style interfaces that were proposed after that movie came out. They seemed to "obviously" be the future. But after a while everybody realized that moving a few cm on a mouse/trackpad was actually orders of magnitude more efficient than waving your arms around like a maniac for ten hours a day.

Surveillance is the big one, I think. Speak to anyone who has worked at a call center. They track you like crazy, and keep every metric imaginable. Imagine how much worse it would be if they were enabled to literally track your eye movements.

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