But is there much of a demand for it? VR has been a feature of video games for over a decade now, last time I used it I thought it was good enough (that was 6-7 years ago), technology wise. But it's nowhere near as popular as e.g. regular displays.
Any movie depictions of VR are fully immersive - Ready Player One (at least the film) takes some liberties in depicting the game world as if it's immersive, even though the guy plays with VR glasses and force feedback gloves/suits, all current-day technology. Most others have a direct brain interface. Some (Star Trek) model a realistic immersive environment around the player, but both of those are very much science fiction still.
There's some brain / tech interfaces, but if I recall correctly the brain has to learn to handle the signals first, there's no way to create a perfect, instant link.
I don't think it needs to be perfect for there to be massive demand, but it does need to get a lot better than it currently is.
Games where you are stationary (racing simulation, mainly) are better suited to it. Gran Turismo 7 in PSVR2 with a Logitech racing wheel was a ridiculously immersive experience. I played through the whole game in VR and it was one of the best gaming experiences I've had and certainly the most immersive, particularly as a diehard car guy. But racing sims are fairly niche.
Outside of racing sims, it's still immersive, but any games with character movement give me immediate motion sickness, the movement is too clunky and disorienting.
If they can figure that out at a reasonable price point the demand will be there because the immersion is just night and day against a screen.
> last time I used it I thought it was good enough (that was 6-7 years ago), technology wise.
Many of us didnt. I wouldnt call low resolution and low PPI (significantly lower than desktop displays) "good enough." Not to mention terrible optics. I would use my current device a lot more if it could match the "viewable" resolution of my desktop displays, but currently, it can not.
The people who wish for these worlds are either complete shut in, terminally online or already spending 8+ hours a day playing video games and walking past their lives.
They are also e.g. architects and designers who get amazing new tools to check their work and present it to clients. What is more honest than getting to walk through e.g. a life size mockup of a building? Now you can do that before the ground is even broken.
These tools already exist and have nothing to do with the metaverse. This is such a weird argument, as if we needed meta to spend 10-50b a year in their bs to have these tools...
Tools exist to view architectural spaces in the same way a headset can without a headset? I'm slightly confused.
Or maybe you think a headset doesn't add anything to the experience of viewing a space. If so, I'd have to ask whether you'd actually used one. Because if there's any inarguably uniquely appropriate use case for VR, it's "viewing architectural spaces"
Meanwhile: "The global virtual reality (VR) market size was valued at $16.32 billion in 2024"
I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
I don't care how many people want it. I personally never claimed it was going to be a huge mass market thing. It's big enough to be sustainable.
Stupid claims by people trying to pump investment hype have no bearing on my interest in the medium.
> I don't know anyone with a social life who care about these toys, the only people I know of who are semi interested already spend 6+ hours a day gaming.
The people I know with an interest in VR are mainly artists and other forms of creatives. We must move in different circles.
Meta alone could have solved like 50% of famines/heavy malnutrition currently happening in the world if they used their metaverse budget to do something useful. And they'd still be so rich they wouldn't know what to do with the leftovers.
No one "needs" to push for that bullshit metaverse, the real world isn't shitty enough, yet, apparently they're dead set and achieving that, for people to wish to live in a computer.
It would be interesting to see how much of a difference a lump sum of $50 billion would make, or not make, to long term world hunger.
It’s a lot of money, but the WFP has spent more than that in the past 10 years on the problem.
A lot of the issues with world hunger aren’t easy solved by throwing more money at it. Politics, logistics, corruption etc. It can’t be solved without money either, of course.
Not to say that money couldn’t be better spent elsewhere than the metaverse.
If you take money for what it should be - a measure of work invested towards achieving a result, then yes, I suppose we could get a lot done with people employed out of that 50B working towards the goal of ending the world hunger. Heck, I'd even argue building a moon base with that money would have been a better investment than the crap the "magnificent 7" is pushing on us.
They are not burning money, they are employing people like you directly or through 3rd party partner companies. The beneficiaries can decide themselves how to spend money. They can live a good life or help others.
Money buys labour. That labour could be in service to ending world hunger. That labour could be in service to creating bullshit. Both approaches leave workers with money in their pocket, letting them engage in that game of prisoners dilemma we call charity.
Somehow Facebook getting a huge amount of money. They are distributing that money to a million people (directly or indirectly to employees, share holders, employees of 3rd party partners). Some people are getting billions and some are getting $100s.
Instead of handful of people in Facebook management deciding to be humanitarian, you now have a million people deciding what to do with their portion. It is that simple.
