What's up with the bad Meta projects?

Cross-posting some thoughts:

Facebook's metaverse strat is focusing heavily on capability / platform, and not content / single-awe-of-moment. To them it's possibly okay if vrchat wins at the expense of horizon worlds, _just as long as majority of peeps access it via quest_ which they do: https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s <- quest users now outnumber pc ones 1:2.

Consider the apple & appstore fiasco, whereby apple can basically, in one OS update, kill retargeting by introducing privacy popups into apps at os level, kneecapping the entire ad industry (single major reason for FB's this quarter _decline of revenues for the first time ever_); and unilaterally decide, that everyone who takes payments for digital services, and has an an app on ios (read: entire B2C SAAS market) now has to pay 30% to them. _and make it a reality_ on pain of removal from app store. _and it works_.

Basically, FB wants to position itself into the same capability / platform play -they control the device, they can dictate terms for everyone building on top of it. 

Please! Explaining a joke kills it. ;_;

In Carmack's recent 5+hr interview on Lex Friedman [1], he points out that finding a particular virtual setting that people love and focusing effort on that is usually how we arrive at games/spaces that have historically driven hardware/platform adoption, and that Zucc is very obviously not doing that. The closest successful virtual space to Zucc's approachis Roblox, a kind of social game construction kit (with pretty high market cap), but in his opinion the outcome is usually you build it and they don't come. I believe Carmack also favors the technical results of optimizing a platform along with a particular game, which is part of his strong motivation for making things better in his immediate environment.

[1] 

Horizon Worlds doesn't look THAT bad. In fact, it looks as good as it can given the circumstances:

• It has to run on low-spec devices, running on batteries
• It's a VR app, so they probably prioritize framerate and response rate over graphics quality

The problem is that the screenshot shared by Mark is a very poor example of how Worlds look (just search it in Google Images and you'll see more fair examples.)

Why did Mark share that? Who knows. Maybe the points above are so obvious that he didn't think of what outsiders would perceive when seeing the image?

The Facebook newsfeed also got a lot of opposition in the beginning. Whether or not a very innovative product is good or bad can not be decided on whether people like to oppose or make fun of it in the beginning. 

BlenderBot 3 is likely running on substantially fewer resources than GPT-2/3 and thus should not be expected to have the same performance.

I am reminded of the opening shot of the 2004 movie "Team America"... Maybe this is the dumb free version of Facebook VR, and a better premium version will just be for paying customers. Maybe premium is even as hard as other comments imply, and meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg is putting this stuff out there to reassure the investors that he does have a product. 

I could go further and speculate that the Team-American deep state has encouraged this crippleware business model (is there a "non-ableist" name for that?), in order to keep technology under control, but that's probably just indulging in the fantasy that NSA et al are secretly far ahead in the technology race. 

Unless humanity destroys itself first, something like Horizon Worlds will inevitably become a massive success. A digital world is better than the physical world because it lets us override the laws of physics. In a digital world, we can duplicate items at will, cover massive distances instantaneously, make crime literally impossible, and much, much more. A digital world is to the real world as Microsoft Word is to a sheet of paper. The digital version has too many advantages to count.

Zuckerberg realizes this and is making a high-risk bet that Meta will be able to control the digital universe in the same way that Apple and Google control the landscape of mobile phones. For example, imagine Meta automatically taking 1% of every monetary transaction in the universe. Or dictating to corporate rivals what they are allowed to do in the universe, gaining massive leverage over them. Even if Zuckerberg is unlikely to succeed (and it's still very unclear what direction the digital universe will evolve), he knows the potential payoff is staggering and calculates that it's worth it. That's why he's investing so heavily in VR, and Horizon Worlds in particular.

As for the aesthetics of Horizon Worlds being creepy, boring, or ugly, there are 2 factors to keep in mind.

First, VR hardware and software are in their infancy and you simply can't have very crisp graphics at this stage. That is fine according to the philosophy of modern tech companies. Just ship a minimum viable product, start getting users, and react to user feedback as you go. If Horizon Worlds succeeds, it will look far better in 20 years than it does today.

Second, Horizon may get attacked on the internet for being sterile and lifeless, but internet commenters are not the people who are putting direct pressure on Zuckerberg. Rather, he is surrounded by employees and journalists whose primary complaint is that Horizon Worlds is not sterile enough. I'm sure you've seen the articles: Harmful language is going unpunished, women are being made to feel uncomfortable by sexual gestures. Considering that Zuckerberg receives a constant barrage of these criticisms now, can you imagine the kind of heat he would get if he made Horizon more like VRChat, with its subversive culture and erotic content?

↑ comment by Yitz (yitz) · 2022-08-19T00:00:52.253Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

VR hardware and software are in their infancy and you simply can't have very crisp graphics at this stage

As an occasional video game developer, I’m going to strongly disagree with you there. To give a counter-example:

Walkabout Mini Golf is a VR game that runs on Oculus Quest, Rift, and Steam VR, made by this fairly small studio (and most of the people listed there didn't even work on the game) [EDIT: I reached out to the studio on Twitter and it turns out the game was mainly developed by a single guy, Lucas Martell].  It looks like this:

I've played this game with a friend of mine (who shows up as a stylized floating head that looks pretty great), and it was crisp, clear, high frame-rate VR perfection. Even in multiplayer, everything works smoothly, and it serves as a really nice virtual social space.

Having limited graphics capabilities does not place a significant limiting bound on aesthetics. As another example,  Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is a jaw-droppingly beautiful game (developed by only two people!) deliberately made with PS1-era  graphics:

Simplicity does not necessitate ugliness.

Rather, he is surrounded by employees and journalists whose primary complaint is that Horizon Worlds is not sterile enough.

This may very well be true (despite my personal distaste for that line of thought), but even if it is, being inoffensive and "bland" doesn't mean you have to look bad! Nintendo's oeuvre, for instance, shows that being friendly for all ages doesn't require sacrificing aesthetic beauty. Meanwhile, in screenshots online and in the "selfie" Zuckerberg posted, model sizes are wildly inconsistent (look at the trees—or is that supposed to be grass?—on the ground), the clothing of avatars are almost surrealistically bad (why is Mark's top button so far off to the left?), the shading is worse than what I could make in half a day with Unity when I was 12, and overall everything manages to look more slapped together than this notorious disaster of an asset flip.

I can't help but feel that on some level this must be intentional, or at least the result of some absolutely horrific mismanagement. 

My theory (at least for the image) is that someone at Meta has decided that "big has to be bland". They want their software to be super mainstream, the "default, vanilla" VR world that every other VR place will be compared to. (Maybe one is more Super Mario, another more gritty.).

If you tell the design team to aim for blandness maybe it destroys their artistic tendencies so completely they are unable to make anything that looks remotely good.

I don't think the screenshot looks that bad. Netizens love to be irrationally extremely negative about Zuck, and it's possible you have been swept up in this.

LW is not my usual place to have some laughs, but this made my day.